Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger

“Three years ago, a former staff member of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, was released from federal prison after serving around 20 years. Her crime? Spying for Cuba. For some 16 years, Montez had been secretly providing classified information to officials in Cuba that she acquired as part of her federal position. Needless to say, when she was finally caught, federal officials, especially those within the national-security state part of the government, condemned her for being a traitor and a bad person. At her sentencing hearing, Montes made it clear that her spying for Cuba had nothing to do with money. Instead, her spying, she stated, was intended to help Cuba defend itself from acts of aggression by the U.S. government, especially the national-security state part of the federal government (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA).” (04/15/26)

https://www.fff.org/2026/04/15/ana-montes-traitor-and-bad-person/

Source: The Findings Substack
by Paul Rosenberg

“The first problem with the Prime Directive was that it made the captains stupid. Rather than doing what they knew had to be done, they had to contend with a wrench thrown into their formerly strong minds. It was, to have fun with words, stupidizing to those captains. It made them delay rational choices. In the end they ignored the Prime Directive anyway (reason and decency demanded it) or else they found some clever way around it. … When encountering a difficult situation, a capable person considers the facts available and tries to imagine a win-win resolution. And Star Fleet officers were supposed to be great at this: That the primary attribute of a great captain, after all, and it was generally the Federation’s flagship we were observing. What we saw were these powerful minds and wills brought low by the basest of mental choices: a binary, obey-or-transgress choice.” (04/15/26)

https://thefindings.substack.com/p/why-the-prime-directive-is-evil

Source: The Atlantic
by Annie Lowrey

“If you earn a salary or an hourly wage, the Internal Revenue Service already knows how much money you make. It likely knows how much you owe or how big your refund should be too. Nine in 10 households take the standard deduction, making their liability easy to glean from payroll and banking data. Yet Uncle Sam demands that Americans fire up TurboTax, head to a storefront preparer, hire an accountant, or sit down with a sharp pencil and a strong cup of coffee to get their taxes done each spring. The average filer spends 13 hours on their 1040 — a time tax that many of our wealthy peer countries have reduced to a couple of minutes, if that. Prepopulated documents and return-free systems are common everywhere but here.” (04/15/26)

https://archive.is/c8Nl0

Source: Common Dreams
by Lior Stenrfeld

“On April 7, the United States, Israel, and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. By the afternoon of the same day, it was already unraveling. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the deal, announced it would cover ‘everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewher, —effective immediately’. Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office contradicted him: The ceasefire ‘does not include Lebanon’. Israel’s military said it ‘continues fighting and ground operations’ against Hezbollah. Missile alerts sounded across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. A gas facility in Abu Dhabi was ablaze. Iran and Israel each accused the other of violating a truce that neither had fully agreed to in the first place. This is not a diplomatic miscommunication. This is a structural diagnosis.” (04/15/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/imagine-peace-middle-east

Source: Mother Jones
by Laura C Morel

“In the last year, the country’s most prominent legal organizations—such as the American Bar Association and the American Immigration Lawyers Association— have warned that scams targeting immigrants and attorneys have increased to an alarming level. Certainly, these kinds of grifts are not new in the legal world, which for years has dealt with bad actors practicing law without a license. But representatives from several legal groups and private attorneys told me that today’s scams are more sophisticated and harder to detect thanks to the proliferation of AI and social media.” (04/15/26)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/the-scammers-profiting-off-trumps-immigration-crackdown/

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Mark Nayler

“Although it’s the world’s second most-visited country, Spain hasn’t been sending out a welcoming message recently. Its Socialist-led government has proposed or passed several measures aimed at deterring foreign property investors, such as a 100% tax on non-EU citizens buying houses (so far just an idea) and a ban on Golden Visas, which awarded residency to non-Spanish citizens who purchased real estate worth at least €500,000 (effective from last April). Over the last few years, there have also been protests against what residents see as over-tourism in hotspots such as Valencia, Málaga, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands. One might have expected all this negative publicity to have dented Spain’s reputation as one of the best places in the world to take a vacation or buy a second home. But the opposite seems to be true: Spain set a new tourism record in 2025 with 97 million visitors, a 3.2% increase on 2024’s 94 million.” (04/15/26)

https://fee.org/articles/international-appeal/