May’s PPI increases significantly topped economists’ expectations. Analysts polled by Reuters forecasted an increase of just 0.7 percent.

The surge in prices was driven by increased energy costs, which have risen sharply due to the ongoing war in Iran. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has reduced available energy supplies, creating significant shortages. The report noted that “over half of the May advance in prices… is attributable to a 23.4-percent increase in the index for gasoline.” Other fossil fuel–derived commodities, including plastics, industrial chemicals, fertilizer, and diesel and jet fuels, have also been adversely affected.

The continued surge in wholesale prices suggests that headline inflation will remain high, information that will factor into the Federal Reserve’s decision next week on how to adjust its benchmark interest rates. President Donald Trump has advocated for rate cuts, a move the central bank will find difficult to make in an inflationary environment.

The post Wholesale Inflation Reaches Highest Level Since 2022 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Economists and investors expect the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England to join the ECB by the end of the year in raising interest rates as inflation continues an upwards climb. Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz has driven up energy prices significantly and weighed significantly in inflationary pressures across the globe. 

The eurozone’s economy shrank by 0.2 percent in the first quarter of the year, though this was likely biased by a much larger decline in the often volatile Irish economy. The central bank has revised down its growth forecasts for 2026 and 2027, down to 0.8 and 1.2 percent respectively. 

Economists believe that the lower starting rate for the ECB allows it to raise rates far sooner than other central banks, like the Federal Reserve.

The post European Central Bank Raises Interest Rates by 0.25 Percent appeared first on The American Conservative.

In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump on Thursday morning vowed that “at some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America,” adding that he will bomb Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT.”

U.S. Central Command said the Wednesday evening strikes targeted “Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran.”

Tasnim News Agency reported that Iran retaliated with two waves of attacks, which “struck and destroyed eighteen important targets belonging to the…U.S. army in the Ali Salem and Ahmad al-Jaber air bases, as well as the Sheikh Issa air bases.”

Iran said Wednesday that the U.S. attacks on Tuesday destroyed two reservoirs, leaving 20,000 residents in its southern Hormozgan province without water. Abdolhamid Hamzepour, the director of the Hormozgan Water and Wastewater Company, noted that the residents “live under the harshest climatic conditions and extreme heat” and “have lost access to safe drinking water” as a result of the bombing.

The spokesperson for Kuwait’s Defense Ministry said that 24 drones entered their airspace over the past 48 hours, with no casualties reported.

India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told reporters Thursday that a ship was attacked by the U.S. Navy, the third Indian-crewed oil tanker to be hit with U.S. strikes this week. Three Indian sailors are reported to have died.

Amwaj Media reported on Thursday evening, citing an Iranian source, that Qatari mediators have helped to finalize a draft paper for an Iran–U.S. memorandum of understanding to end the war.

Iran’s Tasnim News Agency on Thursday morning dismissed reports that the U.S. and Iran are finalizing an agreement to end the war, saying that “the claim is incorrect as no such text has been finalized,” adding that the “Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has denied the claim” made by Trump that “Iranian officials had contacted him directly and requested a halt to military strikes.”

Israel continued its bombing and occupation of Lebanon, with Lebanon’s Health Ministry reporting Thursday that the death toll from Israeli airstrikes since March 2 is at least 3,711 people.

The price of Brent Crude oil rose to $93.5 per barrel on Thursday while gas prices remained elevated. AAA reported the national average price of regular gas at $4.13.

The post Iran War Day 104: Trump Says, ‘We Will Be Taking Kharg Island’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

Bill Would Place Israeli Components in U.S. Weapons Systems

This year’s NDAA treats American interests as identical to those of a foreign nation.

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

Buried within the “must-pass” annual defense authorization bill now before the House is a provision, Section 224, that would order the Pentagon to merge key parts of the American and Israeli defense technology sectors, creating a deeper level of military-industrial integration, analysts say, than the United States maintains with any other country on Earth. 

Though presented by Israel and its American lobby as a way to draw down U.S. support for Israel, the Quincy Institute, which first reported the measure, describes it as a vehicle to move from the expiring 10-year, $3.8-billion-a-year U.S. aid package to Israel to enduring military cooperation, nestled deep inside the Pentagon’s procurement system, which affords less transparency and accountability.

Section 224, the institute’s Ben Freeman wrote, would lay the groundwork for “bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of American-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation.” The two countries already collaborate heavily on missile defense, he noted, but the provision would extend that coordination to nearly every frontier of defense technology, including AI, quantum technology, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, and biotech, as well as “network integration” and “data fusion.”

“In other words,” Freeman wrote, “the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”

The provision has already survived its first challenge. On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee took up an amendment by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) to strip Section 224 from the bill, and voted it down by voice vote. The committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) and others maintained that the section merely covers “existing initiatives” and “actually improves oversight and accountability of these programs by designating a single official responsible for them.” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the panel’s ranking Democrat, agreed. “It’s not a new framework at all,” he said. “We have three existing programs right now where we do military cooperation with Israel to develop technologies. Those programs already exist.” 

Those remarks, while perhaps expected from Israel lobby-funded politicians, radically understate the degree to which Section 224 integrates American and Israeli weapons and technology production, in ways that should concern every American.

The text of Section 224 directs the Pentagon to identify “Israeli-origin technologies… for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record” (224(a)(1)) and to build “United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry” (224(a)(4)). A direct function of this bill would therefore be to place foreign-built parts into American weapons systems. 

The presence of foreign components in U.S. systems inherently raises the risk of compromised integrity—a risk sharpened in this case by Israel’s demonstrated willingness and capability to weaponize supply chains, most vividly in the 2024 terror attack that involved the detonation of thousands of pagers that were turned into remote-controlled bombs.

Despite those risks, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) does not set any conditions on the integrity of systems developed with Israel under Section 224’s partnerships. The omission would be less conspicuous had the same bill not, elsewhere, written exactly the expected safeguards for what the legislation calls the American “Defense Industrial Base.” 

An entire subtitle of the NDAA, “Provisions to Protect and Strengthen Supply Chains,” outlines four. They include the authority to exclude untrusted vendors as “sources of concern” (Sec. 1802); a rule that sensitive parts be bought “exclusively from the original manufacturer or an authorized dealer” (Sec. 1803); restrictions on “purchases from certain countries” (Sec. 1804); and a program to “illuminate, assess, anticipate, and respond to risks” across the defense supply chain (Sec. 1805).

Yet those provisions to protect supply chains almost exclusively screen adversaries, not allies and other partners, and nowhere in the text are applied to Israel. Section 1802 defines an excludable “source of concern” as one controlled by or affiliated with the intelligence service of a “foreign adversary.” And while the U.S. intelligence community has assessed Israel to be one of the most aggressive intelligence services operating against the United States—a secret National Intelligence Estimate has ranked it third while NBC reported last Friday that the Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat assessment on Israeli spying operations against Americans to the highest level, “critical” —Washington does not officially designate Israel an adversary, leaving the Section 224 partnership exempt from the safeguards the bill constructs for other foreign-sourced parts.

Section 224’s lone gesture toward protecting the integrity of American systems and assets from Israel is a requirement that collaborative research be conducted “in a manner that protects sensitive technology and information and the national security interests of the United States and Israel.”

But it never says whether that means two separate sets of interests or one shared set, and elsewhere, in subsection (e)(2), the legislation calls them “shared national security interests,” treating the two countries’ security interests as one and the same, even though they very often diverge.

Moreover, Section 224 is just one gift to Israel, adding to a broad array of other Israel-specific privileges renewed and expanded by this same NDAA bill. Those include a two-year extension of the war-reserve stockpile the United States maintains on Israeli soil (Sec. 1221), a broadened “subterranean” cooperation authority dealing with “tunnels, bunkers, and other underground targets” (Sec. 1222), and a counter-drone program (Sec. 1223). That is on top of an additional $300 million allocated for the Missile Defense Agency’s “Israeli Cooperative Programs” (line 096, photo below for reference).

As the NDAA makes its way through the House, where it is expected to be considered for a floor vote before the July recess, Americans should demand that their politicians distinguish between the national security interests of the United States and Israel, and that they place the former ahead of the latter.

The post Bill Would Place Israeli Components in U.S. Weapons Systems appeared first on The American Conservative.

Takimag

This Week in Hate Crimes

Karmelo Anthony plunged a knife into Austin Metcalf’s heart—and then garnered donations and supporters.

TakiMag

On Tuesday this week, 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a competitor at a track meet in Texas last year. The killing quickly became national news because Anthony is black, his victim was white, and black people were rooting for the stabber.

The events that led to Anthony plunging a knife into Austin Metcalf’s heart are these: Driven for some reason to sit in a rival team’s tent, Anthony was repeatedly asked to leave by Metcalf. He refused, and tauntingly dared, “Touch me and see what happens.” Metcalf pushed him, whereupon Anthony knifed him.

For killing a white kid who had the effrontery to 1) ask him to leave a tent he was not supposed to be in, and 2) touch him, Anthony collected more than $600,000 in donations and gained a small group of protesters outside the courthouse, yelling racist abuse at white people.

Anthony’s admirers claimed to be protesting “white supremacy.” Don’t these white people realize Anthony is black? You can’t ask a black person to move! A minister outside the courthouse denounced the entire justice system as the “final frontier of racism and it’s legalized here.” A potential juror admitted, “I don’t know if I feel right putting a brother in jail.”

One thing you’ll never see is a group of white people rooting for whites who kill blacks—or anyone else for that matter—just because the accused is white. Nobody protested the arrests of Derek Chauvin, Kim Potter, George Zimmerman, or Jake Gardner, and two of those were accidents, the other two self-defense.

[Point of law: Lying on your back, having your head smashed into a concrete sidewalk, or being locked in a chokehold so lethal that police are no longer allowed to use it, are not remotely similar to being pushed.]

Gardner, for example, an Omaha bar owner, shot and killed a black career criminal who was choking him to death during a BLM riot. The district attorney, along with his entire homicide department, investigated and concluded the shooting was justified.

But realizing he was white, the Democratic D.A. recused himself and assigned a black special prosecutor to the case. The black prosecutor promptly issued a warrant for Gardner’s arrest, charging him with manslaughter, attempted first-degree assault, making terroristic threats, and use of a weapon to commit a felony.

With a legion of white people rushing to disavow him, evict him, destroy his business, and manipulate the system to ensure his conviction, Gardner killed himself.

In other news this week, a 14-year-old black kid in Indianapolis fatally shot a 23-year-old white man in the head during a carjacking. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department chief of police (the city’s first female police chief!!!) and deputy chief of police (a black guy, naturally) held press conferences, emoting over the horrible thing that had happened—to the killer.

Chief Tanya Terry, who looks like Janet Reno’s younger, more butch sister, barely mentioned the victim, Brett Scrogham, a serious Christian, who was on his way to meet his parents at a baseball game when he was attacked. Terry began by saying she had “mixed emotions” about his murder—as one does when an innocent man has been shot in the head.

In her telling, the vicious cold-blooded crime was merely a “tragic incident.” Tearing up, she bemoaned the fact that the suspected killer would “face lifelong consequences,” his life “forever impacted and changed by short-sighted, impulsive, and reckless decisions.”

You know, if you think about it, you could say that Scrogham’s life was also impacted, in a way. Finally remembering him, Terry added, “There are victims on the other side of those decisions. And those victims matter.”

Yes, we all remember the “tragic incident” in Minneapolis when police officer Derek Chauvin’s life was forever “impacted and changed.” It’s easy to forget, but there was another victim in that encounter, too.

Deputy Chief Kendale Adams also called the unprovoked attack a “tragedy,” saying it was “a setback for all of us.” Yes, especially Scrogham. He then called on the community to ensure that potential teenage killers feel valued. “I know that those community-based organizations are out there doing this kind of work, and I would like to keep encouraging them to continue to do the work… we have to do more.” Everybody has to step up and “do more,” except the teenagers who keep killing people.

This is like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) saying, the day after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, that she grieved for both “the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday,” or Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) referring to the 9/11 terrorist attack as a day when “some people did something.”

Sometimes it seems as if, no matter who kills whom, it’s either the white person’s fault or it’s nobody’s fault.

COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES

The post This Week in Hate Crimes appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

You Can’t Blame Netanyahu for Israel’s Militarism

The prime minister is, in an important sense, a man of the people.

(Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)

Prime Minister Netanyahu has been the longest serving prime minister of Israel, having assumed the office in 1996 and served off and on for a total of almost two decades. His upcoming election looks to be a tossup, so there’s a fair chance voters will show him the door. Even if they do, analysts would be fools to write him off altogether, as they’ve tried to do many times before. And even if “Bibi,” as he is known, doesn’t find a way back to power, the hardline militarism he represents will probably dominate Israeli politics for a long time.

Just as he faces political challenges at home, Netanyahu has presided over a turn in global opinion against his country, including a massive loss in American support for Israel and its regional designs, and for U.S. intervention in the Middle East broadly. Lately we’ve seen signs that President Donald Trump is getting fed up with Netanyahu—and especially with his military campaign in Lebanon—which could hurt the Israeli leader at the polls.

Yet, for all the blame the man receives, he is doing what he was elected to do, and even his most hawkish supporters are far from the fringes of Israeli politics. There is a delusion among some Americans that, if and when Bibi finally exits center stage, Israel will pursue a new path, and the rapid decline in its approval ratings will be arrested or reversed. But this misses the forest for the trees. The Israeli population’s hawkishness has little to do with the current prime minister and will easily outlive his tenure, whether it ends this year or not. This hawkishness is, at its core, what is driving the break between Israel and its superpower patron. 

Americans have long been opposed to the kind of U.S. adventurism that has defined the last decade of geopolitics in the Middle East. After 9/11, of course, there was a surge in support for waging war against America’s enemies in the region. But since the Iraq War went south presidential candidates have been elected on promises to wind down Mideast involvement. They have all failed to completely fulfill those promises for fear of the political blowback from donors and special interests, many of whom prioritize strong U.S.-Israel ties.

After Hamas’s October 7 attacks, the Israeli government decided to seize the initiative not only against Hamas, but also against other militant groups supported by Iran, and even to decapitate its major adversary in Tehran. In doing so, it opened up a multi-front war and attempted to claim more territory outside its recognized borders. This included fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ahmad al Sharaa’s newly formed government in Syria, and conducting smaller but still costly wars in Iraq and Yemen.

This pathway of militarism led to a direct American-Israeli war against Iran, with the fiercest hostilities kicking off this February. While the earlier conflicts had material costs for America, the current one, now in a fragile ceasefire, has been, by far, the most damaging to U.S. interests. As a result, more and more Americans across the political spectrum are questioning the value of nonstop investment in Middle East wars and of the allies that seem to drag us into them. 

This is not a uniquely Israeli problem; the Saudi Arabians, along with the rest of the Gulf countries, are part of the same issue. The populations of those countries have less responsibility for the conflicts in the Middle East because they are not democracies. Israel, by contrast, has free and fair elections, yet American critics of Israel often blame its government, not its broader society, for the nation’s militarism. While Israeli election results obviously don’t reflect the views of all Israelis, they do reflect the views not only of a majority, but of a growing majority.

The current Israeli population is far more hawkish than it was previously. The total collapse of parties advocating against war in the past few elections is a strong piece of evidence for the thesis, as is the growth of support for parties enthusiastic about perpetual confrontation with Muslim-majority nations, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party. 

These are not fringe figures, but high-ranking officials. Netanyahu welcomed each of these men into his coalition, partly because he could not govern without them, but also because he knows the center of gravity is shifting toward the hard right in Israeli politics. One cannot maintain a grip on power for decades, throughout numerous crises and scandals, without a keen sense of politics.

The extremely hawkish population has been able, in effect, to wield Netanyahu as a sword against their enemies but also as a shield against criticism of Israeli actions. And Netanyahu, in turn, has harnessed his nation’s escalating hawkishness to pursue grand designs on the international stage and bolster his reputation as “Mr. Security,” which suffered after the October 7 attacks.

The irony is that Netanyahu is blamed for Israeli militarism by Americans who say they still admire and support Israel when in fact he is doing what the people who elected him want. He is, in that sense, a man of the people. More crucially, he is doing what any other Israeli leader would do in his position if they hoped to retain power.

No one can say who will win the next election, but even if it brings the end of Bibi, it will not bring the end of an extremely militaristic and expansionist Israel. If Netanyahu loses, it might bring the end of a delusion that he somehow didn’t represent the people who kept him in power for so long.

The post You Can’t Blame Netanyahu for Israel’s Militarism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Takimag

Does the UK Government Understand How Money Works?

As Margaret Thatcher once said, the problem with socialists is that they always run out of other people’s money.

TakiMag

Nobody in the United Kingdom can do arithmetic these days—especially not when it comes to the nation’s supermarkets. I once observed with amusement a shopper in the line ahead of me confused over a “Buy One, Get One Free” offer. The shopper had only brought one of said items to the checkout desk. The girl on duty mentioned the sale. “I know,” replied the woman. “But I don’t want two of them. So I’ve chosen to get the one I’ve bought for free instead.” 

I now realize this mathematical moron must have been Rachel Reeves, the current UK Chancellor of the Exchequer. In a vain attempt to counteract inflation, Reeves recently floated the idea of “asking” British supermarket chains to enact “voluntary” price caps on a series of unspecified “essential goods” for the poor. In return, Reeves promised, shops would be “excused from some government policies” to save them money in return.

But, once the supermarkets refused to price-cap laxatives, lard, and latex condoms, or whatever it was Reeves thought the working classes consumed, the government immediately reverted to type by announcing that a threatened tax on product packaging would therefore go ahead as planned. It’s expected to add an extra £2bn to supermarket operating costs per year, which doesn’t seem likely to bring costs down: That £2bn, of course, will find itself being added onto ordinary shoppers’ bills by the supermarkets, who need to cover costs somehow. So, since the supermarkets will not lower their prices, the all-wise UK Government will now force them to raise their prices even more.      

Reeves was pushing retailers to sell vital items to consumers at a loss. What she did not appear to realize is that supermarkets already sell their cheapest staples like milk and bread to consumers at a loss, a scheme designed to lure shoppers into their stores where they will then hopefully spend rather larger sums of cash on more unnecessary, but also more expensive, purchases like chocolate and cake. By uncanny “coincidence,” the price of the cheapest two-pint units of semi-skimmed milk in every last one of Britain’s leading supermarket chains is precisely £1.20; so they are in effect price-capping their everyday basic loss leaders collectively anyway. Reeves just wanted them to reduce prices ruinously, rather than to the level that rationality allows.

If Reeves really does want to make bread cheaper, she could do it herself, quite easily, simply by cutting de facto taxes on farming. Due to be taxed senseless in the name of Net Zero is fertilizer, which will receive a “carbon tax” of around £50-75 per ton, at precisely the same time the substance has already been rendered more expensive per ounce than heroin, thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Possibly the UK government doesn’t realize this, but farmers need fertilizer to grow something called “food,” that very same substance the Treasury worries has gotten too expensive. Maybe a better way to lower food prices would be to scrap the stupid tax on fertilizer? Because, in effect, a tax on fertilizer is a tax on food, isn’t it? What else are farmers going to use fertilizer for? Painting their barns brown?      

The last time the UK Treasury tried imposing centralized supermarket price controls, back in the 1970s, they “worked” so well that inflation only reached nearly 25 percent per annum. In 2023, when the previous Conservative administration briefly proposed something similar, Labour Party MPs condemned the idea as economically illiterate. Now the Labour Party is proposing the very same idea, and its MPs call it economically sound. Why? Perhaps because they know full well the average member of the public is economically illiterate too. When asked to estimate what supermarket profit margins are, the average guess is 50 percent. Close: The actual figure is between 2 and 4 percent.

It doesn’t take much interference from scapegoating politicians to eat into that 2–4 percent and thereby render stores completely unprofitable. At the same time that Reeves was proposing that grocers actively pay customers to come in and take all their milk off their hands, major budget supermarket chain Morrisons announced it was being forced to close around 100 of its smaller stores. Though previously viable, the chain has been running at a loss, thanks to what bosses termed “significant cost increases resulting from government policy choices” relating to endless costly regulations and increased green levies on energy use.

So, idiotic policies lead budget supermarkets to close shop, and then the same government that enacted those policies complains there’s nowhere for families on a budget to shop anymore. Rather than demonizing stores as profit-hungry capitalist vampires, maybe the state should acknowledge itself as the cause of most of these problems?

To disguise her supermarket price-capping failure, Rachel Reeves stood on a gasoline forecourt and declared a “cut” in fuel taxes—a “cut” which, when you actually examined it, only meant postponing a planned 5-pence-per-liter fuel duty rise by 12 months, until the Iran War was hopefully over. No wonder a man in a white van pulled up alongside her and began shouting obscenities, accusing Reeves and her party of “ruining the country.”   

Even more desperate, Reeves then announced a “Great British Summer Savings” scheme, whereby hard-pressed families would receive a series of extremely small discounts on trips to theme parks and cinemas and on children’s menu meals in pubs, facilitated by temporary cuts to VAT sales taxes on such things. According to analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the average saving produced would be a pathetic £10 per household. But, cumulatively, that would be a lot of £10s, and would cost the Treasury £300 million in lost VAT receipts. 

How will Whitehall make up the shortfall? By putting an extra £300 million tax on oil companies, who, just like with supermarkets, will inevitably end up passing that cost on to the consumer, probably to the tune of rather more than £10. So, something families need, like winter heating, will now wind up costing appreciably more, whereas something families don’t need, like a summer trip to Chessington World of Adventures, will cost ever-so-slightly less. Does the current Labour leadership even understand how money works?

If they don’t, they share their ignorance in common with the likely next lot in charge. As the feeble Prime Minister Keir Starmer battles for his political life, the leading candidates to replace him as the nation’s humanoid open wallet have been lining up to demonstrate they too have dyscalculia. 

The present favorite to succeed Starmer is long-serving Labour Party Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham, whose big fiscal policy two-step is borrowing money from people and then calling them greedy for asking for it back. Famously, Burnham has spoken of Britain’s urgent need “to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.” Of course, the best way to do that would be for the government to stop endlessly borrowing more and more money from those very same bond markets to vomit away on infinite meaningless fripperies like summer cinema tickets for kids. Andy, though, considers purchasers of government gilts to be literal bond villains and, in the words of one leading financial analyst, “thinks you can tell the people lending you money to f— off.”   

Andy’s ally Paula Barker, a Liverpool Labour MP, says, “The markets will have to fall into line” behind Burnham once he becomes PM. Maybe if Burnham threatens to tax the sun for not shining, the weather will have to fall into line behind him too? Burnham aims to borrow more cash from the bond market, to spend on [INSERT TODAY’S PRETEND POLITICAL PRIORITY HERE], but somehow also to pay less interest on such loans, when every normal person knows that the more you borrow, the higher your rates tend to be. Even the very prospect of a Burnham leadership has driven the bond market into overdrive, pushing gilt interest rates up, meaning that, already, the man is costing the country more money—which he proposes to pay for by borrowing even more money, at even greater expense.

When Burnham was Manchester Mayor, paying for the consequences of his actions was no real problem. Burnham was able to just endlessly beg from central government and spend this “free” cash relentlessly, with no real consequences for himself, just for the national Treasury—a Treasury he now wants to be placed in charge of.

To be fair, Andy does have some valuable expertise in the property market. In 2005, Burnham bought an apartment in London whose mortgage interest he put on parliamentary expenses. Since then, the apartment’s value has doubled to nearly £500,000. He even began renting it out to others at a profit, whilst charging the taxpayer £17,000 a year to pay his rent on a different apartment just around the corner for him to live in, effectively gratis.      

So, on second thoughts, perhaps Labour Party politicians do understand how money works after all. But only when it flows from the working man to their own bank accounts.

The post Does the UK Government Understand How Money Works? appeared first on The American Conservative.

In response, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the Iranian navy said it had targeted two commercial vessels attempting to transit. CENTCOM denied that the strait was closed, saying “ships are continuing to transit in and out.”

President Donald Trump told Fox News the U.S. will bomb Iran on Thursday night as well if Tehran doesn’t sign a U.S.-proposed deal. “We’ll bomb the s— out of them tomorrow night,” Trump said.

Iran launched retaliatory strikes against U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, according to Iranian media.

Trump had signaled earlier in the day that the U.S. strikes were coming. “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them again hard today,” Trump said in the Oval Office. He added that the U.S. and Iran had been close to striking a deal but “they keep tapping us along, they keep playing us for suckers.”

After the strikes began, a U.S. official told Barak Ravid of Axios that the targets include air defense systems, radars, and drone units in southern Iran. But the Trump administration has suggested it might strike civilian infrastructure. Earlier Wednesday, Trump told Fox News he was getting closer to striking Iran’s power plants and bridges, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that the Iranians could see “bombs dropping on key facilities in Iran from the United States of America.”

On Tuesday evening, the U.S. had launched what CENTCOM called “self-defense strikes” in response to the downing on Monday of an Army Apache helicopter.

The post U.S. Attacks Iran for Second Consecutive Evening appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Federal Reserve group responsible for monetary policy is scheduled to meet on June 16-17, as financial markets predict that the central bank will have to raise interest rates by the end of the year.

The post U.S. Inflation Soars to Highest Level Since April 2023 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

Iran’s Yemeni Partner Threatens to Change the Mideast Game

The Houthis announced they would close the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to Israeli ships.

Ansar Allah, the Yemeni political and military organization commonly known as the Houthis, announced on Monday that they would close the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait to Israeli ships, adding ominously that they “consider all enemy movements to be legitimate military targets for our Armed Forces.”

The declaration highlighted another unrealized goal of the American-Israeli war on Iran. Along with ending Iran’s nuclear program, toppling the Islamic Republic, and eliminating Tehran’s missiles and drones, the U.S. and Israel have sought to sever Iran from its forward deterrent network of partners—or what Western commentators, without nuance or real understanding, call Iran’s “proxies.”

The dramatic Houthi entrance into the war and Iran’s firing of missiles into Israel in defense of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group have clearly demonstrated that failure. The relationship between Iran and its partners has been altered, but not in the direction the Trump administration sought: Iran’s partners are more willing and able to defend Iran, and Iran is more willing and able to defend them.

That alteration has enhanced Iran’s ability to impose costs across the region, punishing actions that the U.S. and Israel once carried out with minimal resistance. The desire to preserve that freedom of action is a primary reason for the obsession with preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But this war has shown that economic deterrents can be as effective as military ones: “The Strait of Hormuz is more important…  than a nuclear bomb,” Iran’s Deputy Parliament Speaker Ali Nikzad recently said. “Our nuclear bomb is the Strait of Hormuz.” 

And as we were reminded this week, the Strait of Hormuz isn’t the only “nuclear bomb” that comes in the form of a key chokepoint for global trade. Iranian leaders have declared that, along with partners in “the Resistance Axis,” Tehran can shut down both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb. Bolstering that threat, the Houthis warned that the group’s decision to close the latter to Israel might only be the first step: If the war continues to escalate, they’ll close the strait to everyone.

That’s serious. Though the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait receives less attention than the Strait of Hormuz, it is critical for two reasons. Normally, around twenty percent of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, hence the tumult in the oil markets since its effective closure by Tehran, and about 10 percent of the world’s oil comes through the Bab-el-Mandeb. That means a whopping one-third of the world’s oil shipments would be affected by the disruption.

The second reason is that closing the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait wouldn’t just add another big problem, but eliminate one partial solution to the existing one, blocking natural end runs around the Hormuz blockade. When the Strait of Hormuz closed, Saudi Arabia diverted more than 70 percent of its oil through Bab-el-Mandeb, helping to keep oil prices from rising even further. And, as with Hormuz, other critical resources and goods, not just oil, pass through the waterway.

Control of the straits is just the economic half of the new reality Iran is trying to impose on the region. The military half is Tehran’s unprecedented willingness to hit back hard after being struck, and even to do so in defense of non-Iranian territory, as happened after Israel attacked Beirut over the weekend. Iran had vowed to strike back if Israel struck Lebanon’s capital, and this week it made good on that promise, firing as many as 30 missiles at Israel. 

It was the first time Iran had ever struck Israel in defense of one of its Axis partners. Iran called it a “formal declaration of a strategic doctrine.” Sadegh Larijani, the chairman of Iran’s Expediency Council, which advises the supreme leader, explained, “If any component of the Axis of Resistance is attacked, the response will extend beyond geographical borders and will alter the regional balance of power.”

Far from ushering in a new, more compliant regime, the U.S. now faces Iranian leaders who have concluded that Tehran’s pre-war leaders were too cautious in responding to past American and Israeli strikes. The more assertive Iranian policy, if it succeeds and continues, could transform the region. Once free to act with near impunity, the U.S. and Israel, when contemplating military action, now have to factor potentially significant costs into their calculations: If the U.S. strikes Iran, Iran will strike U.S. assets in the region; if Israel strikes Iran or one of its partners, Iran will strike Israel.

The closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the recent round of missile strikes on Israel highlight yet one more way the war on Iran has been a failure that has achieved none of its goals: Iran has not been severed from its regional partners, but has forged a stronger relationship in which both sides will come to the defense of the other. The result could well outlive the failed war on Iran, changing the Middle East for the foreseeable future.

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