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Sweden Plans To Lower Criminal Age To 14 Amid Rise In Violent Crime By Children

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Sweden Plans To Lower Criminal Age To 14 Amid Rise In Violent Crime By Children

Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

The Swedish government has announced plans to reduce the age of criminal responsibility to 14 after dropping plans to lock up violent offenders as young as 13 in special prison units.

Ambulance and police stand at the scene where Swedish rapper Einar was fatally shot in Hammarby Sjostad district, in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 22, 2021. Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP

Earlier this month, Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer announced plans to cut the age from 15 to 13, but on June 11, he said there was not enough support in parliament for that and that he had agreed to compromise at 14.

“We are going to propose that the age of criminal responsibility should be cut to 14 instead of 13 years old,” Strommer told reporters.

Currently, anyone under 15 who is suspected of having committed a serious crime is sent to a youth home, run by social services, and cannot be sentenced to a custodial sentence in prison.

Strommer said in 2025 that more than 50 children under 15 were suspected of murder or attempted murder.

There has been a surge in gang crime and drug-related violence in Sweden over the past 20 years, and it now has one of the highest rates of shootings and bombings in Europe, dozens of which were carried out by minors.

Thousands Of Gang Members

Swedish police estimate there are 17,500 active gang members and around 50,000 who are loosely associated with them.

Magnus Lindgren, a former police chief in Uppsala County and current secretary-general of the Safer Sweden Foundation, told The Epoch Times last year that there were about 15,000 “very dangerous criminals” in Sweden, who were divided evenly into biker gangs, football hooligans, and criminals from around 60 high-crime neighborhoods.

Organized crime gangs, such as the Foxtrot Network, use social media to recruit teenagers and children as young as 11 to commit acts of violence, including bombings and murders.

The recruiters, who operate anonymously, post adverts in special groups on social media apps and offer money through banking apps.

The EU’s law enforcement agency, Europol, launched Operational Taskforce GRIMM in April 2025 to target so-called “violence-as-a-service,” which it said often used “young perpetrators.”

After the 2022 elections, Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the center-right Moderates, formed a government that includes the Christian Democrats and Liberals, but has the crucial support of the right-wing Sweden Democrats, who campaigned against immigration and in favor of tougher criminal justice measures.

Kristersson’s government has overhauled Sweden’s criminal justice system, giving the police more powers and introducing tougher sentences for violent crime.

Under the new plans, children aged 14 who are convicted of violent criminal offenses will be sent to special prison units.

The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends that the age of criminal responsibility should be no lower than 14, which is the average across the European Union.

Swedish organized crime networks are also operating in Denmark, Norway, and Finland, and also in the Netherlands and Belgium, which have the two biggest ports – Rotterdam and Antwerp – for importing narcotics, hidden in cargo.

On March 12, 2025, sanctions were imposed on Rawa Majid, the alleged leader of the Foxtrot Network, one of Sweden’s largest organized crime groups, by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

OFAC stated that the gang trafficked illegal drugs and carried out attacks on Israelis and Jews in Europe on behalf of the Iranian government.

Norwegian Teen On Trial

A Norwegian teenager, Johannes Natland, was arrested in Huddersfield, England, in March 2025 and is currently on trial in London, where he has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to murder on behalf of the Foxtrot Network.

Natland, who was 18 at the time, was found in possession of two handguns and 17 bullets and has admitted to possessing firearms.

Giving evidence in court this week, Natland said he had been offered 25,000 euros ($29,000) to kill someone but said he planned to shoot himself in the foot to get out of having to do it, the BBC reported.

“I thought if I was to say no, I would be in serious danger, they’re going to hurt my family,” Natland said. “I thought they’d kill me.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Natland’s barrister, Paul Hynes KC, for comment but did not receive a response.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson attends a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, on Feb. 26, 2024. Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images

Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/13/2026 – 08:45

Hungary Backs Away From Crypto Criminalization In Regulatory U-Turn

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Hungary Backs Away From Crypto Criminalization In Regulatory U-Turn

Authored by Micah Zimmerman via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Hungary is dismantling the restrictive digital asset framework introduced under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a policy overhaul that will decriminalize crypto trading and eliminate the prison sentences that had driven major platforms from the country, government spokesperson Anita Kobol said Thursday, according to Bloomberg. 

The rollback marks a full reversal of legislation that took effect July 1, 2025, after parliament passed rules criminalizing the use of unlicensed exchanges and certain unauthorized high-value crypto transactions. 

Those transactions — ranging between 50 million Hungarian forints (roughly $162,000) and 500 million forints (roughly $1.62 million) — subjected individuals to prison terms of up to two or five years, depending on the transaction value.

Service providers operating without a central bank license faced sentences of up to eight years.

The rules required approved validation for both crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto conversions, a burden that led platforms including Revolut to suspend crypto services in Hungary and triggered an EU probe into whether the restrictions complied with bloc-wide regulations. 

Domestic trading volumes fell as local firms absorbed steep compliance costs.

Hungary’s politically motivated safeguards against bitcoin

Zoltán Tanács, Hungary’s Minister of Science and Technology, characterized the previous rules as “politically motivated” rather than market safeguards and announced the government’s intent to scrap the penalties. 

The new administration plans to abolish criminal prosecution for market participants, revise cybersecurity rules affecting approximately 4,000 Hungarian businesses subject to the NIS2 directive, and align national law with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation.

Officials have identified Estonia as the template for rebuilding Hungary’s digital regulatory environment. Tanács said the reforms should draw international platforms back to Hungary and reduce friction for domestic operators, according to Bloomberg.

The shift carries significance beyond Hungary’s borders. The Orbán-era framework was one of the most restrictive in the European Union, and the EU’s inquiry had put Hungary at odds with the broader MiCA framework that governs crypto activity across the bloc. 

Alignment with MiCA would bring Hungary in line with the regulatory standard now binding all 27 member states.

Hungary’s pivot follows a wider trend of governments reconsidering punitive crypto policies. In April, Pakistan’s central bank lifted an eight-year ban on cryptocurrency operations, part of a broader move toward regulatory openness across emerging markets. 

The convergence of those shifts suggests that restrictive unilateral frameworks face mounting pressure as institutional adoption of digital assets accelerates globally and cross-border regulatory coordination deepens under frameworks like MiCA.

The Hungarian government has not yet set a timeline for when the legislative changes will take effect.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/13/2026 – 08:10

Romania Asks Ukraine To Add Self-Destruct Function To Stray Drones, After One Exploded At Its Port

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Romania Asks Ukraine To Add Self-Destruct Function To Stray Drones, After One Exploded At Its Port

Errant Ukrainian drones which wonder across borders and into neighboring Baltic and Eastern European countries are becoming enough of a problem to where some NATO allies pushing for a self-destruct function. 

Romanian Defense Minister Radu Miruta has proposed that Ukraine program its maritime drones to self-destruct if they veer into the country’s territorial waters, coming just on the heels of a major disaster.

AP image: explosion of errant Ukrainian drone at key Romanian port.

The remarks were prompted by a Magura-type kamikaze naval drone having exploded in Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta on Friday. 

Others also detonated while still at sea east of the city, apparently close enough to Romanian waters to be of serious concern – though Ukraine’s navy bit back by alleging that Russian signal jamming is to blame. 

Miruta said that “maritime drones can be programmed so that, if control is lost, they are unable to enter Romanian territorial waters and will self-destruct once they are 12 nautical miles from the coast.”

“This should be a default feature built into the system from the moment the drone is launched into the water,” he said.

The drone explosions were serious, just judging by the photographs and videos alone:

 A Ukrainian maritime drone that was being used in the country’s war against Russia exploded Friday at a Black Sea port in Romania, while three other sea drones exploded outside the port, Romanian authorities said. No one was hurt.

The drone that self-detonated in the port of Constanta exploded at around 10:30 a.m., after the area had been secured and isolated by the Romanian Intelligence Service, coast guard and the Defense Ministry, authorities said.

The Romanian government described in a statement: “Immediately after identifying the drone, the Ministry of Defense contacted its Ukrainian counterparts, who confirmed that they had lost control of the operation of four drones.”

“The other three drones self-detonated — two offshore and the third outside the port,” it added. “Confirmation of these events came from both the Ukrainian side and from data obtained by the Romanian authorities.”

There have also been a lot of errant aerial drone incidents of late, prompting NATO to scramble aircraft and shoot them out of the sky. These aerial drones might need a self-destruct feature as well.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/13/2026 – 07:35

‘The Suicide Of Europe’: Historic EU Migration Pact Goes Into Force Today As Fracture-Lines Grow

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‘The Suicide Of Europe’: Historic EU Migration Pact Goes Into Force Today As Fracture-Lines Grow

Via Remix News,

Six years ago, in 2020, French political leader Marine Le Pen described the Migrant Pact, which was then in the planning stages, as the “suicide of Europe.” She said it would bring 60 to 70 million new migrants to Europe, as Remix News reported at the time.

Europe is about to find out just how prophetic its critics have been. On June 12, the highly contested EU Migration Pact officially came into force, instantly triggering a sharp political divide across the continent.

Brussels is already signaling a hardline approach toward resistance; the bloc’s own EU Migration Commissioner recently admitted that the Union is preparing a “crackdown” on member states that refuse to comply with the new relocation directives.

At the heart of the controversy is the pact’s mandatory migrant quotas, framed by Brussels as “burden-sharing.” In practice, critics argue this distribution system allows nations like Germany and France a convenient mechanism to offload asylum seekers onto Central and Eastern European nations – such as Poland and Hungary – which have historically maintained strict anti-refugee stances.

Europe’s anti-immigration politicians are already responding to what they say is a law that will bring disaster to Europe. Le Pen, six years later, is calling for a “constitutional referendum on immigration.”

“Tomorrow, the Migration Pact will enter into force. It will require the States of the European Union to welcome migrants, under penalty of fines. When we come to power, we will propose to the French a constitutional referendum on immigration, the only means to regain control of our migration policy,” she wrote on X.

The financial penalties for defiance are severe. Non-compliant governments face fines as high as €21,000 per migrant, potentially costing dissenting nations hundreds of millions of euros. Furthermore, the pact allows for these financial penalties to be adjusted upward in the coming years, which could quickly escalate the cost of non-compliance into billions of euros.

Meanwhile, other establishment European politicians are celebrating the move. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to frame the migration pact as a positive for controlling immigration.

“The migration turnaround has been initiated—nationally and at the European level. As of today, the Common European Asylum System applies: better control and order, faster procedures, and a fair distribution of responsibility. The reform must be implemented effectively. This is how our country will benefit,” wrote Merz.

Of course, the EU is also trying to sell the pact on social media as well.

The end goal of the EU Migration Pact

Linguistically, the EU’s emphasis on sharing a migration “burden” represents a stark rhetorical departure from the peak of the 2016 refugee crisis. A decade ago, newcomers were widely championed by Brussels as Europe’s future workforce—the doctors, lawyers, and engineers destined to salvage the continent’s aging pension systems. Today, that idealistic language has been replaced by the utilitarian vocabulary of managing a “burden.”

Strategically, the pact acts as a political pressure valve. By reducing the immediate concentration of migrants in Western Europe, Brussels hopes to blunt the rapid electoral rise of populist right-wing parties. Simultaneously, the framework seeks to introduce demographic diversity into Eastern European nations, which EU leadership has long criticized as being overly homogenous and politically conservative. Over the long term, the naturalization and family reunification of these migrants could fundamentally alter the electoral dynamics in these traditionally conservative regions in favor or left-wing and pro-migration parties.

However, Central and Eastern European populations remain overwhelmingly opposed to forced relocation. Decades of polling show a deep societal preference for maintaining current demographic structures, setting the stage for protracted constitutional and political gridlock between national capitals and Brussels.

Hungary under new leadership

The EU’s political chess board has also shifted significantly with Hungary’s recent transition of power. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, long the most fierce opponent of Brussels’ migration quotas, has been succeeded by Prime Minister Péter Magyar.

A report in Euractiv’s newsletter questions “whether some national governments are ready” for the EU Migration Pact, which has “raised questions over whether Brussels will need to crack down on non-compliant capitals.”

In an interview, Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner said they are ready to use “sticks” to make countries like Hungary fall into line.

“There are sticks and carrots in the pact. So, you get funding, you get money, only if you apply the pact,” he said.

In fact, Euractiv is quite open that Magyar may be more than willing to sell out the public on the issue of migrant quotas.

“Péter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister, once firmly opposed to the EU migration pact, is now keeping his options open. Pressed by the opposition Fidesz to rule out implementation, he sidestepped the question, saying only that ‘there will be no illegal migrants in Hungary’ under a Tisza government,” wrote Euractiv.

This carefully worded distinction leaves the door wide open for the arrival of migrants who are processed “legally” under the parameters of the new EU framework. Unsurprisingly, Commissioner Brunner has lauded the new Hungarian administration’s shift, calling the government “very constructive” and adding, “Our job is to explain the advantages for Hungary and make them visible on a political level.”

Certainly, Brunner was smart enough to not frame the new migration pact as the “suicide of Europe” while trying threaten the new Hungarian government. He can be given that much credit.

Read more here…

Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/13/2026 – 07:00

A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty

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A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty

Authored by Veronique de Rugy via The Eoch Times,

Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains.

Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in “The Fountainhead” would scheme to seize the global economy’s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice.

But the people who hold such ideas don’t just appear in cartoons or in Rand’s novels.

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.

In early June, Piketty – the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations and cherry-picked baselines – and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan.

It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept.

But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty’s plan would cap GDP per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430.

The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent.

There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes.

This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist.

This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.

Let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan?

About this matter, he is conveniently vague.

Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely.

You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history.

The mechanism must be authoritarian.

It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat and how many hours they are permitted to work.

And to what end?

“Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Piketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the “RCP8.5” climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the UN’s own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things. Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It’s also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief.

It’s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels.

These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care and pensions and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people.

Rand’s villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/12/2026 – 23:25

These Are The Hardest Languages For English Speakers To Learn

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These Are The Hardest Languages For English Speakers To Learn

For English speakers, learning Spanish or Italian can take less than a year. Reaching the same level of proficiency in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic may require nearly four times as much study.

This wide gap reflects how closely a language resembles English in its vocabulary, grammar, sounds, and writing system.

This visualization, created by Julie R. Peasley via Visual Capitalist, ranks languages by difficulty using categories and study-time estimates from Effective Language Learning and Rosetta Stone, which reference Foreign Service Institute-style benchmarks.

Which Languages Are Easiest to Learn for English Speakers?

Languages are generally easier to learn when they share familiar grammar, vocabulary, sounds, or writing systems. That’s why many Category I languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish, are considered relatively approachable.

The data table below shows the difficulty rankings and estimated learning time for 70 different languages:

Language Category Time to learn
🇿🇦🇳🇦 Afrikaans I 24-30 weeks
🇩🇰 Danish I 24-30 weeks
🇳🇱🇧🇪 Dutch I 24-30 weeks
🇫🇷🇧🇪🇨🇭🇨🇦 French I 24-30 weeks
🇮🇹🇨🇭 Italian I 24-30 weeks
🇳🇴 Norwegian I 24-30 weeks
🇵🇹🇧🇷 Portuguese I 24-30 weeks
🇷🇴🇲🇩 Romanian I 24-30 weeks
🇪🇸🇲🇽🇦🇷 Spanish I 24-30 weeks
🇸🇪 Swedish I 24-30 weeks
🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭 German II 36 weeks
🇭🇹 Haitian Creole II 36 weeks
🇮🇩 Indonesian II 36 weeks
🇲🇾🇧🇳 Malay II 36 weeks
🇹🇿🇰🇪 Swahili II 36 weeks
🇦🇱🇽🇰 Albanian III 44 weeks
🇪🇹 Amharic III 44 weeks
🇦🇲 Armenian III 44 weeks
🇦🇿 Azerbaijani III 44 weeks
🇧🇩🇮🇳 Bengali III 44 weeks
🇧🇬 Bulgarian III 44 weeks
🇲🇲 Burmese III 44 weeks
🇨🇿 Czech III 44 weeks
🇦🇫 Dari III 44 weeks
🇪🇪 Estonian III 44 weeks
🇮🇷 Farsi III 44 weeks
🇫🇮 Finnish III 44 weeks
🇬🇪 Georgian III 44 weeks
🇬🇷🇨🇾 Greek III 44 weeks
🇮🇱 Hebrew III 44 weeks
🇮🇳 Hindi III 44 weeks
🇭🇺 Hungarian III 44 weeks
🇮🇸 Icelandic III 44 weeks
🇰🇿 Kazakh III 44 weeks
🇰🇭 Khmer III 44 weeks
Kurdish III 44 weeks
🇰🇬 Kyrgyz III 44 weeks
🇱🇦 Lao III 44 weeks
🇱🇻 Latvian III 44 weeks
🇱🇹 Lithuanian III 44 weeks
🇲🇰 Macedonian III 44 weeks
🇲🇳 Mongolian III 44 weeks
🇳🇵 Nepali III 44 weeks
🇦🇫🇵🇰 Pashto III 44 weeks
🇵🇱 Polish III 44 weeks
🇷🇺 Russian III 44 weeks
🇷🇸🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪 Serbo-Croatian III 44 weeks
🇱🇰 Sinhala III 44 weeks
🇸🇰 Slovak III 44 weeks
🇸🇮 Slovenian III 44 weeks
🇸🇴 Somali III 44 weeks
🇮🇳 Telugu III 44 weeks
Tibetan III 44 weeks
🇮🇳🇱🇰🇸🇬 Tamil III 44 weeks
🇹🇯 Tajiki III 44 weeks
🇵🇭 Tagalog III 44 weeks
🇹🇭 Thai III 44 weeks
🇹🇷🇨🇾 Turkish III 44 weeks
🇹🇲 Turkmen III 44 weeks
🇺🇦 Ukrainian III 44 weeks
🇵🇰🇮🇳 Urdu III 44 weeks
🇺🇿 Uzbek III 44 weeks
🇻🇳 Vietnamese III 44 weeks
🇿🇦 Xhosa III 44 weeks
🇿🇦 Zulu III 44 weeks
🇸🇦🇪🇬🇦🇪 Arabic IV 88 weeks
🇭🇰🇲🇴 Cantonese Chinese IV 88 weeks
🇨🇳🇹🇼🇸🇬 Mandarin Chinese IV 88 weeks
🇯🇵 Japanese IV 88 weeks
🇰🇷🇰🇵 Korean IV 88 weeks

One of the most striking findings is the size of the gap between the easiest and hardest languages. While Spanish or French can often be learned in 24–30 weeks, mastering Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic may require roughly 88 weeks of study.

Many Category I languages use the Latin alphabet and share vocabulary roots with English through Germanic or Romance-language connections.

This may also help explain why European languages often rank highly in language-learning apps and why Duolingo’s most popular languages globally include several widely taught European options.

What Makes a Language Harder to Learn?

Category III languages tend to have greater linguistic distance from English. This can include unfamiliar grammar structures, new alphabets, or pronunciation patterns that require more time to master.

For example, languages like Russian, Greek, Hindi, Turkish, and Vietnamese all fall into this category. Some use different scripts, while others introduce grammatical systems that are less intuitive for native English speakers.

The “Super-Hard” Languages

Category IV languages are considered exceptionally difficult for English speakers. This group includes Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.

Many of these languages present multiple learning hurdles simultaneously. Mandarin and Cantonese require mastery of tones, Japanese combines several writing systems, Korean introduces a unique alphabet and grammar structure, and Arabic uses an entirely different script. Together, these differences significantly increase the time needed to reach professional proficiency.

To learn more about language use across the U.S., check out Mapped: America’s Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish on the Voronoi app.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/12/2026 – 23:00

Half Of Israelis Agree Deterrence ‘Weakened’ Following Wars In Iran, Lebanon: Poll

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Half Of Israelis Agree Deterrence ‘Weakened’ Following Wars In Iran, Lebanon: Poll

Via The Cradle

Israelis are raising doubts about their government and military’s ability to provide security after more than three months of renewed war against Iran and Lebanon. 

According to a Maariv poll released on Friday, 50 percent of Israelis believe their country’s deterrence has declined following the recent escalation with Iran and Lebanon, compared to 28 percent who say it has strengthened, while 22 percent are undecided.

via Le Monde

The US and Israel launched a renewed bombing campaign on Iran on February 28. The Islamic Republic retaliated by firing missiles and drones at Israel and US bases in Persian Gulf states until a ceasefire was reached on April 8, largely halting the fighting amid negotiations.

According to the Maariv poll, 49 percent think the Israeli army’s freedom to carry out strikes in Lebanon has decreased after the latest confrontation, versus 30 percent who say it has improved and 21 percent who are unsure.

On 2 March, Hezbollah took advantage of Tel Aviv’s vulnerability from the war with Iran by renewing its own missile and drone attacks on Israel. Hezbollah had refrained from retaliating to thousands of Israeli bombings of Lebanese territory that violated the previous ceasefire reached in November 2024. 

Israel responded by intensifying its airstrikes and sending ground troops to occupy additional Lebanese territory. At least 30 Israeli soldiers have since been killed and 1,302 injured, primarily by Hezbollah’s newly introduced FPV drones.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to launch an attack on Iran despite US President Donald Trump’s supposed request not to do so.

In an interview with the Financial Times (FT), Trump stated, “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots.”

However, Netanyahu ordered a strike on Iran just hours after Trump’s comments. Iran responded by striking targets in Israel.

According to the poll, Israelis are divided in their opinion on Netanyahu’s decision to ignore Trump and order the bombing. Around 29 percent said he acted correctly, 36 percent said a stronger strike should have been carried out, and 19 percent preferred to follow the US position.

Meanwhile, 62 percent of poll respondents expressed distrust in Trump, while 21 percent said they trust him regarding Israeli interests in any agreement, and 17 percent said they did not know. A poll published by Israel’s Public Broadcaster (KAN) on 28 April found that a majority of Israelis believe the state has failed to secure victory in any war since October 2023.

According to the survey, 57 percent of respondents said no victory had been achieved, while 28 percent believed success had been reached in at least one arena, and a further 15 percent said they were unsure. 

The findings came after more than two years of Israel’s reported genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, during which Tel Aviv waged multiple offensive military campaigns against Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, alongside attacks in Yemen and Syria and a campaign of destruction and displacement in the occupied West Bank. 

On Thursday, Trump warned that in the coming hours the US would hit Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT” and take “total control” of Tehran’s oil and gas industry before reversing course and claiming that a deal with Iran is expected to be “finalized” soon.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/12/2026 – 22:35

“Flying Beer Cooler”: Pentagon’s Next Kamikaze Drone Ushers In Era Of Cheap Mass-Produced Airpower

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“Flying Beer Cooler”: Pentagon’s Next Kamikaze Drone Ushers In Era Of Cheap Mass-Produced Airpower

Our focus on the rise of the “war unicorn” theme over the last four months, shaped by technological innovation seen in the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East, has allowed us, in countless notes, to inform readers very early that 2030s warfare has already arrived. In fact, hyperinnovation in Ukraine, now the world’s AI weapons laboratory, is what pulled forward these extremely advanced, low-cost weaponry.

Modern battlefields are now defined by low-cost robotics, whether on the ground, at sea, or in the air, as well as drones, other autonomous systems, and AI-enabled kill chains. Meanwhile, the Department of War’s shift toward funding and procuring from defense startups, rather than solely from big defense primes, thanks to DOGE, has accelerated the U.S.’s ability to spur a boom in the defense universe as President Trump’s broader war economy ramps up, mainly for stockpiling reasons. 

Let’s not forget our view in late January, when nearly all of Wall Street was misguided on alleged water and climate threats from data centers, completely missed that with hundreds of billions of dollars in data center buildouts by hyperscalers, now around $800 billion this fiscal year, these facilities had, and still have, a missing layer of air defense against FPVs and fiber-optic one-way attack drones.

We warned at the time:

Then noted:

In fact, it only took two Iranian attacks targeting Gulf-area data centers with Shahed drones to become a major wake-up call to Wall Street and private equity about the urgency of understanding this threat and how to capitalize.

More importantly, it triggered the urgent need for private equity to begin raising capital for war unicorns that will eventually become major suppliers of interceptors, counter-UAS products, and much more, because much of America’s critical infrastructure, data centers, and the list goes on and on, remains entirely exposed to FPVs.

We understand that multiple private equity funds, each with billions of dollars in AUM, have sent personnel to Ukraine to assess the investment landscape across FPV drone, counter-drone, passive acoustic threat detection, and battlefield AI companies. That alone underscores how quickly the “war unicorn” theme is being adopted on Wall Street, one set to surge in the coming quarters.

Going mainstream on Wall Street: 

This leaves us with the innovation question: the “evolve or die” moment now confronting America’s military-industrial complex. The focus must shift away from high-cost weapon systems built around titanium, carbon fiber, and decade-long procurement cycles, and back toward what made the U.S. an industrial powerhouse during World War II: the ability to mass-produce low-cost weapons at scale, rapidly, repeatedly, and in volumes that overwhelm foreign adversaries.

Answering the innovation question above, deep inside America’s drone industry is California-based DZYNE Technologies, a company building one-way attack drones from the same material used in beer coolers.

The wings are formed by steam chest molding. That’s the process behind beer coolers, bike helmets, and the packaging your TV arrived in. Hot steam, expanded foam, a mold, done. No autoclaves. No exotic supply chain. No aerospace machinists charging aerospace rates.

“We joke that it’s a flying beer cooler, and honestly, we lean into it,” said CEO Matt McCue. “If your airframe costs almost nothing and pours out of a mold by the thousands, you’ve solved the problem Ukraine has been screaming about for three years.”

That problem is mass: cheap, expendable, attritable mass. Every report from the Black Sea to the Red Sea to the Hormuz chokepoint points to the same conclusion: the side that can afford to lose drones wins. Firing a $2 million missile at a $1,000 drone is a losing trade.

DZYNE’s Blitz drone fits in the standard-issue rucksack. It assembles in under two minutes. A new operator is mission-ready in a couple of hours. Range runs 80 to 150 kilometers, with swappable payloads for surveillance or jamming, or it can be easily converted into a one-way attack drone.

Notice what Blitz is not. It’s not one of those quadcopters filling your X feed from Ukraine. Those are real and they work, and nobody will say otherwise. But they’re one layer of a bigger stack. Multi-rotors burn through batteries just to stay airborne, which makes them deadly in a close fight and spend a lot of energy before the fight gets deep.

A fixed wing gets its lift for free, so Blitz extends the same expendable logic out to 150 kilometers, loiters for hours instead of minutes, hauls heavier payloads, and keeps flying in wind that grounds FPVs. Picture the FPVs owning the last mile while waves of cheap fixed wings seek targets, jam radars, and strike staging areas far behind it. That’s not a rivalry. That’s a kill chain.

Blitzing is a bet that pressure is cheaper than coverage. NFL football fans understand that, and so does every air-defense crew that has watched a million-dollar interceptor chase a cheap Iranian or Russian drone. That brings us to DZYNE’s BlitzBox, a nondescript shipping-container system designed to autonomously launch up to 100 Blitz drones into the air for a coordinated swarming raid.

“Adversaries have spent twenty years planning around our big, fixed, easy-to-find bases. A hundred drones in a box that could be anywhere changes that math overnight…

… BlitzBox looks like every other container out there on any truck, ship, port, or railyard. That’s a feature,” said Ryan Holcomb, DZYNE’s VP of Expendables.

That is exactly the logic Ukraine demonstrated last year when it launched a drone swarm deep inside Russia from a modified shipping container positioned near an airbase, targeting strategic bombers.

A drone made from cheap beer-cooler material directly answers the Trump administration and Pentagon’s call for low-cost, scalable defense war tech. The question now is how many of these drones the Pentagon will stockpile and how quickly these drones can be produced.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/12/2026 – 22:10

Russian Governors Rush To Deny Fuel Crisis As Rationing Spreads

survivalnomics
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Russian Governors Rush To Deny Fuel Crisis As Rationing Spreads

Submitted by Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

Russia’s authorities and regional governors are racing to assure residents there are no fuel shortages amid an intensified Ukrainian drone campaign at Russian refineries and fuel supply roads.

Ukraine has stepped up attacks this month on key fuel supply routes in its territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea and Mariupol. Several Russian regions have been experiencing fuel shortages as Ukraine hits Russian oil refineries.

Last week, the Moscow Times reported that some gasoline stations in Moscow and regions in northern Russia have started to cap fuel purchases per driver, in a move to prevent panic buying.

Officials are playing down the fuel crisis.

Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the northwestern Leningrad region, said this week that “Supplies are being delivered according to plan, there are no shortages,” as carried by Bloomberg.

Some isolated complaints about fuel shortages “do not reflect the overall situation,” the regional official said.

Governors all across Russia are looking to play down the extent of the crisis.

Meanwhile, earlier this month Russia admitted for the first time that its crude oil production is falling.

Russia’s crude oil production has declined since the beginning of the year as a number of local refineries are under unscheduled repairs and maintenance, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said, in the first public acknowledgement from Moscow that its output is flailing.

“We have a number of refineries under unscheduled repairs. However, we are maximizing the use of the export infrastructure,” said Novak, who represents Russia at the OPEC+ meetings and at discussions about the alliance’s output.

Russia is preparing to sharply reduce crude oil exports this month as mounting refinery disruptions, fuel shortages, and Ukraine’s bombing campaign force Moscow to divert more barrels into the domestic market.

Exports from Russia’s western ports of Primorsk, Ust-Luga and Novorossiysk are expected to fall to roughly 1.7 million barrels per day in June from 2.5 million bpd in May, according to Reuters calculations based on preliminary industry and trading data.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/12/2026 – 21:45

America’s Hiring Map Has Flipped Since 2020

survivalnomics
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America’s Hiring Map Has Flipped Since 2020

America’s hiring recovery has split into sharply different regional stories since 2020.

Some states, including Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas, continue seeing elevated hiring demand years after the pandemic. Others, particularly across parts of the West Coast and Mountain West, have experienced steep declines in job openings.

The map below, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows how job openings changed in every state between February 2020 and January 2026, based on data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The contrast is especially striking in the Mountain West. Idaho leads the nation with hiring demand up over 20%, while neighboring Wyoming ranks last at -39%.

Where Job Openings Have Increased the Most

The rankings below show the change in job openings since 2020 by state.

Rank State Change in Job Openings
Feb 2020 vs Jan 2026
1 Idaho 20.5%
2 Mississippi 19.6%
3 Oklahoma 18.8%
4 Georgia 16.0%
5 Texas 14.2%
6 Ohio 9.9%
7 Missouri 9.7%
8 Minnesota 9.5%
9 District of Columbia 6.5%
10 Louisiana 4.4%
11 South Carolina 3.7%
12 Arkansas 1.6%
13 Connecticut 1.5%
14 Tennessee 0.7%
15 Delaware 0.0%
16 Kansas 0.0%
17 Alabama -1.0%
18 North Carolina -1.7%
19 Florida -1.8%
20 Rhode Island -4.2%
21 Virginia -4.5%
22 Michigan -5.5%
23 Kentucky -6.4%
24 North Dakota -8.7%
25 Utah -10.7%
26 West Virginia -12.0%
27 Maine -12.5%
28 South Dakota -13.0%
29 Pennsylvania -13.2%
30 New York -13.5%
31 Colorado -14.1%
32 Iowa -14.5%
33 New Jersey -14.8%
34 Illinois -15.4%
35 Montana -17.9%
36 Indiana -19.2%
37 Nebraska -20.0%
38 Nevada -20.5%
39 Arizona -22.3%
40 Maryland -22.7%
41 Massachusetts -22.8%
42 Wisconsin -25.6%
43 New Hampshire -26.5%
44 California -27.0%
45 Oregon -28.4%
46 Hawaii -30.0%
47 Alaska -30.4%
48 New Mexico -35.3%
49 Vermont -35.3%
50 Washington -36.3%
51 Wyoming -38.9%
— 🇺🇸 U.S. State Average -9.6%

Where Hiring Demand Is Growing Fastest

Idaho leads the nation with job openings up 20.5% since 2020, followed by Mississippi and Oklahoma. Georgia (16.0%) and Texas (14.2%) have also posted strong gains, reflecting continued migration toward lower-cost states and expanding regional economies.

Manufacturing investment is helping drive demand. Billions of dollars tied to semiconductors, EVs, and industrial reshoring have fueled hiring across parts of the South and Midwest. Significant population growth has added another tailwind, boosting both labor supply and consumer demand.

The map highlights how America’s labor market is increasingly diverging at the state level, with neighboring states often moving in very different directions.

Why Many Western States Saw Hiring Cool Off

Several Western states have seen some of America’s steepest declines in job openings since 2020.

Wyoming ranks last nationally, with hiring demand down 38.9%, while Washington is close behind at -36.3%. California, Oregon, and Nevada have also posted sizable declines after the rapid hiring surge seen earlier in the decade.

Much of the slowdown reflects a reversal of pandemic-era expansion, especially across technology and white-collar industries. During 2021 and 2022, many companies aggressively expanded payrolls amid booming demand and cheap capital. Since then, layoffs, higher interest rates, and efficiency-focused cost-cutting have pushed many firms into retrenchment mode.

California alone has announced more layoffs than any other state since 2022. The result is a labor market that looks very different from the hiring frenzy that defined the post-pandemic recovery.

What It Means for Workers and the Economy

Hiring demand affects more than just how easy it is to find a job. It can influence migration patterns, wage growth, housing demand, and local economic confidence.

States with stronger hiring markets often attract more workers, investment, and new business formation, reinforcing long-term economic growth. Weaker hiring markets, meanwhile, may experience softer consumer spending and slower labor demand.

The map increasingly reflects broader economic shifts unfolding across America. Lower-cost states continue attracting people, capital, and industrial investment, while many high-cost markets are adjusting to slower growth after the pandemic-era boom.

The result is a labor market that is becoming more fragmented geographically, with economic momentum increasingly concentrated in a smaller group of states.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic showing where wealth is moving across America.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/12/2026 – 21:20

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