Camp Century, part of a secret Pentagon plan called Project Iceworm, was designed in the late 1950s as a hidden network of nuclear missile launch sites beneath Greenland’s ice. Built in 1959 and abandoned by 1967 due to unstable ice, the facility was meant to store 600 medium-range ballistic missiles.

Today, it lies buried under at least 100 feet of ice, according to the Wall Street Journal, who wrote a lengthy piece on the sites this week.

Although presented as a research station, its real military purpose remained classified until 1996. Nina Erofeeva explained: “The first [licenses] have been received for the creation of oil storage facilities, in the Krasnoyarsk territory. This was also an unusual case. Russia has never had oil storage facilities. Oil has always been pumped through pipelines. Given recent events and the lack of infrastructure in the Arctic zone, oil storage facilities are needed in several regions. Accordingly, oil will be placed in these oil storage facilities so as not to burn it during pilot development.”

With 21 tunnels stretching nearly two miles under the ice, the base housed around 200 personnel and operated on nuclear power. Robert Weiss, a physician stationed there in the early 1960s, recalled: “We did realize that it was important; that the Russians could come over the top of the Pole.”

Life at Camp Century was harsh but bearable. “When I got there, it was blowing snow and minus 50 degrees,” Weiss said, remembering how he spent weeks underground. “It wasn’t very hard living from that standpoint.” Joking about the isolation, he added: “We used to say that there was a pretty girl behind every tree. Of course, there was one problem: There were no trees.”

The Journal writes that the base’s full scale wasn’t revealed until April last year, when NASA’s cryospheric scientist, Greene, captured the first complete images using advanced ice-penetrating radar. “You see how the buildings and tunnels were connected, how people had to move about in their day-to-day life, and think what a wild experience it must have been to be stationed there,” Greene said.

The U.S. presence in Greenland has long been controversial. During the Cold War, the U.S. operated 17 bases there and stationed about 10,000 troops. Today, fewer than 200 remain at Pituffik Space Base.

Tensions rose again when President Trump openly criticized Denmark for not securing Greenland and even suggested taking the island by force for U.S. security. Denmark reminded Washington of the 1951 treaty that already allows U.S. bases there but firmly rejected any takeover.

Denmark’s uneasy compromise with U.S. military interests goes back to World War II. In 1941, a Danish envoy in Washington handed control of Greenland’s defense to the U.S. without Copenhagen’s consent. After the war, the U.S. offered to buy Greenland for $100 million, but Denmark refused.

“In the 1940s Denmark learned that if you say no to the U.S., the U.S. will go ahead anyway,” said Ulrik Pram Gad of the Danish Institute for International Studies. “Denmark has been allowed to maintain sovereignty over Greenland by outsourcing some of it—security—to the U.S.”

The U.S.’s undisclosed storage of nuclear weapons in Greenland and a 1968 crash of a nuclear-armed B-52 near Thule Air Base caused long-lasting tensions. More recently, reports of increased U.S. espionage and Trump’s interest in buying Greenland have pushed Greenlanders closer to Denmark.

Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com,

Ukraine is reportedly moving closer to adopting Bitcoin as a national reserve asset, a move that could bolster its financial resilience amid the ongoing war with Russia.

Lawmakers are reportedly working on a Bitcoin national reserve proposal, with a draft bill in its final stages, according to Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a member of parliament who confirmed the plan to local media outlet Incrypted.

The proposal was announced during the CRYPTO 2025 conference in Kyiv on Feb. 6. 

“We will soon submit a draft law from the industry allowing the creation of crypto reserves,” Zhelezniak said.

Cointelegraph reached out to Zhelezniak for comment on the bill’s status but had not received a response by publication.

Bitcoin has gained international attention as a national reserve asset since the election of US President Donald Trump in November 2024. On March 7, Trump signed an executive order to establish a national Bitcoin reserve seeded with BTC confiscated from criminal cases.

Source: Margo Martin

A month later, Swedish MP Rickard Nordin issued an open letter urging Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson to consider adopting Bitcoin as a national reserve asset, citing its growing recognition as a “hedge against inflation,” Cointelegraph reported on April 11.

Legal challenges may delay adoption

While Ukraine’s push for a national Bitcoin reserve marks a potentially historic shift in crypto policy, it may require “significant legal change,” according to Kyrylo Khomiakov, regional head of CEE, Central Asia and Africa, at crypto exchange Binance.

“We commend Ukraine’s ambition to establish a strategic crypto reserve,” he told Cointelegraph. 

“Implementing such a reserve would necessitate significant legal changes, indicating that this process will not be swift.”

He added, “Another positive aspect is that this initiative will likely lead to greater regulatory clarity in Ukraine, as the government will need to articulate its stance more clearly.”

Ukraine was reportedly planning to legalize cryptocurrencies in early 2025 with the finalization of a draft bill in coordination with the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), according to Daniil Getmantsev, head of the tax committee of the Verkhovna Rada.

On April 8, Ukraine’s financial regulator proposed taxing certain crypto transactions as personal income with a rate of up to 23%, excluding crypto-to-crypto transactions and stablecoins.

Not all voices in Ukraine’s crypto industry are optimistic about the timing of the proposal.

”The country is broke. More than 50% of the budget is in grants and loans from the European Union,” said Michael Chobanian, the founder of Ukraine-based Kuna exchange.

“The population is decreasing at the fastest rate in the world. Men are kidnapped and sent to the army against their will. What kind of BTC reserves are we talking about here? This is done only to divert your attention,” Chobanian claimed.

The global population is undergoing a major demographic shift.

As fertility rates fall and life expectancy rises, average ages are climbing in nearly every country, while population growth is steadily tapering off.

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, visualizes global population growth and average age from 1980 to 2100, based on data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, April 2025 edition.

How the World Will Age as Population Growth Falls

As of 2025, the average person is 33.6 years old, up from 26.5 years in 1980. Over that same period, global population growth has slowed from 1.8% to 0.9% in 2025.

This trend is expected to continue through the end of the century, as shown in the table below, which breaks down the projected average age and population growth rate from 1980 to 2100:

The global population is projected to begin declining in 2085, as the average age rises to 42 years. By the year 2100, the average person is expected to be 43 years old, with population growth at -0.1%.

However, the trend is divided across countries. Advanced economies like Japan, Germany, and Italy are aging rapidly and seeing population declines. Meanwhile, emerging economies like India still have growing populations, but the growth is slowing down.

The gradual decline is largely due to falling fertility rates globally, along with improvements in healthcare and life expectancy resulting in larger senior populations.

The Impacts of an Aging Population

Many economies are reaching their demographic turning points—when the share of the working-age population in their total population begins declining.

European countries like Germany, France, and Italy crossed this mark pre-2000, and are now among the world’s “super-aged societies”. The United States, the U.K., and China have followed in the last two decades.

But what does this mean for economic growth and the global economy?

Population aging carries several economic challenges. These include shrinking labor forces, slower productivity growth, and increased fiscal pressure on pension and healthcare systems.

However, there is a silver lining: the IMF notes that while people are living longer, they’re also aging more healthfully. This could result in longer working lives and enhance productivity among older workers, potentially easing the economic impacts of an aging population.

If you enjoyed this infographic, check out A Visual Breakdown of Where Economic Power Lies in 2025, on the Voronoi app.

Via Remix News,

The German domestic spy service, the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has released a 1,100-page report on the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which it used to label the party a “confirmed” right-wing extremist party. The report is huge and reads like it was written by Antifa, but that was to be expected. However, one interesting point is that it contains only public statements, including quotes made by AfD politicians and a lot of memes.

Why is that?

We already know that the BfV is secretly surveilling AfD members in certain German states, mostly in the east, where the party is “confirmed right-wing extremist” already. This designation allows for the BfV in those states to partake in extraordinary surveillance powers over AfD members, including reading their chats and emails. Presumably, they can also track their browsing history, and perhaps they are even listening in on their conversations at home.

What this means is that the BfV has plenty of statements, memes and content to use based on private statements, but it is purposefully choosing not to use them. After all, a certain number of those AfD members, in private moments, probably also express opinions, post memes, or share thoughts that the BfV would love to include in a secret report on the party, which many hope will eventually justify an outright ban.

Again, why is the BfV not using these private statements?

There are multiple reasons.

For one, a big part of the apparatus of spy agencies is to obtain information, but not release it to the public. The public may not be able to stomach such personal and private information and the means that were used to obtain it. Since the Edward Snowden revelations, and even before then, we have become acutely aware that we have accepted devices into our lives and homes that can be used to spy on us on a scale never seen before in history. However, even now — even after all this information has been revealed — I believe nearly all of us still cannot quite grasp what this means — nor do we want to.

Yes, we know that AfD members are being spied on across Germany. Their emails are read, their phone calls are recorded. AI is being used to sort out keywords of interest to the security services. However, nobody really knows how this information is being processed and what it is being used for, or even who is reading it. The spies who control this information have extraordinary power. As a significant portion of them are now far left, at least in Germany, they believe they are acting as a bulwark against the rise of Nazism, and the ends justify the means when it comes to the AfD. There are other psychological motives at work, of course, as spy agencies are on the whole very good at keeping their secrets, not even necessarily because of internal controls, but because the spies are dedicated to their mission. There is, also, the sense of power that comes with being the watcher, and for many spies, this is a powerful intoxicant. They know, while you are in the dark.

In practice, these spies know which AfD members are having affairs, their personal struggles, their health issues, their financial situation, and even their personal browsing history. In other words, they know their targets better in many cases than even their close friends and family. The spies of the world, not just in Germany, are now in many ways gods and mind readers, seeing through the walls people build up around themselves and accessing their darkest fears and secrets — all due to rapid advances in technology and the rise of smartphones.

Earlier this month, commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the famed Dutch activist reported that she was alerted that her phone was being breached with Pegasus-like spyware, mainly produced in Israel, which can unlock essentially every aspect of her personal life, including chats, location data, photos, contacts, and so on. With this software, they can even record her in real time, including personal conversations in her home, as well as turn on her camera to record her in her most personal moments.

After having been alerted that the deep state is spying on me through mercenary spyware, I’ve been feeling like there is someone standing in the room with me at all times.

Now, I’m not naive: exposing the wicked ways of the establishment is quite literally at the core of my… pic.twitter.com/16dXkeJMAq

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) May 7, 2025

This software, and software like it, has been used on thousands of people, including journalists, politicians, and activists, sometimes with deadly results. It is not just the right, but far-left activists have also been targeted, including human rights activists. It is also unclear how long Vlaardingerbroek may have been targeted in such a manner. Previous versions of Apple iOS may have not been able to detect this software on her phone. In short, much of her personal life may already be in a database somewhere waiting to be used by intelligence.

Vlaardingerbroek is not in the AfD or even German, but she has backed the party, and she and people like her are most certainly the target of intelligence operatives in countries across Europe.

The point is that this software and the means for surveilling people are very unsettling. In a privacy-minded country like Germany, revealing the scale of surveillance being used against the AfD may be a scandal within itself, and could taint the entire report, which at the end of the day, should be used to justify a ban of the AfD.

There may have been voices in the BfV who were calling to use secretly recorded data in the report as well, but the agency also knew this report would eventually be leaked and made public. The agency does not appear to want to divulge who they are surveilling, what information they have about them, and how they obtained this information.

Another important consideration is also to be taken into account. The BfV decided it did not need to include this secret information in the report because it is likely confident that it can get what it wants using public statements alone. It can still keep the scale of its surveillance secret and get the ban it desires — at least that is the gamble the agency is making.

Surveillance is everywhere, it is being practiced by the left, the right, and many foreign governments are also active in the West, collecting data on targets. So, this is not a uniquely German issue by any means. However, if the establishment in Germany becomes truly desperate, there is probably a secret report waiting that includes far more information and personal details than many Germans want to believe is possible.

Read more here…

Authored by Sam Sorbo via American Greatness,

For decades, Americans have watched as federal involvement in education expanded, ballooning into a behemoth bureaucracy that imposes top-down mandates while divorcing parents from their rightful role as the primary educators of their children, while failing to achieve academic success for students.

If we are serious about fixing our children’s education, we must restore parental authority and end federal control of education.

America’s Founding Fathers never intended for Washington, D.C., to dictate how children in Kansas or Kentucky learn to read, write, and think. Education was, and should be, a local and parental matter. President Donald Trump rightly stated in Executive Order 13985, Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, “The experiment of controlling American education through federal programs and dollars…has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.” That failure is clearly documented by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card.” Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, NAEP scores had stagnated or declined. Today, nearly 40% of fourth graders read below basic level, despite record federal funding. Billions of taxpayer dollars have produced declining literacy.

It’s not just ineffective—it’s indefensible.

Federal education initiatives have repeatedly promised results, especially for low-income students, but have failed to deliver. Programs like Title I and Head Start have cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the years with no consistent academic gains to show for them. Similarly, federal control over college grants and loans has inflated tuition and buried young Americans under a mountain of debt.

The evidence is clear: centralized, bureaucratic control undermines education.

As the founder of the “They’re YOUR Kids Foundation,” I work with parents every day who feel helpless. The system fails their children academically and often undermines their values. If we truly want to empower families, we must strip away the federal red tape and hand the reins back to those who know and love their children best: parents.

Representative Barry Moore of Alabama has proposed legislation (H.R. 2691, “Eliminate the Department of Education Act,” Congress.gov) to eliminate USED and redirect education funding based on what residents in each state pay in federal income taxes. But simply shifting USED’s functions to other agencies, as some proposals suggest, won’t solve the problem—it just moves the bureaucracy around.

That’s why I support the US Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) Blueprint: a five-step plan to close the U.S. Department of Education and return education governance to the states. The Blueprint is simple, sensible, and long overdue:

1. Return all program management and funding to the states.

2. Repeal laws like the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that enable federal overreach.

3. Privatize college loan programs through local financial institutions for increased accountability.

4. Eliminate all divisions and spending within USED.

5. Reduce federal tax collection so states retain education funds directly.

We have a singular opportunity to implement meaningful change, including a federal tax credit system that empowers parents to direct their own children’s education. Under this proposal:

• Parents who homeschool or choose private education would receive a Child Tax Credit equal to the federal per-pupil expenditure.

• Federal taxpayers of households with children attending government schools would prompt their per-pupil allocation to be block-granted to their respective states.

This model respects choice while avoiding the pitfalls of government entanglement. Voucher programs, while well-intentioned, often bring government regulation with them. The 1980 Supreme Court ruling involving Hillsdale College affirmed that any institution accepting federal funds—even indirectly through student aid—is subject to federal control. [Grove City College v. Bell, 465 U.S. 555 (1984)] That’s the Trojan horse we must avoid.

We must stop pretending we can reform federal education mandates and instead recognize them for what they are: unconstitutional, ineffective, and dangerous to parental rights.

As a mother who homeschooled three children, I know firsthand the value of individualized learning guided by a parent who knows their child’s needs and aspirations. Education is not simply the memorization of facts or test preparation. It is the formation of character, virtue, curiosity, and conviction. That formation is best entrusted to families—not bureaucrats in Washington.

President Trump’s 2025 executive order declared that closing the Department of Education would “restore the proper role of families and local governments in education.” But that can only happen if we also change the funding structure and remove all federal strings. If not, we risk replacing one failed model with another, abandoning the nation’s most precious resource, and ultimately forfeiting our very future.

It’s time to reject the lie that Washington knows best. Parents are not the problem. They are the solution. Local communities, not federal mandates, are best equipped to nurture the next generation of citizens. And education must once again become the deeply personal, values-rooted family journey it was meant to be.

We have a roadmap. We have legislation. And most importantly, we have an awakening of parents across this country who are saying, Enough is enough.

Let’s seize this moment to make education truly free—by making it family-led.

Authored by Rachel Acenas via The Epoch Times,

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday announced the state’s first-ever “inflation refund,” a one-time payment to eligible residents.

Hochul said during a news conference that inflation has driven up costs for New Yorkers, and they should get that money back. The funding, according to the governor, will come from the money the state collected in higher sales taxes because of inflation.

“We collected more in sales tax as a result. Unanticipated revenue. I said, this can go into the state coffers, but why not give it to the residents whose pockets it came out of? They paid more than they ever expected. That’s the whole idea behind an inflation refund.”

Collectively, the one-time payment will put $2 billion back in the pockets of over eight million New York taxpayers, Hochul said. The amount of the payment would be based on filing status and income.

Joint tax filers who earn up to $150,000 will receive a $400 check, while those earning between $150,000 and $300,000 will get $300. Single tax filers with incomes up to $75,000 should expect to receive a $200 inflation refund check, and those earning between $75,000 and $150,000 will get a $150 check.

Hochul first proposed her plan of an inflation refund check last December and secured the funding in the fiscal year 2026 state budget agreement. Her initial plan called for higher refunds, specifically $300 for single filers making $150,000 or less, and $500 for joint filers making up to $300,000.

According to data from the Consumer Price Index, the New York area experienced the highest inflation rate in the country from April 2024 to April 2025, with a rate of 3.9 percent. New York’s rate was much higher than the national average, which was 2.3 percent in April 2025. The New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area experienced a 3.9 percent increase in prices, while core inflation reached 4.3 percent.

In announcing the inflation refund plan, the governor signed a large check while announcing the inflation refund. “We got it done, everybody. We got it done,” she told supporters.

Residents who qualify for the one-time payment don’t need to fill out an application or take any type of action, according to a news release by the governor’s office. Rather, the state will automatically send them a check based on their 2023 tax filing. The checks will be mailed over a period of several weeks beginning in the fall of 2025.

As part of the state budget, Hochul is also giving 1.6 million New York families an annual tax credit of up to $1,000 per child under age four and up to $500 per child from four through sixteen, marking the largest expansion of New York’s child tax credit in its history. The state budget agreement also includes her plan to cut taxes for more than 75 percent of all tax filers in the state.

United Way of New York City President and CEO Grace Bonilla said in a statement in response to Hochul’s budget: 

“These changes will ease the burden on people who are already facing untenable challenges – forced to choose between feeding their children or paying bills.”

According to United Way’s 2023 True Cost of Living report, 50 percent of working-age people in New York City are struggling to make ends meet.

New York’s inflation refund checks are similar to California’s Middle Class Tax Refund program. That one-time payment was issued to eligible recipients between October 2022 and January 2023, to provide relief to residents in the state. California’s refund came in the form of a debit card that required activation.

By Rob Jenkins of Minding the Campus

My colleague at Minding the Campus, Jared Gould, has written persuasively on the problem of colleges and universities over-admitting foreign students, who can fill seats that should have gone to American students, drive up costs for everyone, and ultimately take jobs from American workers. 

In my view, however, a more pressing issue—although one that is rarely broached, lest the complainant be labeled “xenophobic”—is that of foreign-born professors, especially those whose command of spoken English is, shall we say, less than optimal.

These days, institutions have come to rely more and more on non-native Ph.D.s. Just scan through the faculty roster at any American university and see how many names you can pronounce. This is a problem for some of the same reasons Jared mentions: Not only did many of these professors take grad-school seats from American students, they eventually took jobs that might have gone to American candidates.

There’s another problem with foreign-born professors, though, on an even more basic level: Students often struggle to understand them in class. If students literally can’t grasp what the professor is saying, due to a language barrier, how can they learn the material? Often, they resort to essentially teaching themselves, using textbooks, study groups, and online aids.

The daughter of a good friend is currently in medical school at a large, highly respected Southeastern university. I had a chance to chat with her over the holidays and asked her how it was going. What she said frankly shocked me.

According to her, not a single one of her medical school professors, so far, has been American-born. All speak with thick accents, although some are clearer than others. Asking questions in class doesn’t help much, because she often can’t understand the answers. And she isn’t alone. Her classmates all have the same problem.   

So how are they supposed to learn this information that is presumably so important for doctors to know—information they will be tested over, repeatedly, throughout their years in medical school, culminating in board examinations?

This bright young woman, along with her classmates and many other medical students all over the country, has simply taken matters into her own hands, purchasing expensive software that covers the same material. She attends class religiously each day, then goes home and spends eight or ten more hours watching videos. Despite shelling out tens of thousands of dollars on an “elite” medical school education, she is essentially having to teach herself—all because her professors don’t speak clear English.

This is just one example of what seems to be a widespread problem. In my 40 years of college teaching and advising, I’ve had dozens of students complain to me that they have one or more professors they can’t understand, particularly in mathematics, engineering, and the hard sciences.

How did we get ourselves into this situation, and how can we get out of it?

The answer to the first question, which also suggests an answer to the second, is that we got here mainly by prioritizing research over teaching—in some cases, by a wide margin. Indeed, some of our most prestigious institutions seem to value research almost exclusively and teaching hardly at all. Almost any tenure-track professor at a Research 1 university will tell you that their annual evaluations and tenure bids are highly focused on research, publishing, and grant procurement, with teaching coming in a distant second, if that. In other words, if a candidate is an accomplished researcher or has the potential to be, schools don’t really care if students can understand them or not.

The simple solution is for institutions to prioritize teaching, or at least make it equal to research. Honestly, most of what passes for “research” these days is either derivative naval-gazing or unreproducible nonsense; only a relative handful of professors are doing truly groundbreaking work in any field. The rest should be expected to teach more and publish less, and be evaluated accordingly. Departments, too, should be judged primarily on how well students learn in their classes, not on how many journal articles they produce or how much grant money they generate.

With a renewed emphasis on teaching, departments might start to care a little more about whether students can actually understand their professors and make that an integral part of the screening process for new faculty. Some institutions already do this, but every candidate for a faculty position should have to give a public presentation that students are encouraged to attend—bribed with food, if necessary—and their opinions solicited.

In that way, perhaps we can eventually move beyond this frankly untenable situation in which even our brightest students sometimes struggle to pick up on important concepts. We might be pleasantly surprised at how much and how fast they learn once they actually understand what their professors are saying.

Financial centers are a core pillar of the modern economy, channeling capital, facilitating trade, and driving innovation across the world.

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu visualized the world’s top 40 most competitive financial centers, using data from the 37th edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI 37).

Data & Methodology

The GFCI 37 was compiled using 140 quantitative measures from sources like the World Bank, OECD, and UN.

These measures are combined with assessments collected by respondents to the GFCI online questionnaire. In total, the GFCI 37 used 31,314 assessments from 4,946 respondents.

The data we used to create this graphic is listed below.

Areas of Competitiveness

The quantitative factors used in the GFCI model are grouped into five areas of competitiveness:

• Business environment: Transparency and stability of systems, regulatory complexity

• Human capital: Access to skill professionals, investment in education

• Infrastructure: Quality of physical and digital infrastructure

• Financial sector development: Accessibility to clients, development of digital solutions

• Reputation: Trustworthiness of legal and regulatory systems

Regional Insights

We’ve summarized the main highlights from each GFCI region below.

North America

North America has four centers in the top 10: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The most improved within North America are Miami and Vancouver, which both climbed over 10 places in the ranking.

Western Europe

London is the region’s dominant center, with seven other cities featuring in the top 20. The average rating across Western Europe increased by 2.14%.

Asia Pacific

Asia Pacific has six centers in the top 20, with four belonging to China (Hong Kong SAR, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing). Looking elsewhere, Hangzhou, New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, and Manila all rose six or more places.

Middle East & Africa

The region’s leading centers are Dubai and Abu Dhabi, with Dubai climbing four places to 12th in GFCI 37. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv, Kuwait City, and Johannesburg each fell more than 10 places.

Latin America & The Caribbean

São Paulo rose seven places this year, making it the leading financial center in the region.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Billion Dollar Companies by Country in 2025 on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.