Israel is lifting its state of emergency given that the Iran ceasefire appears to be holding, and with that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial will resume in the coming days, according to Reuters.

“With the lifting of the state of emergency and the return of the judicial system to work, hearings will resume as usual,” a statement from the Israeli courts confirms.

Hearings are scheduled to take place from Sunday through Wednesday. Of course, the fragile truce could collapse at any moment – after Netanyahu, along with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, have pushed to extend Israel’s wars. But normalcy is returning to Israel, and sirens are no longer constantly blaring out. Even Ben Gurion international airport is fully reopened.

Netanyahu has long been accused, even within Israel, of seeking to prolong Israel’s ‘multi-front’ wars in order to permanently delay the corruption trial and ensure his time in power is extended.

The trial focuses on three corruption cases – including charges of fraud and breach of trust, as well as charges of bribery.

The allegations range from illegally receiving expensive gifts based on political favors, to quid pro quo agreements with some Israeli media sources for more favorable coverage, to authorizing telecom-related regulatory decisions to benefit friends and allies.

Israeli Shekel Closes at Highest Level Since November 1995 on Iran Ceasefire:

Netanyahu was first indicted in 2019 following years of investigation. The trial began in 2020 and faced repeated delays, including interruptions tied to the Gaza war that began in October 2023.

President Trump has on several occasions called the whole legal saga “politically motivated” and asserted that the prime minister been through a “Horror Show”. He’s asked for Netanyahu to be pardoned, calling it a “witch hunt”.

Iran’s Foreign Minister meanwhile used this development on the resumption of the trial to troll both Israel and the US…

Netanyahu’s criminal trial resumes on Sun. A region-wide ceasefire, incl in Lebanon, would hasten his jailing.

If the U S. wishes to crater its economy by letting Netanyahu kill diplomacy, that would ultimately be its choice. We think that would be dumb but are prepared for it.

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) April 9, 2026

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog does have the power to grant a pardon, but has so far resisted pressures from Washington.

His office has only indicated justice ministry’s pardons department will be busy collecting opinions and will submit them to the president’s legal adviser, who will eventually issue a recommendation, in a non-committal response.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The UK Labour government’s new definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” – rebranded from “Islamophobia” – is being shaped by a working group where every single member has links to Islamist organisations.

The details are exposed in the Free Speech Union’s latest investigative briefing which highlights ties between the group members and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), groups that governments since 2009 have refused to engage with due to their extreme views. 

One member, Baroness Gohir, tweeted in support of Hamas in 2014. Another stood for the far-left, Islamist-supporting Respect Party.

The Free Speech Union’s latest investigative briefing reveals that ALL FIVE members of the Government’s working group tasked with defining “Islamophobia” — now rebranded as “anti-Muslim hostility” — have troubling links to Islamist organisations.

These include the Muslim Council… https://t.co/MZsgc4amKF

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) April 8, 2026

As the Free Speech Union states: “In a free society, no religion should enjoy greater protection than others — nor be shielded from legitimate criticism and challenge.”

The FSU adds: “This group was stacked with members already sympathetic to such a definition.” And with the government yet to appoint a new Islamophobia tsar, “there is deep cause for concern.”

Conservative MP Katie Lam put it bluntly in her video response: “The Government’s new ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition will make it harder to talk about Islamist extremism, FGM, and the grooming gangs. They’d rather restrict our right to criticise than deal with these problems head-on. It’s putting us all in danger.”

Parliament abolished blasphemy laws in 2008. Yet as the FSU warns: “This Government risks reviving them for Islam alone, via the back door.”

The wider context is the government’s “Protecting What Matters” report from March 2026, which rolled out the non-statutory definition alongside plans for a special representative on Muslim hostility. Officials insist it protects free speech – but the panel’s composition tells a different story. 

Read the full Free Speech Union briefing here.

This comes just weeks after we reported on the government’s leaked social cohesion strategy that branded the Union Flag a “tool of hate” and told schools children’s drawings could be blasphemous under Islamic law. 

It builds directly on the Orwellian push we exposed where UK schools are urged to snitch on “anti-Muslim hostility.” 

The pattern is clear: criticism of Islam is being reframed as hostility, while real problems like grooming gangs, FGM and Islamist extremism are sidelined.

Challenging Islamist extremism or mass migration’s consequences is now being treated as the real threat. Legitimate debate on integration failures, cultural clashes, or grooming scandals gets reclassified as “hostility” while the actual problems fester.

Britain’s free speech tradition is under sustained assault – not from the public, but from a government more interested in shielding one ideology than defending open society. 

The Free Speech Union is right to sound the alarm. Without pushback, this backdoor blasphemy regime will silence the very conversations the country desperately needs.

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Authored by Ryan McMaken via the Mises Institute,

Late last year, German lawmakers passed new legislation paving the way for military conscription. As the Guardian reports, “The change will include the obligatory screening of all 18-year-old men to gauge their suitability to serve in the military from 1 January..” This is not (yet) full-blown conscription, but clearly moves in that direction, providing the German state with a plan to measure and assess the availability of young men who can be used as a resource in coming military conflicts. 

Now, the legislation faces additional opposition because it turns out the law “requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime.” In other words, the law restricts the emigration of young men who might be of some use to the state as cannon fodder. According to The Guardian: 

The fine print, which went largely under the radar until a media report called attention to it this week, says men aged 17 to 45 would have to apply for authorisation to leave Germany for more than three months. … The clause could potentially affect millions of German citizens embarking on anything from a gap year or study abroad to a new job or sabbatical.

It touched off agitated media coverage in a country where the changes to the military service policy have already led to street protests by school pupils subject to the law’s new requirements.

From restrictions on free speech to attempts to shut down entire political parties, the German state has increasingly showed its affinity for despotism in recent years. Now, by introducing emigration controls, Germany is reverting to an old tactic used by militarist, socialistic European regimes of the past. 

As I showed in a 2018 article on how restriction on emigration are a hallmark of despotic states, mandatory military service has long been used as a justification for regulating those who seek to leave the country:

According to Stanley Johnson, in Emigration from the United Kingdom to North America, 1763-1912, “In Germany, an enactment of 1897 forbade the departure of any citizen who had not completed his military training; it appointed also, a special staff of officials to regulate the emigration agencies.” Also: “The movement in Italy is practically in the hands of the Government, and no one can lawfully depart from trans-Atlantic ports without special permission.” In Italy, as in Hungary, there were only certain government approved “routes by which all migrants are to travel.” In Russia, “permits for crossing the frontier are only granted when all military obligations are at an end.”

Military service was not the only reason for restricting emigration, of course. European states restricted emigration whenever it was thought potential migrants might be fleeced for tax revenue or other riches before being allowed to leave. In Alan Kulikoff’s book From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, he states

Dissatisfied German peasants, like those in Britain, could emigrate, but German states, worried about losing population and taxes, put roadblocks in their way. Emigrants had to settle all debts and taxes. Free emigrants had to pay large fees for permission to depart and to take property with them, and serfs – a substantial part of the populace – had to pay manumission fees amounting to 12-25 percent of their property.” 

Many emigrated anyway, often illegally. Indeed, military conscription proved to be a motivation for countless men across many regions from Spain to Germany to the Ottoman Empire, and to Japan. As I note in this article from 2022: 

Some immigrant groups in America, such as the Volga Germans, are practically defined by their avoidance of conscription. Specifically, the Volga Germans in America are descended from Germans who emigrated to Russia in the eighteenth century on the condition that they would not be subject to conscription into the czar’s army. When these exemptions were revoked in the nineteenth century, many Volga Germans emigrated to the United States, where they today constitute a sizable portion of the ethnic German populations of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oregon, and Washington. Anabaptist subgroups of the Volga Germans also fled to America to avoid conscription. Groups such as the Hutterites and the Mennonites were explicitly opposed to military service. …

Before the Volga Germans, many other Germans had fled the German kingdoms. A large percentage of Germans arrived in Chicago “during the 1830s … to avoid conscription in the army.”

In Spain during the 1860s, unknown numbers of young men fled to avoid military service to the crown, even in spite of the watchful eyes of government agents seeking to prevent emigration. Wayne H. Bowen writes:

Given the poor conditions for troops, conscription was always a challenge for the central government. Many potential soldiers did their best to avoid service, even through leaving Spain. Emigration was a serious problem, as the families of young boys tried to send them to the colonies or encouraged them to emigrate to Latin America or the United States in order to avoid conscription. The Guardia Civil, Spain’s national paramilitary police, had orders to watch the coast and port cities for young men trying to leave, and colonial governors were prohibited from issuing passports to boys who could not prove service or exemption.

Membership in an ethnic minority in Spain likely provided an added impetus to exit, and “evasion of military service was … widespread among Spanish Basques.”

Meanwhile, in Japan, “militarization [in the early twentieth century] and the initiation of the so-called blood tax or national conscription also encouraged many young Japanese males to emigrate to avoid the draft.” Many went to Peru and Brazil.

Although the German state has not yet adopted full conscription, Berlin is clearly up to its old tricks. Of course, the fact that the German state has to take these steps at all shows just unpopular German foreign policy is. After all, if the public were supportive of the state, conscription—or “pre-conscription,” so to speak—would not be necessary. The “need” to impose forced military service on the population is always an illustration of a state lacking legitimacy. Moreover, if a state has to intervene to prevent people from leaving, what does that tell us about that state’s so-called “social contract.” After all, how many times have we heard the political myth that sounds something like this “by choosing to live in this country, you are saying that you will abide by all the state’s demands and rules. Thus, everything the state does to you is voluntary.” But now, it seems, young men will need to get permission to leave. That’s a truly strange social “contract” indeed.  

China’s government debt has surpassed the European Union’s for the first time, marking a major shift in the global debt landscape.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S., China, and Europe have followed very different borrowing paths. While Europe kept debt growth relatively constrained, both the U.S. and China expanded rapidly—especially after 2020.

The chart below, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, visualizes annual government debt totals for the U.S., EU, and China from 1995 to 2025 in current U.S. dollars (not adjusted for inflation), using data from the IMF.

In 2025, China’s government debt reached $18.7 trillion, surpassing the EU’s $17.6 trillion total for the first time.

The crossover underscores how rapidly China’s borrowing has scaled over the past two decades.

The Rapid Rise in U.S. and China’s Government Debt

In 2008, U.S. government debt stood at $10.9 trillion, roughly in line with the EU’s $10.7 trillion total. By 2025, it had surged to $38.3 trillion, leaving the EU behind by $20.7 trillion.

The data table below shows the government debt of the U.S., China, and EU from 1995 to 2025 in current U.S. dollars:

From just $1.2 trillion in 2008, China’s government debt grew at roughly 17% annually—fast enough to overtake the EU in less than two decades.

Since 2008, U.S. government debt expanded at about 7.7% per year, compared with roughly 3.0% per year for the EU.

Why China and U.S. Debt Grew Much Faster than Europe’s

While the EU’s slower debt growth partially reflects weaker nominal growth across the bloc compared to the U.S. and China, it also is a symptom of the bloc’s tighter fiscal constraints after Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, which peaked between 2010 and 2012.

In contrast, China’s surge in debt was driven by credit expansion, infrastructure spending, and state-backed growth.

The U.S., meanwhile, combined crisis-era borrowing with persistent deficits, especially after 2020, allowing debt to scale far beyond Europe’s. With fewer fiscal constraints at the federal level, Washington has maintained higher spending levels—helping explain why U.S. debt now stands far above both China and the EU.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The World’s $111 Trillion in Government Debt on Voronoi.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In Two-tier Britain words trigger instant action, but violent offenders get indefinite leave to remain.

UK border policy under Keir Starmer’s Labour government has never looked more lopsided.

An Afghan migrant who carried out a ‘horrific’ bottle attack on a 14-year-old girl and her mother has been allowed to stay in the country despite his violent criminal record. At the same time, the Prime Minister moved swiftly to block Kanye West from headlining the Wireless festival.

Afghan migrant who carried out ‘horrific’ bottle attack on 14-year-old girl and her mother allowed to stay in UK https://t.co/dLTI2Mgzak

— LBC (@LBC) April 8, 2026

The contrast exposes the reality of Britain’s immigration system: tough on controversial speech, soft on actual predators who crossed the Channel or arrived via asylum claims.

Starmer stated: “Kanye West should never have been invited to headline Wireless. This government stands firmly with the Jewish community, and we will not stop in our fight to confront and defeat the poison of antisemitism. We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.”

He banned Kanye to “protect the public.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of random foreign men with no passports swarm into our country every single day.

The UK has border control for naughty words while the actual border is violated en masse by actual violent predators. https://t.co/fnGlGuB8G2

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 7, 2026

This is not an isolated case. It reflects a pattern where the Home Office struggles to remove foreign offenders while celebrities face pre-emptive bans over lyrics or statements. 

The Afghan national in question arrived in 1999, claimed asylum, and received indefinite leave to remain by 2001. His record includes multiple violent incidents, yet tribunals have repeatedly sided with his continued presence citing treatment for mental health issues and years without reoffending.

British families see the result. A mother and her teenage daughter were left traumatised after a savage attack in a shop following a dispute over religious comments. 

The perpetrator struck them repeatedly with a bottle and issued threats. That level of violence earned convictions for wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and related offences.

Yet the system found reasons to keep him here.

Meanwhile, actual border enforcement is reserved for figures like Kanye West. The government’s message is clear: speech can be policed aggressively, but mass illegal entries and criminal migrants receive layers of legal protection, appeals, and human rights considerations.

This is the same Labour government that inherited a broken asylum system and has done nothing meaningful to fix it. Small boats keep arriving. Foreign criminals remain. And the public is told this is all compatible with “protecting the public.”

Until politicians stop treating violent offenders as victims of circumstance and start treating British safety as the non-negotiable priority, stories like this will keep coming. 

The public has had enough of two-tier justice and open-border hypocrisy. Real protection means removing the threats, not shielding them.

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Southwest Airlines is limiting passengers to one lithium portable charger each – “to strengthen our ability to contain and mitigate lithium battery incidents, including reducing the risk of battery fires,” the airline said in a Tuesday statement.

Passengers will also be prohibited from recharging their devices using in-seat power outlets, and the chargers must remain in an under-seat carry-on bag or on their person. 

The new policy goes into effect April 20 and will apply across the airline’s network of flights, as company officials noted that the entire fleet would have in-seat power by mid-2027, reducing the need for travelers to bring their own portable chargers. 

This is the latest in a series of rules around portable power sources. As the Epoch Times notes, Southwest had already moved earlier to address the same risks. In May 2025, the airline required passengers to keep portable chargers visible while using them, a measure that took effect on May 28 that year. That earlier policy formed part of a broader push to keep potential fire sources in plain sight for quick crew response.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a safety alert in September 2025, warning carriers about lithium batteries stored in passenger compartments. The agency recorded 97 incidents involving smoke, fire, or extreme heat on flights the previous year—up from 89 the year before.

The agency said incidents triggered by lithium-ion batteries are now, on average, a weekly occurrence at roughly 1.3 incidents per week. Since 2015, the number of such events has increased by more than 330 percent.

Between March 3, 2006, and March 7, 2026, a total of 709 lithium battery incidents have been recorded, with the majority of cases coming from passenger carriers.

Battery packs and batteries accounted for the bulk of these incidents, with 229 events, followed by e-cigarettes/vape devices, with 122, cell phones, with 81, laptops, with 70, and the rest involving other electronic and medical devices.

On Nov. 5, 2025, a smoke detector alarm from the lavatory of a United Airlines flight departing from San Francisco went off.

“Flight attendants found a passenger in the lavatory who stated their laptop began to overheat. A flight attendant placed the laptop in a thermal containment bag, and the aircraft continued to its destination without further incident,” the FAA said.

Earlier, on Oct. 5, 2025, a passenger’s carry-on bag caught fire during the boarding process in Buffalo, New York, with lithium batteries being the culprit. Passengers were removed from the aircraft, while the fire was extinguished and the batteries were taken out of the plane.

Lithium cells power everything from phones to laptops to the chargers now limited by Southwest. When damaged, overcharged, or exposed to heat, they can ignite in ways difficult to extinguish mid-flight.

Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.

Via Middle East Eye

The cessation of US-Israeli strikes has brought relief to people in Iran. For those among them who began the conflict supportive of the assault, it also came with a kind of realization. “I thought this was it,” says Leila, 25. “I thought the Islamic Republic was finally coming to an end.”

Leila, who like all Iranians Middle East Eye spoke to is identified using a pseudonym to protect her own safety, says she believed the strikes on her country would be short and decisive – that they would lead to political change. “I even thought the US and Israel had already agreed with Reza Pahlavi about Iran’s future,” she said. “I was wrong.”

Leila is not alone. In the early days of the conflict, some Iranian opponents of the ruling establishment saw Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as potential forces for change, even as unlikely allies. But as the war dragged on, and the scale of destruction became clearer, those expectations faded dramatically.

“Why did they hit bridges?” Leila asks. “Why destroy railway lines? Why target oil depots?” She shakes her head. “How does that help change a government?”

In January, at the height of massive anti-establishment protests in Iran and the authorities’ crackdown, Trump took to social media to tell demonstrators that help was on its way. But last Tuesday, he told Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, before backing down and agreeing a ceasefire.

For anti-establishment Iranians like Leila, the contrast was shocking. “In the span of just two months, we went from ‘help is on the way’ to threats about the destruction of Iranian civilization,” she says. For Leila, the consequences were not only political, but personal. “I lost friends over this,” she says.

She recalls arguments with people who warned her not to trust foreign powers. “They told me Trump and Netanyahu were no better,” she said. “But I didn’t listen. I accused them of supporting the government.”

Some of those friendships have not recovered. “Now I feel like everything I believed in just collapsed,” she says.

‘We thought it would be quick’

Ali, 29, had similar expectations. He says that after the January protests he came to believe that change could only come through force. The demonstrations began in response to rising inflation and spread into nationwide, anti-establishment protests.

The government says that 3,117 people were killed – including protesters, security forces and bystanders. The US-based human rights organisation Human Rights Activists News Agency estimates at least 7,015 deaths.

“We thought war would finish everything,” Ali says. Instead, it destroyed his family home. “Our house was flattened,” he says. “We were lucky to survive. But now we have nowhere to go.”

Ali says he believed claims that the strikes would be precise. “They said they would target specific people and military sites. We thought their technology was advanced enough to avoid civilians,” he says. “Maybe when they realised they couldn’t change the system, they started hitting everything,” he adds. “Or maybe I was just naive.”

Those who never believed

Not all anti-establishment Iranians shared that early optimism. Maryam, 47, says she never believed the war would bring anything positive.

“Only blind people could think that a war started by Trump and Netanyahu would bring us freedom,” she says. “Didn’t we see Gaza? Lebanon? Syria? How could anyone think this would be different?”

Israeli and US strikes destroyed energy infrastructure, bridges, steel and petrochemical plants, a synagogue, hospitals, universities and schools, not to mention hundreds of businesses. “Maybe we should be relieved that the explosions have stopped,” Maryam says. “But how do you rebuild a country after this?”

Maryam is very critical of Iranians who supported the war. “Now some of them say they had nothing to do with it,” she says. “They are trying to distance themselves.”

But she does not accept that. “Didn’t they hear Trump saying Iranians welcomed the bombings?” she says. “I cannot forgive that.”

Abbas, 54, takes an even harsher view. He believes the war has effectively ended Reza Pahlavi’s political relevance. “Reza Pahlavi did everything he could to reach to power,” he said. “But he never condemned any of the US or Israeli attacks on Iran’s infrastructure.”

After cheering on a war that is now killing Iranians and tearing apart the country, Masih Alinejad has warned Donald Trump against targeting civilian infrastructure, in a reversal that critics say lays bare the recklessness of those who backed the US-Israeli assault.

Before her… pic.twitter.com/a1dzoAOIhD

— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) March 23, 2026

He points to the praise that the son of Iran’s last monarch heaped on Trump. “He tried every form of flattery you can imagine, hoping Trump would take him seriously,” Abbas says. “But in the end, when a deal was reached between Washington and Tehran, he was left more discredited than ever.”

He pauses, then adds: “I hope his supporters understand now: you can’t rely on someone who is willing to see his own people killed and his country destroyed just to get to power.”

A ceasefire filled with doubt

Niloufar, a 34-year-old resident of Tehran, can barely believe the strikes have stopped. For weeks, she has stayed inside her home, listening to the sound of jets and explosions.

“When the ceasefire was announced, it felt unreal. Like something had lifted off my chest,” she says. “For the first time in 40 days, I was able to sleep peacefully.”

Yet uncertainty remains. There are still reports of sporadic explosions. Many are unsure whether the pause will hold. Israel killed scores of people in Lebanon on Wednesday, attacks that Iran said violated the ceasefire agreement.

Leila says she struggles to believe the attacks on her country have stopped. “They said there is a ceasefire,” she says. “So what are these explosions?” he lowers her voice. “What if it starts again?”

Others worry the ceasefire itself may be temporary – or even strategic. Mehdi, 31, says he does not trust either side. “I don’t trust the US or Israel,” he says. “Honestly, I don’t even trust them more than our own government.”

Boomer minds would break if they showed this video on Fox News https://t.co/A5qjRylh40

— Trevor Sutcliffe (@TrevorSutcliffe) April 8, 2026

Negotiations were under way before the US and Israel launched their war. It’s unclear to Mehdi why these latest talks should be taken more seriously. “We were negotiating, then suddenly they attacked,” he says. “What if they negotiate again and then strike even harder?”

The disillusionment runs deep. Ali puts it simply: “Before the war, we used to say things couldn’t get worse. Now we know they can. We thought war would solve everything. Now we know it’s not that simple.”

Ali pauses, and his voice becomes quieter, but more pointed. “And we learnt something else, too: Reza Pahlavi is a stupid and ineffective politician who shows little real concern for the lives of those of us still living inside Iran.”

Turns out there’s a price point for everything where consumers just stop paying. Guess that whole “price as a rationing mechanism” talk means something after all…

Just ask Pepsi. The iconic brand had recognized for some time that its Frito-Lay snack prices were becoming too expensive, with major retailers like Walmart repeatedly raising concerns, according to Bloomberg.

Even so, prices remained high as sales declined, with some chip bags climbing past $7. Popular products such as Doritos saw sharp increases, jumping nearly 50% since 2021. In response, retailers began allocating more shelf space to lower-cost store brands and competing products.

Bloomberg writes in a new report that in early 2026, PepsiCo finally moved to reduce prices, cutting some snack items by as much as 15%. This decision followed two consecutive years of Frito-Lay missing internal revenue targets. However, new challenges quickly emerged. Rising oil prices tied to global conflicts increased costs for production and packaging, which could weaken the effectiveness of these price cuts and limit their ability to bring customers back.

Prior to these external pressures, analysts believed that moderate price reductions might have been enough to improve sales. Company executives said they planned to assess the results by mid-2026, after earlier test runs showed encouraging increases in product demand. In return for lowering prices, PepsiCo also secured additional shelf space at large retailers, with full implementation expected nationwide.

The report notes that for several years, leadership had struggled with how to address pricing. Executives were reluctant to lower prices because of concerns about short-term financial losses. Instead, they experimented with strategies like reducing package sizes and offering temporary promotions, but these efforts failed to reverse declining sales. A turning point came in 2025 when Rachel Ferdinando reviewed the business and concluded that price cuts were unavoidable.

At the same time, the company was facing broader pressures. Frito-Lay’s long streak of consistent revenue growth came to an end, and it began losing ground to more affordable competitors. Other major food companies had already started lowering their prices, increasing the urgency. Meanwhile, PepsiCo was also investing in higher-priced, health-focused products, which added complexity to its pricing decisions.

The situation can be traced back to the pandemic period, when PepsiCo raised prices to offset supply chain disruptions and rising labor costs. Consumers initially accepted these increases, but over time the higher prices became harder to justify. Although revenue briefly surged, shoppers eventually began cutting back. Even as demand weakened, the company hesitated to reverse its pricing strategy.

By 2025, it became clear that affordability was a key concern for consumers. Price reductions were first tested in select markets and then expanded more broadly in 2026. While discounts have attracted some buyers, overall demand remains uncertain. PepsiCo now faces the ongoing challenge of maintaining lower prices while dealing with rising costs and cautious consumer spending habits.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Indiana has suspended its gas sales tax for 30 days as prices keep rising amid the United States’ war with Iran.

Gov. Mike Braun announced the suspension on April 8.

“I am declaring a gas tax holiday to give Hoosiers relief from the pain at the pump from high gas prices,” Braun said in a statement. “Affordability is my top priority.”

Indiana’s state gas sales tax, also known as its gasoline use tax, is 7 percent. A separate excise tax of $0.36 cents a gallon is not affected by the suspension.

The 30-day reprieve could be extended, Braun’s office said.

Indiana officials are going to be “patrolling the pumps” to make sure that savings from the gas tax suspension go to Indiana residents, rather than retailers.

Braun also said the Indiana attorney general should enforce regulations prohibiting retailer price gouging.

“With the suspension of Indiana’s gas tax for the next 30 days, my office will closely monitor fuel prices to guard against any potential price gouging,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a statement.

The United States attacked Iran in February, sending the price of oil soaring.

On April 7, Iran and the United States agreed to a two-week cease-fire.

Oil prices dropped below $100 a barrel in the wake of the cease-fire agreement.

The average price per gallon in Indiana on Wednesday was $4.13, slightly lower than the $4.16 nationwide, according to the American Automobile Association.

The average in Indiana a week ago was $3.96, and the average a month ago was $3.46.

“Many Americans have been concerned to see the recent rise in gasoline prices here at home,” President Donald Trump said in a speech on April 1. “This short-term increase has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers and neighboring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict.”

Georgia’s governor was the first in the nation to suspend his state’s gas tax. Gov. Brian Kemp on March 20 signed a bill suspending the state’s gas tax for 60 days.

Georgia’s tax is typically 33.3 cents per gallon.

Kemp also signed a bill that authorized $1.2 billion in income tax refunds.

“Hardworking Georgians know best how to spend their money, not the government,” he said in a statement. “That’s why I’m proud to sign these bills and, along with the General Assembly, deliver meaningful tax relief on top of the other measures we’ve taken in recent years. Because we budget conservatively, we can take steps like these that actually deliver on affordability issues for families in our state.”

Authored by William L. Anderson via MisesInstitute,

If there is a mantra among progressive American political and media elites, it would be “our democracy,” usually preceded by what they believe to be a threat from the Right. For example, progressives deemed the recent reversal of Roe “a threat to our democracy” because it removed laws regulating abortion from Supreme Court jurisdiction and returned the issue to democratically elected legislatures.

It would seem inconsistent to invoke the democratic electoral process to deal with a contentious issue like abortion, but progressives are nothing if not inconsistent. But even in challenging logic on political issues, progressives at least try to stick to the language of democracy, and especially the language of “our democracy.”

However, occasionally progressive elites demonstrate their contempt for democracy because they realize that the democratic process is not going to have the desired progressive results because voters and their representatives do not want to knowingly harm themselves.

Recently, the New York Times, in a progressive moment of truth, reacted to the US Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, in which the court ruled that because carbon dioxide is not among the pollutants regulated by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, the Environmental Protection Agency could not enforce CO2 emissions rules for electric power plants.

In its 6–3 ruling, the SCOTUS indicated that Congress was free to pass legislation to regulate carbon dioxide but that the EPA was not free to simply add it to its list of regulated power plant emissions on its own. In other words, the high court declared that democratically elected members of the US House and Senate are free to write (and pass) any anti–climate change legislation they choose. This is what the ancients once called democracy.

Not surprisingly, the NYT went ballistic, and in so doing exposed the progressive mentality, with its affinity for rule by “experts.” Declared the newspaper’s editorial board:

Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.

The ruling did no such thing. Instead, the court said that federal regulatory agencies are not free to create and enforce rules outside of their statutory authority. The EPA had simply declared itself the official power plant CO2 emissions regulator under the Obama administration despite the fact that Democrats had a supermajority in the US Senate and a huge majority in the House and theoretically could have passed a law giving new regulatory powers to the EPA. That Congress did not do so is instructive.

In other words, this was an extralegal power grab but one approved by elites because, well, elites know more than everyone else. The NYT editorial continued:

In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators—and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.

The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule. (emphasis mine)

The “administrative state,” of course, is anything but democratic; it is autocratic to the core. For all of their professed love for democracy, progressives have long demanded rule by experts, or at least rule by “experts” that meet progressive approval. As I pointed out last year, when actual scientists studied the effects of so-called acid rain and concluded that it was not causing lake and river acidification, progressives in the media, as well as EPA administrators, immediately tried to destroy the careers of scientists failing to echo the party line. Not surprisingly, one of the loudest antiscience voices in the acid rain affair was the New York Times.

Furthermore, for all the “experts know best” rhetoric in the NYT editorial, there is no proof that the administrative state governs as effectively as democracy, which elites pretend to love. The “experts” at the Federal Reserve believed they could substitute trillions of printed dollars for actual production of goods without creating monetary chaos. In western forests, the “experts” at the US Forest Service have had fire suppression policies in place for more than a century, and the result has been that what were once mere forest fires have become destructive conflagrations that burn so hot that they often destroy the scorched soil’s ability to generate postfire growth.

The ”experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed policies that precipitated massive job losses, caused unnecessary premature death from ailments other than covid-19, and still failed to promote adequate information about the virus and its origins. Education “experts” have created one educational crisis after another, and so on. Rule by experts—the administrative state—has caused destruction whenever it is invoked, yet the editors at the “newspaper of record” have failed to notice.

Instead, they proclaim eternal fealty to what only can be called a failed experiment in governance, not to mention that it is antidemocratic. Yet, the NYT editors cannot keep from claiming loyalty to both forms of governance, even when they contradict one another:

Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.

There is much to dissect in those words, but suffice it to say that to assume that EPA decision makers have the kind of knowledge and expertise implied in that editorial is to foolishly demonstrate faith in something that inevitably fails. Far from being near-omniscient sages of science, the bureaucrats making life-altering decisions at the EPA are people who bear no costs if they impose unnecessary burdens on the lives of ordinary people but who also find that the more draconian their edicts, the greater the praise from environmental interest groups and, of course, the New York Times. What possibly could go wrong?