The White House also issued what is known as a ‘lid’ on Saturday, a notification to the press pool indicating the president would not be making any public appearances for the remainder of the day. Krassenstein noted that a lid at 11 am was unusual for Trump, adding that the president had not travelled to Mar-a-Lago as he typically does at weekends. A separate, unverified post on Bluesky from an anonymous user claimed that a major road near the hospital had been blocked off and that an emergency meeting was underway at the White House. Neither claim has been independently verified.

Better than newt Gingrich idea, and yet strangely still involving nuclear radiation.

Instead of grappling with this dilemma, the Trump administration appears to be making it more acute. As the prospect of near-term regime change fades, both the United States and Israel seem to be flirting with fomenting internal fragmentation as a fallback. Reports indicate that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish militia forces in northern Iraq, while Israel bombs frontier posts, police stations, and military positions along the northern Iran-Iraq border to clear a path. In recent days, Trump has suggested he is backing away from this scheme, but Israel has not. Indeed, Israeli leaders seem to view the destabilization of Iran as a preferable backup if regime change proves impossible, potentially pushing Iran into the kind of state fragmentation seen in Libya, Syria, and post-2003 Iraq. In a country of 90 million people at the crossroads of Eurasia, that outcome would be profoundly destabilizing, not just for Iranians but for U.S. interests in the region and beyond.

From: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/what-endgame-iran

My guess is that they are moving replacement AN/TPY-2 radar and AN/FPS-132 as there are claims of 4 of the radars have been taken out across the middle east.

Reading into what this means strategically as well as for both the THAAD operability and Patriot systems probably guarding the high altitude ballistic defense is something I’m curious about, but am not going to speculate about at the moment.

I will say that was probably a good choice on the part of whatever Iranian’s which targeted them. The US needs to pull it’s head out of it’s ass on this.

A monkeys tail! Third hand, balancing, grabbing, etc.

The graph doesn’t give enough context, nor does the article IMO. China is a third party in this, as well as the Ukraine War, etc. And Trump seems unlikely to be good for the economy in his time in office so next year might be up, but there are many more factors.

With Donald Trump preparing to cut taxes and increase tariffs, US inflation is forecast to stay above 2 per cent throughout the whole of 2025, according to predictions compiled by Consensus Economics. Eurozone inflation is on the other hand forecast to drop below the ECB’s target of 2 per cent as soon as February.

“We expect a divergence to open up between the loosening cycles of the Fed and the ECB as mounting inflation risks cause the former to take a fairly cautious approach, while the latter responds forcefully to economic weakness,” said Jennifer McKeown, chief global economist at Capital Economics.