United States | News & Politics

https://archive.ph/ddV1i

2,666 Melania sequels

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy was supposed to start the year with a bang, fueled by an unusually large jump in tax refunds from President Donald Trump’s tax cut legislation. Yet spiking gas prices are on track to eat up those refunds, leaving most Americans with little extra to spend.

“Next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time,” Trump said in a prime-time speech in December that was intended to address voters’ concerns about the economy and stubbornly high prices.

But that was before the Iran war, which began Feb. 28. Oil and gas prices have soared since then, with the nationwide average price of gas reaching $3.94 Sunday, up more than a dollar from just a month earlier.

What the National Guard is supposed to be for... let us not forget and let fascists tell us a different story.

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1000465/coast-guard-conducts-overflights-impacted-areas-following-flash-floods-oahu

A lot of the world’s fertilizer turns out to come from that area and normally get shipped through the strait. And the United States, we’re a great agricultural nation, and we do import significant amounts of fertilizer. We import a large share of our fertilizer, and some of it from the Persian Gulf, a significant share of that.

So this is having a direct impact on U.S. farmers.

Most people in the United States are significantly adversely affected by the spillover from this war. Now, oil companies, particularly oil refiners, who seem to be seeing a big explosion in their margins, they’re doing well, but what good does that do the rest of us? It’s not as if the U.S. has any fiscal measures in place to capture those gains. So this is in fact, this is hitting the United States, it’s hitting all of us quite hard, and it may be actually kind of catastrophic because plans, plans to travel, never mind, but plans to plant crops may be seriously endangered by all of this.

Has anybody told Trump about this? From everything we’re reading, the answer is probably not. Basically, we’re in a situation where the courtiers don’t tell the emperor that he has no clothes and don’t tell him that actually war in the Persian Gulf really hurts the United States a lot, too. So, you know, God knows.

Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who led the investigation into alleged Russian interference in US President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, has died aged 81. The veteran prosecutor, long seen as a bipartisan figure, drew a sharply divisive response from Trump, who said he was “glad he’s dead” in a post on social media.

John Wilson grew up as a renter before his biotech company took off. Now he wants to help people struggling after Operation Metro Surge.

gift link — uses URL shortener because lemmy removes the gift token from the URL

Mark Robinson, who ran for North Carolina governor in 2024, tells podcast he had ‘obsession’ with porn and sex

Taylor, 26, was shot to death by police when they broke down the door of her apartment while serving a no-knock drug warrant looking for a former boyfriend who no longer lived there

Congressman Jim Himes claims a sweeping surveillance authority should stay intact because he hasn't seen abuses by Kash Patel's FBI, according to internal messaging obtained by WIRED.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260320205610/https://www.wired.com/story/a-top-democrat-is-urging-colleagues-to-support-trumps-spy-machine/

U.S. services also preparing to receive tanks with no turrets and trucks with no engines, for the time being. Temporary setbacks!

Damn the rest of the world is so jealous of our F35s!

The US Mint is generally prohibited from producing coins featuring living public figures or presidents.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20972845

Unannounced Deals:

• Patriot PAC-3 Missiles— about $5.6 billion;
• CH-47 Chinook helicopters— about $1.32 billion.

The State Department is not required to announce the sale to the public under the rules governing U.S. arms exports, which use different modalities for different types of sales.

The sales were not announced publicly because they expanded previously agreed arms deals.

Source: Wall Street Journal(WSJ).

"[W]e have included a map marking each of these facilities, in hopes of providing local journalists, organizations, and concerned citizens with information about the hold rooms operating closest to them. We have also included a list of each hold room broken down by state so that readers and researchers in each locale can more easily find the facilities near where they live."

According to Breaking Defense, the program was launched after the Army halted internal development of the Extended Range Cannon Artillery system and shifted toward evaluating existing self-propelled howitzers in 2024. The report noted that an official list of competitors has not yet been released.

However, several companies are known to be pursuing the program. These include South Korea’s Hanwha, Germany’s Rheinmetall, U.S.-based Elbit America, and a joint offering from Leonardo DRS and European land systems group KNDS.