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It’s opening the door to a nightmarish new type of conflict in which machines hunt down and exterminate humans — changing war everywhere.

As part of his effort to turn the NYPD into a passive “community safety” agency, Mayor Mamdani dispatched a fact-finding team to Columbus, Ohio to learn how the police there manage crowds at protests.

Not to ruin your high, but habitually smoking marijuana has been known to take a toll on the body.

Just 1% of Google News articles in non-customizable sections of Google News come from outlets that rank as right-leaning, according to a bombshell study by AllSides, a nonpartisan group that classifies news outlets according to their political leanings.

The city Fire Department is proposing significant double-digit increases in the fees it charges for ambulance trips and emergency medical services provided for patients. The cost of a normal or a "basic life support" ambulance ride called through the 911 emergency system would spike from $1,385 to $1,793 -- a 29% increase.

These Are The Countries Building The Most Nuclear Power

China is set to become the world’s dominant nuclear power producer.

Based on existing and planned projects, its total capacity could reach nearly 186 gigawatts, far surpassing the U.S., which currently leads globally. This shift reflects a broader push to secure reliable, low-carbon energy as electricity demand rises.

This chart, via Visual Capitalist's Tasmin Lockwood, ranks countries by current and prospective nuclear capacity, using data from Global Energy Monitor.

How Nuclear Energy Is Set to Scale by Country

The U.S. currently leads nuclear energy production with a capacity of 102,475 megawatts, exceeding France by more than 35,000 MW.

China ranks third today at 60,898 MW, but that is set to change as new plants come online.

Dive into the data, which includes sites of any capacity as of September 2025, below:

This shift has major geopolitical implications. Countries that expand nuclear capacity can reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels while strengthening energy security and grid stability.

If all planned projects are completed, China will lead with 185,812 MW, followed by the U.S. at 117,910 MW and France at 75,590 MW.

France remains a historic leader in nuclear energy, with around 69% of its electricity generated from the technology.

The UK was home to the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant, which came online in 1956, but later scaled back its use of nuclear. The government is now aiming for a “golden age of nuclear,” though current commitments totaling 15,394 MW would rank the country just 12th globally.

Of the 17 countries with zero installed capacity today, Uganda is set to scale up the most to 18,000 MW, followed by Poland with 15,612 MW and Türkiye with 14,700 MW.

Betting on Nuclear Fusion and Fission

Today’s nuclear expansion is centered on fission, the technology that powers all existing reactors and accounts for about 10% of global electricity generation. While mature, it is evolving through smaller, modular designs that aim to reduce costs, improve safety, and speed up deployment.

This helps explain why much of the prospective capacity in the chart includes not only large-scale plants, but also a growing wave of smaller reactors backed by governments and private capital.

At the same time, nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, remains a long-term ambition. Despite rising investment and recent technical progress, it has yet to reach commercial scale.

For now, the global nuclear buildout is firmly rooted in fission, as countries prioritize reliable, low-carbon power that can be deployed within the next decade.

To learn more about nuclear, check out this graphic ranking the countries building the most reactors.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 05:45

“As a taxpayer and as a parent, it drives me insane."

The Edmonton Oilers may have landed in the perfect spot in the Western Conference playoff picture.

Europe Faces Summer Jet Fuel Crisis As Iran War Slashes Supply

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• Europe faces an imminent jet fuel crisis as the Iran war and Hormuz disruption cut off key Middle Eastern supplies.

• Long-term refinery closures and rising import dependence have left Europe highly exposed, with limited alternatives and growing competition from Asia.

• Airlines are already cutting capacity and warning of higher fares, with potential flight cancellations looming as fuel shortages intensify.

Accelerated refinery closures in the past decade and increased dependence on kerosene from the Middle East have exposed Europe’s energy supply vulnerability once again.

For years, European consumers have had to contend with last-minute strikes of ground personnel and cabin crew during peak summer travel. This year, strikes may be viewed as a minor nuisance compared to what’s coming within weeks—a jet fuel supply crisis that could ground flights and hike fares.

The war in Iran has cut most of Europe’s imports of jet fuel, while local output has been falling for nearly two decades due to dozens of refineries closing permanently or being converted to biofuel production.

The war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have severely constrained Europe’s jet fuel supply, while jet fuel prices have spiked to over $200 per barrel. The last imports from the Middle East on tankers that had passed Hormuz before the war began have arrived, and there is only one alternative to source jet fuel—from the United States. These supplies are not only insufficient to replace the loss of Middle Eastern jet fuel. Europe faces increasingly fierce competition from Asia for these cargoes as the crisis first hit Asia with crude supply from the Middle East collapsing, Asian refiners cutting refinery runs, and countries imposing fuel export restrictions to preserve domestic supply.

Back in 2009, nearly 100 refineries were operating in Europe. Of these, 28 refineries – more than 25% of the number of refineries and 16% of refining capacity – have been either shut or transformed since 2009, according to data from the European Fuel Manufacturers Association.

As refineries were closing, due to declining fuel demand in Europe and emission-reduction policies, the European dependence on imported supply has grown. The hit to supply from the Middle East caught Europe off guard regarding the security of energy supply for the second time in just four years, after natural gas deliveries from Russia crashed in 2022.

This time, the jet fuel crisis could be imminent, analysts and forecasters warn.

Last year, Europe imported about a third of the jet fuel it consumed, with 75% of imports coming from the Middle East, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

Its executive director, Fatih Birol, this week warned that Europe has “maybe six weeks or so” of remaining jet fuel supply.

“If we are not able to open the Strait of Hormuz ... I can tell you soon we will hear the news that some of the flights from city A to city B might be canceled as a result of lack of jet fuel,” Birol told Associated Press in an interview.

Northwest Europe is one of the regions most exposed to the jet fuel crisis, as imports have dropped from historical norms this month, and the import decline is set to accelerate in the coming weeks as more U.S. jet fuel cargoes would go to Asia instead of Europe, Ernest Censier, market analyst at Vortexa, said in an analysis on Thursday.

The 15% drop in European jet fuel imports so far in April “reflects structural dependence on Middle Eastern supply: approximately half of NWE’s jet fuel imports typically transit through the Strait of Hormuz,” Censier said.

In addition, relatively short voyage times of about 21 days from Mina Abdulla in Kuwait to Rotterdam mean that supply disruptions are transmitted quickly into regional imports, the analyst added.

The U.S. has emerged as the key source of substitution for lost Middle Eastern supply, but this is unlikely to be sustained as U.S. jet/kerosene exports are increasingly being redirected toward the Pacific Basin, reaching a seven-year high this month, and now accounting for over 30% of total U.S. jet fuel exports.

“This reallocation reflects a broader shift in US product exports toward the Pacific Basin,” Vortexa’s Censier noted.

This leaves Europe highly exposed to the turbulence in the jet fuel markets.

Lufthansa, Europe’s biggest airline, on Thursday said it is accelerating plans to reduce its flight program and retire some aircraft earlier.

“In view of significantly increased kerosene prices, which have more than doubled compared to the period before the Iran war, as well as rising additional burdens from labor disputes.”

“The package for accelerated implementation of fleet and capacity measures is unavoidable in light of the sharply increased kerosene costs and geopolitical instability,” said Till Streichert, Chief Financial Officer of Lufthansa Group.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 05:00

A United Airlines plane with around 200 passengers on board was forced to evacuate over a bomb threat at Denver airport – the second such security scare in a matter of days. Travelers bound for Washington Dulles disembarked the plane Sunday night while the jet was screened over a “security concern,” a United Airlines spokesperson...

Chicago schools may help students attend 'civil engagement events' despite May 1 still being a full school day.

An earthquake ‌with a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 struck off ​the northeastern coast of ​Japan on Monday afternoon, ⁠the Japan Meteorological ​Agency said.

A woman has been arrested as part of the ongoing investigation into a fifth grade teacher accused of 25 child sex crimes – including first degree rape. 

Europeans Pay The Most For Public Transport

Creating and maintaining reliable, efficient and affordable public transportation networks is crucial for developing a more sustainable mobility sector worldwide, though challenges vary by region.

In Europe, gaps are most evident in rural areas, where low population density limits service frequency.

In North America, many cities also suffer from fragmented public transport systems, making car dependency widespread in both rural and urban areas.

In Latin America and South Asia, semi-formal systems such as minibuses are an important and affordable part of transport networks, but often lack reliability and efficiency.

But, as Statista's Anna Fleck details below, according to Statista Market Insights, even regions with strong public transport coverage face affordability challenges.

You will find more infographics at Statista

In Switzerland, for example, average monthly revenue per user was estimated at around $535 in 2025, with other high figures seen in Nordic countries such as Denmark ($491) and Norway ($443).

However, this metric reflects operator revenue rather than typical ticket prices and should be interpreted cautiously.

At the lower end, countries such as Burundi, Malawi and Madagascar show monthly revenues per user below $3, while Bangladesh and India range between $6 and $8.

Overall, the global public transportation sector generated an estimated $294 billion in 2025, an increase of roughly 40 percent from the pandemic-induced slump in 2021.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 04:15

Elon Musk has been summoned to Paris on Monday, where investigators are looking into allegations of misconduct related to the social media platform X, including the spread of child sexual abuse material and deepfake content.

Homa had criticized golfers who 'beat up the golf course' just days before his own outburst at Harbour Town.

Cracks Appear In Climate Consensus As Germany's Energy Minister Admits Renewables Are Ruining The Country

Authored by Tilak Doshi,

When Simon Wakter, Political Adviser to Sweden’s Minister for Energy, posted on X last Wednesday with a simple “Wow, incredible article” and a clapping emoji, he captured the shock rippling through Europe’s energy commentariat.

The target of his applause was not some fringe sceptic but Germany’s own Economy and Energy Minister, Katherina Reiche.

In a guest column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reiche delivered a verdict that would have been career-ending heresy only a year ago: “One fact has been concealed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.” To anyone who has watched Germany’s Energiewende — that totemic experiment in decarbonisation-by-decree — unfold like a slow-motion train wreck, Reiche’s words land like a thunderclap from the Establishment itself.

Here is a senior CDU Minister in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Government openly admitting that two decades of Green-inspired fantasy have saddled the continent’s industrial powerhouse with hidden costs now running, according to estimates she cites, at €36 billion a year and climbing towards €90 billion. Grid expansions, backup power for intermittent wind and solar and the sheer inefficiency of trying to run a modern economy on the weather: all of it, she says, must stop being airbrushed out of the official narrative. The self-deception, she warns, is over.

This is not mere technocratic tinkering. It is the first major public crack in the ideological edifice that has dominated German — and by extension European — energy policy since the anti-nuclear, beatnik ’68ers’ generation seized the cultural high ground. Rupert Darwall chronicled the phenomenon with great precision in Green Tyranny: how a handful of German Greens, personified by the sneaker-wearing Joschka Fischer swearing in as Hesse’s environment minister in 1985, exported their peculiar red-green blend of anti-capitalist zeal and romantic environmentalism across the continent and beyond.

That gospel found a ready audience in the Anglosphere. In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen delivered his now-infamous testimony to the US Congress, declaring that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now”. The moment was theatrical, the science shaky, but the political effect electric. It fused with the inchoate ideas already circulating among Western intellectuals: Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which prophesied mass famine that never came; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which launched the modern environmental movement on the back of exaggerated claims about DDT; and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), the manifesto of ‘Buddhist economics’ that preached reducing human demand rather than raising living standards. As the great Chicago economist Frank Knight observed, economic progress consists not in suppressing desires nor even in satiating them but in their “ever greater refinement and multiplication” — a direct antithesis to Schumacher’s call for ascetic material restraint as spiritual virtue.

This European ideological curse of environmental misanthropy spread among the young urban intelligentsia of the developing countries through the educational curricula and mass media and the vast number of students studying in the progressive universities of the West, from Canada to Australia, Ireland to Italy and New York to California and Florida.

The spread of Europe’s green gospel was enthusiastically supported by Left-wing billionaire foundations which sprouted thousands of “grassroots NGOs” in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These so-called grassroots NGOs were handy to provide a moral cover for grifting renewable-energy lobbies seeking rents from the public purse. Local ‘Bootleggers and Baptists‘ coalitions arose across the developing countries that derived mutual benefits in Europe’s carbon colonialism. To complete the circle, captured agencies such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the IMF imposed anti-fossil-fuel constraints as a condition for aid and public finance to poorer African and Asian governments.

At the root of it all lay Europe’s long love affair with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage”, the fantasy that the simple, low-energy lifestyles of Tahitian natives represented a purer existence than the artifice of industrial civilisation. When Voltaire received a copy of Rousseau’s book The Social Contract, he replied:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than 60 years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.

Perhaps the German intelligentsia never saw the thrust of Voltaire’s rather disdainful response to Rousseau’s love affair with Pacific Islanders.

What began as German domestic posturing metastasized into EU-wide dogma with Angela Merkel’s fateful 2011 decision to shut the country’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima incident in Japan. The results were as predictable as they were catastrophic. Germany, once the engineering envy of the world, now imports electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. It has destroyed its nuclear industry — 20 gigawatts of reliable, low-carbon baseload — only to watch coal-fired plants, including the dirty lignite variety, roar back to life.

Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the few credentialled German voices who has consistently refused to drink the Gaia Kool-Aid, pointed out in an interview last week that the country sits atop enough domestic gas reserves for 25 years of secure supply. Yet it refuses to exploit them, crippled by what he calls the “German disease” of nature worship.

The March 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran’s IRGC merely administered the coup de grâce to an already terminal patient. Qatar’s force majeure on LNG shipments removed nearly 20% of global supply overnight. European gas prices spiked and power prices followed as German storage levels plunged.

Suddenly the same political class that had spent years lecturing voters about the moral imperative of Net Zero found itself quietly dusting off moribund lignite coal plants previously earmarked for closure. A ‘renaissance for coal’ is how analysts describe the spectacle. The prior government’s solemn pledge to phase out coal by 2030 now reads like a bad joke told at the expense of German households and manufacturers.

In a Facebook post, the TechTimes said:

In a move that highlights the severe economic strain of the Middle East conflict, the German Government is reportedly considering a ‘renaissance for coal’ to prevent a total energy meltdown. … While Germany has spent years pushing for a 2030 coal phase-out, the current energy crisis has forced a pivot toward energy security over climate targets. Reports indicate that several lignite units, previously held in safety reserve, may be returned to full market operation.

Conservative leader Alice Weidel, riding a surge of popularity for the conservative-populist AfD party that is now second only to the ruling CDU/CSU coalition, has forthrightly stated that under an AfD-led government, the Net Zero movement would be rejected:

We must also declare the climate crisis over. The whole thing is, as the American President so nicely puts it, a hoax – it is a complete scam. … We must immediately end the failed Energiewende. We must also immediately cut back and eliminate the waste of resources and the subsidies for so-called renewable energies.

German Energy Minister Reiche is not alone in her seeming Damascene conversion. Chancellor Merz has repeatedly called the 2023 nuclear shutdown a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany vulnerable to import shocks and deindustrialisation. Even EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, that high priestess of the Green Deal, stood before a nuclear summit in Paris on March 10th and confessed that “reducing Europe’s nuclear sector was a strategic mistake”. Reliable, affordable, low-emission power had been sacrificed on the altar of ideology, she effectively admitted — 15 years too late for the German utilities that had already been forced into insolvency or foreign ownership.

Yet these deathbed ‘repentances’ cannot disguise the deeper truth: the entire red-green project was always a triumph of wishful thinking over engineering reality, favouring Rousseau’s imaginations of noble savages in the South Pacific over Voltaire’s rather commonsensical rejection of being told that walking on all fours was heavenly.

The West’s punitive climate policies — layered atop self-inflicted energy sanctions on Russia — have boomeranged with spectacular precision. Entire sectors of German manufacturing have decamped to jurisdictions unburdened by the climate industrial complex. Energy-intensive industries that once powered the Mittelstand now eye the exits, while households stare at electricity prices that remain among the highest in the developed world.

Following the recent elections in Baden-Württemberg, the exasperated pseudonymous commentator Eugyppius remarked that: “Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods.” For the German Greens and their socialist allies, of course, the stupid people are the working- and middle-class majority who are ‘climate deniers’. Never mind that they are cost-of-living realists who notice when their heating bills triple, when German industry bleeds jobs and when the same politicians who preached energy poverty as virtue now scramble to fire up the dirtiest coal plants to prevent blackouts.

The polling numbers tell the story with merciless clarity. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now routinely polling at 25–27% nationally, ahead of or level with the CDU/CSU in several surveys. In western states long considered immune to its message, AfD has doubled its vote share in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. Its platform could not be clearer: man-made climate change is a ‘scam’, the entire Net Zero apparatus a vehicle for crushing industry and sovereignty.

Enter the ‘Far Right’

This is not fringe muttering; it is the explicit rejection of the Energiewende that Reiche herself is now edging towards. The pattern repeats across Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leads Presidential polling by framing the Green transition as “ultra-ecological fanaticism” that punishes farmers and motorists while enriching the Davos set. Britain’s Reform UK under Nigel Farage mocks Net Zero as “Net stupid Zero” and surges on promises to drill domestic resources. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, though more circumspect in office, has little patience for Brussels’s eco-mandates and has quietly prioritised energy security over emission targets. Even a section of British Conservatives, once captured by the same delusions, have begun to row back on timelines that threatened to bankrupt households.

What unites these movements is not they are led by ‘far-Right’ extremists, as the legacy press hysterically insists, but a straightforward recognition that ideology has collided with physics and economics. German households — those not among the young urban Greens steeped in deep-ecology dogma — are fed up. They have watched their country destroy its nuclear fleet, subsidise intermittent renewables to the tune of hundreds of billions of Euros and then beg Qatar and the United States for LNG while quietly reopening coal mines. The same elites who imposed these costs now express shock that voters are turning to parties promising relief.

The Hormuz shock has merely accelerated a reckoning that was already baked in. Ireland’s riots and protests over energy-driven cost-of-living pain offer a grim preview of what happens when governments refuse to admit their role in manufacturing the crisis. Dublin is quietly backing down without ever conceding the policy errors that made energy poverty inevitable. Berlin, Paris and Brussels are engaged in the same contortions: walking back punitive green measures while pretending the original strategy was sound.

History’s reckoning

Yet there is a larger historical arc at work. The German Greens’ capture of energy policy was never really about climate; it was about power — cultural, political and economic. It represented the final victory of a post-1968 worldview that equated industrial civilisation with original sin. BRICS nations and the Global South have no intention of sacrificing development on the altar of Western guilt. China builds coal plants and nuclear reactors with equal enthusiasm; India refuses to apologise for using its own coal.

Only in Europe did policymakers convince themselves that virtue-signalling could substitute for watts. Reiche’s epiphany, however partial, is therefore welcome. So too are Merz’s and von der Leyen’s belated acknowledgments. But rhetorical corrections will not suffice. Germany must confront the full cost of its ideological detour: the lost nuclear capacity, the stranded assets, the industrial hollowing-out and the political polarisation that has handed AfD its strongest hand since its founding.

The question is whether the Establishment possesses the courage to follow where basic economics and common-sense leads — towards a pragmatic energy mix that includes nuclear revival where feasible, domestic fossil resources where necessary and an end to the ruinous subsidies that have enriched renewables rent-seekers while impoverishing citizens.

Fifteen years after Merkel’s nuclear panic and decades after the Greens first infiltrated the corridors of power, reality is reasserting itself with the cold logic of physics and markets.

The fevered dream of a weather-dependent utopia is dissolving under the pressure of rolling blackouts, price spikes and voter revolt.

What comes next will hopefully be a return to something more honest: an energy policy grounded in engineering, not eschatology. For a country that once prided itself on Sachlichkeit — sobriety and realism — the awakening cannot come soon enough. The alternative is not climate salvation but national decline. Germany, and Europe with it, stands at the threshold. The only question remaining is whether its leaders will step through it before the lights go out for good.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 03:30

Two US Embassy officials were among four investigators killed in a car crash following a daring operation to shut down a clandestine drug laboratory in Mexico.

Dear Abby advises a woman who's son has stolen money meant for his daughter's college fund.

The actress' Open Hearts Foundation threw the western-themed party featuring a reunion with co-stars from the 1990s series.