On May 9, 2024, a fire broke out at an IKEA warehouse in Vilnius, Lithuania (Lrytas, May 20, 2024). Subsequent investigations revealed that the arson was orchestrated by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU), and that the suspects were also planning similar attacks in Latvia (LRT, March 17).

The Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office classified the incident as an act of terrorism aimed at intimidating the societies of Lithuania and pressuring them to reduce support for Ukraine (LRT, March 17).

Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy extends beyond its war against Ukraine as it also targets other European frontline states through influence operations, election interference, and intimidation.

The Baltic States—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are targeted by Russian hybrid tactics as a daily reality and direct challenge to their sovereignty.

Historically, Moscow has used political, economic, energy, and cyber tactics to undermine the Baltics.

Recent efforts, however, are markedly more aggressive, particularly as they involve military pressure.

Understanding the origins of Russia’s hybrid strategy is crucial to recognizing its evolving influence in the region.

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A new rapid blood test for newborns could potentially detect genetic mutations linked to thousands of rare diseases all at once, greatly improving on current inefficient detection methods, according to a study to be presented Monday.

The new test developed by Australian scientists has proven highly accurate in identifying gene mutations associated with many rare, inherited diseases, all from just a minimally invasive blood sample taken from infants and children, the authors say.

 

The study, being unveiled at the European Human Genetics Conference in Milan, Italy, demonstrated that a single, untargeted test capable of analyzing 8,000 human proteins at once was able to correctly identify 83% of people with confirmed rare, inherited diseases.

The "proteomics" test was also able to differentiate between parental carriers of the mutations, who only have one copy of the defective gene, and the affected child, who carries two copies.

Those encouraging results are raising hopes for a new era in which screening infants and children for suspected inherited rare diseases can be accomplished quickly and efficiently for the first time, and that testing can be extended to many more of the estimated 300 million people worldwide affected by these genetic mutations.

Testing for suspected inherited diseases has traditionally been a time-consuming, costly and sometimes painful process that required different procedures for different suspected mutations. But that paradigm could be about to change, the study's lead author says.

 

Daniella Hock, a senior postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne, told UPI that if the test is implemented in clinical labs, "it can potentially replace multiple functional tests. This can potentially reduce the diagnostic time for patients and families and healthcare costs.

"The test only requires only 1 milliliter of blood from infants, and results can be achieved in less than three days for urgent cases," she said.

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The antidote to war is not peace.

The antidote to war is commerce.

This concept of cultivating peace by fostering commerce traces its roots back to Montesquieu and the Enlightenment.

The thought is that increasing commerce leads to shared interests, recognition of the rule of law, and growing prosperity, all of which preclude armed conflict.

At the end of WWII, the U.S. realized that only America, with about fifty percent of the global GDP, could reignite the fires of international trade, production, and competition.

In league with its wartime allies, agreements like Bretton Woods were executed and multilateral regulatory and monitoring organizations like the WTO were established.

With its enormous financial, military, and market clout, America was able to get the flywheel of global commerce moving again.

It worked, of course.

In 1945, global GDP was approximately $1T, while today it is about $117T.

Even better, the percent of the world’s population living in extreme poverty shrank from fifty-five percent to less than ten percent today.

These epic improvements are all due to the expansion of global commerce and free markets, driven by the U.S. sharing its markets, finances, and enforcement power.

But we still have war….it’s obvious to the casual observer that the outstanding component of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy is increasing commerce…

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Make no mistake about it: The Democratic Party is facing an existential crisis that even their media allies can't spin anymore.

The New York Times, the crown jewel of the liberal media establishment, just published a devastating analysis showing how the Democrats' supposed stronghold on American politics has crumbled under the MAGA movement.

While Democrats continue their tired routine of Trump-bashing and pretending to care about working Americans, the numbers tell a completely different story.

The Times' analysis reveals a political earthquake that's reshaping the electoral landscape, and it's not in the Democrats' favor.

“All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party's share of the presidential vote in each election he's been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all. It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020. By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.”

In the 2024 election, six times as many counties shifted toward the GOP as toward the Democrats. While 435 counties trended more Democratic compared to 2012, 2,678 moved more Republican—by an even larger average margin of 13.3 points versus 8.8 for Democrats.

That's not just a loss; that's a political bloodbath.

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This week, the Supreme Court continued to deliberate over what to do with the growing number of national or universal injunctions issued by federal district courts against the Trump Administration.

The court has long failed to address the problem, and what I call “chronic injunctivitis” is now raging across the court system.

Justices have only worsened the condition with conflicting and at times incomprehensible opinions.

Both Democratic and Republican presidents have long argued that federal judges are out of control in issuing national injunctions that freeze the entire executive branch for years on a given policy.

For presidents, you have to effectively sweep the district courts 677-to-0 if you want to be able to carry out controversial measures.

Any one judge can halt the entire government.

Under President Barack Obama, Justice Elena Kagan expressed outrage over the injunctions in public comments at Northwestern University School of Law.

Kagan lashed out at the obvious “forum shopping” by then conservative advocates to get before favorable courts, insisting “It just cannot be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years it takes to go through the normal [appellate] process.”

In his first term, Trump faced a more than 450 percent increase in the number of such injunctions over the number issued under Obama — a rise from 12 to 64.

The number then went down to just 14 under former President Joe Biden.

With Trump back in office, district courts have now outstripped that record and may surpass the total from the first term in the first year.

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China is the original riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. A country striving for modernity but feudal in its treatment of its citizens, Beijing's economic identity is a combination of Communist orthodoxy and crony capitalism.

As you might expect, the two don't work well together.

On the outside of the riddle, China is booming, the people are subservient and happy, and the government is looking to the future with confidence. This is the picture the Chinese Communists paint for the world to see. The reality is much different.

China is being crushed by debt, has become dependent on high levels of debt, and has created a humongous bubble in several sectors, like housing and household goods.

One noted Chinese economist says, “Basically, China’s economy is all built on speculation and everything is over-leveraged.”  Yet it's not just the debt that's pulling China down. It’s much worse than that.

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