US Existing Home Sales Disappoint In April, Despite Lower Mortgage Rates

New Member Of Trump's Iran Negotiating Team Comes From FDD Think Tank Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, Amid stalled peace talks and a US blockade on Iranian ports, the Trump administration has added a new member to its negotiating team who comes from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a notoriously hawkish think tank that has been lobbying for aggressive action against the Islamic Republic for many years. Nick Stewart, the head of the FDD's lobbying arm, has joined the office of US envoy Steve Witkoff, journalist Alex Marquardt first reported...

Gulf Energy Shock Spreads To Global Plastics As War Sparks Force Majeure Wave Building on our earlier "Global Demand Destruction" note, which mapped how the Gulf energy shock is spreading globally and the immediate effects of rationing, price controls, and fuel shortages, another second-order disruption is quickly emerging: supply chain disruptions in critical plastic feedstocks. Plastics are core to the modern economy, and a troubling new Bloomberg report indicates that several producers of monoethylene glycol (MEG) and purified terephthalic acid (PTA) have declared force majeure, as tanker flows through the Strait...

California Supreme Court Orders "Rogue" Sheriff To Pause Election Fraud Probe Authored by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco was ordered by the California Supreme Court on April 8 to halt his investigation into 2025 election fraud allegations so the judges can review the legal challenges that his probe faces. Bianco, a Republican who is running for California governor, seized more than half a million 2025 election ballots after allegedly receiving complaints from locals. Then, last month he seized an additional 1,000 boxes of election materials. Local election officials...