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Is Washington's ally the United Kingdom making preparations to 'do more' related to the Iran crisis at the behest of President Trump? 

New reporting in The Associated Press suggests so. But the new Monday report also points to the UK possibly just making an appearance of action: "Aboard the RFA Lyme Bay docked off the coast of Gibraltar, hundreds of British sailors are waiting to be deployed for a mine-clearing mission to the Strait of Hormuz that is still in doubt," the report says.

The AP continues, "On the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, the U.K.’s Royal Navy is preparing to do that — but only once a peace agreement is reached."

So indeed this potential mine-clearing mission by the Royal Navy is heavily dependent on a series of conditions and caveats being met. Currently Washington has been teasing that a final deal with Tehran is nearing the goal-line. 

And yet the latest words from Tehran have voiced caution, and have warned against any premature assessments.

Back in March Trump had told NATO allies to "go get your own oil" and secure the strait themselves amid a series of reprimands for not joining a US-led coalition in the Persian Gulf.

For now, the UK Royal Navy mission is in a holding pattern:

Britain’s Armed Forces Minister Al Carns took a small group of reporters to visit the RFA Lyme Bay as it prepares for a possible international operation, led by the U.K. and France, to secure the strait. As Carns spoke, the amphibious landing vessel, docked at the gateway to the Mediterranean, was being loaded with ammunition and mine-hunting sea drones equipped with sonar.

With a crew of several hundred sailors, the RFA Lyme Bay will soon depart Gibraltar to link up with the U.K. destroyer HMS Dragon and allied ships for air support before sailing through the Suez Canal to the Persian Gulf.

Again, all this seems merely London's way of signaling to Trump that it is preparing to take action in support of the US but without actually pulling the trigger.

Other European nations have made similarly symbolic displays, such as pledging support for a post-war navigation mission, but not actually signing on to a regional deployment while the conflict is still in an active phase.

Weeks ago, Iran allegedly fired off more drones on Gulf states, which highlighted how fragile the current ceasefire remains, and even amid continued Qatar-led diplomatic mediation efforts.

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

A fatal fiscal dynamic has become entrenched across the European Union. In nearly every member state, public spending is accelerating at all levels — from municipalities and social insurance systems all the way up to the European Commission — while the private economy at best stagnates and its industrial core sectors visibly erode.

This dangerous economic imbalance, in which a shrinking private sector is forced to finance a continuously expanding state apparatus, is already producing fiscal consequences visible in the bond markets. Interest rates have been rising steadily for years, making debt servicing increasingly expensive, while the financing needs of public budgets continue to grow under the ruling ideology of an all-encompassing state. This widening fiscal gap is fueling political appetites for higher taxation — a destructive race among parties to squeeze taxpayers at every level has begun.

And naturally, when it comes to fleecing European taxpayers, the European Commission cannot be absent. Brussels is currently preparing its seven-year budget framework, set to exceed €2 trillion beginning in 2028.

Apollo News recently reported that the European Parliament is even demanding a further 10 percent increase in this budget ceiling. Excess, wastefulness, and a complete detachment from economic reality are driving the EU’s relentless search for new independent tax revenues.

To this end, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen commissioned the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) last year to produce a study examining the potential of wealth taxation in the EU — another brick laid in the rapidly expanding tax debate.

Bluntly put, this reflects the incestuous culture of Brussels, where academic satellites traditionally align themselves with the ideological winds of their political sponsors in order to secure taxpayer-funded grants.

The study focused primarily on the collection methods and revenue shares associated with wealth taxes, capital gains taxation, and the so-called exit tax. In other words, Europe’s tax policy is now moving toward the heart of private property itself. Brussels is unpacking the toolkit of preparatory state propaganda. Terms such as “justice gap,” “redistribution,” and “social justice” appear throughout the report, alongside the usual resentment-driven rhetorical formulas designed for one purpose only: preparing the public for a future in which the fiscal arms of European governments reach ever deeper into family wealth and long-term financial planning.

The central thesis of the CASE study is that private wealth in Europe has grown disproportionately and become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of households. Right from the outset, however, the state itself — with its swelling bureaucracy and expensive interventionism in climate policy, the Ukraine conflict, and welfare systems — is carefully removed from scrutiny.

Not a single critical word appears in the study about the darker side of taxing citizens’ accumulated assets. Taxation today is carried out in the spirit of subservience: the taxpayer no longer possesses any meaningful voice. Instead, a debate framed around “fairness” is intended to soften the final pockets of resistance. In the end, everything is reduced to fiscal design and public relations.

One particularly revealing sign of the EU’s fiscal direction can be found in the debate surrounding the so-called exit tax. Combined with the introduction of a digital euro and the possible integration of Switzerland into the EU’s fiscal regime, escape routes for capital would effectively be sealed off. Wealthy citizens would likely flee beforehand, pulling their capital out of the EU while they still can.

What is remarkable is that politicians, institutes, and media organizations appear incapable of drawing conclusions from real-world experience. Norway’s introduction of a wealth tax triggered an exodus of the super-rich, ultimately leading to a noticeable decline in tax revenues. Understandably, Brussels now seems eager to close the gates — and has even helped ignite a wealth-tax debate in Switzerland, though this effort will likely fail. Its climate-policy framing alone makes it highly suspect to Swiss voters.

Switzerland does, of course, already levy wealth taxes at the cantonal level. But the current debate within the EU reaches much further into the direct taxation of citizens’ existing wealth than anything Switzerland has implemented thus far.

Europe’s treatment of its productive classes reveals the deeply statist spirit that now dominates the political and media establishment. The fact that the top 10 percent of income earners in Germany already contribute roughly 55 percent of all income tax revenues is no longer politically relevant. Desperate states will pull every lever available to fill the fiscal holes left behind by the green transformation.

The CASE study also aligns strikingly — both in timing and substance — with the current German debate over abolishing income splitting for married couples, increasing inheritance taxes on business assets, and reintroducing the wealth tax.

Germany already imposes a form of exit tax under certain circumstances when companies relocate abroad. What may be missing is only the Dutch approach: the comprehensive fictitious taxation of unrealized capital gains. The Netherlands is serving as the testing ground. Such taxation would likely become the next maneuver of a bloated state apparatus that has lost control of its spending.

What we are witnessing is a political class that continues to believe in building an eco-socialist surveillance state despite economic reality, visible deindustrialization, and social decay. And like every socialist project before it, environmental statism will eventually damage its host economy so severely that the laws of economics, logic, and resource scarcity will ultimately bring it down.

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About the author:  Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The digital euro ranks among the most ambitious projects within the political architecture of the European Union. As the Eurosystem and the EU increasingly merge into identical and integrated political spaces, it can no longer be denied that this CBDC project is primarily a geopolitical power play by Brussels. Yet the euro-CBDC — shorthand for “central bank digital currency” — remains stuck in a loop. Originally envisioned years ago as already being in the project phase, the first digital wallets are now not expected before the end of 2029. Bundesbank President Nagel pointed this out in his interview with Handelsblatt.

During the interview, Nagel emerged as an articulate advocate of a euro-CBDC, despite the fact that its introduction would inevitably hand enormous power to the European Central Bank as issuer and administrator of digital wallets. This would coincide with the dismantling of core business areas currently controlled by commercial banks. Nagel downplayed the danger of large-scale capital flight from accounts held at savings banks, Deutsche Bank, and others, arguing that planned digital wallets would be capped at €3,000. With this argument, Nagel attempts to minimize the undeniable risk that the technology could later be expanded far beyond its initial limits.

Unfortunately, the interview fails to clarify the substantive difference between the CBDC envisioned for the eurozone and the already existing stablecoins, most of which are denominated in U.S. dollars. There is a fundamental distinction between programmable digital money issued by a centralized state authority and digital currency services provided by multiple competing private-sector issuers.

A full-scale battle between systems is increasingly taking shape in the realm of digital money. On one side stand European institutions pushing for systematic centralization of power. On the other side of the Atlantic lies a model that, compared with the EU approach, resembles a return to Wild West capitalism: more deregulation, a shrinking state apparatus, and in monetary policy, a gradual return to private-sector money creation through privately issued stablecoins.

Fiat-linked digital currencies, so-called stablecoins, are currently one of the hottest trends in American finance. The largest private issuer of a dollar stablecoin is Tether, whose digital dollar has now reached a market volume of roughly $190 billion. These privately issued digital dollars represent a major innovation within blockchain technology. In particular, they enable real-time transfers, operate without banking holidays, and provide access outside the traditional SWIFT system for anyone with an internet connection.

Users essentially need nothing more than a smartphone and an installed wallet app — no traditional bank account required. Another advantage lies in potentially lower fees and, in some cases, higher yields, since providers avoid the bloated administrative structures of traditional banks. Stablecoins undoubtedly represent a major increase in individual sovereignty - at least until issuers, possibly under government pressure, decide to freeze access to users’ holdings.

The fact that the eurozone has so far neither agreed on a digital CBDC control standard nor trapped citizens inside such a digital financial prison stems from several factors. One is technological. The threat posed by quantum computing dramatically intensifies the risks involved. A centralized digital financial system such as the euro-CBDC would face massive hacking attempts and manipulation from the moment of its launch. This is the classic weakness of centralized systems: they provide attackers with one clearly defined point of attack. Moreover, the European Union and the Eurosystem together form an over-bureaucratized and fully centralized power structure that inevitably lags behind current technological standards.

For precisely this reason, decentralized financial ecosystems such as the Bitcoin network are technologically superior. Bitcoin is secured by a decentralized network of independent miners and node operators. Every participant defends the structure out of direct self-interest. With well over 100 million Bitcoin holders worldwide and tens of thousands of miners, an almost impenetrable protective wall emerges. Contrary to Nagel’s remarks in the interview, the commercial banking sector is obviously also resisting the centralization of the financial system in the hands of the ECB. The reason is simple: a full rollout of the digital euro would make the traditional banking business model — accounts, savings products, and transfer services — largely obsolete.

But the real reason there has so far been relative calm on the CBDC front inside the Eurosystem becomes obvious once one observes the speed at which global capital flees crisis zones. The introduction of a CBDC would signal that the ECB intends to build in a mechanism for capital controls, possibly in anticipation of a full-scale financial or sovereign debt crisis in the euro area. A dramatic surge in interest rates triggered by a selloff in European bonds would once again force the ECB to intervene as lender of last resort, on a scale potentially far greater than anything seen during the financial and sovereign debt crises of the past decade and a half. Such intervention would inevitably raise fundamental questions about the long-term stability of the euro itself.

That the eurozone will eventually face another debt crisis is hardly in doubt. The only uncertainty is timing — namely, when bond markets, confronted with Europe’s relentless debt binge, in which even Germany is now enthusiastically participating, will finally give the thumbs down.

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About the author:  Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Want to earn more than $300,000 a year in America? The clearest path is still a highly specialized medical career.

This ranking of America’s highest-paying occupations uses Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data to compare mean annual wages and total U.S. employment across the country’s top-paid roles.

As Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld details below, the results show how concentrated high pay is in healthcare. They also reveal another important pattern: many of America’s best-paid jobs are held by relatively small workforces, making them some of the rarest careers in the economy.

America’s Highest-Paying Jobs

The rankings below show the 30 highest-paying occupations in the U.S. based on mean annual wages, alongside total nationwide employment levels.

Why Doctors Dominate America’s Highest-Paying Jobs

Healthcare’s dominance reflects a powerful mix of high barriers to entry, limited specialist supply, and steady demand for complex medical care.

Most of the highest-paying medical specialties require more than a decade of education and residency training, limiting the pipeline of qualified professionals. At the same time, America’s aging population is increasing demand for specialists in cardiology, radiology, oncology, and surgery.

As a result, highly specialized physicians command some of the largest salaries in the economy. Adding to this, the U.S. is projected to face a shortage of more than 141,000 physicians by 2038.

America’s Highest-Paying Jobs Are Also Among Its Rarest

Many of America’s top-paying professions employ surprisingly small numbers of workers nationwide.

For example, there are only about 1,000 pediatric surgeons across the U.S., despite the profession ranking first overall in pay. Several other elite medical specialties, including prosthodontists (760) and oral surgeons (5,000), also have relatively small workforces.

This scarcity helps explain why wages remain exceptionally high. Limited supply continues to collide with growing healthcare demand and an aging population with rising rates of chronic illness.

The Highest-Paying Jobs Outside Healthcare

Outside of healthcare, only a handful of roles break into the upper tier of U.S. pay, led by aviation and executive management.

Airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers ($280.6K) rank among the country’s highest-paid workers as aviation faces persistent pilot shortages. Meanwhile, chief executives ($262.9K), financial managers ($180.5K), and architectural and engineering managers ($175.7K) command high salaries due to their leadership responsibilities and oversight of complex operations.

Will America’s Highest-Paying Jobs Change?

Despite rapid advances in AI and automation, many of America’s highest-paying jobs remain difficult to replace.

Specialized surgeons, anesthesiologists, and pilots operate in highly regulated environments that require years of hands-on training and real-time decision-making. These barriers continue to shield many elite professions from automation pressures reshaping other parts of the workforce.

At the same time, healthcare spending is forecast to grow faster than the broader economy through 2033, helping sustain strong demand and high salaries for specialized physicians.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the best places to work in America in 2026.

Amid the flood of AI doomerism, from Pope Leo XIV's Monday warning that AI and the digital transformation of the economy could unleash "new forms of slavery" and mass job losses, to Bernie Sanders and unhinged socialists calling for a halt to data centers buildouts, a move that would conveniently cede compute power to communists in Beijing, a growing and emerging chorus of dystopian futurists is now trying to frame the AI boom as an existential labor-market crisis rather than the next productivity supercycle that arrives just in time as a demographic winter unfolds.

Adding to recent comments from Netscape co-founder and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) co-founder Marc Andreessen, who argued that AI-related job-loss fears are merely hysteria and that AI is actually arriving at the moment the nation needs it most:

"We're going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them [with populations shrinking] to keep the economy from actually shrinking."

...none other than Goldman Sachs CEO and occasional weekend DJ in the Hamptons, David Solomon, penned a recent opinion piece in The New York Times asserting that the AI-related "job apocalypse and mass unemployment ahead" hysteria is "overblown."

"I'm the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. The A.I. Job Apocalypse Is Overblown," Solomon titled the NYTimes op-ed, likely aiming for maximum media exposure with such an eye-catching headline.

Solomon's framing of the headline appears to be a direct response to growing resistance not only to AI chatbots but also to data centers nationwide, a backlash wave we pointed out many months ago as alarm bells ring loudly from the tech bro community. As AI infrastructure becomes the backbone of the next economic cycle, the anti-data-center movement is quickly gaining steam and becoming a political weapon by the doomerism community.

Solomon argues that AI will not eliminate jobs at an apocalyptic scale. Instead, he says it will allow workers to become more productive, shift to higher-value tasks, and create new roles focused on managing, implementing, validating, and regulating AI systems.

However, Solomon does acknowledge that there will be labor market disruptions:

Absolutely. This transition, like other significant moments in our history, will entail new challenges, especially as A.I. separates labor from productivity in magnitudes we haven't seen before.

He pointed out that the U.S. economy has seen this story before: it has repeatedly absorbed technological shocks, from electrification to automobiles to computers, while overall employment and living standards continued to rise.

Solomon said AI will likely follow the same pattern as previous technological shifts, eliminating some jobs while expanding others, such as the explosion in construction jobs tied to the $700 billion in capex that hyperscalers are set to deploy this year alone.

Solomon cites his economists, who recently forecast that AI could automate 25% of current work hours over the next decade, with white-collar sectors such as banking, law, accounting, software, and customer service most exposed.

Solomon said that if AI destroys jobs at an unprecedented scale, there should be a "joint effort" between the corporate world and government to help workers and institutions adapt to the new labor market.

"The U.S. economy can and will adapt to major advances in technology," he emphasized.

Solomon's comments were similar to those made earlier this year by venture capital guru Andreessen, who argued that fears of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse are overstated.

In his view, automation and robots are entering the picture at exactly the moment economies need them to offset labor shortages and prevent stagnation.

Read:

• Marc Andreessen Calls AI Job-Loss Fears 'Fake', Expects Employment Gains

• If You're Freaking Out About A Future Jobless AI Dystopia...

Elon Musk has been among the loudest and most vocal voices warning about the demographic winter consuming not only the Western world but many other countries as well. He has framed his Optimus robot as "great for Japan" because it could help offset a shrinking workforce.

Via The Cradle

Fifteen Arab and Islamic countries condemned on Sunday the decision of the breakaway region of Somaliland to open an embassy in occupied Jerusalem. The foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkiye, Pakistan, Indonesia, Djibouti, Somalia, Palestine, Oman, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, and Mauritania denounced the move in a joint statement on Sunday.

The countries condemned "in the strongest terms the illegal and unacceptable step taken by the so-called 'Somaliland' region in opening a purported 'embassy' in occupied Jerusalem," according to the statement.

The countries issued the statement one week after Israeli President Isaac Herzog welcomed Somaliland's first-ever ambassador to Israel, Dr. Mohamed Hagi, at the President's Residence in occupied Jerusalem. "This new and important partnership between our countries will lead to a future of cooperation in a variety of fields – for the benefit of both our peoples and the entire region," Herzog stated.

Seven countries have opened embassies in Jerusalem since the US, under President Donald Trump, recognized the city as Israel's capital in 2017.

The decision sparked widespread international condemnation, given that Israeli forces illegally occupied East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967, which Palestinians call the Nakba. Since then, Israel has colonized East Jerusalem in violation of international law by expelling indigenous Palestinian Muslims and Christians and facilitating the settlement of Jewish Israelis in their place.

The 15 countries rejected any unilateral measures to entrench "an illegal reality in occupied Jerusalem or conferring legitimacy on any entities or arrangements that contravene international law and relevant United Nations resolutions."

The statement reaffirmed the fact that "East Jerusalem has been occupied Palestinian territory since 1967" and said any measures seeking to alter its legal or historical status are "null and void."

The foreign ministers also expressed full support for the unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Somalia, rejecting any unilateral actions that undermine Somali sovereignty.

In April, Somalia condemned Israel's appointment of an ambassador to the breakaway region of Somaliland, calling the move a "breach" of its sovereignty and international law. "This action represents a direct breach of Somalia's sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity," the Somalian Foreign Ministry said, adding that it "undermines the established international consensus." 

Mogadishu added that the decision violates its territorial integrity and contradicts the UN Charter and African Union principles. The ministry stressed that Somaliland “remains an integral part” of Somalia, rejecting any attempt to grant it diplomatic recognition outside federal authority.

On December 26, 2025, Israel formally recognized what it termed the Republic of Somaliland, marking a significant shift in its policy toward the Horn of Africa. The move altered the political equation along one of the world's most sensitive maritime routes.

It consolidates a four-party alignment linking Israel, India, the UAE, and Ethiopia. This emerging axis focuses on securing maritime chokepoints in the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandeb, while laying the groundwork for an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in eastern Africa.

16 Arab Islamic Countries Condemn Somaliland’s Opening of Purported Embassy in Jerusalem

Doha | May 24, 2026

The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Republic of… pic.twitter.com/F7gsx4Elsf

— Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Qatar (@MofaQatar_EN) May 24, 2026

The timing followed months of escalating regional pressure, including the 12-day Israeli–Iranian war in June 2025 and the Yemeni maritime blockade targeting vessels bound for Israeli ports following the beginning of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Securing these waterways became a core component of Israeli national security planning. Somaliland's geography explains its importance. Somaliland's territory overlooks one of the world's busiest maritime arteries, facilitating trade flows linking Asia, Africa, and Europe.