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The Alternative for Germany (AfD) continues to run away from its main rival, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) in a new poll, which shows the AfD nine points ahead.

The AfD achieved a new record in the current YouGov poll, reaching 29 percent, while the CDU/CSU and SPD have hit all-time lows. The results are expected to pile on the pressure on a governing coalition the German public increasingly despises.

In the YouGov poll, CDU/CSU achieves 20 percent of the vote and SPD earns 12 percent. The Union parties have never been worse in a YouGov poll.

BUNDESTAGSWAHL | Sonntagsfrage YouGov

AfD: 29% (+1)
Union: 20% (-2)
GRÜNE: 14% (+1)
SPD: 12% (-1)
LINKE: 12% (+1)
FDP: 5% (+1)
BSW: 4%
Sonstige: 5%

Änderungen zur letzten Umfrage vom 12. Mai 2026

Verlauf: https://t.co/f9MV7iZ8iJ#btw29 pic.twitter.com/yO2VS2jJn5

— Deutschland Wählt (@Wahlen_DE) June 16, 2026

However, the Greens at 14 percent and the Left Party at 12 percent are making slight gains.

The FDP is also gaining ground, reaching 5 percent for the first time in a year and a half after a new chairman was elected, Wolfgang Kubicki.

The results for the CDU in particular are bound to spark further turmoil in the party, with some members perhaps even eyeing a future coalition with the AfD, a move that has been soundly rejected by CDU leadership. In particular, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to never work with the party.

The conundrum for the CDU remains that the party is forced to build coalitions with predominately left-wing parties like the Greens, the SPD, and even the Left Party, through its firewall against the AfD. The resulting politics have left CDU voters increasingly unhappy with the results, but remarkably, about half of CDU voters also reject a coalition with the AfD.

Majority of Germans reject politicizing the World Cup

YouGov also found that a majority of Germans do not want the World Cup politicized. The German national team has a history of taking a “woke” stance in the last two World Cups, but the German team was eventually humiliated in each tournament, failing to advance past the preliminary round in both World Cups.

However, Germans soundly reject politics in football, with 65 percent of respondents saying they want the World Cup and politics to be strictly separated. AfD voters (82 percent) and CDU/CSU voters (74 percent) are especially in favor of this position. More than half of SPD voters at 55 percent also share this view.

However, those on the more extreme left, back politics in football, like the Left Party (41 percent) and the Greens (34 percent).

Read more here...

One of Baltimore City's premier bar and restaurant districts was transformed into a warzone over the weekend, with roaming gangs of underage kids, large unruly crowds, fights, and even a shootout that seemed like a scene from the crime drama The Wire. Urban decay in Baltimore is rampant and is a symptom of failed left-wing leadership, which seems more focused on city-killing progressive politics, DEI, illegal aliens, and climate change than actually providing basic law and order to taxpayers.

Fox Baltimore reports that Fells Point was flooded with hundreds of young people, mostly underage teens, overwhelming parts of the nightlife district known for its local shops, bars, and restaurants.

More from Fells Point:

Imagine wanting to go out for dinner and a few drinks on a Saturday and this is what you walk into ?????

Completely unacceptable pic.twitter.com/cP8lRyezM5

— QE Infinity (@StealthQE4) June 17, 2026

What came next was chaos...

In a video that has been making the rounds on social media, footage shows people running after reportedly hearing gunfire in Fells Point early Saturday morning.

??: @lorjuu on Instagram pic.twitter.com/n1sxFiS3SV

— The Baltimore Sun (@baltimoresun) June 17, 2026

The scenes of chaos raise new concerns that the failed left-wing leadership under Mayor Brandon Scott has lost control of the city’s youth. The direct consequence will be that tourists - those still brave enough to visit a city in terminal decline - may abandon plans to come to Fells. This will impact mom-and-pop restaurants.

A large police presence filled Fells Point overnight after hundreds of young people crowded the streets, prompting multiple calls for disorderly conduct and at least one arrest.

STORY: https://t.co/EUHZOFMv1r pic.twitter.com/DoQdQQaifT

— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) June 15, 2026

City leaders are unserious. 

FOX45 is pressing city leaders on how they plan to address the disorderly crowds in Fells Point seen over the weekend. https://t.co/KdJaF2jx68 pic.twitter.com/7dkBehwcU5

— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) June 16, 2026

Lawlessness is nothing new in Baltimore, which continues to suffer a population collapse, now at a 100-year low.

Related:

• "Exponentially Deteriorating": Baltimore's Lawlessness Spreads Into Suburbs As Democrats Lose Control

As public safety concerns mount, quality of life deteriorates, and taxes remain ungodly high, raising a family in a city controlled by Democrats has become unbearable and dangerous - all the more reason to flee to the county or leave the state entirely for a common-sense red state.

Related:

• "Marylanders Are Voting With Their Feet": Johns Hopkins Finds Blue State Exodus To Persist For Years

And it gets much worse, well, the local economy is in turmoil: 

• "Billion-Dollar Ghost Town" Surrounds Under Armor Headquarters

• Downtown Baltimore CRE Crash Signals Deeper Fiscal Crisis Ahead

• Build It, And They Will Come? Not The Case At Baltimore's Harbor East Luxury Tower

For anyone traveling up or down the I-95 along the East Coast this summer, the Baltimore exit may be one to avoid. The wise move is to keep on driving. And if you want a taste of Baltimore, just re-watch The Wire on a streaming platform from the comfort of your sofa. 

The Hudson Institute hosted Dr. Steven Quay on Monday afternoon for a discussion on COVID-19 origins, during which he presented genetic evidence from his new book, The Code as Witness, arguing that the virus originated through gain-of-function research in a Chinese lab.

Years later, there has still been no accountability for what Quay argues was a Chinese lab leak that killed more than one million Americans and caused U.S. economic damages in excess of $18 trillion. Nor has there been a unified U.S. government consensus on the lab-leak theory, let alone on potential consequences for China or Dr. Anthony Fauci.

In the roughly one-hour discussion, which was opened by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a leading voice for stronger oversight of high-risk biological research, Quay, a Hudson senior fellow, said features encoded in the virus's genetic material point directly to lab manipulation rather than natural zoonosis.

Quay warned that irresponsible and unregulated gain-of-function research is accelerating globally and could produce pathogens far deadlier than the one that caused COVID.

Last week, Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a set of internal intelligence slides documenting a long-running US program that has funded a global network of biolabs that handle dangerous pathogens - including dozens in Ukraine.

Returning to Quay's discussion at Hudson, he pointed to several genetic features he says are difficult to explain by natural evolution alone, making it impossible. These include the furin cleavage site, the virus's early optimization for human ACE2 receptors, the ORF8 gene, restriction-enzyme patterns, and the rapid D614-to-G614 mutation.

Hudson Senior Fellow David Asher, drawing on decades of national security and intelligence work at the State Department, spoke with Quay about the confluence of the U.S. government and scientists who censored the lab-leak theory.

Asher told Quay that, years after the pandemic, there is still no formal COVID commission that gives the American people a clear understanding of where the virus came from, who should be held responsible, or a unified government consensus on the virus.

The Quay-Asher discussion then shifted to the biosecurity policy. They spoke of the urgent need for accountability, biosafety reform, and risk reduction as gain-of-function research accelerates globally.

Even with no clear federal government consensus on COVID origins, a recent YouGov poll demonstrated sharp partisan divides among the American people: 80% of Republicans and 47% of Democrats say the virus came from a Chinese lab. Meanwhile, 66% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats think it is definitely or probably true that the virus was released on purpose.

The American people demand accountability. It is time for a COVID commission.

Up until now, Americans primarily hated the flood of data centers popping up around the country like mushrooms (at least those that haven't been canceled or delayed due to regulatory pushback, lack of electricity or outright hostility) because of surging electricity prices and the rising tide of unemployment as chabots gradually make America's white collar workers obsolete. Now they can add surging consumer price inflation to the list of reasons to hate data centers, whose ravenous demand for memory has sent prices to record highs.

According to the WSJ, Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone. 

Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple - which is only the first major consumer electronics company to succumb to surging input prices and pass them through to consumers - raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.

Skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips from artificial-intelligence companies has pushed up their cost so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins. Passing the higher cost on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone Pro model, or a price increase of more than 20% estimates research firm TechInsights.

While Apple doesn’t report the gross profit margins on individual products, the TechInsights research suggests the margin on the $1,099 iPhone 17 Pro was a tidy 47%. To maintain that profit margin for the iPhone 18 Pro, based on estimated costs, the company would have to charge $1,371. Because the company likes standardized pricing, the starting price tag would more likely be $1,299, yielding a 44% gross profit. 

And this calculation doesn’t account for a potential new camera system that will also cost Apple about 50% more than previous models, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In that case, following the same math, Apple could set the starting price of the iPhone 18 Pro at $1,399—or higher.

A full breakdown of the math behind the increase can be found in this WSJ article. 

While chips have emerged as the key bottlenecks for agentic-focused data centers, even more so than GPUs/CPUs, the resulting price surge has prompted manufacturers like Samsung and SK Hynix to focus production on high end HBM products, while shrinking supply for more modest DRAM products which however are used in virtually every modern product; chips for memory and storage are key components inside most computing devices, including smartphones, laptops, game consoles, medical equipment and even cars. But with AI servers gobbling up rapidly increasing volumes of those chips - with little to none price discrimination since it is the latest batch of bondholders who ends up footing the bill - even a company as rich and powerful as Apple is struggling to secure supply.

Since last year, when Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon began announcing big increases in their capital spending budgets, the prices for memory and storage chips have both quadrupled. TechInsights expects both prices to continue increasing into 2027, unless a flood of Chinese chips hits the market .

Memory, also called DRAM, and storage, also called NAND, are like elements of a mid-20th-century office: The memory is a desk that holds all the papers a worker needs to perform a task, while storage is the filing cabinet that holds everything else. Smartphones use DRAM memory to run apps currently in use; they use NAND storage to file away photos and videos, for example. And since both products were (and are) a pure commodity, there were are substitute makers in the Western world besides the big memory companies. 

Cook said prices for memory and storage are both issues for the company, though he focused on the DRAM market in particular, calling out the increased allocations going to so-called high-bandwidth memory that is used for AI servers.

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Three companies dominate the market for DRAM memory: Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, and Micron in the U.S. Makers of NAND storage include those three companies as well as Kioxia and Sandisk. Their stock prices, along with their profits, have exploded over the past twelve months: Micron and SK Hynix shares have risen more than 800% while Kioxia and Sandisk have risen 4,600%.

Seeing the unprecedented demand, memory companies are building more factories: Morgan Stanley forecasts that production capacity for DRAM wafers, the silicon discs on which chips are patterned, will grow 30% by 2027. Yet as suppliers prioritize the specialized AI memory, wafers for consumer tech will fall up to 15% short of demand, Morgan Stanley estimates, although the bank may be conflicted due to its substantial exposure to various companies in the AI ecosystem, which would be terribly vexed if Morgan Stanley were to reach a different conclusion (like, for example, that China - that great commodity crushed - is coming online with massive output in the coming months which will send prices for at least baselines DRAM and NAND sharply lower).

While China has national champion companies in memory and storage, but due to national-security rules, American companies would likely require licenses to work with them. When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said: “I think everything needs to be on the table,” adding, “I think we should look at all supply.”

He is right: as we showed recently, chips and memory have emerged as one of the biggest drivers of wholesale inflation, and now that it is being passed on to consumers, it is only a matter of time before the inflation-averse White House starts making very loud noises, demanding an artificial limit on how high memory prices can rise.

Apple is late to the party: Companies that make PCs, game consoles, smartphones and more have already raised prices, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Nintendo. A consortium of industry associations recently sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick complaining about the overallocation of memory to AI buyers and asking for help to increase supply.

Morgan Stanley estimates a 15% bump for prices of smartphones and PCs in the U.S. this year. This price hike will have a limited impact on the consumer price index, which has only a small weighting for such devices. Yet any price increase on the popular iPhone will immediately grab Washington’s attention. 

Compounding the issue is Apple’s need for additional DRAM to support more AI features, including a rebooted Siri announced last week. And the company has long used NAND storage upgrades to boost profits, charging $100 to $200 for extra increments that cost it just a fraction of that.

In the interview, Cook said Apple stands ready to use its cash reserves to boost memory supply. “We’re willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution,” he said but added that “obviously, more capacity is needed.” 

Cook declined to offer specifics. It is unclear how Apple could match, let alone beat, the deal terms that AI hyperscalers are offering to lock up supply, and how much of a hit to the company's profits such a move would be. Those companies are signing three-to-five year agreements with huge cash prepayments that Apple is unlikely willing to match, given its long history of disciplined spending.

Cook said Apple wouldn’t use its cash and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories. “We can’t do everything,” said Cook. “We know what we’re good at.”

Apple spends in the low tens of billions of dollars per year on memory and storage, according to people familiar with its costs, making it one of the largest customers in the world. Historically it has used its heft to wring the lowest prices out of suppliers, playing them off each other and leaving them little profit. As AI companies have stormed into the market, suddenly Apple has to wait in line.

Cook said during his time working in the electronics supply chain, from IBM to Compaq to Apple, he had never seen a commodity price swing like the one from the past six months. “This is a hundred-year flood,” said Cook. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

Luckily, every flood comes with a drain, and as usual it is made in China. A few weeks ago, we reported that "China Begins Flooding The Market With DRAM And NAND Memory Chips", and followed up with a report yesterday that China's DRAM giant CXMT has gotten a final node for the largest mainland IPO since 2022 (as has YMTC, China’s leading NAND flash maker, #4 globally). In short, CHina is preparing to do to this commodity market what it has done to every other one in recent years: unleash massive price cuts to steal market share, and leave the incumbents in the trash heap (just look at Europe's imploding auto manufacturing sector).

Sure enough, we are now getting reports that none other than Google is evaluating procuring DRAM from Chinese vendors.

And once Google can do it, so will everyone else, at which point sit back and watch as the epic memory bubble crashes and burns. 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) clocked another subsequent license renewal (SLR) in under 12 months. Southern Nuclear’s application for the two-unit Edwin I. Hatch plant in Georgia cleared the finish line on June 11, extending both boiling water reactors from 60 to 80 years of operation.

Hatch-1 is now licensed through August 2054. Hatch-2 runs through June 2058. That is roughly 1.85 GWe of carbon-free baseload secured into the 2050s. The approval makes Hatch the second and third units to ride the NRC’s new streamlined SLR track that targets decisions in 12 months or less. 

Duke Energy’s Robinson Unit 2 in South Carolina was the first, cleared in what staff called the fastest-ever review earlier this spring. St. Lucie Units 1 and 2, run by Florida Power & Light, received their extensions in late April, stretching Unit 1 to March 2056 and Unit 2 to April 2063.

The NRC has moved a noticeable cluster of applications in 2025 and 2026. 

Oconee, Summer, Point Beach, Browns Ferry, and Dresden all picked up subsequent renewals last year. When the agency signed off on Diablo Canyon’s extension in April it issued its 100th renewed commercial reactor license. 

For years the California plant served as the headline example of the “all plants must close” era. Activists and state policy pushed hard for a 2025 shutdown. After legislative rescue and full federal review, the units now hold approval into the mid-2040s. 

The speed of the recent reviews stands out, as historical SLR proceedings averaged roughly two and a half years. But the NRC has now proven that the staff can reach timely calls while keeping strict safety oversight. Nine Mile Point Unit 1 and Cooper already sit in the accelerated pipeline with decisions expected in 2027, and more applications are queued for later this year and 2027.

The practical result is a growing share of the existing fleet now operating under, or heading toward, 80-year licenses. Research inside and outside the NRC is already examining materials performance and aging-management needs for operation beyond 80 years, with some policy signals pointing toward frameworks that could support century-long runs where the data justify it.