The next big day for the U.S. will be Friday, when we will see if our federal government stops functioning or not.   Speaker Mike Johnson has unveiled a funding bill to overcome the potential shutdown .  The Senate is more iffy, for Republicans cannot prevent Democrats from filibustering, which takes 60 votes to stop.  Actually, the USA has recently  closed 10 times , and not to worry, for essential services will continue. Are we entering into a recession?  The Dow Jones sunk 900 points today, with the Nasdaq plunging 4%.   Worst day since 2022. On the international level,  President Trump  is suffocating Ukraine's Zelensky more than ever.  Now that Trump got his blackmail minerals deal, he wants Ukraine to give all lands Russian has conquered to them, with more concessions to come.  He keeps upgrading his revenge quotient. No question that the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, wants to join the president-for-life club, which ra...

From the  New York Times  this morning: More than half of the major actions Trump has taken appear to violate laws or the Constitution, according to a Times analysis.   Here’s a look at all of them . The abrupt end to $44 billion in aid has been chaotic. And wasteful. Hundreds of millions of dollars of food may soon rot in the ports and warehouses where it is stuck. The battle against deadly disease, too, could suffer. Until last month, the United States   provided medication   for 20 million H.I.V. patients. The secretary of state said that work should continue, but now the program is in disarray. Without the meds, those lives are at risk and so is the effort to stop the spread and mutation of H.I.V.   ...the core of U.S.A.I.D.’s mission has been helping the world’s poor, and it was a means to an end. “You have to understand,” a veteran American diplomat told me, “we didn’t do this work because we’re all a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals. We did it for in...

We departed Muscat and are sailing to Mumbai, India.  The   Arabian Peninsula  is a largely ignored part of the world by most visitors.  Under 1.25 million square miles are most of the world's oil.  It is relatively small compared to the USA, which has 3.8 msm and 335 million people.  The AP has a population of 86 million. Saudi Arabia  36.5 million Yeman  33.7 million UAE  9.4 million Oman  4.6 million Kuwait  4.3 million Qatar  2.7 million Bahrain  1.5 million The cities with the two largest population are in Saudi Arabia:  Riyadh 7.5 million and Jeddah 4.8 million. However, in 1950 the population was only 9.5 million, mostly Bedouins in the desert.  Then oil was discovered,  first in Iran in 1908  by the British.  But the story of oil goes back to 600 BC, when the Chinese first found this liquid.  More recently, there was Colonel Edwin Drake's 1859 oil well in Pennsylvania, and within a dec...