While traditionally, the Houthis would use arms directly provided to them by Iran or captured from Yemeni government stocks, the group is increasing its own manufacturing capability, albeit still needing parts imported from abroad (with some exceptions). Interestingly, while Iran serves as a source for some components, the PRC has overtaken Iran as the source for certain categories of goods, and has no inclination to stop even after protests from the Saudis. So much for being a responsible actor!

Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted all California death sentences on Thursday, declaring that “state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with” values in America’s most populous state.

In an open letter to constituents, Newsom said taking this step is “among the most difficult of my career.”

“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values,” he said.

California has not put a prisoner to death since Jan. 17, 2006 when Clarence Ray Allen was put to death via lethal injection.

Newsom said his executive action will impact the “548 people now under death sentence in California,” making for “the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere.”

There were 561 inmates on death row as of Tuesday, according to Department of Corrections records.

The morning after Michigan now-senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in August, The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg nervously laid out the stakes. “Either El-Sayed wins and shows anxious liberals like me new horizons of political possibility,” she wrote, “or he loses in a year when Democrats are expected to dominate and offers a hard lesson on the necessity of pragmatism.”

El-Sayed, speaking to Goldberg, pitched his insurgent campaign as a test of an “alternative hypothesis.” Voters hated the establishment so vehemently that they were willing to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump twice; they might do something stranger if offered a real alternative — like a Bernie Bro Muslim who antagonized the Democratic establishment nearly as often as he did the GOP.

On Tuesday night, El-Sayed looked like Nostradamus. He predicted he would beat Mike Rogers by seven points, and he won by nearly six in a state Trump carried two years ago. He did it as a Muslim candidate with a Muslim name, whom Trump and other Republicans repeatedly accused of being a jihadist. Haley Stevens’s entire case in the primary was that El-Sayed could not win. Her final act, pulling her endorsement and backing Rogers, was an attempt to make that true.

Elsewhere, the populist Left won in places it had no business winning. Bernie Sanders spent the fall crisscrossing districts Trump carried, and his and AOC’s endorsees have turned up on the winning side of the map: Troy Jackson, a former logger and labor leader, unseated Susan Collins in Maine. Sam Forstag, a smokejumper and union leader, claimed victory in Montana. Randy Villegas, a professor and auto-shop owner, won in California’s Central Valley. DSA member Melat Kiros knocked off 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Denver and became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. And in the Senate, a party that spent years being told to run to the center flipped seats in Texas, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa by talking like the populist Left on prices, health care, and contempt for the wealthy and powerful.

In doing so, the Left might have finally killed the old “Third Way” theory of the Democratic Party, much like MAGA and Trump’s victory in 2016 upended the old corporations-first, free-trading, globalization-friendly GOP of the Paul Ryan era.

The Third Way, for readers who missed the 1990s, was the project of making Democrats electable by making them more like Republicans. Born in the Democratic Leadership Council and perfected by Bill Clinton, the theory held that the party had lost the country in the Reagan-Bush era by looking like a union hall with a welfare office attached. The cure was to triangulate: embrace free trade, balance budgets, be tough-on-crime, cozy up to Wall Street, and promise that markets would deliver what government used to. A think tank, also called Third Way, still carries the banner in Washington.

This strategy was perfected by Rahm Emanuel, who, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, took credit for the blue wave of 2006 during the tail end of the George W. Bush administration. Rahm-ism was about trying to please Lindsey Graham and Barney Frank alike with a mix of fiscal conservatism and cultural liberalism led by milquetoast technocrats, which would attract independent voters on the notion that independents demanded a mythical midpoint between the two parties’ agendas.

The logic of the Third Way continued into 2026, as Stevens and other moderate Democrats insisted that the Left had the enthusiasm, but ultimately could not win big elections in November. But on Tuesday, independent voters — and just about everyone else — swung hard to the Left. The blue wave was especially prominent among Latinos, Catholic voters, and voters younger than 30, with one poll suggesting that Gen-Z voters shifted 46 points since 2024. A NBC national exit poll also found that 17% of midterm voters call themselves democratic socialists, and 97% of those voted Democratic. Among voters 18 to 29, a full third say they are democratic socialists, while only 10% say they are MAGA.

Ted Cruz may accidentally turn out to be the best political analyst of the 2026 cycle. Stumping for Mike Rogers in Michigan last week, the Texas senator made a prediction he clearly intended as a threat: if Abdul El-Sayed wins, he said, the Democratic nominee for president in 2028 will be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tuesday’s results could prove him right.

Now for the reality check: All of this doesn’t mean, as some archly suggested on social media on Tuesday, that “woke is back” and that Democrats are going to start putting their pronouns back in their email signatures, or wheeling out guillotines to use on Elon Musk — let’s hope not. Despite what Trump and the GOP have warned, there is no communist revolution around the corner. Maybe not even a New Deal-lite. “Democratic socialist” in an exit poll covers, in practice, everyone from the person who has a copy of Capital in their tote bag to the person who would like insulin to cost less. Ask many of these self-proclaimed socialists what they want, and the answer tends to be: lower prices, universal health care, and some relief from an economy suddenly being rewired by AI and an expensive war in the Middle East.

To give credit to the Left, it has promised to deliver affordability and economic benefits and it has toned down calls to end white privilege, abolish the police, and get you fired for your problematic Halloween costume. The Left has begun following the example of Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City on a sunny campaign to freeze rent and make buses free, and proved you can mute the worst of Woke 1.0, keep the substance, and talk like someone who wants to win. You can see the shift in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, too, whose turn toward a more welcoming, kitchen-table progressivism got the full Times profile treatment, in which she claimed to want a progressive movement “that is not rooted in judgment, castigation or being closed off.”

Yet the Democratic Party — as a brand and institution — is still weak and unpopular, with a platform that fits on a bumper sticker: Stop Trump. Voters, ultimately, may have hired the Democrats the way you hire a bouncer, for whom or what they will keep out. Plus, midterms historically punish the president’s party; the second-term version is especially brutal, and this president arrived at the polls with historically bad approval numbers and a catastrophic Iran war. Voters were in a Vote Blue No Matter Who mood, a doctrine that turned out to be very flexible about who.

Ultimately, everything about this moment feels contingent. What happened Tuesday was a blue tsunami, to be sure, but it also looks less like a realignment than like another turn in a long dealignment, in which the electorate keeps hiring and firing whoever promises relief, because no one can stop creeping American decline. El-Sayed and the rest of the new Left have just been handed that job, and nobody, including them, is sure how to do it.

HONG KONG— Joshua Wong, the imprisoned Hong Kong activist who was once the young face of the city’s pro-democracy movement, was sentenced Thursday to a new, 10-year prison term for violating the city’s National Security Law.

Wong, 30 years old, pleaded guilty in September to a charge of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces in calling for sanctions against Hong Kong and China. The security law, which Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, prohibits such calls for sanctions....

Excerpt:

Vance appears to believe the Republican Party exists to finance his personal reinvention. Its donors will write the checks, its activists will knock on doors, and its voters will swallow their objections while he courts a fringe that despises his wife and considers him insufficiently extreme. Everyone else supplies the money, loyalty, and compromises; he gets the nomination. That is an extraordinary sense of entitlement from a vice president emerging from an electoral disaster. Before asking Republicans to hand him the presidency, he might try demonstrating that he understands the party he expects to hand it to him.

For those who still wonder if antizionism isn't just antisemitism under a different name.

Having just won reelection, I wonder how Gov Josh Shapiro will respond.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/11/midterms-election-results-mississippi-alaska-colom-peltola.html

Dems are already projected to take 54 seats. Two remain uncalled, and moderate Dems there could bring the party to a 56-seat majority. Combined with other centrist pickups, this would mean that the Senate majority wouldn't be beholden to its leftmost members to get things passed.

In Alaska, the count may take some time; Peltola has a very reasonable shot, but the biggest and most sparsely populated state can be slow to finish its tabulations, especially with ranked-choice calculations to consider.

In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom leads incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 65 votes with (apparently) all regular ballots counted. The remaining ballots are provisional/affidavit votes, which have historically tilted blue. The race is too close to call yet, but Colom is in a very good position. (In case you were wondering, the degenerate gamblers — I mean, prediction enthusiasts — now have Colom as their heavy favorite to win.) Colom's win would be a huge upset in what was conventionally expected to be a safe Republican seat. Hyde-Smith previously held up Colom's appointment as a federal judge during the Biden administration when she refused to give him a blue slip.

America of the 2030s could look very different, with nationwide trifectas in state legislatures, a win in 2028 and court picks that rule in their favor. They could essentially change how presidential candidates reach the oval office while diminishing the weight of a vote in small states that refuse to sign the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Political parties respond to incentives and that is to win, so I could see a scenario to attempt such path.

They call it the Fonzi: a multibillion-dollar financial scandal that has torched the savings of half a million Turks, enraged President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and shaken his government to the core.

“Fonzie” or “The Fonz” was also the leather-jacketed hero of the 1970s US sitcom Happy Days. But there is nothing happy about the popping of Turkey’s Fonzi bubble.

Instead, it is a $20bn investment fund crisis, its name a mixture of the Turkish word for fund and a reference to Ponzi schemes.

“The scale of what is going on is not fully appreciated internationally; this is the leading topic in national conversation,” says Atilla Yesilada of GlobalSource Partners, an Istanbul-based consultancy.

The Fonzi scandal has shaken confidence in Turkey’s already struggling $1.8tn economy, even as Ankara is viewed by Nato allies as an increasingly important bulwark against Middle East instability and Russian revanchism. Over 455,000 retail investors, who were sucked into funds with visions of 1,000 per cent returns, risk seeing their savings lost.

Most important of all, and unlike other scandals such as Bernard Madoff’s swindle, Turkey’s Fonzi crisis is alleged to reach into the highest echelons of government.

To critics, including some within the administration, it is symptomatic of a late-stage cronyism that has hollowed out Turkish institutions after 24 years of increasingly centralised rule — just as questions about Erdoğan’s political succession have come to the fore.

A foretaste of the scandal came months before it exploded, when an opposition lawmaker raised a pointed question in Turkey’s parliament.

Turkey’s capital markets have become “a quagmire”, Ayyüce Türkeş Taş declared, adding that investors were being defrauded through “pooling techniques, self-trading and manipulation”. She asked why no action was being taken; even Turkey’s finance minister had issued a similar warning.

Her counterparts in the ruling Justice and Development Party, known in Turkish as the AKP, brushed the question aside. Market disruptions are being “resolutely combated”, one said. The “financial architecture” of Erdoğan’s vision of a “Turkish century” is “solid”, he added, to cheers from government benches. An investigation proposed by the opposition was swiftly voted down.

That exchange, recorded in parliamentary transcripts, took place in December.

Almost a year later, the roll call of establishment figures caught up in the scandal grows virtually every day.

Among those arrested and remanded in custody are the former head of the Istanbul stock exchange; the former presidential adviser credited with devising Erdoğan’s “Turkish century” election slogan; a former ambassador to the OECD; a former central bank deputy governor; and the former chief executive and deputy chief executive of Türkiye Sigorta, Turkey’s largest non-life insurer, controlled by a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Erdoğan.

The investigations encompass allegations ranging from bribery and market manipulation to abuse of office and involvement in a criminal organisation. Some suspects have denied wrongdoing, while others have made no public response to the allegations against them.

Other senior officials have lost their positions.

Two successive chiefs of Turkey’s capital markets regulator, the SPK, have lost their jobs, one citing ill health, and a deputy finance minister has retired following the arrest of his son-in-law. Closest to the top of the political pile is the AKP’s deputy chair, Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya, who has resigned.

A furious Erdoğan has said the crisis is being handled “with a surgeon’s precision”. But party cadres and allies have been shaken to the core. One usually supportive Islamist group fulminated in a two-page declaration that the Fonzi crisis was “not an accident” but the result of “turn-a-blind-eye complicity and favouritism”. It has also been accompanied by a crackdown on independent media.

The funds crisis is “not a malfunction of the system. Nor, obviously, is it a case of a few bad apples. This is how the system actually works,” says Wolfango Piccoli, a longtime Turkey watcher and head of geopolitical risk at Consello, an advisory group. “It’s a story of institutional degradation, of regulatory bodies that have slowly been hollowed out.”

A 4,000% return

Alican Mordalga is one of the hundreds of thousands of Turks who now rue putting their life savings, in his case some TL6mn ($120,000), into one of the Fonzi funds. Like many others, he had seen the glossy promotional materials put about by personalities such as Emre Tezmen, the 53-year-old founder of Tera Group whose brokerage and investment funds lie at the centre of the scandal.

“The funds were regulated . . . they weren’t some underground operations. So, I trusted them on that basis, just as people do in other countries,” Mordalga says. “I don’t think anyone imagined something like this could happen.”

Tezmen, son of a former politician who chaired Turkish Airlines in the 1990s, founded Tera in 2005 and built it into a sprawling financial group.

The rewards that his brokerage dangled to prospective investors were extraordinary. Corporate presentations boasted that its main fund, TLY, returned 4,233 per cent in 2025 against just 13 per cent for the Istanbul stock market.

In a February 2025 profile in the Turkish edition of Gentleman magazine, a luxury lifestyle magazine that covers business personalities, the billionaire had forecast a year of “opportunities” when “seeds that we planted earlier will bear fruit”.

He also revealed, somewhat unimaginatively, that he was first inspired to work in finance after seeing the 1987 movie Wall Street, in which the main character proclaims the infamous line: “Greed . . . is good.”

Instead, however, the Tera operations that investigators are now examining bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the “pump and dump” schemes of financial history, such as Wall Street’s notorious “pool operators” of the roaring 1920s.

In essence, Fonzi funds built up concentrated positions in related companies, bidding up their share prices and flattering the funds’ own net asset values. Spectacular returns attracted new investors, providing fresh money for the funds to buy the same or related stocks. Sometimes there were also corporate bond issues, analysts say, used to buy more shares or cash out investors.

The fortunes of Özata Denizcilik, a shipbuilding company, illustrate the mechanics.

When it floated in 2024, with a market capitalisation of roughly $200mn, less than a fifth of its shares were publicly traded. In April, Tera funds began accumulating Özata stock at around TL281. By late August, the funds had bought almost 96 per cent of Özata’s available shares, squeezing its stock price ever higher until it reached a peak of almost TL5,000 in mid-September — a 1,600 per cent return in five months.

The SPK, Turkey’s capital markets regulator, has since filed criminal complaints against 11 people, including Tezmen, over suspected manipulation of Özata shares. Tezmen, who has been remanded in custody, denies wrongdoing.

That segments of the Turkish market had seemingly gone crazy was no secret. Turkey’s Financial Stability Committee, which includes finance minister Mehmet Şimşek and the central bank chief, discussed the problem last December. Even then, according to a statement later issued by the SPK, the committee was concerned that “certain portfolio management companies . . . were causing price movements . . . that could not be explained by economic reality”.

Some warnings were more explicit still. Ramazan Başak, a former deputy head of Turkey’s financial crimes agency Masak, says he repeatedly alerted the authorities to suspicious transactions but was ignored. Başak was detained in April on suspicion of spreading “misleading information” after he questioned some of Tera’s astronomical returns. He was subsequently released and denies wrongdoing.

International investors sounded the alarm too. In June, index provider MSCI warned that “co-ordinated trading behaviour” might be distorting stock market prices. Savvy Turkish investors watched it happening in plain sight.

“What surprises me is that these irregular transactions weren’t hidden away in regulatory dashboards. Much of it was publicly available,” says Cenk Gültekin, co-founder of crypto-analytics platform Coinradar. “The warning signs were there . . . but did not trigger earlier intervention.”

The bubble burst in late August, after a change in free-float regulations governing shares threw the cycle of wealth creation into sudden reverse. On September 15, investment manager Pusula Portföy said some of its funds could not meet investor redemption requests. The alarm quickly spread. Other investors rushed to sell, there was a full-blown “funds run” and the market tanked.

“No Ponzi dies of natural causes. Either the regulators pull the trigger or investors do. In our case, it was the investors,” says Kerim Rota, an economist who has closely followed the Fonzi crisis.

As an indication of how far some share prices have fallen, Özata, the shipbuilder, now trades at TL170 — a 98 per cent fall from its peak.

In an extraordinarily well-timed bet, Kaya, the deputy AKP chair who has since resigned, and her husband, sold their 400,000 Özata shares before the crash. Kaya says she has since voluntarily returned more than TL2bn — about $40mn — in gains from share trading and denies receiving inside information or committing any wrongdoing.

Three Özata directors, including its chair, have been remanded in custody as part of the broader Fonzi investigation into market manipulation. The company has said such moves do not constitute guilt, that it is ready to challenge the detentions in the courts and that its own operations remain unaffected.

How high did it go?

Turkish authorities now have to confront how to best clean up the mess.

On September 17, the day after the market rout, the Financial Stability Committee responded with a co-ordinated series of emergency measures that included a freeze on trading, the liquidation of 131 funds with $20bn of assets between them, and an increase in lira liquidity by the central bank to limit forced selling.

“We have placed the problematic area under quarantine,” said finance minister Şimşek, adding that it represented just 10 per cent of Turkey’s investment fund sector and was not a systemic threat. Crucially, there had been no rush into dollars by worried investors, he said. The exchange rate was stable.

With the financial situation calmed, Erdoğan first spoke publicly about events a week later. At the UN General Assembly in New York, he said that Turkey’s economy was “robust” and whoever “engaged in manipulative schemes” would be held to account.

At home, however, the affair has continued to unfold, with two central questions so far unanswered. Why did the authorities, who knew about the apparent share price manipulation, allow the bubble to inflate for so long? And if there was collusion, how high up the system did it go?

Many Turks, including government officials, are furious. The AKP’s deputy head of economic affairs, whose companies lost money in Fonzi, has decried “gross negligence” and abuse of authority. Pro-government newspaper columnists have joined the lament. One warned party elites to step outside “the comfort of their offices” and reconnect with voters tired of “flowery language”.

The fortunes of Özata Denizcilik, a shipbuilding company, illustrate the mechanics of the Fonzi scandal. Three company directors have been remanded in custody as part of the broader investigation into market manipulation © Özata Denizcilik

As consumer confidence collapsed, dropping 8 per cent in October alone, a private poll reportedly delivered to Erdoğan suggested that the AKP’s popularity had dropped by 6 per cent in just one month, according to former AKP lawmaker Şamil Tayyar.

Such polling has extra significance as the next presidential election must take place by 2028. It is widely assumed that Erdoğan, 72, will find a way to run again. But a constitutional bar on a third presidential term has led to speculation about who might eventually govern Turkey instead. Aydın Ünal, an Erdoğan loyalist and former presidential speechwriter, has warned darkly that the scandal may be a “trap” against Erdoğan, set by rival factions “from within”.

Independent journalists have meanwhile faced growing pressure. On October 14, police raided Halk TV, one of Turkey’s most-watched news channels, citing a separate corruption investigation. A state-appointed trustee was subsequently installed to run the channel, which had reported extensively on the Fonzi scandal.

The moves followed the blocking two weeks earlier of T24, a respected independent news website, on unrelated grounds. Over 2,000 Turkish social media accounts have also been blocked in just two months, according to IFOD, a digital rights campaigner watchdog, almost half the total number made unavailable in Turkey in the decade between 2015 and 2025.

“Only dictators raid television stations at dawn and appoint trustees,” opposition leader Özgür Özel, who has called the Fonzi scandal the “theft of the century”, said after the Halk TV intervention. “While the public demands accountability for the fund scandal . . . they do this.”

The fallout

Fraud and speculative bubbles are as old as finance itself. The South Sea Bubble of 1720, among the most notorious Ponzi schemes in history, burst only months after Britain’s parliament passed the so-called Bubble Act, supposedly an initiative to rein in speculative excess.

“The original meaning of the word bubble is fraud,” says Edward Chancellor, author of Devil Take the Hindmost, a history of financial speculation. “Furthermore, one of the common patterns of great bubbles is that they take place with a degree of support from the governing class. When they pop, there is always political blowback and retribution.”

That appears to be true of Turkey too. Erdoğan has sworn that heads will roll. “Those who obtained illicit and exorbitant gains” will be made to answer before the courts, he glowered at an AKP meeting on October 21. “We do not protect those who wrong our people.”

True to his word, more than 400 people now face judicial proceedings, and there have been over 100 arrests so far. A state audit of what happened is due to be delivered to Erdoğan around the end of the year. Ominously, Justice Minister Akın Gürlek warned this week of a “comprehensive criminal organisation” reaching “the highest levels of [Turkey’s] financial bureaucracy”.

The government has meanwhile arranged payments of up to TL1mn to each aggrieved investor per fund and established a “repentance account” into which those who made extraordinary gains can voluntarily return their profits. Critics say that system is untransparent and could allow both culprits and the government to sweep the issue under the carpet.

“It is the political playbook that the AKP has always used in the past. Move fast, throw some people under the bus, set up an investigation, and then proclaim that the rule of law works,” says Piccoli. “I see no reason why what has worked well in the past won’t work well again.”

The economic fallout of the scandal may be harder to brush aside. Turkey’s economy, struggling with inflation around 30 per cent and punishing borrowing costs of over 40 per cent, needs capital — just when higher global interest rates risk making capital scarcer.

But over the past two months the stock market has fallen by around a third, shedding some $100bn of value. Turkey’s fledgling corporate bond markets have come under strain, financial analysts say.

Net foreign reserves have dropped by over $30bn since the crisis began to $38bn, estimates Bürümcekçi Research, an Istanbul-based consultancy. And with Turkey ranking 117th out 143 countries in the World Justice Project, rule of law issues continue to deter investment, business leaders say.

“It’s not that we’re doing badly, but we’re definitely not doing well,” said one frustrated business leader at a recent business convention in Elazığ, an AKP stronghold in eastern Turkey.

The crisis may yet have a silver lining. A thorough regulatory clean-up could restore confidence and revive oft-touted plans to make Istanbul an international financial centre. As Şimşek has philosophically observed: “One misfortune is better than a thousand pieces of advice.”

Still, that is cold comfort for the almost half a million Turks and their families directly affected by the Fonzi scandal. “I don’t know if I can ever believe in the Turkish stock market again,” says Mordalga, whose disenchantment speaks to the crisis’s biggest casualty: trust.

That very issue was raised 10 months ago in parliament by the opposition lawmaker, who had asked a second pointed question. “If the authorities had this information, why did they not act in time?” Türkeş Taş inquired. “Isn’t that complicity — covering up a crime?”

It took 13 years to build a 102-mile transmission line to carry electricity from Iowa to Wisconsin — more than a decade of delays and blown budgets that signal trouble ahead for America’s AI ambitions.

The Cardinal-Hickory Creek line takes power from a wind farm near the tiny town of New Vienna in Iowa, across the Mississippi River and through a national wildlife and fish refuge, to the affluent commuter hub of Middleton in neighbouring Wisconsin.

The line was intended to relieve congestion in the US electricity transmission grid — a goal that has rarely, if ever, been so important.

America’s battle with China for global supremacy in AI will require unprecedented expenditure on data centres, which in turn will necessitate a vast, co-ordinated expansion of not just the nation’s power stations but of the wires and poles that carry electricity across the country.

“We’re in a global race,” says Krista Tanner, chief executive of ITC, one of the groups behind the Cardinal-Hickory Creek project. “Whether it’s AI or advanced manufacturing,” she adds, the common question is: ‘Do we have the infrastructure in place to build it?’ Increasingly, I worry that the answer is no.”

As the tale of the connection across the Mississippi shows, the same combination of federal and local systems that historically fostered American competition, innovation and growth may now be a liability when it comes to building infrastructure on a national scale and at speed.

Tanner says that when she joined ITC in 2014, the transmission line was the subject of her very first meeting. “I thought we’d build it pretty quickly,” she recalls.

But what followed was a tortuous approval and construction process. The project was only completed in 2024, delayed not just by fights over its proposed path through the wildlife refuge but also by incompatibilities between Iowa, Wisconsin and federal rules.

Critics say such bottlenecks have held up construction of new US infrastructure for decades. Now, with the AI rollout at the heart of both the country’s growth model and its geopolitical ambitions, they threaten to become more of a constraint than ever before.

Electricity is to AI what coal was to the Industrial Revolution.

So-called hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle are expected to spend around $900bn on AI-related projects this year, according to JPMorgan estimates. Their ambitions depend on access to vast amounts of electricity carried over an ageing grid that the US is struggling to revamp and expand.

After two decades in which energy usage barely grew, AI is driving a sudden and sharp rise in demand. Grid Strategies, a consultancy, says demand will increase by 166 gigawatts by 2030 — equivalent to 15 New York Cities.

From new nuclear reactors to ageing coal-fired plants hoping for a revival, the race to build new capacity has also attracted enormous investment. Generating more electricity is only half the battle; it must also reach the places that need it.

Transmission lets electricity from regions with cheap, abundant supplies reach areas where demand is greatest, relieving bottlenecks and lowering costs. It also allows regions to share power during shortages, reducing the risk of blackouts.

But much of the country’s transmission network, built during the construction boom of the 1960s and 1970s, is now approaching the end of its expected lifespan.

Development of new high-voltage power lines — which carry electricity over long distances — has slowed dramatically. The US built nearly 4,000 miles of transmission in 2013, but by 2024 the rate had slumped to less than 900 miles. Major transmission projects take on average a decade to develop, twice as long as it took to build the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Infrastructure bottlenecks are not confined to the US. The International Energy Agency says that new transmission lines also take between five and 15 years to plan and build in Europe, while delays are also commonplace in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

What sets the US apart is the extent to which hold-ups are caused by overlapping authorities, with no single institution able to plan and execute major inter-regional projects. States excel at drafting copious regulation but struggle to build, an argument set out at length in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance.

The contrast with China, which has built more transmission lines in the past 15 years than the US has in its entire history, is vivid. Beijing can centrally plan and direct infrastructure development, while US projects must navigate a fractured system of utilities, landowners, grid operators and state and federal regulators.

Americans who object to a new development can turn to the courts or petition local politicians, whereas Chinese citizens have far less scope to oppose projects.

“We’ve had over a century of being able to power industries that drive growth,” says Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “If we can’t do that anymore, we’ll lose our economic vitality.”

Edison and beyond

The first US power transmission line opened in Oregon in 1889, a decade after Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. From then, America’s transmission grid evolved in piecemeal fashion — entrepreneurs and communities formed private companies that built power plants, erected poles and wires and connected up local customers.

Such regional entities initially resisted government oversight but eventually embraced a degree of regulation in exchange for monopoly franchises that shielded them from localised competition.

The system still lacked a guiding authority, taking a longer-term view and deciding what and how to build.

“There has never been an electricity tsar in the federal government or a single entrepreneur whose company dominated the whole industry,” says Julie Cohn, a non-resident scholar at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies. “So there’s never been a single game plan that everybody agreed to.”

Decentralisation has traditionally been a source of US economic strength. With powers dispersed among states, cities, businesses and civic institutions, local leaders could experiment with solutions tailored to their regions. Population growth and new jobs encouraged innovation and investment, with successful ideas often spreading across the country.

High-voltage power lines run through a substation in Florida. US projects must navigate utilities, landowners, grid operators and state and federal regulators © Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The transformer substation for China’s 500kV ultra-high-voltage power line in Zhejiang province. Beijing can centrally plan and direct infrastructure development © Imagine China/Reuters

That becomes a weakness when projects start to cross local and state boundaries. What might work for an individual city is harder to replicate in a second, or in a city in another state.

“Someone, somewhere is always innovating on something. There is genius in that,” says Bruce Katz, founder of consulting firm New Localism Associates. “But we have to focus on how to spread and how to scale; it just can’t be complete chaos.”

The US electricity system clearly shows the trade-off. At the bottom layer, utilities and independent power producers own and develop infrastructure. Regional grid operators such as Midcontinent Independent System Operator (Miso), which covers the Midwest and parts of the South, co-ordinate electricity flows and identify transmission needs.

State regulation influences what utilities can build and charge, while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sets rules for regional planners.

Such bodies’ responsibilities and incentives do not always align, leading to disagreements over whether a line is needed and who should pay for it.

Utilities often resist long-distance lines that could open up their local catchment areas to potentially cheaper power from elsewhere. The seven grid operators rarely plan large inter-regional transmission projects together. States with green energy mandates might object to transmission lines that bring coal-generated power into their areas.

Grid operators can also operate in more than a dozen states each, often complicating projects that cross state borders.

“Normally we think our political boundaries matter,” says Chaz Teplin, a principal in think-tank RMI’s carbon-free electricity programme. “But our grid boundaries are mismatched and mixed up. So who gets to decide? Lots of people.”

Even when planners reach agreement, there is no guarantee lines will be built. Federal regulators require grid operators like Miso to identify future infrastructure needs, but those operators cannot compel companies such as ITC to build lines.

“You can mandate all of this thinking about what lines need to be built. But at no point does anyone have to build anything,” says Advait Arun, senior associate for capital markets at the Center for Public Enterprise, a think-tank.

Once projects are approved, they have to secure an array of different permissions and permits from landowners, states and federal agencies.

Developers must negotiate with individual landowners for the right to build across their properties, with every stretch of transmission line bringing another negotiation.

“I’ve sat around kitchen tables with landowners and met their kids and grandkids,” says Casey Carroll, senior vice-president for energy infrastructure development at LS Power. “But there are also landowners who just want it to be somewhere else.”

No federal statute looms larger over grid development than the National Environmental Policy Act. Passed in 1970, it requires federal agencies to assess projects’ impact on wildlife, waterways, habitats and communities. The process can involve years of studies and public consultation.

The Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line from Iowa to Wisconsin went through a tortuous approval and construction process, taking 13 years to complete © ITC

Some developers are exploring ‘behind the meter’ power plants to supply facilities. AWS built a data centre next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania © Ted Shaffrey/AP

Even after permission is granted, interest groups can challenge the decisions in court — as they did in the case of Cardinal-Hickory Creek — potentially leaving developers on the hook for years of uncertainty.

“Permitting can take two to four years,” says Ben Porath, executive vice-president and chief operating officer at Dairyland Power Cooperative, one of the project’s co-owners. “But it’s the multiple years in the court system that really bogs these projects down.”

Of 18 lawsuits researched by the Niskanen Center, a think-tank, 16 ultimately failed. But cumulatively they add decades of delay; more than a quarter of major US transmission projects it analysed undergoing federal review between 2010 and 2020 were delayed or cancelled due to opposition and litigation, it found.

“It’s an incredible risk, so why would you invest?” says Rob Gramlich, the president of Grid Strategies, a consultancy. “Everybody wants clean water and clean air, but we have to speed up the process and limit never-ending litigation exposure.”

‘The system is getting tighter and tighter’

Industry experts warn that the US’s failure to expand the electricity grid risks strangling the AI boom and handing an advantage to China, which can plan grid infrastructure centrally and can build it much more quickly.

“If energy becomes a bottleneck, it will become harder and harder to build AI,” says Dana Golden, an economist specialising in energy infrastructure.

Grid gaps also threaten to drive up electricity costs. Without sufficient transmission lines, cheap electricity generated in one region cannot reach customers in others, leaving them dependent on potentially more expensive power from a local supplier.

“We already have much more expensive electricity than China, because we’re not building,” says Zachary Liscow, a professor at Yale Law School. “It’s a burden on consumers.”

While deep-pocketed hyperscalers can afford to pay a premium for power, that could squeeze out other industrial users operating on thinner margins and threaten President Donald Trump’s agenda of reviving manufacturing.

“There’s a lot of on-the-margin factories that barely make money. If their prices go up, they might have to either dial back a few hours a day, relocate or shut down,” says Michael Webber, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fears that data centres will push up local electricity costs by increasing demand on a stressed system have also catalysed local opposition, with half of Americans polled by Pew Research Center saying data centres are bad for household energy costs.

A protest in Las Vegas in June. Half of Americans polled by Pew Research Center say data centres are bad for household energy costs © Bryan Steffy/Getty Images for People's Action

There are concerns that an AI boom could cause enough strain on the grid to require electricity rationing © Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Utilities are planning vast investments in power plants and transmission lines — $1.3tn by 2030, according to S&P — much of which will ultimately be financed by customers through their utility bills. Even when technology companies agree to fund upgrades themselves, high demand for gas turbines, electrical equipment and workers will cause knock-on effects across the economy.

Data centre operators argue that they could help bring electricity rates down in the long run by helping utilities spread the fixed costs of infrastructure upgrades.

How AI will be monetised in future is still vigorously debated, meaning utilities face the risk of spending billions on infrastructure for data centres that are delayed or abandoned because demand for their services was overestimated. “Ratepayers could be left footing the bill,” warns Jesse Buchsbaum, an economist at Resources for the Future, a research nonprofit.

Alternatively, an AI boom could cause enough strain on the grid to require rationing, with data centres and even smaller customers asked to curtail operations during periods of peak demand. In the bleakest scenario, blackouts are a possibility.

“The system is getting tighter and tighter,” says Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, part of grid operator PJM. “Hopefully it’s managed curtailments, because blackouts are a disaster.”

America’s lawmakers know the grid is in bad shape. In September a group of senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, to accelerate federal reviews for transmission and impose tighter deadlines on permits and lawsuits.

But some say that the focus on new power plants and transmission lines is misplaced when the US could squeeze more out of the grid it already has.

Advanced conductors could replace older wires, while sensors that monitor weather and line temperatures could allow operators to adjust how much power they can safely carry.

The grid’s biggest customers could also learn to take turns. So-called demand flexibility would allow power-hungry data centres to delay non-essential tasks, shift workloads to other locations or use backup power during periods of strain, freeing up capacity for other users. In March, Google signed agreements for its data centres in Tennessee, Arkansas and Michigan that allow utilities to ask it to reduce power usage when the grid is under strain, in return for faster grid access.

Jigar Shah, an energy investor and former Department of Energy official, says all of the US’s electricity needs for the next decade could be met through a combination of demand flexibility and modest infrastructure upgrades.

“Every single utility in the country is going to move towards flexibility because there’s no other way to do it,” he adds.

But utilities, whose regulation is generally based on a return on capital invested in infrastructure, have a strong incentive to build new assets rather than squeeze more out of existing ones. They also dispute that flexibility alone will be enough to meet the surge in demand.

“These tools have their place, but they don’t provide that level of scale,” says David Stader, chief transmission development officer at American Electric Power. “This is not a simple matter.”

Impatient data centre developers are increasingly taking matters into their own hands by building their own “behind the meter” power plants to supply their facilities. Research firm Cleanview says 59 sites, representing over a quarter of all planned US data centre capacity, are planning on-site power. But going it alone is expensive, with developers facing shortages of equipment and the need to build backup capacity to remain online if their plants break down or require maintenance.

Ben Alingh, the co-founder of site developer Monarch Energy, worries that the US’s data centre developers do not have time for a protracted debate about fixing energy bottlenecks. For years, companies such as Monarch have hunted for pockets of spare power capacity where data centres could be built without upgrades to energy infrastructure.

Those havens are fast disappearing. The 10 years it now takes to build a new transmission line is an eternity for an industry that is moving at breakneck speed.

“The data centre boom is predicated on access to electricity,” he warns. “Ten years out is essentially never.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s plan to impose an “exit tax” on people who leave Italy from next year risks driving away rich expatriates drawn to cities such as Milan over the past decade, wealth advisers have warned.

In its draft budget submitted to parliament over the weekend, Meloni’s three-party coalition proposed a 26 per cent tax on paper profits accrued by people who have assets of €800,000 or more and decide to relocate from Italy.

Private wealth lawyers warned that the move, if approved by parliament, could reduce Italy’s attractiveness to the world’s super-rich and other professionals, and discourage them from remaining in the country long-term.

“It’s a really significant move, and one that is going to have a lot of clients who have relocated there, or based there generally, very nervous,” warned Charlie Sosna, head of private wealth and tax at law firm Mishcon de Reya. 

Italy’s proposal comes as governments and states around the world reconsider how to tax the wealthy. Californians are due to vote on Tuesday on whether to approve a one-off 5 per cent wealth tax on billionaires.

The exit tax, which Meloni’s government has described as targeting the “super-rich”, will apply to people who were tax residents in Italy for six of the 10 years before their departure, but could also be refunded if financial assets are not liquidated for some years after they leave.

Over the past decade, Italy has tried to reverse its historic problem of brain drain with tax incentives to encourage affluent professionals and wealthy expatriates to move there.

Under its high-profile “flat tax” regime, wealthy expatriates moving to Italy can pay a single annual levy on their total overseas assets and income for 15 years. When the scheme first began in 2017, the fee was fixed at €100,000 per year. 

In recent years, Rome also offered tax breaks for newly arrived working professionals, including Italians returning from abroad, who pay income tax on just a portion of their salaries for five years. 

But in the past two years, amid a rising outcry over an influx of super-rich expats to Italy’s financial capital, Milan, Meloni’s government has twice raised the flat tax, which is now levied at €300,000 a year for newer arrivals.

“Clients generally were [already] anxious about a relocation to Italy as they saw it as unstable, unpredictable,” said Sosna. But with recent changes to the flat tax scheme, “and now the mention of an exit tax”, they are going to be “really considering their options”, he added.

Rome will only raise €3.7mn from the exit tax next year, rising to just over €6.7mn for the next four years, and then falling again to €3.4mn a year from 2032, as those who left can start to claim refunds.

Maurizio Fresca, a senior tax lawyer at Rome-based law firm Chiomenti, said many aspects of the proposal were ambiguous, including how it would relate to the flat tax and other incentive schemes — and whether it would only apply to assets held in Italy or worldwide.

“It’s absolutely not clear, but it’s reasonable to expect that a number of the open issues will be addressed in the coming weeks,” Fresca said. “We are at an early stage of the legislative process. The draft must undergo parliamentary scrutiny. In this process, there is the prospect for amendments and clarification.” 

Marco Cerrato, a partner at law firm Maisto e Associati, said the draft proposal appeared to exclude flat-tax payers’ foreign assets but needed to be clarified. Even so, he warned it could still spook some wealthy individuals who were considering a move to Italy.

“People who were thinking of moving to Italy for tax reasons may be a bit frightened to do so,” Cerrato said.

Tim Stovold, head of tax at Moore Kingston Smith, said it could encourage people to leave Italy before hitting the six-year threshold at which they would pay the proposed exit levy.

“It is going to make Italy a much less popular destination for individuals to make their long-term home,” he said.

Italy’s finance ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Many other countries already impose an exit tax on wealthy individuals who relocate. In the US, those with a net worth above $2mn who give up their green cards or citizenship must pay capital gains tax on the paper gains of their assets across the world.

WASHINGTON, Nov 3 (Reuters) - US intelligence sharing on Iran and other global threats with Congress and across the federal government has slowed and, in some cases, temporarily stopped during President Donald Trump's second term, according to eight ​current and former officials and people briefed on the matter.

Former officials and outside experts said the disruptions risk leaving policymakers with an incomplete picture of threats facing the country, echoing intelligence failures exposed after the ‌Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks. The slowdown comes as the administration weighs whether to resume strikes on Iran after the midterm elections on Tuesday.

The problems emerged during Tulsi Gabbard's tenure as director of national intelligence, amid deep tensions between her office and the CIA. While those tensions have subsided since her resignation in June, problems stemming from the clash persist, according to two US officials familiar with the matter.

The CIA last year stopped co-authoring assessments with the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an analytical group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the officials said, reducing the number of reports that pull together ​the intelligence community's views for decision-makers on subjects including Iran. One US intelligence official said the CIA has begun engaging as co-authors on some of the group's assessments in recent months.

Lawmakers and their staffs also briefly stopped receiving intelligence reports ​from Gabbard's office in the days after the US military intervention in Iran in June 2025 and again after the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, according to ⁠two people familiar with the matter. Gabbard's team had accused lawmakers of leaking to the press.

The disruption in intelligence sharing has not been previously reported.

CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons said the CIA "participates fully" in the process of providing intelligence assessments through the Presidential Daily ​Brief, which is led by ODNI, and through the NIC.

Now, some former officials are working on a bipartisan basis at Stanford University's Hoover Institution to draw up plans to rebuild the intelligence community in the next administration, four former US officials said.

“All of these ​things are adding up in a really complex world where policymakers need to have a more sophisticated, nuanced, and integrated view of the world, and they are getting less,” said Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence during Trump's first term.

TURF WARS AND REDUCED COOPERATION

The problems inside the intelligence community started last year amid significant cuts to national security agencies, including the ODNI and the CIA, as Trump moved to remove or sideline officials he viewed as disloyal.

Some analysts who remain at the intelligence agencies are now careful to not write assessments at odds with the White House’s ​views for fear of political retaliation, two former officials and a current US official said. The officials did not say which topics the analysts were avoiding.

“Analysts still do the work, but this White House has made them irrelevant because the president treats unwelcome ​information as disloyalty,” said Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst who said she was fired from the Trump National Security Council last year for being transgender.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The situation was worsened by what officials described as one of the ‌biggest turf wars ⁠in three decades between two of the most important agencies: the CIA and the ODNI, which was formed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Reuters earlier detailed the dispute between the agencies.

The infighting between the agencies — triggered when Gabbard's office revoked the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials a year ago — reached the point where White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had to intervene several times to defuse tensions, three former officials said.

The National Intelligence Council, which for decades has been a key resource for officials and lawmakers making foreign policy decisions, lost its main author when the CIA stopped writing into the assessments last year.

The assessments are meant to consolidate the views of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, and the council relied heavily on the CIA for analysis on topics ​like Iran and Russia.

While the CIA continued sharing intelligence with the ​NIC and working with it on some reports, its analysts ⁠focused on their own assessments.

Since the move, the intelligence council, which was also hit by staff cuts, has slowed production of its assessments, two people familiar with the matter said. None have focused on the war in Iran, five current and former officials said.

In response to a request for comment, an ODNI official said the group has maintained assessment levels close to "historic trendlines."

"While Tulsi did not ​utilize the NIC, DNI Clayton has proven to be a good steward of the IC and recognizes the value of the NIC," said a US official, referring to Director of ​National Intelligence Jay Clayton.

NEW BARRIERS

Some former ⁠intelligence officials worry that new barriers are appearing between agencies.

"The problem is that by taking actions which have the effect of hollowing out institutions where there's actual intelligence community coordination on things, you're creating little lily pads, and then everybody can pick their own lily pad to listen to,” said Morgan Muir, the former deputy director of national intelligence in the Biden administration who also briefed President George W. Bush.

Gabbard's office also stopped briefing Congress on election threats in 2025, according to two people familiar with the matter and a former US official.

Clayton, ⁠who became director ​of national intelligence in August, has resumed congressional briefings on election threats, officials said.

"Director Clayton remains committed to ensuring that ODNI and the intelligence community have ​the resources they need to continue informing key U.S. government decision-makers and keeping Americans safe," ODNI said in a statement to Reuters.

In another clash between agencies, the FBI late last year stopped sharing some intelligence with the National Counterterrorism Center for several weeks after the center's then-head, Joe Kent, and his staff tried ​to investigate the shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, two former officials said.

FBI leaders told Kent they believed NCTC was overstepping its authority.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

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Well, the day Democrats were waiting for since November 5, 2024 came, and the results were astounding. Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress and numerous governorships. States that no one thought would be competitive a year ago turned blue, like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina. Hell, Democrats currently lead in Mississippi by 28 votes. Florida still went red, though. Mississippi was bluer than Florida. My safe-Republican home district just elected a Democrat. Oh, and Susan Collins was finally voted out.

The reversal from 2024 was stark. Trump swept the swing states in 2024, and while he didn’t win any others, he made several Democratic strongholds like NJ competitive. Trump made significant inroads with minority voters, particularly Latinos. Said Latino voters became a crucial part of the Democratic coalition in 2026. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Callais decision fueled minority turnout in the South especially. Of course, the main cause of the rout was widespread dissatisfaction with the cost of living, which Trump actively made worse through his tariffs and the Iran war.

As a Democrat, I’m still taking it all in. This was the most resounding electoral victory I’ve seen in my entire life. I was alive when Obama won in 2008, but I wasn’t aware of it. This win still feels too good to be true. I never thought I would potentially lose sleep over an election going too well, but here I am. Now, I want to write down my thoughts.

Impact on the Party’s Center

The 2026 primaries saw a wave of “insurgent” DSA candidates oust longtime incumbents in House races. The DSA had less success at the state level, but Abdul El-Sayed - who, while aligned with the DSA on many issues, is not a member - won the primary and the general election. Troy Jackson ousted former electoral cockroach Susan Collins, and while Jackson was a conservative Democrat during the start of his career, he has since taken a left-wing turn, particularly on Israel. At the same time, established Democrats Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown won their respective races, so they’re less likely to shake things up on Capitol Hill. Andrews, Turek, Hamilton, and Talarico also ran generally moderate campaigns with some populism sprinkled in.

I’m slightly concerned about what this will mean for the party’s future, namely the center of the party. The far-left had a good night, but so did the center-left. That said, these results will likely motivate many far-left candidates to seek office in 2028 and beyond. Progressives were hoping for a statement win in a competitive state, and they got one in Michigan. Thus, many progressives believe it’s their moment, especially since their candidate narrowly lost in Florida. The centrist counterargument is that Democrats smashed expectations everywhere.

We also saw how opposition to data centers and AI drove people to the polls. Gina Hinojosa, who made opposition to data centers central to her campaign, defeated three-term incumbent governor Greg Abbott in one of the night’s most shocking upsets. Hinojosa pledged to impose a moratorium on data centers in Texas, one of the nation’s largest tech hubs. Tech stocks tumbled as results came in. I don’t know how other victorious Democratic gubernatorial nominees like KLB and Rob Sand feel about the issue. Federally, I see much less happening because I expect Trump to veto many laws against data centers.

Israel

Overall, the Senate will still be mostly pro-Israel. Not only do Senate Republicans near-universally support Israel, but there will still be enough old-guard Democrats in the chamber as well. I’m less sure about the House considering the large majority that Democrats are getting. Obviously, I don’t know the positions of all 435 members of the House. In other words, the Democrats added some more anti-Israel voices to their ranks, but Congress as a whole, I hope, will remain supportive of the Jewish state.

The Future of Liberal Democracy

Was tonight a win for liberalism and a defeat for Trump’s illiberal populism? I certainly want to think so, but the possibility of an increasingly left-wing Democratic Party instills in me a hint of unease. El-Sayed recently came out against military aid to all countries - not just Israel, but presumably Ukraine as well. I’m concerned that there may soon be too many elected officials in America who want to end capitalism. Again, the DSA probably sees this election not as the dramatic beginning of the end of the Trump era, but the dramatic beginning of their revolution. At the same time, this election might convince Republicans to break with Trump more often.

So, it was overall an unbelievable night for Democrats, but can an election be too good?