Zelenskiy Pressured To Accept Peace Plan US Drafted With Russia

U.S. President Donald Trump said he will meet New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani at the White House on Friday in what would be the first meeting of the Republican leader with the democratic socialist who won this month's mayoral election.

Mamdani and Trump have been critical of each other, with Trump having backed Mamdani's opponent, Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani, for his part, has been critical of the Trump administration's policies, including its crackdown on immigration and on protests against U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war.

"We have agreed that this meeting will take place at the Oval Office on Friday, November 21st," Trump said on social media on Wednesday.

Mamdani told reporters earlier this week that his team had reached out to the White House to arrange a meeting.

"My team reached out to the White House to fulfill a commitment I made to New Yorkers over the course of this campaign," Mamdani said on Monday.

Mamdani's transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump's post on Wednesday.

Trump has repeatedly turned the powers of the presidency on political rivals. During the New York City mayoral election campaign, Trump threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from the city if Mamdani won.

Mamdani made countering the 79-year-old Republican president's actions in the city - especially on immigration - a centerpiece of his successful campaign.

Mamdani will be sworn in as New York City mayor on January 1, 2026.

Source: Reuters

Ecuador just had a major vote which has gone some underreported in US mainstream media, given perhaps the current focus on the Venezuela crisis. The Latin American country held a referendum Sunday on allowing allowing the return of foreign military bases in the country.

This was ultimately seen as a vote on allowing an American military presence, which the US has long sought to reestablish. Ecuadoreans voted down the proposal in a significant blow to President Daniel Noboa, who has sought a change in the constitution. Since 2008, the constitution has banned foreign bases on Ecuadorean soil.

Image source, US Air National Guard: Ecuador's military receives a US C-130H Hercules aircraft in Latacunga.

One of Noboa's key rationales for seeking a reversal of the prior legislation was to have outside assistance in fighting soaring crime and drug-trafficking in the country and region.

The referendum was held 16 years after the United States was made to shut down a military site on Ecuador's Pacific coast.

The New York Times suggests that Ecuadoreans currently see the Trump administration pushing its military might around in the Caribbean while threatening countries like Venezuela, Colombia, and even more recently Mexico:

They soundly rejected a national referendum on Sunday that he had backed, aimed at authorizing a foreign miliary presence in Ecuador. With more than 98 percent of ballots counted, 61 percent opposed the measure.

The vote comes as the region has been roiled by the intensifying U.S. military campaign against boats the Trump administration claims are smuggling drugs.

The Ron Paul Institute also sees in this a grass roots movement among foreign peoples to reign in US foreign policy and militarism in their lands. Journalist and pundit Adam Dick writes the following:

There is not a lot of reason for hope for the US to start adhering soon to a noninterventionist foreign policy. Indeed, President Donald Trump has been moving the US in the opposite direction. He continued US participation in the wars of his predecessor. This includes the Ukraine and Israel wars, in regard to which Trump had promised, in the lead-up to becoming president, to bring peace very quickly. Further, Trump has begun a new war against Venezuela and is threatening to pursue a new "Global War for Christians," starting with threats of US military attacks in Nigeria. Meanwhile, Congress does nothing to stop or curtail the intervention.

There seems to be little hope of the US government choosing to move toward nonintervention abroad soon. Maybe some of the best hope for change in that direction comes from people in other countries saying "no more" to aiding the US government's interventionist pursuits.

On Sunday, a majority of voters in Ecuador voted in a national ballot measures election against allowing the US government to have military bases in the South American country. The "no" vote win occurred despite Ecuador President Daniel Noboa strongly campaigning for the ballot measure's approval.

So long as Americans fail to put an end to their government's interventions abroad, there is hope that people in Ecuador and elsewhere around the world can impose some restraint.

Also in the background has been Trump admin officials really pushing and reviving concept of influence in the world based on the 18th century Monroe Doctrine.

AFP/Getty Images

The historic Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to other countries, while vowing at the same time the US would stay out of European affairs. Of course, Washington is currently only interested in the former part of this and not so much the latter.

Source: Zero Hedge

The fusion century is not yet wholly within China's grasp, but it will be if the United States doesn't make the right policy choices.

China already won the renewables race.

It's producing nearly a terawatt of new clean energy capacity every year — the equivalent of more than 300 large power plants worth of generation, according to The Economist. That pace has made it a new kind of energy superpower: one that manufactures, builds, and exports clean electricity on a planetary scale. And because that scale has driven prices so low, the rest of the world is now buying from Beijing. Even if the current US government is less supportive of renewables or decarbonization, global demand is undeniable: emerging markets are hungry for cheap renewables, with countries from Pakistan to Brazil rapidly importing Chinese solar and wind equipment to meet rising electricity needs.

There's no catching up to that. We're not going to out-subsidize, out-manufacture, or out-coordinate China on solar panels, inverters, or transmission wire. The truth is we didn't really try to compete until we had already lost—the United States innovated and invented but failed to build the environment needed to rapidly manufacture and scale its own technologies, ceding the market to China.

The question now is whether we're willing to win the next one.

Build It and Connect It — or Lose Again

China's dominance in renewables is a reminder that invention alone doesn't win global markets — scale does. And scale has two requirements: you have to be able to build what you invent, and you have to be able to connect what you build. China has solved both. It aligned its supply chain, manufacturing, permitting, and grid expansion into a single national project, which allowed it to deploy clean energy technologies at breathtaking speed. The United States, by contrast, has repeatedly invented world-changing technologies, only to watch other nations scale them first.

That is the risk in front of us with fusion. We can lead the science, pioneer the breakthroughs, and even set up first-of-a-kind facilities — but if we cannot build the components at volume and connect fusion power to the grid in large numbers, we will replay the solar century in real time.

The chokepoints that cost us leadership once are still with us: brittle supply chains, slow permitting systems, and an interconnection process that makes deployment slower than the technology itself. Winning the fusion century means attacking both barriers at once. It means building the supply chain for the machines we invent and modernizing the grid so those machines can be plugged in at speed. Coordinated scale wins — and this time, we have to be the ones who deliver it.

The Bottlenecks We Built Ourselves

A Third Way report released this month captures the core of America's problem: we've made it nearly impossible to build anything.

More than 70 percent of developers say federal permitting is more onerous than state or local permitting, with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews adding up to two years to project timelines. More than half say interconnection delays are now the single biggest barrier to clean-energy projects. Developers choose where to build not based on where the power is needed — but on where they can get permits fastest.

Those findings confirm what anyone trying to add megawatts to the grid already knows: our process is our policy, and our process is broken.

The report calls for shot-clocks, categorical exclusions, digital permitting portals, and lead agencies to coordinate reviews across federal and state lines. It's a sober, technocratic list—but if we don't act on it now, the United States won't just lose time. We'll lose the capacity to lead in energy, perhaps ever again.

Our electricity markets themselves are now showing their age. As Heatmap recently reported, regional operators like PJM are struggling to keep pace with surging load growth. The grid's "duty to serve" model, built for steady demand, is breaking down in an era of explosive, concentrated loads from AI and data centers. PJM has already warned it will have just enough generation to meet reliability requirements in 2026 and 2027, and billions in new costs are flowing directly to consumers. No one—utilities, producers, or tech developers—is happy with how the system works. America's electricity markets are failing at their most basic task: ensuring enough power can be provided where and when it's needed.

The Grid is the New Chokepoint

Look at what's happening in Nvidia's hometown: brand-new data centers are sitting empty because the local utility company can't connect them to the grid, according to Bloomberg. Across the country, AI demand alone could more than double US electricity use by 2035, and yet projects that could meet that demand are tangled in multi-year interconnection queues.

Texas understands that speed is key. Because of its competitive market and streamlined approvals, it can connect projects faster than any other state, sometimes in a matter of months rather than years. In doing so, Texas connected roughly 40 percent of all new US solar and storage capacity to the grid this year and has proven that faster processes are possible. But even this pace remains far too slow compared with China, which added 260 GW of renewables in just five months, according to The Economist. Texas offers a model worth studying as we consider how to move forward, but if America truly wants to compete, we'll need to go bigger and faster than even Texas has dared to go.

That's the playbook we need to scale nationally.

To their credit, some US regions are starting to act. The Southwest Power Pool just approved an $8.6 billion investment to build a 765-kV transmission "backbone" across 14 states — nearly 1,000 miles of high-voltage lines capable of carrying four times more power than existing lines, as Utility Dive reported. It's a recognition that our current grid is at capacity and that simply adding generation isn't enough without the wires to move it. Even so, SPP expects demand across its footprint to rise up to 136 percent , meaning this backbone is only the start of the buildout required to stay ahead.

China's Lesson: Coordination Beats Chaos

China's clean-energy machine didn't happen by accident. It happened because every part of the system — finance, manufacturing, permitting, and export policy — moved in sync. The country aligned its industrial policy with its energy policy, and then pointed both at a single goal: dominate the supply chain.

We can dislike how it got there and still learn from the lesson. Speed, coordination, and national purpose matter.

And that's what America needs to bring to the next energy revolution — fusion. Not because it replaces renewables, but because it extends the frontier of clean, firm, dispatchable power that can run factories, data centers, and whole cities. Fusion is not a science experiment anymore. It's a buildout challenge.

Winning the Fusion Century

If we want to win the fusion century, we have to clear the same barriers strangling the renewables boom:

• Permitting and NEPA reform with real deadlines and digitized workflows.
• Interconnection reform that treats large loads coupled with new generation as critical infrastructure, not queue-cloggers.
• A domestic and allied supply chain for critical components so we don't swap one dependency for another.
• A coordinated industrial strategy that builds, licenses, and deploys at the pace this century demands.

That's how we reclaim America's edge: not by trying to win yesterday's race, but by setting the pace for tomorrow's.

China built the solar century. The next one — the fusion century — can still be ours. But only if we learn to build like a nation that wants to win again.

Source: The National Interest

What official data says

Prolonged period of no-hire?

Source: finance.yahoo

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Beth Hammack cautioned Thursday that additional interest rate cuts could pose significant risks to the economy amid persistent inflation above the Fed's 2% target.

"Lowering interest rates to support the labor market risks prolonging this period of elevated inflation, and it could also encourage risk-taking in financial markets," Hammack said in a speech at a conference hosted by her bank.

Hammack, who does not hold a vote on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) this year, opposed the Fed's decision to cut its federal funds target rate by a quarter percentage point in late October to between 3.75% and 4%.

She noted that financial conditions are "quite accommodative today" with rising stock prices and "easy" credit conditions. Making credit even cheaper "could support risky lending," she warned.

The Cleveland Fed president expressed concern that Fed-driven reductions in short-term borrowing costs might distort market pricing, which "means that whenever the next downturn comes, it could be larger than it otherwise would have been, with a larger impact on the economy."

While some view rate cuts as "taking out insurance" for the job market, Hammack cautioned that "such insurance could come at the cost of heightened financial stability risks."

Hammack has consistently maintained that monetary policy was barely positioned to restrain price pressures, emphasizing the importance of bringing inflation back to target.

In her speech, she stated that "the financial system is in good shape" with well-capitalized banks and solid household balance sheets, though she noted concerns about elevated leverage in hedge funds and insurers, adding that private credit and stablecoins warrant monitoring.

Source: Investing

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously on Wednesday to repeal a controversial provision allowing senators to sue federal investigators for $500,000 over unannounced phone record searches, the latest sign of fraying Republican unity 10 months into President Donald Trump's second term.

The widely criticized Senate provision, tucked into an unrelated funding bill that ended the longest government shutdown in U.S. history last week, would allow eight Republican senators to seek millions of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Democratic President Joe Biden administration's investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

All 426 Republican and Democratic lawmakers in attendance voted for repeal, a tally likely to compel consideration in the Senate, where Republican Majority Leader John Thune defended the provision earlier in the day as an important protection for its members against federal agency actions that violate the constitutional separation of powers.

The House action marked the second time this week that Republicans have shown cracks in the partisan cohesion that has dominated the party since Trump took office in January. After months of bitter debate and opposition from Trump, the House and Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly adopted a measure requiring the Justice Department to divulge its unclassified materials on late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

"We'll find out what our colleagues in the Senate want to do," Thune told reporters. "There is a high level of interest in addressing the weaponization of the federal government, in this case the Biden Justice Department."

JOHNSON BLASTS 'BAD OPTICS'

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was shocked and angered by the Senate provision and called for its repeal, adding later that the language should be changed to address what he called "bad optics."

House Republicans and Democrats attacked the Senate provision on Wednesday as an unacceptable enrichment scheme for public officials. Several cited remarks from one of the senators involved, Republican Lindsey Graham, who vowed to sue the Justice Department for "tens of millions of dollars."

Republican Representative Austin Scott, who authored the repeal, described the Senate provision as "probably the most self-centered, self-serving piece of language that I have ever seen in any piece of legislation."

TRUMP SEEKS PAYMENT FROM DOJ

Last month, the New York Times reported that Trump is seeking $230 million from the Justice Department for legal costs tied to federal investigations against him.

Democrats noted that the eight Republican senators targeted by the January 6 investigation had supported Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Biden.

"They are senators who may have had knowledge of, or even participated in, efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election - efforts that culminated in a violent attack on this very institution," said Democratic Representative Joseph Morelle.

Despite Johnson's anger over the Senate provision, Thune played down differences with his House counterpart, telling reporters: "For the most part, I would say that we have an incredibly strong working relationship."

Not all House Republicans were willing to give their Senate colleagues the benefit of the doubt.

"A little personal message to the Senate: take this up and pass it, or you're not getting any support from this member for any of your measures," said hardline Republican Representative Chip Roy.

Source: Reuters