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https://www.ft.com/content/e8bcac46-eba1-4985-be31-fc913186895f
The Middle East crisis will fuel a surge in US inflation to 4.2 per cent this year, the highest in the G7, according to an OECD forecast that highlights the cost of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

The Paris-based organisation predicted that energy price rises would sharply increase inflation around the world, with “significant downside risks” to growth if disruptions to energy exports worsened.

While the OECD expects US inflation to jump from 2.6 per cent in 2025, countries including China, South Korea and India also face a sharp increase in price growth because of the energy shock.

“The breadth and duration of the conflict are very uncertain, but a prolonged period of higher energy prices will add markedly to business costs and raise consumer price inflation, with adverse consequences for growth,” the organisation predicted in its interim economic outlook.

Rising pressure on consumers would hurt US economic growth, which is expected to slow to 2 per cent this year and 1.7 per cent in 2027, the OECD said. Global growth is forecast to slow from 3.3 per cent last year to 2.9 per cent in 2026, before picking up to 3 per cent next year.

Prior to the Iran war, global growth was proving resilient, driven in part by a jump in capital spending on AI as well as surging stock markets.

But the prognosis has changed radically since the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran at the end of February, pushing up oil and natural gas prices and sending ripple effects through other commodities including metals and fertiliser.

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https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/26/economy/mortgage-rates-us-housing-market-iran-war
The US housing market was supposed to turn a corner this year, but economic uncertainty and a jump in mortgage rates fueled by the US-Israeli war in Iran are complicating affordability for American homebuyers.

After years of sluggish sales, economists expected 2026 to bring lower mortgage rates and more homes for sale, breathing new life into the market after home transactions fell to 30-year lows last year.

But the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.38% this week, climbing for the fourth-straight week to levels not seen in more than six months, according to data released Thursday by Freddie Mac.

It’s the largest one-week jump in mortgage rates since April 2025, when markets were rattled due to President Donald Trump’s initial tariff announcement.

Higher mortgage rates due to the conflict in Iran and a weakening job market are making buyers more cautious, real estate experts told CNN.

“What we really want to see is healthy demand going into the spring selling season,” Kamini Lane, CEO of Coldwell Banker, one of the country’s largest real estate brokerages, told CNN. “Now, there’s a lot of volatility. The geopolitical landscape, coupled with the macroeconomic landscape, means a lot could change, and it could change on a dime.”

Home sales were sluggish in January and February, but that may have had more to do with winter weather than weak demand, Lane said. The housing market usually gains momentum in the spring, when listings rise and buyers return.


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https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/3/27/trumps-signature-to-appear-on-us-currency-in-first-for-sitting-president

United States President Donald Trump’s signature will soon appear on US currency under plans to mark the 250th anniversary of the country’s Independence Day on July 4.

The move announced by the US Department of the Treasury on Thursday marks a first for a sitting president.

Until now, US banknotes – which are divided into denominations of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 – have featured the signature of the Treasury secretary and the treasurer.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Trump had put the country on a path towards “unprecedented economic growth” and “fiscal strength and stability”, and the change would recognise his “historic achievements”.

Under Trump, economic growth has been broadly in line with the post-pandemic trend overseen by his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.

US gross domestic product (GDP) grew 2.2 percent in 2025, slightly below the 2.5 percent average expansion from 2022-2024.

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https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/g-s1-115366/senate-dhs-tsa-deal

The Senate voted overnight to fund large swaths of the Department of Homeland Security after a 42-day standoff over immigration enforcement tactics. The bill does not include funding for the agency's main immigration enforcement operations.

The legislation now goes to the House for a vote.

The DHS funding lapse forced tens of thousands of employees to work without pay - or quit– and resulted in long waits at some airports amid peak spring break travel.

Democrats have refused to support funding for DHS over objections to immigration enforcement tactics used by the agency's officers. Democrats insisted on reforms to the agency after federal officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

The latest package allowed Democrats to fund operations like the Transportation Safety Administration, or TSA, and emergency response divisions, without backing down from those demands.

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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/iran-linked-hackers-claim-breach-of-fbi-directors-personal-email-doj-official-2026-03-27/
WASHINGTON, March 27 (Reuters) - Iran-linked hackers on Friday claimed they had accessed FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet.
On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.
A Justice Department official confirmed that Patel's email had been breached and said the material published online appeared authentic. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The hackers did not immediately respond to messages.
Handala, which calls itself a group of pro-Palestinian vigilante hackers, is considered by Western researchers to be one of several personas used by Iranian government cyberintelligence units. Handala recently claimed the hack of Michigan-based medical devices and services provider Stryker (SYK.N) on March 11, claiming to have deleted a massive trove of company data.
Reuters was not able to independently authenticate the Patel emails, but the personal Gmail address that Handala claims to have broken into matches the address linked to Patel in previous data breaches preserved by the dark web intelligence firm District 4 Labs. Alphabet-owned Google, which runs Gmail, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A sample of the material uploaded by the hackers and reviewed by Reuters appears to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g8w4xp97jo
The death by euthanasia of a 25-year-old Spanish woman after a protracted legal battle with her father has triggered debate about the role of the state in caring for her and why it took so long to implement her wish to end her life.

Noelia Castillo, who had been left paraplegic due to injuries suffered when she tried to take her own life in 2022, died on Thursday evening at a Barcelona hospital.

The Catalan regional government had granted her the right to assisted dying in 2024.

However, the process was suspended at the last moment after legal objections raised by her father, backed by campaign group Christian Lawyers.

The case has received enormous attention in Spain, with Christian Lawyers (Abogados Cristianos) attempting to block her death until the last moment.

After an 18-month legal battle, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled this week in Noelia Castillo's favour and her death was eventually confirmed late on Thursday.

Castillo had spent much of her childhood in care homes and had recounted the impact on her mental health of her father's problems with alcohol and of being sexually assaulted by an ex-boyfriend and also by several men in a nightclub.


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As the Iran war continues, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains stalled, many Americans are seeing higher gas prices. Of course, the longer the conflict lasts, the more it impacts consumers at the pump.

That elevated cost threatens to offset larger tax refunds this season, some experts say. In a March 20 note, Oxford Economics estimated that if gas prices averaged $3.60 per gallon in 2026, consumer spending on fuel could be “almost exactly offsetting the boost from refunds.”

American consumers are still paying higher prices at the pump. The price of gasoline on Thursday was at a nationwide average of $4.04 a gallon, up by roughly 33% from one month ago, according to AAA.

“The energy shock is going to hit those who have the least cushion ... and it doesn’t look like those tax refunds are going to be here to save them,” Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning economic policy think tank, said during a press call Friday.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/high-gas-prices-iran-war-tax-refunds.html

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg06q36052o
The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity", a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.

The resolution - proposed by Ghana - called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund. It does not mention a specific amount of money.

The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against - the United States, Israel and Argentina.

Fifty-two countries abstained, including the United Kingdom and European Union member states.

Countries like the UK have long rejected calls to pay reparations, saying today's institutions cannot be held responsible for past wrongs.

Unlike UN Security Council resolutions, those from the General Assembly are not legally binding, though they carry the weight of global opinion.

"Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of the millions who suffered the indignity of the slave trade and those who continue to suffer racial discrimination," Ghana's President John Mahama told the assembly ahead of the vote.


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https://usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/27/house-republicans-shutdown-dhs-deal-rejected/89349043007/
WASHINGTON – Republicans in the House of Representatives are revolting at the eleventh hour against a deal to end the six-week-long Department of Homeland Security shutdown, hurling the prospects of any impending solution into serious political jeopardy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, after a long call with GOP lawmakers on Friday, March 27, denounced the compromise the Senate unanimously passed in the dead of night. In a highly visible split between House and Senate Republicans, Johnson said the agreement to fund all of DHS minus Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol wasn't palatable to his members.

"This gambit that was done last night is a joke," Johnson said. He added that he had just spoken to President Donald Trump and said the president "understands exactly what we’re doing and why, and he supports it."

Many conservative hardliners woke up in the morning furious about the situation, pledging to withhold their support for advancing the agreement unless it added immigration enforcement funding and a voter ID provision. ICE and Customs and Border Protection, two agencies within DHS, are already operating with cash reserves from a megabill passed last year.

We can't believe that the Senate abdicated its responsibility this morning," Rep. Andy Harris, R-Maryland, said. "This deal is bad for America. It's bad for Americans. The president has already said he's going to fund TSA out of funds he has. So it's not going to affect the airports if we don't do this today."

Johnson later said he planned to instead put to a vote a two-month stopgap measure that would keep all of DHS funded at its current levels through May 22.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/iran-plans-tolls-on-ships-passing-through-strait-of-hormuz.html
Iran is preparing legislation that would impose tolls on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian state-aligned media.

Traffic in the waterway, a critical shipping route, has effectively come to a standstill since the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran began almost four weeks ago. Subsequent supply constraints, along with attacks on energy facilities and regional production shutdowns, have pushed oil prices into triple digits.

Revolutionary Guard-aligned news agency Fars said overnight that a lawmaker had told its reporter the plans to impose tolls were also a bid to officialize Iranian supervision over the Strait of Hormuz.

A draft had been prepared, but was not yet complete, Fars reported. It said lawmakers were planning to complete a draft bill by next week, so it would be ready to put to parliament.

The lawmaker said Iran would collect tolls in exchange for secure passage through the Strait of Hormuz, according to a Google translation.

Multiple media reports have emerged in recent weeks that Iran has been charging ships vast sums to bypass traffic in the waterway. CNBC has not been able to independently verify those claims.

As the conflict moves closer to its fifth week, Washington and Tehran are delivering mixed messages on whether they are in negotiations to bring the war to an end. Iran is reported to have received a 15-point peace plan from U.S. President Donald Trump, but Iranian media said Wednesday night that officials in Tehran have dismissed the proposal.


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https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/26/sport/olympics-transgender-women-athletes-banned
AP —

Transgender women athletes are now excluded from the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy on Thursday which aligns with US President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

“Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females,” the International Olympic Committee said, “determined on the basis of a one‑time SRY gene screening.”

It is unclear how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level. No woman who transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Summer Games.

The eligibility policy that will apply from the LA Olympics in July 2028 “protects fairness, safety and integrity in the female category,” the IOC said.

“It is not retroactive and does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programs,” said the IOC, whose Olympic Charter states that access to play sport is a human right.

After an executive board meeting, the International Olympic Committee published a 10-page policy document which also restricts female athletes such as two-time Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya with medical conditions known as differences in sex development, or DSD.


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>Revelation was included in lawsuit challenging practice of targeting people seeking to gain legal status as they leave immigration courts

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/ice-lawyers-justify-detaining-on-false-information

>Lawyers for ICE provided false information to justify arresting and detaining thousands of people who had attended immigration courts, according to newly filed court documents.

>Federal prosecutors said that lawyers for ICE acknowledged that an agency memo from May of last year gave no authorization for the arrests, court documents show, despite previously citing it to justify the arrests.

>The revelation was included in filings by the office of Jay Clayton, a US federal attorney, in a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups, first reported on by the New York Daily News.

>The lawsuit is challenging ICE’s practice of targeting people seeking to gain legal status in the US as they leave immigration courts. Agents have arrested thousands of people after they attended hearings, preventing them from further pursuing their cases.

>The NYCLU said that ICE had not provided any legal justification for the arrests, which have been part of Donald Trump’s wide-ranging, and sometimes deadly, effort to ramp up detentions and deportations.

>“The implications of this development are far-reaching,” wrote Amy Belsher, an attorney for the NYCLU, wrote to Kevin Castel, a federal judge based in New York City who is overseeing the lawsuit against ICE.

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The IOC’s shift in position on trans women in elite sports is seismic, but new president Kirsty Coventry is reflecting a changed political climate
By any measure, it amounts to one of the most astonishing U-turns from a governing body in modern times. Four and a half years ago, the International Olympic Committee was lauding the appearance of the first transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, at an Olympics, and issuing a framework to sports saying that transgender women “should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage” over biological women.

Now it has not only ripped up every last morsel of that guidance but also performed a spectacular 180-degree turn.

Over 10 tightly worded pages, the IOC now states that the female category must be protected for fairness and safety reasons, and makes it clear that SRY screening – a sex test using saliva or a cheek-swab – will be used to determine biological sex.

It is a monumental shift that means transgender women and athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), who were reported as female at birth but have internal testes and have undergone male puberty, are now banned from the female category at all future Olympics.
In conversations with multiple sources in IOC and sporting circles, the same names come up: Kirsty Coventry, Imane Khelif and even Donald Trump. But, perhaps surprisingly, there is also broad agreement that the IOC was pushing at an open door – in private, most sports had been urging it to introduce such a policy for some time.

Was there one moment where the mood began to shift? For most sources it came amid the furore surrounding the Olympic women’s boxing tournament in Paris, and the questions over whether Khelif had a DSD, and thus an unfair advantage.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/mar/26/why-olympics-u-turned-gender-rules-sex-testing

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In other news, Trump supporters are still dumb enough to believe Voter Fraud happens all the time with no evidence except retards getting caught unsuccessfully committing voter fraud

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/activist-pushed-2020-election-fraud-claims-convicted-election-fraud-rcna265134

A jury convicted a Wisconsin man of election fraud and identity theft for requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

Jurors in Racine County on Tuesday found Harry Wait guilty of two misdemeanor election fraud charges and one felony identity theft charge following a two-day trial. He was acquitted of a second count of identity theft.

Wait leads a group that makes false election claims, including that Wisconsin’s elections are riddled with fraud and that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by about 21,000 votes.

Wait admitted in 2022 that he requested Vos’ and Mason’s ballots to try to prove that the state’s voter registration system is vulnerable to fraud. Wait told The Associated Press at the time that he wasn’t surprised he was charged.

“You got to expect to pay some costs sometimes when you are trying to work for the public good,” he said.

“I tested the system and the system failed,” he said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/26/finnish-mp-paivi-rasanen-convicted-homosexuality-developmental-disorder

A Finnish member of parliament has been found guilty by the country’s supreme court of inciting hatred after claiming that homosexuality was a “developmental disorder”, in a conviction that prompted criticism from far-right government ministers.

Päivi Räsänen, of the Christian Democrats, made the claims in a pamphlet first published in 2004 and reproduced on the website of the Luther Foundation Finland and the Finnish Evangelical Mission Diocese in 2007.

In a 3-2 vote, the supreme court on Thursday found Räsänen guilty of a crime when she republished the pamphlet on Facebook in 2019 and on her website the following year. She was fined €1,800. The court ruled her claim that homosexuality was a disorder of psychosexual development was incorrect.

Räsänen was supported in her case by the US-based conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which has tried to use her case as an example of censorship in Europe. The group has ramped up its global spending on litigation and other campaigns after successfully overturning Roe v Wade, which protected the right to abortion, in the US.

Räsänen said the outcome was “a shock” and that she would consider appealing against the ruling at the European court of human rights. Lower courts had acquitted her of all charges.