Piousbox

Europe has folded rather quickly on EU leaders' controversial plan to confiscate Russian assets held in Belgium's depository Euroclear to use as a reparations loan for Ukraine.

On Friday it became clear in the two day Brussels summit the EU was unable to agree on the plan, but instead has opted to raise €90 billion ($105 billion) in joint borrowing, with Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia choosing not to take part.

President Trump ordered the suspension of the U.S. green card diversity lottery after federal investigators said the suspect in the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT nuclear scientist was a non-citizen who entered the country through the program.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in an X post late Thursday that, at Trump's direction, she had ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the Diversity Immigrant Visa (DV) program.

Russia has deployed all eight of its nuclear icebreakers simultaneously in an unprecedented move. The fleet is being used to keep critical winter shipping lanes in the Gulf of Ob and the Yenisei Gulf open, ensuring continued access to key export terminals. The deployment sends a clear signal to the West that Russia can sustain year-round Arctic shipping and maintain its natural resource export revenues.

Ship tracking website MarineTraffic reported earlier this week:

Bloomberg Opinion columnist and chief energy correspondent Javier Blas posted a chart on X from the International Energy Agency's new global coal report showing that coal demand jumped to an all-time high this year, despite years of efforts by the green-industrial complex to end its very existence.