4-15-2025*******Trump officials unveil designs for president’s controversial 250-foot arch. WAPO   Dan Diamond  4 Apr 2026 The arch is intended to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Military veterans have sued to halt the project, saying it would alter key views of Arlington National Cemetery. The Trump administration on Friday unveiled new renderings for President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot triumphal arch, his most significant effort to remake Washington’s skyline, as officials begin the process of seeking formal approval for the controversial project. The renderings prepared by Harrison Design feature a golden inscription reading “One Nation Under God” on the arch, which is topped with a winged Lady Liberty statue and flanked at its base by statues of four golden lions. The project is slated for Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery, which city planners have eyed for more than a century as the site of a potential monument.  The project is intended to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Built to Trump’s specifications, it would transform a small plot of land between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery into a dominant new monument. Architects and historic preservationists have warned that the planned arch, which would be more than twice the size of the roughly 100-foot Lincoln Memorial and tower over the nearby cemetery, would distort the intent of the existing memorials and obstruct pedestrians’ views. And then there's Kitsch fromTrump -  Trump cologne, the Trump Gold Bible, Trump shoes, Trump NFTs, Trump crypto, Trump resorts, and Trump University — all turning out to be a con     https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/10/trump-arch-designs/

What does the Iran war mean for clean energy transition?.Here’s what to know about how the current crisis could shape the expansion of renewable energy.Guardian Dharna Noor As the deadly war in Iran triggers what the International Energy Agency has described as the worst oil crisis in history, climate advocates are calling for a faster shift away from fossil fuels, but the conflict may also hamper that transition. US-Israeli strikes on Iran have disrupted supply routes through the strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of global oil flows. The US, Israel and Iran have also all launched strikes on fossil fuel facilities, creating additional market shocks.

Reduced reliance on oil and gas is insulating some regions from the ongoing fuel crisi“Electricity generated from wind and solar is largely insulated from fossil fuel price volatility – once built, the fuel is free,” said Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy at Oxford University. Some countries are indeed better positioned to withstand the current fuel crisis because of the growth of clean energy technologies. Spain and Portugal, for instance, have seen electricity prices decline in recent weeks. Pakistan, too, has seen a surge in the deployment of rooftop solar panels over the past five years, helping the country weather disruptions in the oil and gas market. There, “households and businesses have discovered that rooftop solar coupled with batteries are cheaper than electricity imported from the grid,” Rosenow said.

Clean energy as a shield......Climate advocates are calling for the world to grow its renewable energy capacity to boost energy independence. Former US secretary of state John Kerry this month told the Guardian that oil and gas were a “security challenge”, while the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, last week said that “our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security”.

But the war is also creating near-term challenges that could slow clean energy growth.Here’s what to know about how the current crisis could shape the expansion of renewable energy. Electric vehicles have also helped some economies withstand price increases for gasoline, in which crude oil is a key ingredient. Two examples are China, where more than 50% of all new cars sold are electric, and Nepal, where that share sits at at 70%.In light of this evidence, countries across the world are being urged to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels. But the Iran war may also make that more difficult.

“The only action I can personally take,” she continued, “is to put it into my general waste bin. I don’t want to do this, as in Sheffield all general waste is incinerated as ‘energy recovery’. This isn’t a sustainable option as such processes have been shown to be as damaging to local air pollution as burning coal.” So, she concluded, “as Sainsbury’s is responsible for designing and manufacturing this product, making decisions to use polycotton with no consideration for what could be done once it reaches the end of its life, I have decided to return it to you. I would really love to hear what you decide to do with it.” Last year, “brain rot” was named Oxford University Press’s word of the year, a term that captures both the specific feeling of mindlessness that descends when we spend too much time scrolling through rubbish online and the corrosive, aggressively dumb content itself, the nonsense memes and AI garble. When we hold our phones we have, in theory, most of the world’s accumulated knowledge at our fingertips, so why do we spend so much time dragging our eyeballs over dreck?

One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.......read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/29/you-sold-it-now-recycle-it-the-protesters-mailing-worn-out-clothes-to-the-shops-they-bought-them-from

Start with Trump's approval: 36%...... That was the president's rating in the Associated Press/NORC survey taken Feb. 5-8, the latest of the public polls considered most credible. The tepid measure of his political temperature was consistent with other respected pollsters, including a 37% approval rating in the Quinnipiac University poll Jan. 29-Feb. 2 and the 36% rating in the Gallup Poll Dec. 1-15. That level of support, if it persists, would be a seven-decade low for a president at a midterm and a red alarm for the GOP.......read on               https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/midterm-math-watch-trumps-37-100800256.html?utm_source=pushly&ncid=pushly                 More: Older women are spooked by the economy. Their vote is up for grabs.