How Russia's disinformation campaign seeps into US views | House Lawmakers Reject Renewal of Key US Intelligence Program | America's Greatest Enemy Isn't China or Russia: Its $35 Trillion In Debt, and more

Another finding is that hybrid regimes, which are known for containing both democratic and autocratic traits, are at a crossroads.

House Lawmakers Reject Renewal of Key US Intelligence Program  (Katherine Gypson, VOA News)
U.S. House lawmakers rejected an attempt to reform a controversial foreign intelligence program Wednesday, the latest blow in Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to lead a narrow Republican majority.
A renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, failed to advance, 228-193, following a warning from former President Donald Trump on TruthSocial.
Trump said that FISA “was illegally used against me, and many others. They spied on my campaign!!” he wrote, using all capital letters.
A Justice Department investigation found in 2019 that surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page continued for months after it should have ended.
The law — also referred to as Section 702 — allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect data on foreigners overseas without obtaining a warrant. But it has received the most criticism for so-called “backdoor searches” that allow collection of U.S. citizens’ data. An attempted reform would have required the FBI to secure a warrant before collecting data.

America’s Greatest Enemy Isn’t China or Russia: Its $35 Trillion In Debt  (Brandon J. Weichert, National Interest)
With a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, $35 trillion in overall debt, and $1 trillion in interest payments this year, if the U.S. dollar is no longer the primary global reserve currency and there is suddenly a true rival to the U.S. currency, then the entire American financial system comes crashing down.
In the 2012 film Prometheus, a prequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 hit Alien, one of the lead characters, Michael Fassbender, looks upon an embryo of the iconic monster and quips, “Big things have small beginnings.” 
One could say the same thing about the rising economic and financial trading bloc, loosely known as the BRICS bloc. 
BRICS is short for “Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.” The term can find its roots in a 2001 Goldman Sachs report about the economy of the developing world. Many in the West have poo-pooed the term and the very notion that this budding economic alliance is anything but a gigantic show for the leaders of those countries to look like statesmen.
Yet, just as with the embryonic alien monster in Prometheus, the BRICS bloc has moved from a mere theory in the minds of turn-of-the-21st-century Wall Streeters and is slowly growing into a financial dagger aimed at the heart of the U.S.-led economic system. 

In MAGA World, Everything Happens for a Reason  (Brian Klaas, The Atlantic)
On March 26, in the middle of the night, an enormous container ship—the MV Dali—lost power. Slowly, excruciatingly, it drifted toward the towering steel piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, moving slightly faster than a brisk walking pace. But force is mass times acceleration, and the MV Dali weighed at least 220 million pounds—more than 50,000 cars. Even at a snail’s pace, it was a wrecker. The bridge buckled. Six men died.
No hidden saboteur or shadowy agent of darkness caused this tragedy, just fallible electricity, a technology that sometimes breaks. Safeguards, such as routine inspections and a backup generator, failed to prevent a poorly timed accident, because even carefully regulated environments remain subject to some degree of chaos and randomness.
Don’t try to tell that to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the avatar of the MAGA movement. While rescue operations were still under way, she couldn’t resist insinuating a hidden hand: “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” She eagerly played the role of queen conspiracist, and her like-minded subjects were legion. Perhaps the captain of the ship had been incapacitated by a COVID-19 vaccine. Or maybe President Joe Biden was really behind it, damaging the American economy and taking out a crucial bridge for … unknown reasons. Conspiracy-theory TikTok videos sprouted up and garnered millions of views; some suggested that Barack Obama was the secret architect of the bridge collapse, or that it was an attempt to distract attention from the recent federal raid on the home of Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Then, last Friday, an earthquake struck the Eastern Seaboard, its epicenter near Tewksbury, New Jersey. That such an unusual event would occur within mere days of a total solar eclipse visible across much of the United States was just too much of a coincidence for MTG: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Greene didn’t mention that God’s message, if it had been sent from above, seemed to be aimed at Donald Trump himself, because ground zero for the earthquake was just a few miles from the closest thing to a gilded shrine in the MAGA movement: the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Nor did she mention that astronomers can predict, with astonishing accuracy, the next time that God will apparently admonish the faithful through a total solar eclipse: at 3:34 p.m. UTC on August 12, 2026. (Those who must repent next will apparently be the notorious heathens of Greenland, where the eclipse will most easily be viewed.)
The notion that “everything happens for a reason” isn’t just a false mantra of comfort to stitch on flowery pillows; it’s also a central delusion of the MAGA movement, a fun-house-mirror reflection of reality as a world of perfect, top-down control, in which random accidents never happen and everything has significant, hidden meaning if you only dare to look closely enough.