The Kremlin follows.

Russian public opinion is swinging decisively in favour of Iran and hostility towards the US and Israel is growing, according to the latest nationwide opinion poll conducted by the Levada polling group of Moscow between March 18 and 26, 2026.

Sympathy for Iran is expressed by 40% of the nationwide sample; this percentage is accelerating with time and with state television news broadcasts reporting Iran's fightback, its successful attacks on US bases in the Gulf states, and unprecedented strikes against Israeli targets. During the June War against Iran last year, by contrast, 29% of Russians supported Iran. This shift in public opinion has occurred among those who said they were uncertain or undecided last June.

The longer the war continues, the stronger Russian public support for Iran is likely to become. A parallel swing of Russian support for the Palestinians of Gaza occurred following the Hamas breakout of October 7, 2023, as the Israeli destruction of Gaza over the past three years failed to stop the resistance.

Netanyahu pitched the war as a repeat of Israel's apparent 'audacious feat' of smashing Hezbollah. The US president should have noted instead Israel's moral and strategic defeat in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much like the pager attack in Lebanon 18 months ago.

The two militaries would jointly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, and it would crumble just as Hezbollah had collapsed - or so it then seemed - after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group's spiritual leader and military strategist.

If so, Trump bought deeply into this ruse. He assumed that he would be the US president to "remake the Middle East" - a mission his predecessors had baulked at since George W Bush's dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

Trump isn't the first US president tempted by an Israeli plan to destroy Iran and thereby "remake the Middle East".

Thirty-three days into the US-Israeli war on Iran - launched on February 28 with the assassination of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei - the military aggression continues to target civilian and industrial infrastructure across the country.

US-Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday hit a wide range of sites nationwide, including steel plants, pharmaceutical facilities, port infrastructure, and residential complexes, with explosions reported in Tehran, Ahvaz, Shiraz, Isfahan, Karaj, Kermanshah, and Bandar Abbas.

The death toll from the unprovoked and illegal aggression has surpassed 2,000, while thousands of civilian sites - including hospitals, schools, universities, and pharmaceutical factories - continue to come under attack.

The US-Israeli bombing of the Tofigh Daru pharmaceutical raw material units, which destroyed its research and development department, drew widespread condemnation.

The Russian Embassy in Tehran reported damage to the Orthodox Cathedral following two missile strikes in close proximity to the religious site.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, called for nationwide efforts to repair the damage caused by the unprovoked aggression and to ensure the country's continued prosperity.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, in an open letter to the American public, questioned whether Washington is truly pursuing an "America First" policy or acting as a "proxy for Israel."

In a landmark 8-1 decision issued today, the Supreme Court sided with a Christian mental health counselor - ruling that Colorado's law banning "conversion therapy" violates the First Amendment.

The majority held that Colorado's 2019 law unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of viewpoint by allowing counselors to affirm and support clients exploring gender transition or identity while prohibiting any talk-therapy efforts to help clients reduce unwanted same-sex attractions, change sexual behaviors, or align their gender identity with their biological sex.

The solo dissent being (drumroll...) Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Update (1315ET): President Donald Trump has ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, multiple outlets report. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is serving as acting AG in the interim.

The move comes amid White House frustration with Bondi's leadership at the Justice Department - particularly her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and what Trump viewed as insufficient aggression in targeting his political opponents. Trump had privately discussed firing her and floated EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (or Blanche) as a possible replacement.

Bondi met with Trump in the Oval Office Wednesday night ahead of his speech to the nation on the war in Iran, where she reportedly was informed of her ouster, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

One of those sources said that by the time Trump took his place behind the podium for the address, Bondi already lost her job and was on her way back to Florida. -Fox News

There are moments in the moral life of nations when the language of restraint — so cherished by diplomats, so worshipped by Western editorial boards — ceases to be a virtue and becomes instead an alibi for cowardice. Restraint, in the abstract, is a noble thing; it is the discipline of power, the modesty of the strong. But when restraint is demanded only of the weak, when it is invoked solely to pacify the victim while the aggressor is permitted to strike again and again without consequence, then it is no longer a moral principle. It is a weapon — a rhetorical cudgel wielded by the powerful to ensure that their own violence remains unchallenged and their own transgressions remain unpunished. When a nation suffers unprovoked assault, when its sovereignty is violated repeatedly, when its citizens are assassinated in foreign lands with the impunity that only empire can confer, it has not merely the right but the solemn duty to respond. Iran's retaliation against the forces of the United States and Israel belongs to that category of rightful defiance — the kind of war that Augustine called just, the kind that Aquinas said restores peace not through submission but through the punishment of injustice. To call this "escalation" is to reveal a fundamental dishonesty; it is to pretend that a chain of violence began with the party that finally, after years of provocation, decided to strike back.

Let us be clear about what set this tragedy in motion, because the fog of diplomatic euphemism has already descended. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two men united less by any coherent principle than by vanity, by fear, and by a shared genius for transforming political weakness into military aggression, built their respective powers on the foundation of perpetual crisis. For both, governance became indistinguishable from provocation; leadership was reduced to the art of manufacturing emergencies that only they were positioned to exploit. They discovered in aggression a convenient substitute for statesmanship, finding that nothing unites a fractured political base quite like the spectacle of foreign violence. Their reckless pursuit of what they called "deterrence" was in fact the systematic destruction of deterrence — a relentless campaign of open violations of sovereignty, of assassinations thinly disguised as "pre-emptive strikes," of covert acts of war conducted without even the pretense of lawful justification. What they offered to their publics as defense was in reality provocation: extralegal, unprovoked, and profoundly immoral. And the world, for the most part, watched in silence, occasionally murmuring its disapproval but never acting to restrain the architects of this unfolding catastrophe.

In 2002, the Pentagon spent $250 million on the largest wargame in US military history called 'Millennium Challenge'. 13,500 participants, 2 years of planning, the works. The idea was pretty straightforward: simulate an invasion of a Middle Eastern country in the Persian Gulf. Suspiciously resembling Iran. The purpose was to demonstrate that America's technological dominance could steamroll anything in its path.

They picked a retired 3-star Marine named Paul Van Riper to play the enemy.
Van Riper, who spent 41 years in uniform from Vietnam to Desert Storm, took one look at the scenario and did what any self-respecting adversary would do. He ignored it completely. Instead of radios, he used motorcycle couriers. Attack orders were hidden in the daily call to prayer. Swarms of explosive-laden speedboats were sent through the Strait of Hormuz.

And in less than 10 minutes, he sank 16 US warships. An aircraft carrier, 10 cruisers, and 5 amphibious ships. Over 20,000 simulated American casualties. The equivalent of Pearl Harbor, executed with small boats and cruise missiles by a retired Marine with a phone and a bad attitude.

So the Pentagon did what any self-respecting institution does when reality disagreed with the plan.

"And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication^. And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. [...] And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.⁰And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he comes, he must continue a short space. And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goes into perdition. And the ten horns which thou saw are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. [...] And he said unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. [...] And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth."

-Revelation 17:1-6, 9-12, 15, 18

BlackRock CEO and possible antichrist Larry Fink didn't want to systematically undermine Western civilization by shoving suicidal policies down everyone's throats over the last decade. He was merely held hostage, his hand forced, by his investors clamoring for child transgenderism and helicopters destined for fatal crashes flown by BIPOC women!

Real-life-Clark-Kent-all-American-football-quarterback-red-blooded-prom-king Brett Baier, totally not a traitorous ventriloquist dummy for globo-homo race communism, gently put it to Fink whether he had any lingering regrets about trying to strong-arm the world to submit to DEI and ESG.

Fink, the duplicitous weasel that he is, sidestepped any accountability, instead framing "investors" and a generalized force of nature — "the pendulum moves all the time," he explains — as the conductors on the crazytrain to hell.

Update(1320ET): We detailed earlier that more and more EU and NATO countries are moving to block US military flights operating in Iran. This includes Spain, Switzerland, Italy and now France.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared "without the United States there is no NATO." In a fresh Al Jazeera interview Rubio appeared to issue a veiled threat, suggesting the US could pull the tens of thousands of troops which 'defend Europe' out of Europe.
First Spain, now France and Italy...

There is no painless option left. It's deflationary depression or crippling inflation.

There is a special kind of denial that only financial markets can sustain. It is the quiet insistence that everything is fine because the S&P is only down about 10%, as if that number alone captures the health of an entire financial system. It is the belief that until equities are in full free fall, nothing truly serious can be happening underneath.

But as we know, underneath, things are already starting to break.

That is the part people are not fully appreciating. If a modest correction is enough to expose fragility in private credit that is already spilling over to counterparties and sectors like real estate, what exactly happens when there is a real downturn, the kind that actually forces price discovery instead of delaying it?

It does not stop at private credit. Private credit flows into private equity, which depends on leverage to generate returns. Private equity flows into commercial real estate, which is already dealing with structural problems that have nothing to do with interest rates and everything to do with demand. Commercial real estate flows into regional banks, which hold the debt and rely on valuations that have not fully adjusted.

It is a chain reaction waiting for a trigger. We knew this heading into 2026.