Benet Fusté

"We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media (...) These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour"

🚨🇮🇷🇺🇸Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: 🔴There are no direct talks between Tehran and Washington 🔴The U.S. president’s statements are part of efforts to reduce energy prices and buy time to implement his military plans 🔴Yes, there are initiatives from regional countries to reduce tensions, and our response to all of them is clear: we are not the party that started this war, and all such requests should be directed to Washington

FT reporting that Pakistan will start to run out of LNG in the coming days: ft.com/content/64c5a6…

We had a whole threat inflation media and commentary cycle this weekend about missiles that were possibly never fired.

The flow of liquefied natural gas from the Gulf is expected to come to an abrupt end in the next 10 days ft.trib.al/fbv1oLK

"Iran is going after the petrodollar system" Brother, they've already shut in 10 million barrels per day of Gulf crude oil production capacity. What petro?

BREAKING: The Israeli army has informed the Palestinian Military Liaison that all entrances and exits to multiple cities and towns across the West Bank will be closed today due to calls by settlers to attack Palestinian villages. Punishing Palestinians, who are the victims of settler terrorism, instead of those carrying out the attacks.

Unlike the Islamic Republic, Trump doesn’t have the benefit of time. He needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in days or, at most, weeks or oil prices would rally. He doesn’t have months to crank up the pressure on Iran via Kharg to accept a deal. Time favours Tehran. 🧵10/10

NETANYAHU: "If anyone needed an explanation of why Iran is the enemy of civilization, and the enemy and the danger to the entire world, you got it in the last 48 hours. They fired a terror weapon on civilians; on children!" By these standards, Israel is the ULTIMATE ENEMY of civilization: 50,000+ kids killed in Gaza, refugee tents bombed, and babies frozen to death under siege. Iran hits back once and suddenly it’s horror, while Gaza’s kids were “just collateral?” Give me a f*cking break. This is a pure evil double standard and should open the eyes of even the last one of you.

Netanyahu and Rupert Murdoch pushed Trump towards war, according to this Bloomberg report. Vance, Rubio and Wiles were less enthusiastic, but no one says no to Trump in his second term bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@shashj @owenjonesjourno Shashank, you didn’t just uncritically report these claims (which were being used by Israel to drum up support for genocide) you then implied anyone who questioned them had ulterior motives. x.com/michaeljswalke…

Former Reuters bureau chief who lost his job and is now struggling to survive as a taxi driver: "In my previous jobs, I interviewed prime ministers and CEOs (...) We are all improvising, all one broken transmission or missed paycheck away from something even worse (...) in the United States, more than 10,000 journalists lost their jobs between 2022 and 2024 (...) Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok have gobbled up the advertising dollars, and campy 30-second videos by influencers now deliver what passes for news on social media (...) my family (...) flew to Italy, where they could live rent-free in a family member’s home (...) After I said goodbye to them, I wept uncontrollably in the airport parking lot, not knowing when I would see them again (...) I trust an app to buy me another day"

NEW: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan held telephone conversations today • Iranian FM Abbas Arakchi • Egyptian FM Bedir Abdulati • EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas • US officials The talks focused on steps to bring the war to an end.

Risible—and frighteningly woolly thinking for a Hudson Institute scholar. Repeat after me: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is NOT the deterrent. The strategic aim of Iran is to stop the flow of oil through it in order to cause pain. Closure is just ONE means of doing so. THE REAL DETERRENT is the destruction of Gulf oil and gas infrastructure so that hydrocarbons do not reach the global economy IRRESPECTIVE OF WHETHER THE STRAIT IS OPEN OR NOT. If Iran pushes that button in response to some dumb Trump-Bibi escalation, we can expect GLOBAL depression. This in turn means mass starvation in the Third World, which in turn leads to a worldwide equivalent of the Arab Spring. In the developed world, ex-the, Russia and maybe China, it means mass unemployment, travel restrictions, mandatory WFH, and the victory for far more extreme versions of populism in Europe. It means command economies. It means aggressive, militaristic efforts to secure important national resources, and war when such efforts are disputed. It means the forced rewiring of the entire postwar civilisation. It is the final conflagration of the Fourth Turning. It is the violent sweeping away of the existing excess elites (per @Peter_Turchin). THIS is the potential threat now. It is not certain. But it is now in view as a realistic outcome. Would you play Russian roulette with one live bullet in a 100 slot cylinder revolver, even for a billion pounds? Me, neither. Yet our so called elites, cocooned as they have been in their sweet fantasy lives, are making puerile points about how their guy is now fully committed to total victory, and isn't that great, or something. If we have allowed the creation of a system in which such people get research positions at august institutions like Hudson, we deserve everything coming to us.

The world energy shock is coming — it will deepen inequality in ways we've seen before. Our new @newstatesman piece argues that without urgent government action, the Strait of Hormuz crisis will ripple through our economies and rip apart our societies. Here's why. 1/

Dimona is one of the most strategically important places in Israel, for many reasons. If Israel can't even intercept Iranian missiles aimed there, that is an obvious sign of the serious weakening of their air defenses, a development already widely reported.

Iranian hardline researcher and analyst Yaser Jebraili: What has become clearer today than ever before is a strategic truth: for the United States and the Zionist regime, the issue has never been the “bomb” as an offensive tool; rather, it is the “bomb” as a pillar of deterrence. What concerns them is not Iran’s potential to initiate war, but the impossibility of waging war against Iran. If the real concern were “nuclear offense,” the logic of their foreign policy would require them to confront other nuclear-armed states with the same intensity and sensitivity. Yet historical experience shows this is not the case. In dealing with established nuclear powers such as China and Russia, and even more unconventional actors like North Korea, the logic of engagement, containment, and coexistence has replaced threats and military action. Why? Because the cost of an attack in those cases exceeds the threshold of acceptability. In reality, what is being pursued with regard to Iran is not a neutral non-proliferation policy, but rather the preservation of a strategic imbalance—keeping Iran at a level where it can be threatened, sanctioned, and, if necessary, attacked without facing a devastating and uncontrollable response. Put more plainly, they do not merely say, “Iran must not have nuclear weapons”; in practice, they are saying, “Iran must not reach a level of deterrence that would make the cost of attacking it incalculable.” Within this framework, “becoming nuclear” is not an offensive objective but a shift in the security paradigm: a transition from structural vulnerability to a balance of threat. It is precisely this transition that conflicts with the strategic interests of the United States and the Zionist regime, because once achieved, the military option is effectively removed from the table, and the tools of pressure lose their effectiveness. Therefore, the core dispute is not about “having or not having a weapon,” but about the definition of power relations. What they truly fear is the emergence of an Iran that can no longer be addressed from a position of threat—an Iran that is not seeking war, but rather seeking to close the door to it. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the country’s nuclear doctrine.

Wrote about the Toll-gate war and why there will be no Free Hormuz coalition of the willing b/c it is already free for those who pay the toll and the emergence of multi-polarity w/ @ssmumbai on @BWBusinessworld businessworld.in/article/the-gr…

BREAKING: New U.S. license allows the sale of Iranian crude oil and petroleum products loaded on ships between March 20 and April 19.

🧵Very noteworthy findings by FIFA's Disciplinary Committee on Israeli clubs in illegal settlements, saying they are part of a "system of segregation" that breaches FIFA Statutes.👇 These were brazenly ignored in FIFA's decision yesterday to avoid any action against these clubs.

BREAKING: The Pentagon is preparing detailed plans for a possible U.S. ground force deployment in Iran, sources say. cbsn.ws/4bsFiCw