Olga Ioffe 🇺🇦

Q: Can you explain why you’re sending 5,000 Marines and sailors? Trump: Shhhhhh. You’re a very obnoxious person

Fiona Hill, former White House advisor on Russia: "What Putin is negotiating, or trying to, is Trump handing over Ukraine to him: forcing Ukraine to capitulate, holding new elections, installing a new proxy leader, demilitarizing, neutralizing, and neutering Ukraine so it becomes essentially Belarus. That is not in the interests of Ukrainians; that's not what they want to negotiate."

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends. A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets. Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses. The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits. A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days. Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive. The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away. The investing angle nobody talks about. Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in. Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies. The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates. Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try. (a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

Trump: "We're always there for NATO. We're helping them with Ukraine. It's got an ocean in between us. It doesn't affect us, but we've helped them. It would be interesting to see what country wouldn't help us with a very small endeavor, which is just keeping the Strait open."

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not. And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters. The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves. It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news. When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen. Time for change!

Axios: Iranians will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed until they get a permanent peace deal, even if Trump TACO's. Privately, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials believe the crisis could continue for the next six months.

Germany rejects Trump’s proposal to participate in the Strait of Hormuz operation. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius: "What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot? This is not our war, and we didn't start it."