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🇫🇮 Finland stays first as social media keeps dimming youth well-being. Finland is still the world’s happiest country. Costa Rica climbed to fourth this year. Nordic countries again dominated the top ranks. Researchers tied that stability to wealth, equality, welfare systems, and longevity. The report also carried a warning for younger people elsewhere. Life ratings fell sharply among under-25s in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Researchers said heavy social media use is part of the decline. Young people using it less than one hour daily reported the highest well-being. Adolescents now spend an estimated 2.5 hours a day on it. Happiness, it seems, still tracks better with trust and company than with an endless feed.

🌏 War forces energy triage as Asia scrambles to keep the lights on. The Iran war is pushing countries into energy triage. Asia is the most exposed region. Much of its imported fuel passes through the blocked Strait of Hormuz. That route carries about a fifth of global crude oil and liquefied natural gas trade. Governments are now choosing where to cut demand and where to eat the cost. Japan began releasing about 45 days of reserves this week. South Korea plans to release 22.46M barrels. India is already seeing household gas anxiety and longer queues. Analysts say reserve draws can buy time, not solve the underlying squeeze. The new politics of energy procurement is no longer a narrative about abundance, but controlled scarcity with a timer attached.

🕊️ The last campus protest detainee is out, but the crackdown lingers. Leqaa Kordia was released Monday from immigration detention in Texas. She was the last protester still held after Donald Trump’s 2025 campus crackdown. Kordia is Palestinian. She was freed on a $100K bond. She had spent over a year in custody. Her release turns a long-running detention fight into a political marker. Supporters treated the moment as vindication, not closure. The case had become a symbol of how far the crackdown reached. It also showed how protest can slide into immigration punishment. One release ends a chapter, but not the punitive ICE machinery that wrote it.

💰 American debt tops $39T, and the war only sharpens the contradiction. The American national debt passed $39T on Wednesday. The milestone arrived just weeks into the Iran war. It also arrived as Washington tries to spend bigger on defense and immigration enforcement, and less on healthcare, jobs, and education. Donald Trump had promised to reduce the debt. Instead, the bill keeps swelling while priorities multiply. The Government Accountability Office said rising debt raises borrowing costs for mortgages and cars. It also squeezes business investment, wages, and prices. Fiscal hawks warn that interest payments will force harsher tradeoffs ahead. Michael Peterson said the pace of growth is an alarming burden for the next generation. In a capital that loves grand promises, arithmetic remains the least pliable branch of government.

🏛️ Joe Kent quits over a war he says never met the test. Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He said he could not support the Iran war in good conscience. Kent’s resignation turned on the case used to justify the strikes. He said Iran posed no imminent threat. That claim cuts at the core of the administration’s rationale. Donald Trump responded by calling him weak on security. Trump said anyone who doubted Iran’s danger did not belong in his government. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said it was up to Trump to decide whether Iran was a threat. Kent had been a loyal Trump ally through years of political turbulence. The resignation turned a foreign war into a domestic credibility rupture.

🏦 Fed stands pat, Powell refuses to leave under pressure. The Federal Reserve (Fed) kept its key rate unchanged on Wednesday. Policymakers still forecast one additional cut this year. Jerome Powell said the Iran war makes the outlook unusually uncertain. He said nobody knows whether the economic effects will be bigger or smaller. He also said the Fed needs more progress on inflation before cutting again. Markets did not love the caution. Share prices fell after his comments. Powell also said he has no intention of leaving until the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into his testimony is dropped. A judge already threw out the subpoenas, but prosecutors plan to appeal. Powell is offering the same message on rates and tenure: not yet.

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