White House Queries Ballroom Spend, Hormuz Maps, May 21

A Republican senator questioned why the Secret Service needs a billion dollars for a ballroom for Donald Trump, which is a question that could only be asked in a country where a president is both the most protected man on earth and also apparently the most demanding party planner in American history. The White House will decide if the ballroom gets built. What the ballroom will actually be used for is probably classified, but the price tag is public record.

The better news, if you can call it that, came from the UK: asylum seekers in hotels dropped 35% year-on-year, to 20,885. That sounds like a system working. The Home Office published the number, and the number is down. People will argue about what it means, but the direction is clear, and for once the words and the numbers point the same way. In Jamaica, an MP stood up in parliament and spoke Patois, which broke the rule that English is the only language allowed, and the country is now arguing about whether that rule is a postcolonial hangover or just a rule.

In DR Congo, the Ebola outbreak has killed 139 people, and it is a rare species of the virus, meaning the vaccines and treatments that exist for the more common strain may not work perfectly. The World Cup training camp was cancelled. The India-Africa summit was postponed. The armed conflict in eastern DRC is hampering containment. And the United States has imposed strict travel restrictions on Americans exposed to Ebola and hantavirus, which experts say could run counter to officials' previous rhetoric on public health measures, meaning the government is afraid of the disease but also afraid of how it looks to be afraid of the disease.

In France, Air France and Airbus were found guilty of corporate manslaughter for the 2009 crash that killed 228 people. The verdict is the latest milestone in a legal fight that has taken seventeen years. No amount of guilt can bring back 228 people, but the judgment says something about accountability in a world where accountability is often priced into the settlement. The US indicted Raul Castro for shooting down planes in 1996, thirty years ago. The charges are a message, not an arrest warrant. Cuba is 90 miles from Florida, and the US government is running out of patience with patience.

Anthropic bought Fractional AI, its first deal, backed by Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. The deal reportedly ended Fractional's partnership with OpenAI. Anthropic is also in talks to rent servers with Microsoft-designed chips. The AI arms race is now a real estate play: it is not about who has the better algorithm, it is about who can get access to the most electricity, the most chips, the most cooling towers. The physical world is what stops the digital world from scaling. Meanwhile, water covers 71% of the planet, and Iran just claimed armed forces oversight over 22,000 sq km of the most strategic waterway on earth. The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint for 20% of global oil. Iran published a map.

In England, 106 young care leavers died in the past year. Not old people in care homes. Young people who aged out of foster care and fell through the bottom of the system. Labour launched an urgent review. The word urgent is used a lot by governments. The 106 deaths happened anyway. The ballroom in Washington is a billion dollars. The Ebola outbreak in Congo is killing people and stopping football. The verdict in Paris came seventeen years late. The young care leavers in England got a review. The water in Hormuz is warm and blue and full of oil tankers, and the map Iran published is not a map of the sea. It is a map of the leverage.