Resident doctors in England – the new name for junior doctors – are taking part in their 15th walkout in a long-running pay dispute.
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Digital Hopes, Real Power: How the Arab Spring Fueled a Global Surveillance Boom
This is the third installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the first post here, and the second here.
When people remember the 2011 uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), they picture crowded squares, raised phones, and the feeling that the internet had finally shifted the balance of power toward ordinary people. But the past decade and a half is also a story about how governments, companies, and platforms turned those same tools into the backbone of a powerful state surveillance apparatus.
For activists, journalists, and everyday users, that means now living with a constant threat: the phone in your pocket, the platforms you organize on, and the systems you rely on for safety and connection can be weaponized at the flip of a switch. A global surveillance industry has treated repression by many MENA governments as a growth opportunity, and the tactics refined there now shape digital authoritarianism worldwide. This essay traces how that shift unfolded: security agencies upgraded older systems of repression with new surveillance tools and permanent monitoring infrastructure; cybercrime laws and mercenary spyware markets turned digital control into standard operating procedure; and biometrics, facial recognition, and ‘smart city’ projects laid the groundwork for AI‑driven surveillance that now shapes protests, borders, and everyday life far beyond the region.
Remembering the Arab Spring today means seeing the events of 2011 as both a remarkable moment of movement history when people leveraged networked tools in their fight for freedom and the beginning of a long, grinding effort to turn those same tools into mechanisms of state control.
Old‑School Repression, New‑School Tools
Long before Facebook and Twitter, regimes in places like Egypt and Syria already knew how to crush dissent. They leaned on informant networks, physical surveillance, and wiretaps, backed by emergency laws that let security agencies monitor and detain critics with almost no restraint. Research on the use of surveillance technology in MENA shows that, even before the Arab Spring, states were layering early digital tools like internet monitoring, deep packet inspection, and interception centers on top of that older machinery of control.
At the same time, connectivity was racing ahead. Cheap smartphones and social media suddenly let people share information at scale, coordinate protests, and broadcast abuses in real time. In 2011, EFF described both the excitement around “Facebook revolutions” and the early signs that governments were scrambling to upgrade their capacity to watch and disorganize popular dissent.
After the uprisings, Western critics endlessly debated how much credit to give social media itself. While in the background, security agencies across several MENA states reached a much simpler conclusion: if networked communication can help topple a dictator, then they needed to embed themselves deep inside those networks. Analyses of the rise of digital authoritarianism in MENA show how quickly officials pivoted from being surprised by online organizing to building systems to monitor and pre‑empt it.
In the years after 2011, governments across the region poured money into expanding internet monitoring and deep packet inspection, investing heavily in tools that let them systematically watch what people said and did on major platforms. Foreign vendors set up monitoring centers and interception systems that let security agencies block tens of thousands of sites, scrape and analyze social media at scale, monitor activist pages and online communities, and track activists in real time. They took the lesson of 2011 and built a new, pre‑emptive model of digital control, one that assumes the state should see as much as possible, as early as possible.
As we noted in 2011, exporting permanent surveillance infrastructure to already‑abusive governments doesn’t “modernize” public safety; it locks in an architecture of control that is primed to abuse dissidents, journalists, and marginalized communities.
Domestic Lawfare and Cyber-Mercenaries
The surveillance tech stack was only half the story. After the uprisings, a number of governments also rewrote the rules that govern online life. Cybercrime laws, “fake news” provisions, and overbroad public‑order and ‘morality’ offences gave prosecutors and security agencies legal cover to act with impunity. Governments in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Jordan, and Egypt combined counterterrorism, cybercrime, defamation, and protest laws into a legal thicket designed to make online dissent feel dangerous and costly. Morality laws and cybercrime provisions are used to target queer and trans people based on identity and expression.
At the United Nations, a new global cybercrime convention now risks baking this logic into international law. The convention was adopted by the UN General Assembly in late 2024, despite serious human rights concerns raised by civil society. Echoing our partners, EFF warned at the time that the UN cybercrime draft convention remained too flawed to adopt and urged states to reject the draft language because it legitimized expansive surveillance powers and criminalized legitimate expression, security research, and everyday digital practices around the world.
While on paper, these instruments gesture to “public safety” objectives, in practice they function as pathways for state security agencies to monitor, prosecute, and silence the communities most at risk. For state-targeted communities, that makes being visible online a calculated risk, not a neutral choice.
But criminal codes are only half the story. Mercenary tech is the other.
As governments worldwide looked for ways to outpace their critics, a parallel market emerged to help them infiltrate and take over devices. Companies like NSO Group marketed Pegasus and similar tools as off‑the‑shelf capabilities for governments that wanted to hack a target’s cellphones or other devices to read messages, turn on microphones, and monitor entire social networks while bypassing the courts.
In 2019, UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of private surveillance tools until real, enforceable safeguards exist. Two years later, forensic work by Amnesty and media partners showed how the same spyware used to hack phones of Palestinian human‑rights defenders was used to surveil journalists, activists, lawyers, and political opponents across dozens of countries.
Regional groups responded by demanding an end to the sale of surveillance technology to autocratic governments and security agencies, arguing that you cannot keep selling “lawful intercept” tools into systems where law itself is an instrument of repression. Commercial spyware is at the center of digital repression, not at its margins. Surveillance vendors are not neutral suppliers. Safeguards remain weak, fragmented, or nonexistent in most of the countries buying these tools, yet vendors continue seeking new contracts and new militarized “use cases.” In other words, the companies that design, market, and maintain these systems precisely because they enable this kind of control profit from and help entrench authoritarian power.
Biometrics, Facial Recognition, and AI‑Powered Surveillance Cities
On top of this rapidly intensifying interception and spyware stack, governments and companies began layering biometrics and face recognition into everyday systems, creating pathways for bulk data collection, automated analysis, and risk profiling. In parts of MENA, national ID schemes, border and migration controls, and centralized biometric databases have been rolled out in environments with weak or captured data‑protection laws, making it easy to link people’s movements, services, and political activity to a single, persistent identifier.
Humanitarian programs are not exempt from this protocol. In Jordan, Syrian refugees have been required to submit iris scans and biometric data to access cash assistance and food, turning “consent” into a precondition for survival. When access to aid depends on enrollment in centralized biometric systems, any breach, misuse, or repurposing of that data can have severe, life‑altering consequences for people who have no realistic way to opt out. Investigations into surveillance‑tech firms complicit in abuses in MENA show that vendors profit from supplying biometric and surveillance tools for migration management and internal security, even when those tools are used in discriminatory or abusive ways.
Mass, indiscriminate surveillance technologies were first piloted in MENA on people who are already criminalized or made vulnerable by poverty, but their use quickly expanded from narrow, security‑framed deployments at borders and checkpoints to routine use in welfare offices, aid distribution sites, and city streets. As hardware for sensors, cameras, and data storage got cheaper and “smart city” surveillance systems promised seamless security and services, it became easier and less politically contentious to keep these systems running everywhere, all the time.
Unlike targeted hacking tools, these broad, city‑wide surveillance infrastructures built on camera networks, persistent sensors, and biometric databases erase any practical line between people under investigation and the broad public, normalizing bulk, indiscriminate monitoring of public space and everyday movement. In the Gulf, facial recognition and dense sensor networks are increasingly built into high‑profile “smart city” and mega‑project plans that lean heavily on biometric and AI‑driven monitoring. These are security‑first development projects where biometric and sensor infrastructures are designed from the outset to embed policing, migration control, and commercial tracking into the urban fabric. In this vision of the Gulf’s “smart city” future—often sold as seamless services and digital opportunity—“smart” is the branding, and pervasive monitoring is the operating principle.
EFF has consistently opposed government use of face recognition and biometric surveillance, in some instances calling for outright bans. In contexts that treat peaceful dissent as a security threat, embedding biometric surveillance into everyday infrastructure locks in a balance of power that favors militarized policing and state control. That infrastructure is now the starting point for a new set of risks. Surveillance systems built over the last decade are being repackaged as the foundation for a new generation of “AI‑enabled” defense and security products.
Companies that once focused on video management or perimeter security now advertise “defense applications” for AI‑driven situational awareness and threat detection, using computer‑vision models to scan camera feeds, compare against existing watchlists, and flag “suspicious” people or behaviors in real time. Drone and sensor platforms are being upgraded with embedded AI that tracks and classifies targets autonomously and with “drone‑based AI threat detection and intelligent situational awareness,” turning aerial surveillance into a continuous data feed for security agencies and militaries. In smart‑city and defense expos from the Gulf to Europe and North America, similar systems are marketed as neutral efficiency upgrades or tools to “protect critical infrastructure,” even where they are explicitly designed to scale up border enforcement, protest surveillance, and internal security operations.
As these systems are folded into AI‑driven defense products, the line between “civilian” infrastructure and militarized surveillance disappears, turning streets, borders, and aid sites into continuous input for security operations. That is the landscape that human rights and accountability efforts now have to confront.
Templates of Control, Networks of Resistance
The patterns established in heavily securitized MENA states after the Arab Spring now shape how states monitor and crush more recent uprisings, from Iran’s use of location data and facial recognition to track down protesters to long‑running crackdowns elsewhere in the region. This model of “digital authoritarianism” built on spyware, data‑hungry ID systems, platform control, and emergency‑style security laws has emerged everywhere from Latin America to Eastern Europe to here in the United States. As the new UN Cybercrime Convention moves toward implementation, its broad offences and surveillance powers risk turning this ad hoc toolkit into a formal template for cross‑border data‑sharing, repression, and an all‑purpose global surveillance instrument.
For people on the ground, none of this is theoretical. Human‑rights defenders, journalists, and ordinary users across the region face arrest, long prison sentences, and exile based on their digital traces. In that landscape, commercial spyware is not a side issue but part of the core machinery of repression. Pegasus has been used to hack journalists’ phones through zero‑click exploits and compromise human‑rights defenders and watchdog organizations themselves, including staff at Amnesty’s Pegasus Project partners and Human Rights Watch. These deployments give practical effect to the “cybercrime” and “terrorism” frameworks described earlier: person‑by‑person campaigns against particular communities, contacts, and networks, rather than neutral, generalized security measures.
Under these conditions, everyday security becomes a second job. People describe carrying multiple phones, keeping one for relatively “clean” uses and others for riskier conversations, splitting identities across platforms, using coded language, and moving their organizing off mainstream services when possible. Pushing this burden onto users is a political choice: states, platforms, and vendors could build systems that are safe by design; instead, they externalize risk to the people they watch and punish.
Even against that backdrop, civil society organizations have refused to cede the terrain to security agencies and vendors. Regional coalitions have demanded strict export controls and outright bans on selling intrusive surveillance tech to autocratic governments
Advocates have also pushed companies to do more than box‑ticking “due diligence.” Work with surveillance‑tech firms in the context of migration and border control has repeatedly shown that most are still far from serious human‑rights assessments, let alone willing to turn down these lucrative contracts.
Many of the same governments that have been critical of others on the issue of human rights have hosted or licensed companies that build these tools, in some cases buying similar capabilities for their own security agencies. European authorities, for instance, have investigated FinFisher’s export of spyware “made in Germany” to Turkey and other non‑EU governments. Meanwhile, the NSO Group has at least 22 Pegasus contracts with security and law‑enforcement agencies in 12 EU countries. This is a transnational industry, not a localized problem.
Against near impossible odds, people continue finding pathways to freedom. The global surveillance sector reinforces the same hierarchies and violence that people have found ways to survive against for generations. Queer activists and others at the sharpest edges of this system have had to develop their own forms of resistance, including against biometric and data‑driven targeting. Encryption, circumvention tools, and security training are not silver bullets, but they remain essential for anyone trying to organize, document abuses, or simply exist online with a bit less risk. Resources like EFF’s Surveillance Self‑Defense are one piece of that ecosystem, alongside trainers and groups who have been doing this work on the ground for years.
Remembering the Arab Spring in this context means not only tracing how surveillance expanded in its wake, but lifting up the people and coalitions who are still pushing back against that infrastructure today.
Defending the Future of Digital Dissent
The Arab Spring is often remembered through images of packed squares and hopeful tweets. But living with its aftermath means confronting the surveillance architecture built in its shadow: laws that turn online speech into a crime, spyware and biometric systems that turn phones and faces into tracking beacons, and platform practices that routinely sacrifice the people most at risk. None of that is inevitable, and none of it is confined to one part of the world.
Accountability has to reach both governments and the companies that profit from arming them with these tools. That means pushing for far stronger limits on how surveillance tech is built, sold, and deployed; demanding meaningful transparency when these systems are used; and defending the tools people rely on to communicate and organize safely, including robust encryption and secure channels. It also means taking direction from people in the region who have been navigating and resisting this landscape for years, rather than only paying attention once similar abuses show up elsewhere.
Surveillance itself is transnational: tools are exported, playbooks are copied, and data moves across borders as easily as money. And so we continue our work, documenting abuses, sharing security knowledge, and collectively organizing against these violent systems.
This is the third installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.
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EU Parliament Blocks Mass-Scanning of Our Chats—What’s Next?
The EU’s so-called Chat Control plan, which would mandate mass scanning and other encryption breaking measures, has had some good news lately. The most controversial idea, the forced requirement to scan encrypted messages, was given up by EU member states. And now, another win for privacy: the EU Parliament has dealt a real blow to voluntary mass-scanning of chats by voting to not prolong an interim derogation from e-Privacy rules in the EU. These rules allowed service providers, temporarily, to scan private communication.
But no one should celebrate just yet. We said there is more to it, and voluntary scanning is a key part. Unlike in the U.S., where there is no comprehensive federal privacy law, the general and indiscriminate scanning of people’s messages is not legal in the EU without a specific legal basis. The e-Privacy derogation law, which gave (limited) cover for such activities, has now expired. Does that mean mass scanning will stop overnight?
Not really.
Companies have continued similar scanning practices during past gaps. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap have already signaled in a joint statement to “continue to take voluntary action on our relevant Interpersonal Communication Services.” Whether this indicates continued scanning of our private communication is not entirely clear, but what is clear is that such activity would now risk breaching EU law. Then again, lack of compliance with EU data protection and privacy rules is nothing new for big tech in Europe.
Most importantly, the “Chat Control” proposal for mandatory detection of child abuse material (CSAM) is still alive and being negotiated. It has shifted the focus toward so-called risk mitigation measures, such as problematic age verification and voluntary activities. If platforms are expected to adopt these as part of their compliance, they risk no longer being truly voluntary. While mass scanning may be gone on paper, some broader concerns remain.
So, where does this leave us? The immediate priority is to make sure the expired exception for mass scanning is not revived. At the same time, lawmakers need to pull the teeth from the currently negotiated Chat Control proposal by narrowing risk mitigation measures. This means ensuring that age verification does not become a default requirement and “voluntary activities” are not turned into an expectation to scan our communications.
As we said before, this is a zombie proposal. It keeps coming back and must not be allowed to return through the back door.
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Ross Douthat’s Shoddy Arguments For Religion
According to Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, a growing share of Americans identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” These so-called “nones” made up 16 percent of the population in 2007, but 29 percent in the latest survey, from 2023-24. The trend among younger Americans is even more striking. In this latest survey, 43 percent of those born in the ’90s and early aughts identified as nones.
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Russia Hacked Routers to Steal Microsoft Office Tokens
Hackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.
Microsoft said in a blog post today it identified more than 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices that were caught up in a stealthy but remarkably simple spying network built by a Russia-backed threat actor known as “Forest Blizzard.”
How targeted DNS requests were redirected at the router. Image: Black Lotus Labs.
Also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard is attributed to the military intelligence units within Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). APT 28 famously compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
Researchers at Black Lotus Labs, a security division of the Internet backbone provider Lumen, found that at the peak of its activity in December 2025, Forest Blizzard’s surveillance dragnet ensnared more than 18,000 Internet routers that were mostly unsupported, end-of-life routers, or else far behind on security updates. A new report from Lumen says the hackers primarily targeted government agencies—including ministries of foreign affairs, law enforcement, and third-party email providers.
Black Lotus Security Engineer Ryan English said the GRU hackers did not need to install malware on the targeted routers, which were mainly older Mikrotik and TP-Link devices marketed to the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Instead, they used known vulnerabilities to modify the Domain Name System (DNS) settings of the routers to include DNS servers controlled by the hackers.
As the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) notes in a new advisory detailing how Russian cyber actors have been compromising routers, DNS is what allows individuals to reach websites by typing familiar addresses, instead of associated IP addresses. In a DNS hijacking attack, bad actors interfere with this process to covertly send users to malicious websites designed to steal login details or other sensitive information.
English said the routers attacked by Forest Blizzard were reconfigured to use DNS servers that pointed to a handful of virtual private servers controlled by the attackers. Importantly, the attackers could then propagate their malicious DNS settings to all users on the local network, and from that point forward intercept any OAuth authentication tokens transmitted by those users.
DNS hijacking through router compromise. Image: Microsoft.
Because those tokens are typically transmitted only after the user has successfully logged in and gone through multi-factor authentication, the attackers could gain direct access to victim accounts without ever having to phish each user’s credentials and/or one-time codes.
“Everyone is looking for some sophisticated malware to drop something on your mobile devices or something,” English said. “These guys didn’t use malware. They did this in an old-school, graybeard way that isn’t really sexy but it gets the job done.”
Microsoft refers to the Forest Blizzard activity as using DNS hijacking “to support post-compromise adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks on Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections against Microsoft Outlook on the web domains.” The software giant said while targeting SOHO devices isn’t a new tactic, this is the first time Microsoft has seen Forest Blizzard using “DNS hijacking at scale to support AiTM of TLS connections after exploiting edge devices.”
Black Lotus Labs engineer Danny Adamitis said it will be interesting to see how Forest Blizzard reacts to today’s flurry of attention to their espionage operation, noting that the group immediately switched up its tactics in response to a similar NCSC report (PDF) in August 2025. At the time, Forest Blizzard was using malware to control a far more targeted and smaller group of compromised routers. But Adamitis said the day after the NCSC report, the group quickly ditched the malware approach in favor of mass-altering the DNS settings on thousands of vulnerable routers.
“Before the last NCSC report came out they used this capability in very limited instances,” Adamitis told KrebsOnSecurity. “After the report was released they implemented the capability in a more systemic fashion and used it to target everything that was vulnerable.”
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The $5 Million Shadow Bank: California Man Admits to Funneling Cybercrime Cash
A California man pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business that funneled more than $5 million across international borders, spotlighting the critical role shadow networks play in the global cybercrime ecosystem.
By acting as an illicit intermediary between fraud victims and the ultimate beneficiaries, operations like his deliberately obscure the financial paper trail, making illicit transactions significantly harder for law enforcement to detect while laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen funds.
The man, Ifeanyi Emmanuel Ugwu, 49, of Bakersfield, admitted in federal court to deliberately bypassing the licensing requirements mandated by United States law to track financial flows and combat money laundering.
From December 2020 to August 2023, Ugwu operated the illicit network through his company, Franklin Finance Inc., according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California. Court records detail an elaborate effort to evade detection, claiming Ugwu opened and controlled 20 accounts across nine banks and financial institutions, relying on false statements to deceive bank officials and customers alike about the true nature of his enterprise to keep the operation running.
Over the nearly three-year period, Ugwu received funds from more than 100 people across the United States, systematically transferring the money to recipients in countries including China and Nigeria. Prosecutors stated that approximately $580,000 of the total sum was traced directly to victims of various fraud and cybercrime schemes, though authorities did not elaborate on the specific nature of the underlying scams.
Ugwu is scheduled to be sentenced in July and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
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Romania Lifts Judicial Control on Tate Brothers
A Romanian court has lifted all preventive judicial control measures, including mandatory police check-ins, against internet personality Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, according to The Telegraph. The final, unappealable ruling removes the remaining pre-trial restrictions stemming from the dual U.S.-British citizens’ December 2022 arrest on human trafficking and rape charges, which defense lawyer Eugene Vidineac said confirms the case was built on “questionable evidence.”
The brothers, who deny all wrongdoing, still face a second Romanian criminal investigation involving allegations of trafficking minors and money laundering, as well as pending extradition to Britain. In an exclusive statement to the British newspaper, Tristan Tate accused Romanian authorities of corruption and said he and his brother are currently in Uzbekistan, adding that he had faced various forms of detention for more than three years while prosecutors “were left holding absolutely nothing.”
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The Iran War Is Changing How People Cook — and What They Eat
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
About a decade ago, India’s government began subsidizing the purchase of liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, to promote greater adoption among its lower-income citizens. Switching to the gas was considered a safer and more reliable alternative to burning wood and coal for cooking at home, which families in resource-strapped rural areas were still doing en masse. Ever since, the fuel has become ubiquitous. The bulk of Indian households prepare most of their food with it, and typically use a few cylinders of LPG every year, an amount that varies depending on whether they are in rural or urban communities.
In all that time, Subhash Kapoor hadn’t had much trouble securing cooking gas. Kapoor, who works as a driver in Noida, on the outskirts of New Delhi, lives with his wife and three children. A single gas cylinder would cost about Rs. 900 (about $10) and last about 40 days for the family. The process to secure one had become painless and routine: Every couple of months or so, he would place a call to a nearby gas agency, and the cylinders would be delivered to his home. In January, Kapoor did just that and received two cylinders, the maximum a household is allowed to keep at any given time.
“I had no issues getting a cylinder in January,” said Kapoor, speaking in Hindi. “I thought the cylinders were easily available. Whenever I called, they would send them home.”
“I had no issues getting a cylinder in January.”
That changed in early March. As the U.S.-Israel war with Iran took off, the Middle Eastern country shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key channel for the flow of oil and, in particular, liquified petroleum gas, which more than 2 billion people across Asia and Africa rely on for cooking.
With the flow of trade through the Strait halted due to the conflict, a cooking gas shortage has swept across the country. India is particularly vulnerable because it is the world’s second largest importer of LPG. Last year, imports accounted for roughly 60 percent of India’s supply, 90 percent of which came from the Middle East.
Panic set in among those dependent on LPG for cooking. Out of the blue, Kapoor received a text message saying that he’d picked up his allotment of cylinders for March — even though he hadn’t. When he called the agency, he says he was told he wouldn’t be able to get another cylinder until the end of the month. Kapoor suspects that the agency sold his allotment off in the black market, where prices were surging.
People began hoarding gas cylinders, and in the Delhi area, prices skyrocketed by 600 percent. Some people stood in line for three or four days to get LPG cylinders.
With his own supply running low, Kapoor had little choice but to turn to the black market. About three weeks ago, he purchased a cylinder for Rs. 3,600 (about $39), more than three times what he usually pays. Kapoor’s been able to schedule another delivery from the gas agency for April, and he’s hoping he won’t have to rely on the black market again.
Supporters of a local party in Kolkata march to protest the gas shortage in March 2026. Rupak De Chowdhuri / NurPhoto / Getty Images via Grist The shortage has forced restaurants across the country to close, while others have stripped staple meals like butter chicken and dosa that require more gas to prepare from menus. Everywhere from hospital kitchens to corporate businesses and school cafeterias have reported shortfalls. In Mumbai, street food vendors who serve chaat, vada pav, and other snacks that school children and day laborers rely on, are closing up shop, drastically altering their menus, or securing cylinders from the black market but hiding them in gunny sacks for fear of discovery. University students living on campus have also seen their dining options scaled back, with some colleges allowing students to cook in their dorm common areas.
For those who can afford it, induction stoves have become a popular option. The electric, plug-in stovetops sell for the equivalent of $20 to $30, and they’ve been flying off shelves. The demand for these stoves is so high that some manufacturers are running out of stock. But the stoves are only a possibility for those who can afford the upfront cost and live in homes with reliable electricity. Lower-income rural communities are much more likely to revert to burning wood and coal, said Dawit Guta, an economist at the University of Northern British Columbia who has studied the clean energy transition in India.
“Rural areas, they don’t have any other option,” he said. “This is the biggest challenge the sector is facing.”
When cooking gas becomes scarce or unaffordable, households begin making impossible choices, according to Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under Biden. Many households throughout India are reverting to burning firewood, charcoal, even food scraps — a regression that carries its own serious health costs. The indoor air pollution generated by these practices puts families, particularly women and children who are most often home during food preparation, at heightened risk of heart disease, respiratory illness, and other harmful health conditions.
For those who can afford it, induction stoves have become a popular option.
Some families may even skip meals, according to Marcho. And people’s diets are likely to shift away from nutritious staples that require longer cooking times toward faster-cooking foods or nonperishables that need no preparation at all. The tradeoffs, she said, are as much nutritional as they are economic.
The crisis has not yet tipped into a full-blown humanitarian emergency, but it is already disrupting everyday life and food access in tangible ways. Manufacturers that rely on LPG are also feeling the squeeze, meaning the damage extends well beyond restaurants and home kitchens. “We sometimes forget that food systems, and energy systems are deeply interconnected. So a disruption in one of these can quickly affect other parts of the system. We’re seeing this unfold in real-time right now,” said Marcho. “Cooking gas feels like a small piece of this puzzle,” she added, “but when you’re thinking about food systems broadly, and how everything’s connected, it can make a big impact on global food security.”
Meanwhile, the global food system is straining on all fronts. Fertilizer costs are spiking in tandem with fuel prices, making agricultural inputs more expensive. Packaging and shipping costs are rising, too. Every pressure point along the food supply chain, Marcho said, is getting more expensive — and all at once.
Economists predict that other nations with thinner margins that rely on LPG imports through the Persian Gulf could see similar cooking gas shortage patterns in the near future — among those in Asia are Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Countries with relatively strong economic growth and ongoing industrialization, such as Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, are also likely to face significant access challenges. These countries don’t depend on the Middle East for fuel to prepare food, but they do depend on the region for a stable energy supply, which, when disrupted, can show up in escalating grocery costs.
A man cooks using a coal-fired oven amid a shortage of commercial LPG cylinders in Kolkata, India, in March 2026. Debajyoti Chakraborty / NurPhoto / Getty Images via Grist But that’s just the near-term picture. If the Strait’s closure persists well into the rest of the year, Chris Barrett, an agricultural and development economist at Cornell, warns we could see it exacerbate the food accessibility crisis across multiple African nations, too. Those that are heavily reliant on LPG and food imports and already among the most food-insecure — such as Senegal, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, and Mozambique — are highly vulnerable. Others, such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania, have been shifting to domestic production of LPG, which offers some buffer, but because of fertilizer shortfalls and rising food prices, no part of the continent is insulated. Global food commodity prices rose in March for the second month in a row, due largely to energy inflation from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO. If the conflict stretches beyond 40 days and high input costs persist, pronounced effects on global food supply and commodity costs are expected through the rest of the year and all of 2027.
Further down the line, Barrett argues that the war’s fallout could very well prop up the clean energy transition in some of the regions facing the more pronounced consequences. Some world leaders are already calling for a rapid transition amid skyrocketing oil prices as they enact emergency measures to protect supplies and slow inflation. South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung even recently urged the country to rapidly shift to renewable energy while confessing the situation is “so severe even I can’t sleep at night.”
“I suspect that this is most likely to generate a bit of a slowdown in, for example, installation of new solar capacity across big parts of the low and middle income world,” said Barrett. “But once you get beyond the present pressing financial constraints, the incentives to move more rapidly to solar, in particular, or to a lesser degree, geothermal or wind, are massive. I mean, this is really illustrating the hazards of being dependent upon hydrocarbon shipped from halfway around the world, where the supply chain is very easily disrupted.”
Global food commodity prices rose in March for the second month in a row.
Others, like Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University, aren’t so sure. Because of the economic strain created by the conflict, nation-level progress toward the U.N.’s sustainable development targets, for example, are more likely to see at least a short-term regression on the aim to transition billions of households away from using coal, kerosene, or solid biomass as primary cooking fuels, according to Lee.
For now, Lee warns that if disruptions to the Persian Gulf’s flow of trade continue, no region will go unscathed.
In a televised address to the American people on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump stated that talks with Iran are ongoing, but did not clarify when he expects the war to end. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” said Trump. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” Over the weekend, the president vowed to target Iran’s power plants and bridges, warning that the country would be “living in Hell” if the Strait isn’t reopened by Tuesday. Iran, for its part, has refuted the president’s claim of direct discussions.
Even nations in the Western Hemisphere, including the U.S., “are not immune” to the downstream effects on the global food system, Lee said. “Eventually, it’s a matter of time. Everybody will be directly, or indirectly, affected by this.”
The post The Iran War Is Changing How People Cook — and What They Eat appeared first on Truthdig.
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Trump’s Pledge: Cut Medicare and Medicaid To Pay for War
No one ever accused the Democrats of being competent at politics, but with Trump leading the opposition, it shouldn’t take much competence to win. Ordinarily, politicians look to twist their opponents’ words to put them in a more negative light. But Trump has done that job for them.
Last week, Trump said:
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
This is both an absurd statement — we have been paying for Medicare and Medicaid for six decades — and runs directly counter to Trump’s most fundamental campaign promise of putting America first. Trump insisted he would not get involved in foreign wars, especially in the Middle East, and defend these programs that more than 100 million people depend on.
Now, Trump has flipped 180 degrees on putting America first. He says he only wants to pay for his wars and forget about people’s health care.
And just to drive home the point, there was a reason Trump made this promise. Medicare and Medicaid are hugely popular; wars in the Middle East, and especially wars of choice, are not. Trump’s comments should be the reddest of red meat for Democrats looking to challenge Republican candidates this fall.
Trump’s Military Buildup is Real Money
It is also important to realize that Trump is proposing to use huge sums for his military. The media have made a practice of having deliberately uninformative budget reporting. They routinely report huge numbers in the millions, billions, and trillions, without any context, knowing that almost none of their readers have any comprehension of their meaning.
But Trump’s budget request is real money, by any standard. The military budget for 2025 was $862 billion. Adjusting that up by 6 percent for inflation would put it at $914 billion in 2027. Instead, Trump is asking for $1,500 billion, a difference of $584 billion, an increase of 64 percent.
And to be clear, this is for a single year. If this is summed over a decade, as is common in budget debates, it would be $5.8 trillion, far more than the huge tax bill Trump pushed through last summer (the “One Big Beautiful Bill). It swamps everything else that becomes a huge debate topic in Washington.
Yes, I did use this graph a couple of weeks ago, but that was when the issue was just the $200 billion that Trump was going to ask for his war in Iran. Now we’re looking at an even bigger military request. And I didn’t forget to include the bars for the Minnesota fraud that Trump constantly hypes, or the nixed funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are too small to see next to Trump’s military spending request.
And just to be 100 percent clear, this demand for more military spending is entirely coming out of Donald Trump’s dementia. This is like when he said that he had to deploy National Guard troops to Washington, DC, because people were scared to go out to restaurants. I lived in DC for more than a quarter century and still know plenty of people there. This was lunacy. There are some high-crime areas (mostly poor and Black), but most of the city is very safe, and the restaurant industry was thriving.
The vast majority of people would rather see their tax dollars go to something useful.
Similarly, Trump was insisting that he needed to deploy National Guard troops to Portland last summer and fall because the city was burning down. He said the stores had all closed down or were boarded up because people kept breaking the windows. This would be news to anyone in Portland, which is a beautiful, peaceful city with plenty of stores with big windows.
Trump’s big military request is more of this nonsense, but with a hugely larger price tag. Who are the enemies that we need to spend so much money to protect against, Russia, with an economy less than one quarter the size of ours?
China does have an economy that is one-third larger than ours, but until recently it was our largest trading partner, not an enemy. It is more than a bit crazy that Donald Trump is looking to make enemies around the world so that he can demand absurd amounts of military spending and then tell us we can’t afford to pay for healthcare and childcare.
This is not a tough question. Congress needs to tell Trump that he can’t have another $580 billion for unnecessary wars and an endless supply of big weapons for him and Pete Hegseth to play with. The vast majority of people would rather see their tax dollars go to something useful.
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