HMM: More than 1,600 European planes hit by mystery GPS jamming with Russia feared responsible.

Planes flying over and around the Baltic Sea in northern Europe have been suffering technical problems caused by jamming since Sunday, with 1614 planes, mostly civilian, reporting problems since then.

Such interference poses serious issues for pilots, as it can force them to contend with fake signals that give false information about the plane’s position in the sky.

A map posted on X by an open-source intelligence account that tracks interference shows incidents widely spread across Poland and southern Sweden.

Most of the incidents appear to be taking place in Polish airspace, OSINT blogs have reported that planes flying in German, Danish, Swedish, Latvian and Lithuanian airspace have suffered interference problems.

Notably, little to no interference appears to be taking place in Belarus, a staunch Russian ally, or Kaliningrad, the Russian province separated from the mainland by sea and land.

The jamming is almost certainly coming from Kaliningrad.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Let’s Talk About the Absolute Worst Thing in the World.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Boeing, NASA target May 1 for first crewed flight of Starliner to the space station.

Because this is a test flight, Wilmore and Williams, both astronauts with military test pilot experience, will perform some manual maneuvers during the trip to the ISS as well as on the return to Earth. Most of these actions won’t be needed during routine ferry flights to the station outside of emergency situations.

“What’s really kind of cool about Starliner is that it’s very much a pilot’s spacecraft. It’s really maneuverable,” Lammers said. “There’s close to 50 reaction-control and orbital maneuvering jets on it and there’s a stick. And what’s really cool about it is, when you have astronauts that are pilots, they really gravitate towards using it.”

Godspeed…

GOOD LORD: Canadian Man Allegedly Attacks 10-Year-Old Girl When Confronted About Being in Changing Room.

THE FALLOUT CONTINUES: More California fast food chains announce changes ahead of minimum wage hike.

In December, two major Pizza Hut franchise operators announced they would be laying off all in-house delivery drivers as a result of Assembly Bill 1228, which passed in the state Legislature and was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September.

The bill is seen as a critical cost-of-living boost for the approximately 700,000 quick-service restaurant workers in the Golden State who launched a statewide union last month after successfully lobbying for the wage increase.

Alexander Johnson, whose family owns 10 Auntie Anne’s and Cinnabon locations in California, told the WSJ that he has reduced his staff by about 10 employees and his 73-year-old parents have returned to working in the family business.

“It pains me to think about shutting down stores or laying people off,” said Johnson. “I love California, and I’m very sad about what’s going on.”

The owner of Round Table Pizza locations in California, Excalibur Pizza, said in a state WARN notice that it would eliminate 73 driver positions by mid-April.

An estimated 70% of Californians consume fast food each week.

KTLA 5 News consumer reporter David Lazarus says fast food operators find themselves at a crossroads that was paved, in large part, by their own success.

“This is a balancing act. Fast-food operators have the dual challenges of paying workers fairly while also keeping prices affordable. Unfortunately, this speaks more to an unsustainable business model than it does a need to keep wages in check,” Lazarus argues.

Well, no — it’s big, stupid government forcing an unsustainable business model on existing businesses.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The RFK Jr. Running Mate Nonsense Was a Welcome Break on a Dark Day. “Because nothing is allowed to make sense anymore, there was a curious amount of talk in center-right circles about whether Donald Trump should pick RFK Jr. as his running mate. I’m hoping those people were concussed and are feeling better now.”

INCENTIVES, HOW DO THEY WORK? New York City has begun paying migrants $1,400 every month for food & baby supplies

The first batch of debit cards, which are reportedly meant to be used by the illegal immigrants to purchase food and baby supplies, were handed out Monday to a handful of migrant families in the city, New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office confirmed to Fox News Digital.

The effort is part of a reported $53 million pilot program to hand out prepaid credit cards to migrant families housed in hotels despite public outcry.

The program, which the mayor’s office confirmed will provide migrant families of four with two children under 5 with up to $350 each week until the end of their stay, began with a limited number of families on Monday and will expand to about 115 families, or roughly 460 people, over the next week.

Plus: “New Jersey company Mobility Capital Finance has partnered with the city to run the program.”

Previously: Inside Mayor Adams’ migrant debit card boondoggle — no-bid bank will hand out thousands to border crossers.

A thousand dollars a month for 500 families for a year — a good time frame for a pilot — would cost $6 million.

The city could have written and signed a contract for about that amount — a contract that allowed for a well-defined pilot program with such well-defined costs, and a way to judge its results.

That’s not the contract the city signed — at all.

As the contract document clearly and explicitly states, over the year’s term, “in exchange for [MoCaFi’s] … performance of the services, the city shall pay to the contractor a total amount not to exceed $53 [million] … in accordance with the scope of services and fees.”

That “scope of services” does not include the money that the migrants actually receive on their debit cards.

The city funds the cards — that is, puts money on them — separately.

In other words: MoCaFi issues blank Mastercards, in bulk.

That’s it.

To be continued… and continued…

I DIDN’T LET MY KIDS INSTALL SOCIAL MEDIA APPS NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY BEGGED: DeSantis Signs Bill Restricting Social Media Access for Kids Under 14 Years Old.

THE COST OF WAR: 6,400 wounded being handled by Rehabilitation Dept, three times the number in 2022.

The Defense Ministry told the Knesset’s State Control Committee today (Tuesday) that its rehabilitation department is now handling some 6,400 wounded soldiers since the beginning of the war, a threefold increase compared to 2022.

Per the report, some 21% of those wounded suffer from head injuries or mental ailments.

The ministry said that it was working fast to increase the help it provides to all the wounded, including immediately contacting them at the hospital, adding hundreds of caregivers, providing a hotline, and assisting family members.

Nevertheless, the ministry said that Israel has never had to handle so many wounded in such a short time.

As awful as that sounds, it’s a testament to how smart the IDF is fighting that their casualties in five months of mostly urban combat have been unexpectedly low.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: It’s the End of the World As We Know It and the Normies Are FINALLY Waking Up. “My Spidey sense tells me your giggly ‘I don’t watch the news’ neighbor has finally gotten a whiff of reality.”

DOG BITES MAN: Joe Biden Tells a Huge Whopper to Make Key Bridge Collapse About Himself.

AND NOW FOR SOME GOOD EDUCATION NEWS: Classical ed — seen as ‘a white child’s education’ — is thriving in the Bronx.

Are the liberal arts conservative?, asks Emma Green in a New Yorker story about the revival of “classical education.” A growing number of classical-ed charter and private schools are offering “a traditional liberal-arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.”

Unlike many traditional public schools, “classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems,” she writes.

Reading lists aren’t trendy. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante,” writes Green. “In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.”

At Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, the middle school is calm and phone free, she writes.

“Classical education is often seen as a white child’s education,” says Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who co-founded Brilla using the slogan: “This is what the elite get.”

Yet Brilla, located in the poorest neighborhood of the Bronx, is filled with English Learners from Central America and West Africa, writes Green. Nearly 90 percent of students come from lower-income black and Hispanic families.

Brilla students attend a daily character class, “where they talk about how to live out the different virtues reflected in the texts they read,” she writes. Most classical schools emphasize ethics, not just academics.

More like this, please:

I MISSED THIS ON MONDAY BUT IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO REMEMBER: Today Is National Medal of Honor Day.

BOOKMARK THIS FOR LATER. IT MIGHT PROVE RELEVANT AS THE FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE INVESTIGATION GETS GOING:

This really is just too good pic.twitter.com/Q6TVbRcc08

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) March 26, 2024

BREAKING: RFK Jr. Picks Radical Leftist as Running Mate.

Not to toot my own horn but I told you so.

AL GORE HARDEST HIT: ‘There’s Been No Increase’: Scientists Debunk Climate Change Claims About Hurricanes.

A SAD BUT ALMOST INESCAPABLE CONCLUSION: Let’s Face It: The Hostages Are Probably Dead.

THIS IS NOT SURPRISING: ChatGPT linked to declining academic performance and memory loss in new study. “Moreover, the study uncovered significant adverse effects of ChatGPT usage on students’ personal and academic outcomes. Increased reliance on ChatGPT was associated with higher levels of procrastination and memory loss, and a negative impact on academic performance, as reflected in students’ grade point averages. These findings suggest that while ChatGPT can be a valuable resource under certain circumstances, its excessive use might lead to detrimental effects on learning behaviors and outcomes.”

CHUTZPAH: White House Claims Republicans Want to Defund the Police and I Can’t Stop Laughing.

NARRATOR: HE WILL NOT SIT DOWN.

For YEARS you have falsely claimed that Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. You spent years attacking people who didn't agree with your dangerous conspiracy theory. You can sit down.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 26, 2024

I’m not sure which is worse — whether Todd knows he’s lying or if he actually believes he’s part of some democracy-saving band of “honest journalists.”

NBC’s ratings and the general state of the mainstream media indicate that more and more people believe that Todd is lying.

UPDATE (From Ed): “Chuck Todd is the personification of everything wrong with NBC News, but he can’t be confronted as such by his bosses because they made him, they made all of them. You can’t lecture your kid against smoking with a Marlboro hanging out of your mouth, and can’t scold anyone for lying when you employ, well, literally everyone at NBC News. Not in any credible way, at least. Lucky for NBC News, credibility hasn’t been an issue or a goal for at least 10 years.”

BRUSSELS: EU rejects Apple’s European App Store changes: Company could be fined 10% of global turnover.

As we predicted, the EU has today announced that it is not satisfied with the changes Apple has made, and the company is now subject to a non-compliance investigation. Google and Meta are also under investigation for their own responses to the DMA.

Another DMA requirement was for Apple to ensure that iPhone users had a free choice of web browser. The company announced that it would make this possible with a new option screen during iPhone setup.

This has now been implemented, and seems to be having at least some small effect. However, the EU is not satisfied with the specifics of this – which may simply be down to the wording used. This one is likely to be easily resolved.

The maximum fines allowed under many laws are trivial for a company of Apple’s size – but this is not the case with the DMA.

Apple’s 2023 turnover was $383B, which could mean fines of up to $38 billion initially, rising to $76 billion.

Having strangled European innovation to death with regulation, the EU’s new mission is to bleed successful foreign innovators dry.

WE’RE SAVED! Kamala Harris Is Back in ‘The Border Czar Returns Again Part II: Electric Fence Boogaloo.’

SKYNET SMILES: Transformer Drones: Chinese Military UAV Swiftly Splits into Six Swarming Units. “Shumate revealed that if the threat were to suddenly multiply, it could present an opportunity to overwhelm the air defense resources in play. He further mentioned that if the drone were prepared for deployment and a conflict were to emerge today, it could potentially be a tactical game changer.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden and Harris Just Want to Be POTUS and VEEP of Dearborn, MI. “Now the masks are off of the few D.C. Democrats who were at least paying lip service to a strong alliance with Israel and they’re doing all they can to ensure that Hamas will be around. Maybe they can improve their standing with the anti-Semitic voters along the way.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise.

In San Jose, Brian Hom, owner of two Vitality Bowls restaurants, now runs his stores with two employees, versus four workers that he typically used in the past. That means it takes longer to make customers’ açaí bowls and other orders, and Hom said he is also raising prices by around 10% to help cover the increased labor costs.

“I’m definitely not going to hire anymore,” he said.

Proponents of the California law setting the new minimum food-worker wage and a state-appointed council overseeing it have said the measures would help improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of local workers. Organized labor groups have said they hope to replicate the law in other states.

The coming minimum-wage increase for California fast-food workers at bigger chains represents a 25% increase from the state’s broader $16 minimum wage. McDonald’s, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Jack in the Box and other restaurant chains have said they would raise menu prices in California to offset some of the cost.

Many California restaurant operators are looking for other ways to cover the cost, like reducing hours, closing during slower parts of the day or serving menu items that take less time to make.

“I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals. I’m leaving no stones unturned,” said Scott Rodrick, owner of 18 McDonald’s restaurants in Northern California.

Other restaurateurs, including Hom of Vitality Bowls, said they are turning down opportunities to open new locations in California and looking at expanding in other states instead.

Previously: “California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients.”

All they know how to do is make things worse.