March 27 2025

Energy Security Shifts from Oil to Electricity as Demand Surges

Trump Imposes 25% Tariff on Imported Autos

Tufts Student’s Arrest by DHS Sparks Outrage, Free Speech Debate

GSK Alleges Pfizer Delayed Covid Vaccine News Until After 2020 Election

JD Vance’s Anti-Europe Stance Signals Strained U.S.-EU Ties

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1. Energy Security Shifts from Oil to Electricity as Demand Surges

Americans have long equated energy security with oil. The country wanted as much as possible because of the havoc an interruption to supply—from wars, disasters and political convulsions—can cause. In coming years, though, energy security will mean electricity. Power demand, stagnant for decades, is now growing rapidly, for data centers to run artificial intelligence and other digital services and, in time, transportation and buildings. An economy dependent on electricity will be different from one dependent on oil. It will require mammoth investment in generation, distribution and transmission. It will challenge regulators and political leaders, as the supply and price of electricity become as politically potent as that of gasoline.

Source: WSJ

2. Trump Imposes 25% Tariff on Imported Autos

President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported automobiles and auto parts, gambling that consumers will accept higher prices on cars today in return for the promise of regaining lost manufacturing jobs in the future. Speaking in the Oval Office, the president said he was acting to encourage the return of auto manufacturing to the United States, predicting “tremendous growth” in the industry and enormous new tax revenue for the U.S. Treasury. “We’ll effectively be charging a 25 percent tariff. But if you build your car in the United States, there is no tariff,” Trump told reporters. Vehicles that meet the duty-free requirements of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement will be taxed only on the non-U.S. portion of their components, the White House said.
Source: Washington Post

3. Tufts Student’s Arrest by DHS Sparks Outrage, Free Speech Debate

As Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk made her way to an interfaith center to break the Ramadan fast on Tuesday, plainclothes agents, some masked, descended on her. She screamed as an unmasked agent in a hooded sweatshirt grabbed her, security video shows. Within about a minute, the agents whisked her away in handcuffs. The widely circulated video of the agents — who Ozturk’s lawyer said belonged to the Department of Homeland Security — sent shock waves through the community as thousands turned out in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Wednesday demanding her release. Ozturk, 30, is a Fulbright scholar doing a PhD in child study and human development on an F-1 student visa at the Boston-area university, her lawyer Mahsa Khanbabai said in an email. “We should all be horrified at the way DHS spirited away Rumeysa in broad daylight,” she wrote, adding that Ozturk has not been accused of committing any crime. A federal district judge, considering a petition from her lawyers, ordered agents on Tuesday not to move the student out of Massachusetts without advance notice. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator page showed Ozturk’s location as Louisiana late Wednesday. President Donald Trump has promised to deport international students he alleges are engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American” campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. But critics and lawyers for the students say they that are being targeted for expressing their political beliefs and that the government is trampling on the First Amendment right to free speech. “Trump sent masked law enforcement officers to arrest Rumeysa Ozturk — a Tufts University grad student with legal status — without a criminal charge,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) wrote. “Disappearances like these are part of Trump’s all-out assault on our basic freedoms.”
Source: Washington Post

4. GSK Alleges Pfizer Delayed Covid Vaccine News Until After 2020 Election

Soon after President Trump won the presidential election in November, British drugmaker GSK brought an unusual claim to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election. The scientist disputes that account of what he told colleagues. But prosecutors are taking a closer look at what GSK shared with them, which is potentially politically explosive. Trump for years has claimed that Pfizer sat on the positive results of clinical trials, which could have reflected well on his management of the pandemic and reassured voters as they headed to the polls. There has never been evidence to support the accusation, and the development of the Covid vaccines is widely viewed as a medical miracle, coming faster than any other vaccine in history. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has interviewed at least two people in connection with the allegation, including a GSK executive who took notes of a conversation with the former Pfizer scientist, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. The scientist, Phil Dormitzer, led Pfizer’s viral vaccine research and development before moving to GSK in 2021.
Source: WSJ

5. JD Vance’s Anti-Europe Stance Signals Strained U.S.-EU Ties

European leaders had hoped that Vice President JD Vance’s antagonism was a political show to build domestic support. Now, after Vance expressed disdain for Europe in a private text chat about Yemen attack details, officials are coming to terms with a vocal vice president whose antipathy for Europe appears to run deep. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he said regarding planned U.S. strikes against Houthi rebels, in an exchange published by the Atlantic magazine. He told fellow administration officials that the U.S. was “making a mistake” by hitting the Houthis, whose attacks on Red Sea shipping have scrambled global shipping routes. He noted that only “3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth replied to Vance’s comments: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” Vance has played a leading role in sharpening tensions between Washington and Europe, articulating a degree of contempt for the continent that transcends President Trump’s milder scorn. He lambasted European democracies in a speech in Munich last month, calling European Union officials “commissars.” He once called Ukraine “a country I don’t care about.” In the Oval Office recently he berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of Trump and international media.

Editors note: Vance is current the top 2028 GOP Presidential candidate, signally rough times ahead for US-Europe affairs
Source: WSJ

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March 27, 1939: “March Madness” crowns its first men’s NCAA Champion

The University of Oregon defeats The Ohio State University 46–33 on March 27, 1939 to win the first-ever NCAA men’s basketball tournament. "March Madness," as the tournament became known, has grown exponentially in size and popularity since 1939. By 2005, college basketball had become the most popular sporting event among gamblers, after the Super Bowl.

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Sources

1. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/economic-growth-now-depends-on-electricity-not-oil-40250941?mod=hp_lead_pos4
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/26/trump-auto-tariffs-imports/
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/03/27/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts-student-ice-video/
4. https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/pfizer-covid-vaccine-2020-election-probe-2f3ec247?mod=hp_lead_pos6
5. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europe-jd-vance-trump-8fc67a79?mod=hp_lead_pos8