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Daily Bafflements

• She may have already been named the world’s most powerful woman—now, though, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is TIME’s Person of the Year for 2015. In a way, it’s not hard to see why. Twenty-six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel’s Germany has become the de facto leader of a European Union adjusting to economic stress, the Russian incursion in Ukraine, and an influx of Middle Eastern refugees. The damage wrought by enforcing economic unity through anachronistic austerity measures to a host of countries that can take these reforms no longer is all but forgotten. Unsurprising, perhaps, but aggravating nonetheless. 

• Another day, another supposed unmasking of Satoshi Nakamoto—the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. Now with more house raids by Australian law enforcement

• The U.K. is sick of Trump’s shit. So are we. Who isn’t these days? On The Baffler blog, senior editor Chris Lehmann has found one group that, despite its constant griping, clearly isn’t: the media.