What's News - Sales of smaller cars and compact SUVs have been on the rise this year. Amid high vehicle costs and interest rates, shoppers are prioritizing affordability over size. The average price for a small SUV in 2024 was about $29,000 as opposed to $48,000 for a midsize SUV and $76,000 for a large one, according to car-shopping website Edmunds.
December 24, 2024
SCOTT TURNER
ProPublica - As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner voted against those very initiatives.
Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against two bills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans
DONALD TRUMP
Newsweek - In June 2019, the owners of a Panama City hotel that was managed by Trump's businesses, and carried the Trump brand, accused two companies, Trump Panama Hotel Management LLC and and Trump International Hotels Management LLC, of not paying taxes on their Panamanian earnings.
In a filing to the U.S. district court in New York, private equity manager Orestes Fintiklis and his company, Ithaca Capital Partners, alleged that the Trump businesses failed to pay 12.5% taxes on the millions of dollars they earned from managing the Panama City hotel. They also alleged that the Trump units failed to correctly report the number of people the hotel employed so that he could avoid Panamanian social security payments.
The filing documented how the Panamanian government later conducted a tax audit on the hotel and found major irregularities. Fintiklis and his company were forced to pay the money Trump owed, the court filing alleged.
In an updated complaint filed in the same court on March 30, 2020, Fintiklis' attorneys complained that "had Trump been honest with Ithaca about its failure to pay taxes on the management fees it earned and its failure to properly report employee salaries to Panama's social security agency, Ithaca would have never entered into the [licensing deal] because, among other things, (i) Ithaca would have recognized the significant, multi-million dollar tax penalty that could be imposed by the Panamanian government once it started auditing the Hotel; and (ii) Ithaca would have known that the representations made by Trump described above were false in that the Hotel was suffering from significant financial irregularities."
The litigation is still before the courts.
HEALTH
Smithsonian Magazine - In the summer after their first year studying architecture at the University of Hong Kong, Jeff Li and Joseph Wong were contemplating hats and climate change. “We were basically thinking: ‘Huh, what are the big issues right now in this world?’” says Li. “And obviously it’s heat, right?”
Keeping cool during a Hong Kong summer is hard. Temperatures in the region often exceed 87 degrees Fahrenheit in July and August, and heat has risen year over year, with 2024 on track to be one of its hottest years on record, according to the Hong Kong Free Press.
The pair saw a need for a wearable item that cools construction workers on the job. Amid increasing temperatures, outdoor laborers in hot and humid climates like Hong Kong’s are at risk of severe heat stress, heat stroke and even death. “In the top of a half-finished building, it’s fully exposed,” says Li. “And in the covered areas, there’s no ventilation. It gets really, really hot.”
This was the origin of the Air Ring 48, a cooling device that attaches to the base of a construction helmet, providing crucial airflow to the sweatiest areas of the head and neck. Air Ring 48 was in the top 20 finalists for this year’s James Dyson Award, an international design competition with a cash prize to find the next generation of design engineers. With a fan balanced behind each ear, the device operates at the level of a whisper (30 decibels), and its battery can last for 17 hours, or the equivalent of two workdays.
BOOKS
AP News - A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional.
“I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a statement to The Associated Press. The law would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible to children. The measure was signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2023, but an earlier ruling had temporarily blocked it from taking effect while it was being challenged in court.
“The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” Brooks wrote in his ruling.
ALTERNATIVE SEX & GENDER
AP News - President Joe Biden on Monday signed into law a defense bill that authorizes significant pay raises for junior enlisted service members, aims to counter China’s growing power and boosts overall military spending to $895 billion, despite his objections to language stripping coverage of transgender medical treatments for children in military families. Read more.
IMMIGRATION
NBC News - NBC News spoke with nearly a half-dozen immigrants’ rights advocates
across four states, and they all said they have received an increased
number of calls from immigrants asking about their rights. In response,
the advocates and groups are conducting know-your-rights trainings and
helping vulnerable families prepare plans of action in case an
undocumented relative is suddenly detained or deported.For example, Hope CommUnity Center, the nonprofit outside of Orlando
which Sousa-Lazaballet leads, is helping immigrant families come up with
a “dignity plan” that includes legal plans about who will take care of
children left behind if an undocumented parent is picked up by
authorities.In Los Angeles, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights has offered 93
know-your-rights presentations at area schools, businesses and
organizations that provide community services. Read the full story here.
NPR - Scientific
research in the U.S. relies heavily of foreign-born scientists, who
include more than half a million working under temporary visas. During
President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, those
visas became harder to get – and they’re likely to face renewed
scrutiny in his second term. The H-1B visa, the most common for working scientists, has been
called a secret weapon because it allows universities and tech companies
to hire top talent from around the world, NPR’s Jon Hamilton tells Up First.
Three months into Trump’s first term, he unveiled a plan to restrict
work visas, specifically H-1B. In 2020, he temporarily suspended new
H-1B visas. The Biden administration reversed those changes. Some tech
firms like Box are making the case that these visas are good for the economy.
MONEY
Daily Kos - Let’s not forget that Trump’s first term in office added somewhere around $8 trillion to the national debt, the most debt added by any single President in history — by trillions.
YOUTH
The Guardian - Some 18-year-olds who take time off from their studies after graduating high school head off to travel, learn a new language or gain employment. Augustus Holm gathered some friends, gave away more than 21,600 pairs of shoes to families in need and set a world record that he hopes lends even more credibility to his future philanthropic efforts.
The 7 December footwear drive that Holm had a major hand in organizing in his home town of San Diego clinched the Guinness World Records mark for largest donation of shoes in 24 hours. But the story neither starts nor ends there, he said in a recent interview.
For Holm, it largely began in 2019, when he was 13 and his mother asked him to help her out with a fundraising gala dinner of which she was the chairperson.
Holm and some of his buddies got some pointers from his mom, Pat Salas, and others in the field of philanthropy on how to convince people to donate to them. They realized they had an advantage being children and siding with a good cause: supporting a local community clinic named San Ysidro Health.
Their pitch – in person and by phone – yielded results. As he has also told the San Diego Union-Tribune, Holm’s group raised $130,000 in the months leading up to the gala. Then they ginned up another $100,000 at the gala itself.
HOLIDAYS
MSNBC - According to a 2023 Christmas report from The Associated Press, almost half the U.S. (47% of us to be exact) had at least one unspent voucher or gift card, and the unspent money on those cards was believed to total $23 billion. That’s enough to buy each of the 334.9 million people in the U.S. a Secret Santa gift that costs $68.67.
Smithsonian Magazine - Writing a letter to Santa Claus has been a deep-rooted tradition in the U.S. So, where do letters to Santa go? Prior to the establishment of the Postal Service in 1775, American children would burn their missives to Santa, believing that the ashes would rise up and reach him, Nancy Pope, longtime curator of postal history at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., told Smithsonian magazine in 2017. (Pope, founding historian at the museum, died in 2019 at age 62.)
Today, despite the advent of more modern communications like email and texting, hundreds of thousands of children, from all over the globe, continue to send their Christmas wish lists to Santa using old-fashioned snail mail. And incredibly, many of those letters are actually answered.
To deal with the annual deluge, the Postal Service—Santa’s primary ghostwriter (aside from parents)—created Operation Santa in the early 20th century. In 2017, the service made it possible for kids to write to Santa online, at least in New York City. And now, everyone can.
Operation Santa was in full swing around 1912, and in 1914, the postmaster in Santa Claus, Indiana, also began answering letters from children, Emily Thompson, who served until 2018 as executive director of the town’s nonprofit Santa Claus Museum & Village, told Smithsonian in 2017. The museum answers letters sent to the town, as well as those from the area that are addressed to Santa or the North Pole.
The digital age has not put a damper on first-class mail received by the museum. “Our letter volume has increased over the years,” said Thompson.
December 23, 2024
IMMIGRATION
What's News - Private prisons and detention companies are preparing to profit from what the president-elect says will be America's “largest domestic deportation operation” ever (read). That includes seeking more detention beds and scouting new sites to house migrants. Some executives are considering whether to take on the controversial work of detaining families, while others are hiring staff and lobbyists.
CORPORATIONS
Epoch Times - Chief executive officers have exited from U.S. companies in 2024 at a greater pace than ever before, with businesses increasingly opting to appoint interim leaders as replacements, according to global outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. As of November, 1, 991 CEOs have departed from their companies, “the highest total on record,” according to a Dec. 20 report from the company. “It has surpassed the previous record of 1,914 CEO exits that occurred in all of 2023. It is up 16% from the 1,710 exits that occurred during the same period last year.” Amid a jump in executive departures, companies were found to be appointing more interim leaders. Last year, interim replacements for CEOs were at seven percent, this year it has gone up to 13 percent.
HEALTH
Thom Hartmann - As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:
— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,
—
The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking
access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing
bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,
— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,
—
And the only country in the developed world that has, since its
founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a
large minority of its population because of their race....
Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense. Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard
DONALD TRUMP
Washington Times - The battle over the border wall is heating up as the Biden
administration sells off materials, seemingly defying the plans of
President-elect Donald Trump, who has asked a federal court for an “immediate stop” to the sales to ensure he can restart building the wall next year. Mr. Trump’s
lawyer, John Sauer, said Biden officials may even be engaged in “a
criminal act” if they are selling the materials at cut-rate prices in
order to thwart Mr. Trump’s plans. Republicans on Capitol Hill have also weighed
in, demanding the current administration explain the current sales and
come clean about past auctions that have dumped wall materials at
incredible discounts.
Daily Beast - President-elect Donald Trump apparently wants to make another play to take control of Greenland—an autonomous region of Denmark that by all accounts isn’t for sale—even after a disastrous attempt during his first term created a diplomatic firestorm.[Trump said] “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
The statement comes more than five years after Trump first floated the idea of buying Greenland in what he bizarrely described at the time as “essentially a real-estate deal.” In fact, the Danish constitution protects Greenland’s autonomy and would need to be amended if Denmark wanted to sell, which so far hasn’t been the case.
MSNBC - Trump’s attack on the so-called Canada subsidy appears to be a reference to the U.S. trade deficit with its northern neighbor. A trade deficit means that the U.S. has purchased more goods and services from Canada than Canada has purchased from the U.S.; the U.S.-Canadian deficit was over $50 billion in 2022.
There is nothing innately wrong with having a trade deficit with a trading partner. But Trump thinks of every interaction as a zero-sum game and believes that you’re either ripping someone off, or you’re the one getting ripped off. His view is at odds with the perspective of most economists that trade is mutually beneficial and mostly a positive-sum game. That isn’t to say that massive international trade flows don’t have costs for society — they can disrupt labor markets — but to look at differences in exports and imports with one country as a sign of “winning” or “losing” is simply the wrong way to look at the entire enterprise of trade.
The statement comes more than five years after Trump first floated the idea
of buying Greenland in what he bizarrely described at the time as
“essentially a real-estate deal.” In fact, the Danish constitution
protects Greenland’s autonomy and would need to be amended if Denmark
wanted to sell, which so far hasn’t been the case.
MSNBC - Trump’s attack on the so-called Canada subsidy appears to be a reference to the U.S. trade deficit with its northern neighbor. A trade deficit means that the U.S. has purchased more goods and services from Canada than Canada has purchased from the U.S.; the U.S.-Canadian deficit was over $50 billion in 2022.
There is nothing innately wrong with having a trade deficit with a trading partner. But Trump thinks of every interaction as a zero-sum game and believes that you’re either ripping someone off, or you’re the one getting ripped off. His view is at odds with the perspective of most economists that trade is mutually beneficial and mostly a positive-sum game. That isn’t to say that massive international trade flows don’t have costs for society — they can disrupt labor markets — but to look at differences in exports and imports with one country as a sign of “winning” or “losing” is simply the wrong way to look at the entire enterprise of trade.
ENVIRONMENT
Nice News - Montana’s Supreme Court upheld a landmark decision that the state’s youth have a right to a clean environment (read more)
WORKERS
Rubie Mosqueda, Time - You might think a corporation worth more than $2 trillion would treat its employees better. At Amazon’s facility in the City of Industry, known as DAX5, we earn $22 per hour and I am not paid for my lunch break. I work four days per week, for 10 hours per day, and do not make enough to cover the cost of living in California.
The vans we drive are dirty and often unsafe. On top of that, we are constantly monitored by cameras inside our vans searching for the smallest infractions—even during our breaks.
But perhaps worst of all, Amazon has attempted to block my co-workers and I from exercising our rights. They do this at my facility and others like it by hiring drivers through supposedly independent companies, referred to as Delivery Service Partners (DSPs), that deliver packages exclusively for Amazon. By doing that, they claim we are not really their employees and that they do not need to bargain with us if we form a union.
CNN - A strike that began last week against Starbucks reached nine states on Sunday, according to the union representing the workers. The Starbucks Workers United said baristas in Missouri, New Jersey and New York began their strike Sunday after locations in Colorado, Ohio and Pennsylvania joined the strike Saturday. Workers walked off the job on Friday in Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, where Starbucks is headquartered and opened its first location. The union has said the strike could reach “hundreds of stores” by Christmas Eve — although that would only be a small portion of Starbucks’ more than 10,000 company-operated stores.
TRUMP REGIME
Axios - Fearing political retribution and strained by new business challenges, media companies that once covered President-elect Trump with skepticism — and in many cases, disdain — are reconsidering their approach, Axios' Sara Fischer and Dave Lawler write...
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, a longtime Democrat whose wife served as the ambassador to the Bahamas during the Obama administration, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week, Axios confirmed. "Morning Joe" co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who railed against Trump for years, met with Trump in an hour-plus meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month, infuriating their loyal audience. Scarborough said the reaction showed "a massive disconnect ... between social media and the real world."
Amid a record media trust deficit, outlets once critical of Trump are now making overtures to the former and future president, and the Americans who voted for him. A week after Trump's victory, two executives from TelevisaUnivision, the parent of the largest U.S.-based Spanish-language broadcaster, flew to Mar-a-Lago so the president-elect could personally thank them for election support, The Wall Street Journal reported.
L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong vowed (on Fox News, no less) to balance out his editorial board with conservative voices. He also has discussed plans to add a digital "bias meter" for editorials and opinion columns.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (who, like Soon-Shiong, overruled his staff to kill a Harris endorsement) said at The New York Times' DealBook Summit that he's "actually very optimistic" about Trump's second term.
Compare that to the resistance media era that started in 2016, with outlets like The Washington Post garnering tough-on-Trump reputations (and thousands of subscriptions).This time around, national outlets — struggling to regain viewers and subscribers — are trying to signal they're no longer out for blood. More
CNN - The House Ethics Committee found evidence that former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex or drugs on at least 20 occasions, including paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017, according to a final draft of the panel’s report on the Florida Republican, obtained by CNN. The committee concluded in its bombshell document that Gaetz violated Florida state laws, including the state’s statutory rape law, as the GOP-led panel chose to take the rare step of releasing a report about a former member who resigned from Congress.
- The current outcry over would-be retiring judges changing their minds is yet another example of partisan gamesmanship. Here’s what really happened: A bipartisan bill creating 66 much needed new judgeships over a 10-year-period passed in the Democratic-controlled Senate in August, but, in what was an obvious attempt to see who would win the election in November, the Republican-controlled House took no action. Then, on Dec. 12, a month after Trump won, the House passed the bill.
The New York Times reported Thursday that “677 district court judges are the front line of the federal judiciary, handling most of the nearly 400,000 civil and criminal cases that pass through the system each year” and that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts this year counted 81,617 civil cases that have been pending more than three years. That’s more than four times the number there were 20 years ago.
Despite the desperate need for new judgeships, Biden has said he’ll veto the bill that has now passed the House and Senate and thereby deny Trump the chance to appoint a slew of new judges who undoubtedly will be very conservative picks. If Biden were to sign the bill, then he’d be giving Trump the power to appoint an additional 22 judges in addition to filling current and expected vacancies, particularly on the powerful circuit courts of appeals, where Biden’s final four picks were denied a Senate vote.
The American Prospect - Elon Musk blew up a near-complete bipartisan budget deal with an
avalanche of tweets contending that it was too costly, luring Donald
Trump into demanding that Republicans kill it. But Musk’s real reason—a story that David Dayen broke in the Prospect—was
that the agreement included painstakingly negotiated limits on American
tech investment in China. Had that provision passed, it would have
been costly to Musk’s extensive Chinese Tesla operations and future AI
plans.
CARS
NBC --Japanese automakers Nissan and Honda announced they had entered into official talks to merge and create the world’s third-largest automaker. Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe said the companies needed greater scale to compete in the development of new technologies in electric vehicles and intelligent driving. Mibe added that if approved, the integration would be a mid to long-term project that is currently not expected to show visible progress until 2030 and beyond. Nissan’s strategic partner Mitsubishi has been offered the chance to join the new group and will take a decision by the end of January 2025. The deal would aim to share intelligence and resources and deliver economies of scale and synergies while protecting both brands, Mibe said.
JUSTICE
Daily Beast - President Joe Biden has spared almost every death row prisoner in the country to sabotage Donald Trump’s plans to launch a flurry of federal executions when he returns to the White House. Biden announced that he is commuting the sentences of 37 murderers less than a month before Trump is back in the Oval Office. The reprieved men will now serve life in prison without parole. Only three convicts who carried out mass killings will remain on death row.
During his first term, Trump restarted federal executions after a 20-year freeze. Thirteen people were put to death, all in the final six months of his presidency. In the 2024 presidential election campaign, Trump said he wanted to expand capital punishment from murderers to child abusers, human traffickers, and drug dealers.
.
JOURNALISM
The Guardian - Worldwide, 104 journalists and media workers were killed in 2024 – and more than half of them were in Palestine...Research by the IFJ, a non-partisan organization representing the rights of media workers, found that 55 journalists were killed in Palestine this year, compared with 49 in the rest of the world. Their figures do not include journalists who have been arrested (75 Palestinian journalists have been imprisoned since October 2023, and just 30 of them have been released) nor does it include those who are injured (approximately 49) or missing (at least two).
December 22, 2024
TRUMP REGIME
Financial Times, UK - Donald Trump’s transition team is pushing to pull the US out of the World Health Organization on the first day of the new administration, according to experts who warn of the “catastrophic” impact it would have on global health. Members of Trump’s team told the experts of their intention to announce a withdrawal from the global health body on the president-elect’s January 20 inauguration. The departure would remove the WHO’s biggest source of funds, damaging its ability to respond to public health crises such as the coronavirus pandemic. “America is going to leave a huge vacuum in global health financing and leadership. I see no one that is going to fill the breach,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health at Georgetown Law, adding that the plan to withdraw “on day one” would be “catastrophic” for global health.
YOUTH
NPR - More than 50% of youth in the United States are very or extremely worried about climate change, according to a recent survey in the scientific journal The Lancet. The researchers, who surveyed over 15,000 people aged 16–25, also found that more than one in three young people said their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily lives.
THC DRINKS
The Guardian - Laws around the US - most recently in Hawaii - are cropping up that allow THC in beverages, a move that some experts say will have mixed benefits for those seeking an alternative to alcohol.It’s part of a growing trend of policies that make THC drinks available, often where alcohol is sold. About a year ago, Minnesota passed a law allowing THC drinks to be sold in liquor stores; ever since, these beverages have begun to appear on shelves around the country.
A loophole in a 2018 farm bill removed federal restrictions on products derived from hemp with low levels of delta-9 THC. Texas has allowed businesses, including bars and liquor stores, to apply for licenses to sell hemp products since 2019, but some liquor store chains did not take advantage of the rule until this year.
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