"democratic values, in the reality that the United States has walked away from them … what should the allies do?"

Matt Gurney: 'We will never fucking trust you again'

Some blunt talk for our American neighbours at the Halifax International Security Forum.

"I’m sure she’ll take it under consideration and look at it seriously. … Trump hasn’t made a secret about the retribution that he is asking some of his U.S. attorneys to take against his perceived enemies. It is an extraordinary request, but maybe this is an extraordinary situation." — Professor Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law, in comments given to Law.com, concerning a request made by ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s lawyers to Chief District Judge Cecilia Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida, 👉to block Judge #Aileen #Cannon from hearing the case. The letter submitted by Brennan’s lawyers to Altonaga reads, in relevant part: “The United States attorney’s efforts to funnel this investigation to the judge who issued this string of rulings that consistently favored President Trump’s positions in previous litigations should be seen for what it is.”

Above the Law

Lawyers Try To Bench Aileen Cannon From Case, Arguing She’s Been In Trump’s Corner One Too Many Times - Above the Law

Attorneys think Cannon’s pattern of deference to Trump has destroyed any appearance of neutrality.

GOP operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, convicted election fraudsters, were paid $960,000 in the second quarter to secure a pardon for a former nursing-home operator who defrauded the government of $38 million. Trump pardoned the man, Joseph Schwartz, last month. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-presidential-pardon-process-dda97c15?st=cjezHF&reflink=article_copyURL_share

Days after starting his second term, Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that targeted DEI programs and policies for elimination, decrying them as illegal and immoral. Museums across the country scrambled to react — and in many cases, comply. Within days, Washington’s National Gallery of Art announced it would close its office of belonging and inclusion and remove the words “diversity, equity, access and inclusion” from its list of values on its website. Five days later, the Smithsonian followed suit. ⭐️But the Japanese American National Museum, a relatively small institution in downtown Los Angeles, chose a different path. Founded in 1992 at the site of a historic Buddhist temple in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, the museum took a stand against Trump and his anti-DEI edicts while other museums acquiesced. Two weeks after the Smithsonian shuttered its DEI office and stripped its websites of DEI-related language, JANM’s leaders announced that they would not waver from their commitment to DEI or their mission of telling the full truth about the Japanese American experience, World War II incarceration camps and all. ✅ We will scrub nothing, JANM announced, in what would become a slogan for the museum’s defiance. ❌ That stance came with significant risks: At stake were millions in federal grants from institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 

This L.A. Museum Is Standing Up to Trump’s Whitewashing, Vowing to ‘Scrub Nothing’

The Japanese American National Museum stands out among cultural institutions by refusing to bend to President Trump’s attacks on diversity, histo...

A new study suggests that #dementia may be driven in part by faulty blood flow in the brain. Researchers found that losing a key lipid causes blood vessels to become overactive, disrupting circulation and starving brain tissue. When the missing molecule was restored, normal blood flow returned. This discovery opens the door to new treatments aimed at fixing vascular problems in dementia.

ScienceDaily

Scientists found a way to restore brain blood flow in dementia

A new study suggests that dementia may be driven in part by faulty blood flow in the brain. Researchers found that losing a key lipid causes blood ...

Analysts believe widespread GLP-1 adoption could mean long-term changes in demand. Food companies including Conagra Brands and Nestle are already dealing with shifts in consumer tastes toward higher protein and smaller portions due to the popularity of weight-loss injections To cope, businesses are promoting products with more protein, tweaking labeling to say they are GLP-1 friendly and working with large retailers to better market products. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/weight-loss-pill-approval-set-accelerate-food-industry-product-overhauls-2025-12-24/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=694c01233265bb00019ede4d&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky

ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post. 
Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system, the document says. Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation. 
The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.

The draft solicitation is not final and is subject to changes. ICE plans to share it with private detention companies this week to gauge interest and refine the plan, according to an internal email reviewed by The Post. A formal request for bids could follow soon after that. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/24/ice-immigrants-detention-warehouses-deportation-trump/

Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all ‘sanctioned’ oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela ports, -- which is technically an act of war. How seriously should we take this? Trump has certainly threatened war with Venezuela in the past. Former US National Security advisor John Bolton reports that Trump said during his first presidential term (2017-2020) that invading Venezuela would be “cool” because it is “really part of the United States.” Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Director of the FBI, says that Trump told him in 2019 that Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” Gustavo Petro, the current president of Colombia, says that his predecessor Iván Duque was approached by Trump in 2020 with a plan to invade Venezuela via Colombia. (No need for an amphibious landing operation. Just disembark the US troops in Santa Marta and march them across the border.) Trump’s advisors talked him out of that one. He was still at it two years ago, when he said at a press conference in North Carolina: “When I left [the presidency in 2020] Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken over it, we would have kept all that oil.” It sounds pretty damning, until you recall that Trump is a blowhard who almost never acts on his threats. (‘TACO’ – ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’) Or just count the numbers and realise that there are not enough American troops in the Caribbean region at the moment to make a full-scale invasion of Venezuela a viable military option. And if you are still in doubt, remember that Trump is politically allergic to wars. His promise to his own MAGA base was ‘no more forever wars’ in exotic places. He is famous for echoing the views of the last person who spoke to him, but it would take some truly masterful manipulation to persuade him to go against his own gut instincts.

Gwynne Dyer | Author, Historian & Independent Journalist

Rubio’s Strategy – The Tail Wags the Dog? | Gwynne Dyer

Trump unveils a new class of Navy battleship -- named after himself Donald Trump on Monday said he will oversee the development of a new class of Navy battleship — named after himself. 
The move was cast in part as an effort to give the nation’s stagnant shipbuilding industry a shot in the arm, but also will upend the Navy’s ship-naming norms and thrust presidential politics firmly into the program from its genesis. The announcement follows a flurry of recent actions by Trump to rebrand existing institutions to include his name, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/22/trump-battleship-golden-fleet/

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of -- Senator Ron Wyden

Bluesky Social

Zach Everson (@zacheverson.com)

🚨 "The Justice Department redacted the names and identifiers of victims. Fox News Digital has learned that the same redaction standards were app...