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...

For fraudsters and tax evaders, the past year has been a cresting wave of successes: the abandonment of seeming slam-dunk prosecutions, presidential pardons for even the most egregious crimes, and a steady hollowing out of the agencies tasked with holding them to account. Trump’s not wrong when he rails about a surge in crime -- But “the crime wave, is white collar”. Trump’s preferred tool for aiding white-collar criminals is simple: the pardon. Where previous presidents deployed that power sparingly, often at the end of their terms, Trump has wielded it promiscuously – issuing clemency even when it results in something completely anathema to his administration’s stated goals. Take Trump’s supposed focus on combating narco-traffickers. Trump has been explicit about wanting to control the influx of narcotics and fentanyl into the US from South America – and is close to waging war on Venezuela despite the fact that it is not among the primary direct traffickers of cocaine to the US. At the same time, Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president.

the Guardian

Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals | Casey Michel

Why would the Trump administration choose to set aside consequences from criminals whose actions threaten the stability of the broader American eco...

Someone should tell Pam Bondi that while Nixon didn't go to prison his Attorney General did

HUGE NEWS from the new Epstein files: Records show that Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein, filed a "child pornography" report to the FBI in 1996. The FBI has never before acknowledged that complaint. The case went nowhere, and mass abuse followed. Maria has been accused over the years of fabricating her story that she had gone to the FBI. After finding the document in the trove, I called her. She broke down in tears. “I’ve waited 30 years. I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.”

Page by Mike Baker | @mikebaker.bsky.social

HUGE NEWS from the new Epstein files: Records show that Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein, filed a "child pornography" report to the FBI in 199...

Alan Dershowitz, a former lawyer for Trump, recently said in an interview that he and Trump have discussed the possibility of Trump running for a third term in office — an action that would violate the U.S. Constitution. “I said ‘it’s not clear if a president can become a third-term president and it’s not clear if it’s permissible,'” Dershowitz recounted of his conversation with Trump. Dershowitz, who was part of Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial, said the discussion took place at the White House this week, after he had delivered a draft of his planned book, entitled “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?” https://truthout.org/articles/trump-confidant-alan-dershowitz-discussed-third-term-scenario-with-the-president/