curated news excerpts & citations
Michael Thomas: America is Losing Power Projects When It Needs Them Most
Electricity demand is growing faster than it has in decades in the United States. Data centers, manufacturing reshoring, and electrification are driving massive growth in power consumption. But at the moment America needs more electricity generation, the country’s infrastructure developers are cancelling projects at an alarming rate.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been analyzing data to see how many power projects have been cancelled this year. In our latest report, we found that 1,891 power projects with a combined 266 GW of generation capacity have been cancelled in 2025—equivalent to roughly one-quarter of America’s entire current electricity generation capacity.
(Michael Thomas more…)
Brian Allen: The courts just blunted Trump’s war on wind energy
A federal judge has ruled that Trump’s freeze on wind development was illegal. What comes next is a fight over who gets to decide America’s energy future.
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Bulwark: Ukraine Stands Firm
Attacks on its infrastructure and a major corruption scandal have rocked the country. But President Trump is wrong that Ukraine is destined for defeat.
(Bulwark more…)![Buildings lie in ruins amid the rubble in Rafah, in southern Gaza, December 8, 2025 [Nir Elias/Reuters]](https://kewus.net/yesterday/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/reuters_69389710-1765316368.webp "Buildings lie in ruins amid the rubble in Rafah, in southern Gaza, December 8, 2025 [Nir Elias/Reuters]")
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Al Jazeera: Hamas urges more international pressure on Israel amid ceasefire violations
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Israeli fire since the start of the ceasefire has killed at least 377 people.
Hamas has said the ceasefire cannot move forward while Israel continues its violations of the agreement, with Gaza authorities saying the truce has been breached at least 738 times since taking effect in October.
Husam Badran, a Hamas official, called on mediators to increase pressure on Israel to fully implement its existing commitments.
(Al Jazeera more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – December 9, 2025
When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”
“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”
But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.
Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.
When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” …
…Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.
…“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Civicus Monitor: USA downgraded in global ratings report on civic freedoms
Dean Blundell: America Just Got Downgraded: “The United States Is No Longer a Functional Democracy” — And Trump’s America Deserves Every Inch of It
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RNS: The Coast Guard’s fumble on Nazi emblem shows the symbol needs understanding
In late November, in a clumsily handled policy change, the U.S. Coast Guard first changed its designation of the swastika from “hate symbol” to a “potentially divisive symbol.” Then, after an outcry, it was changed back to “hate symbol.”
This roller coaster caused anguish for many American and resident Hindus, Buddhists and Jains, for whom this is a fundamental symbol of faith and good luck. It has also again exposed the pervasive problem of failing to distinguish the sacred swastika from the Nazi Hakenkreuz.
(RNS more…)
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Washington Examiner: ACLU sues DOJ for ‘immediate’ release of legal opinion on alleged drug boat strikes
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RawStory: Hot mic at Kristi Noem event catches TSA agents complaining of being ‘terrified’
Brian Allen: TSA Agents Caught on Hot Mic Saying They Are “Terrified” of Leadership as Noem Pushes White House Narrative
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James Eagle: Tech earnings have outstripped the rest of the world
(James Eagle more…)
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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