curated news excerpts & citations
Central News: From Classroom to Community: Ugandan Youth Create Portable Solar Shelters for the Homeless
A group of innovative students in Uganda has turned a simple idea into a life-changing solution for people without stable homes, designing solar-powered tents that fold neatly into backpacks. This clever invention, born from classroom creativity, offers safe, portable shelter to the homeless, displaced persons, and communities hit by disasters, blending technology with compassion to tackle real-world problems. For families in Uganda and across Africa facing hardship, these tents mean more than just a place to sleep – they bring light, power, and hope in dark times. As the world looks for sustainable ways to help the vulnerable, this youth-led project shines as an example of African ingenuity, showing how young minds can drive change with limited resources. In a continent where millions lack proper housing due to conflicts, poverty, or natural disasters, inventions like this could transform lives, one backpack at a time. With solar panels providing renewable energy for basics like lighting and charging phones, the tents address not just shelter but also safety and connectivity. As 2025 ends, this story inspires hope for 2026, reminding us that solutions to big challenges often start small, in the hands of determined students.
(Central News more…)
Wired: The Great Big Power Play
US support for nuclear energy is soaring. Meanwhile, coal plants are on their way out and electricity-sucking data centers are meeting huge pushback. Welcome to the next front in the energy battle.
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Jennifer Rubin: The Best from Cities and States
The tendency, understandably, in Donald Trump’s second term is to focus on events in Washington, D.C. and the national and global consequences of his disastrous domestic and foreign initiatives. But because he and his antics have dominated and decimated the federal government, resistance within states and cities have become even more important. State and city elected officials (as well as political movements beyond Washington, D.C.) have become some of the most valuable fighters in the battle to preserve democracy.
(Jennifer Rubin more…)
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Jess Piper: Legislating Obedience
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Bloomberg: How Hybrid Models Are Helping Keep Automakers’ Electrification Plans Afloat
Like most US car dealers, Scott Kunes has some electric vehicle whiplash.
In the third quarter, he sold EVs like ice cream at the beach. However, after federal purchase incentives expired at the end of September, those models have been tough to move at his company’s 50 or so Midwest stores selling about 20 different brands, from Mitsubishi to Mercedes-Benz.
But buyers aren’t necessarily turning to gas guzzlers. On Kunes’ lots, hybrid vehicles are in high demand, a preference that’s playing out across the country. While fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US in the third quarter, another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles.
(Bloomberg more…)
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CNN: CIA carried out drone strike on port facility on Venezuelan coast
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – December 29, 2025
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Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “It’s a good commentary on 2025 that the US President announces a major military attack on a foreign country and even the straightest arrows think, 50% chance it’s an attack, 50% chance president is on another cognition bender.”Saturday morning, the day before Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was scheduled to meet with Trump for talks on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. The missile and drone strikes damaged more than ten residential buildings, killed at least one person who burned to death, and wounded 27 more, including two children.
When Zelensky arrived in Miami for his trip to Mar-a-Lago, there were no U.S. officials on hand to greet the plane. This was a deliberate snub, especially when compared to the literal red carpet Trump had U.S. military personnel roll out for Putin when he arrived on U.S. soil in August, followed by Trump greeting him while clapping, a military flyover, and a ride with Trump in the presidential limousine.
Trump’s preference for Putin was evident yesterday, too, when he posted on social media …
…In his comments to reporters, one passage perhaps shed more light on events than Trump intended. … “the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was a terrible made-up fictional thing by crooked Hillary and by Adam Shifty Schiff and bad people, sick people. They made it up. It was all a made up hoax.”
But, of course, the idea that Russian operatives worked to put Trump into the White House in 2016 wasn’t a hoax.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Republican, unanimously concluded that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)NY Times: The C.I.A. Strike on Venezuela: What to Know
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Times of London: Russia to ‘review stance on peace’ after claims of attack on Putin’s residence
Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Ukraine attacked Putin’s Valdai residence in the Novgorod region. President Zelensky has denied the claims
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NY Times: New Year’s Eve Concerts at Kennedy Center Are Canceled
AlterNet: Kennedy Center ‘A Jazz New Year’s Eve’ performance latest to cancel over Trump
MTN: Trump Shared Clip Calling to Remove Kennedy Name From Kennedy Center
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Thom Hartmann: Nothing Is Ours Anymore: Is the “Rental Economy” the Most Destructive Scam in Modern American Capitalism?
From 50-year mortgages to paywalled car features, the rental economy is replacing ownership with lifelong monthly bills…
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RawStory: ‘Major scandal’: Trump’s DOJ caught spying on journalist before Epstein’s death
A high-profile investigative journalist received quite a shock on Sunday when she discovered her flight itinerary from a trip to Florida in July 2019 tucked in the latest batch of files related to the FBI’s investigation of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
(RawStory more…)Adam Mockler: They Weren’t Just Hiding the Epstein Files
NY Times: ‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump
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For Greene, the decades that Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.‘Am I going to get murdered, or one of my kids, because he’s calling me a traitor?’
After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”
When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have.
(NY Times more…)Jay Kuo: MTG v. DJT
The NYT piece about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s split with Trump buries the lede—twice.
- A death threat upon her son
- Trump’s “friends” are in the files
Marcy Wheeler: Peeling Off MTG
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WSJ: MAGA’s Latest Stolen 2020 Election Theory
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Elections are supposed to run by the book, and Fulton County’s blunder is bad for public confidence. Yet so are Mr. Trump’s constantly shifting claims that the 2020 election was stolen, with every irregularity claimed as supposedly proving history’s biggest fraud. The reality is that the U.S. has thousands of election jurisdictions, with different rules, counting millions of votes. It’s always possible to find screw-ups.The important question for people who want the truth is what any particular goof says about the underlying ballots, and whether it involves enough votes to be decisive. For 2020 the evidence says no. Even if Mr. Trump had won Georgia, he’d have lost the Electoral College to Mr. Biden by two states.
Mr. Trump will never admit his 2020 claims were partisan nonsense. But Republicans who care about the future could do their man a favor by refusing to keep indulging them.
(WSJ more…)
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Bulwark: Trump Admin Scores Visa for Founder of Russian Propaganda Outlet
Tenet Media’s Lauren Chen is back—even though the illegal-influence and money-laundering investigation remains open.
RIGHT-WING MEDIA PERSONALITY Lauren Chen left the United States in July in disgrace. Her Tenet Media YouTube channel, which positioned itself as a sort of MAGA supergroup bringing together such popular commentators as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin, had been exposed in 2024 by the FBI as a Russian media front illicitly taking money from pro-Putin propaganda outlet RT.
(Bulwark more…)
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Rook T. Winchester, OwlMedia, and Jose Mejia: Free Justo Betancourt
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He built a life in full view of the system that now pretends he is disposable. He did not hide. He did not vanish. He complied. He went to his routine immigration check-in the way he had before, the way he was required to, believing that following the rules still meant something. That belief cost him his freedom.
(Rook T. Winchester, OwlMedia, and Jose Mejia more…)
Accountability Initiative ICE List
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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