Author: sauer@technologists.com

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.
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Dean Obeidallah: We must support the musician Trump is targeting for refusing to play the “Trump Kennedy Center”

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As a lawyer myself, I can only assume Grennell didn’t speak to any lawyers before releasing this letter because dubbing Redd’s boycott “political” speech just made it just about impossible for them to win given the US Supreme Court decision cited above. And Grennell just undermined a breach of contract claim by saying in essence that no one was buying tickets to the show. That begs the question: What are the damages to the Kennedy Center if no one was buying tickets?!

But let’s put aside if the lawsuit will be successful or not. Trump’s lawsuits are not about winning or losing: They are about sending a message designed to intimidate others into submission and silence. Same goes for his Executive Orders targeting everything from Act Blue to universities.

This potential lawsuit is intended to scare other artists into not boycotting the Kennedy Center out of fear Trump will sue them—or use the power of the government to target them from IRS audits (like Richard Nixon did) to trumped up BS investigations.

Controlling the arts and artists is right from the far-right playbook. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made control of the arts one of his priorities–utilizing the arts to further Stalin’s “cult of personality” as well as by creating an idealized version of the Soviet Union. And those artists who refused to submit to Stalin were dubbed an “enemy of the people” and then punished —including interrogation, torture, humiliating public trials, and execution. Trump now threatening to destroy this musician for defying him is right from the Stalin playbook.
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BBC: Attack on Kyiv shows ‘Russia doesn’t want peace’, Zelensky says

An intense Russian attack on Kyiv overnight shows Moscow “doesn’t want peace”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday as he prepared for a fresh round of peace talks.

Zelensky made the comments en route to Florida, where he will meet US President Donald Trump on Sunday to discuss a new 20-point peace plan agreed by American and Ukrainian envoys.

The 10-hour missile and drone barrage directed at Ukraine’s capital killed two people and left 32 injured, local authorities said.

Damage to energy infrastructure left 40 percent of residential buildings in Kyiv and nearby districts without heating, according to Ukraine’s minister for development Oleksiy Kuleba.
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Steward Beckham: Christmas Strikes in Nigeria

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But the narrative that Christians are uniquely or singularly targeted in Nigeria, while politically effective, is at best a half-truth. NPR’s Emmanuel Akinwotu reports from Benue State, which is a region often dubbed Nigeria’s breadbasket, and revealed that the violence afflicting farming communities is deeply tied to resource conflict. Herders, many of whom are Fulani and Muslim, need grazing land for their cattle. Farmers, predominantly Christian, need land for their crops. Climate change, population growth, and land degradation have turned what were once localized disputes into large-scale violent clashes. Terrorist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) have exploited this chaos, piggybacking on grievances to pursue broader agendas. But to reduce this to a simple Christian-versus-Muslim genocide ignores the structural realities and intercommunal complexities driving the conflict.

To understand the gravity of this U.S. strike, it helps to step back and consider the historical arc of Nigeria–U.S. relations.
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Mary Geddry: Now I Have a Statute. Ho Ho Ho.

Christmas Eve with Trump, the courts, and an army of people who actually know what they are doing
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On Christmas Eve, just before midnight, the president of the United States was on Truth Social threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of major television networks because their coverage and late-night programming were “almost 100% negative” toward him. He singled out the networks by name, obsessed over ratings, complained about salaries, and escalated into personal attacks, declaring Stephen Colbert a “dead man walking” who should be “put to sleep,” language that is grotesque even when generously interpreted as metaphor.

His Christmas Eve message to the nation was not peace, unity, or goodwill. It was a public fantasy about using state power to punish broadcasters for being insufficiently deferential. If taken seriously, it would amount to a Soviet-style assault on press freedom. The most charitable interpretation is not that he intends to follow through, but that a deeply unwell man with nuclear-era authority spent Christmas Eve hate-scrolling cable television and rage-posting into the void because he cannot log off. That is the best spin available.

Because no dystopian holiday special is complete without tonal whiplash, this same man then spent part of Christmas Eve taking calls from children via NORAD’s Santa tracker. In theory, this is supposed to be harmless whimsy. In practice, it played like performance art about impulse control. Trump narrated the process out loud, drifted into campaign bragging, …
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Politico: Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ has arrived for the top 10 percent

… the robust numbers mask the extent to which the wealthy are driving growth. And while business leaders from Manhattan to South Florida are bullish on the outlook — “It’s the Roaring ’20s here in Palm Beach County,” said Douglas Evans, the president of the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce — that view is not shared by most voters.

In survey after survey, a majority of Americans say they’re straining under the pressure of rising living expenses and a softening job market. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says low-income consumers have “substantially” higher levels of credit card debt than they did before the pandemic.

Even as growth and asset prices soar, Trump’s approval ratings are sagging. For some of his allies, that’s baffling.
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James Eagle: Hallucination is now the real AI bottleneck

This matters because the usefulness of AI now hinges less on how clever models sound and more on whether they can be trusted. As AI moves from demos into healthcare, law and finance, a single wrong answer is no longer a curiosity. It is a liability.

This chart compares leading AI models across two dimensions accuracy and hallucination. Lower hallucination is better. What stands out is how wide the gap has become. Some of the most capable models also hallucinate more often, while others sacrifice a bit of raw performance to stay grounded. Claude models cluster toward lower hallucination, which helps explain their traction in regulated industries. Several open weight models sit at the opposite extreme, offering flexibility and cost advantages but with far higher error risk.

The deeper point is that scale and fluency are no longer enough. Bigger models trained on more data do not automatically become more reliable. In fact, as systems grow more confident and articulate, their mistakes can become harder to spot. That creates a trust problem, not a technology problem. Until hallucination rates fall meaningfully, AI adoption in high stakes settings will remain cautious and uneven.
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Mary Geddry: If Greenland Is “Essential,” Who’s Next?

Trump’s annexation rhetoric makes Canada’s fears suddenly look realistic

Just days before Christmas, Trump announced that Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry would serve as his “special envoy” to Greenland. Trump explained on Truth Social that Landry “understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security” and would “strongly advance our Country’s Interests for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Allies, and indeed, the World.”
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Landry wasted no time clarifying what the job actually entailed. “It’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position,” he wrote on X, “to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”
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Trump is not hiding the ball. He is saying, out loud, that territory can be claimed if power and “security” demand it. Denmark heard him. Greenland heard him. Europe heard him. Canada would be wise to listen too.
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Rolling Stone: Trump’s DNA Dragnet: The Law That Turns Us All into Suspects

A little-used federal law is being activated in ways that could turn immigration screening into the backbone of a far-reaching DNA surveillance system.
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For roughly 20 minutes, Mubashir says, he repeatedly asked to show his I.D., which officers declined. Instead, they took him to a federal building that houses immigration court and Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, fingerprinted him, and ran his biometrics through federal systems. When officers finally allowed him to present his identification, it confirmed what he had said all along: He is an American citizen.
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Increasingly, identity doesn’t live on paper; it is something the government extracts from your body. This didn’t come out of nowhere. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order containing a blunt directive: DHS should start collecting DNA from everyone it detains, breathing new life into an existing law allowing federal agents to take genetic samples from anyone in immigration custody.
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Tucked into dense language, the agency seeks to redefine “biometrics” so broadly that almost nothing about a person is off-limits.
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This opens the door for immigration bureaucracy to sweep millions of ordinary people into a biometric capture system once aimed only at migrants in custody.
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Rook T. Winchester: 2,300 miles

America is loud right now. Not productive loud. Leaf-blower-at-6-a.m. loud. Everyone has a microphone, nobody has patience, and the national posture is a permanent forward lean toward the next outrage. Into this circus walked a dozen Buddhist monks who decided the correct response was to shut up and start walking.

Not marching. Not rallying. Walking. Two thousand three hundred miles of it, from Fort Worth, Texas, to the marble pressure cooker known as the United States Capitol.
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On November 19, a truck struck the pilot vehicle escorting the group in Texas. The impact pushed the vehicle into the monks. Two were seriously injured. One monk lost his leg.
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They paused. They issued a statement asking for prayers. They expressed gratitude. And they kept going.
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