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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.
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Brian Allen: TWENTY-THREE DEAD: Inside the Torture, Neglect, and Silence of ICE Detention

There are numbers that a government can hide behind and numbers that break through the wall of official language. Twenty-three is the latter. Twenty-three people have died in immigration detention this year under the Trump administration, a total that eclipses previous years and forces a painful question into the national conversation. Who were these people, and what happened inside the walls of a system that operates with almost no public visibility?

Two names rise to the surface first because their stories refuse to stay buried. They belong to men who entered the custody of the United States alive and left it dead. …
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Members of Congress reviewing Ge’s case discovered that he had been found with both his hands and both his feet tied behind his back. They were told that a man with his limbs bound in this way had somehow managed to kill himself. There was no plausible method for such an act. …

The second name is Randall Esquivel. He did not die inside an ICE facility. He died because ICE deported him while he was in a vegetative state. Esquivel became gravely ill in custody. Advocates say his medical decline was rapid and preventable. Instead of transferring him to a hospital equipped to care for him, ICE placed him on a deportation flight. …
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BBC: New US security strategy aligns with Russia’s vision, Moscow says

Russia has welcomed US President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy, calling it “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision.

The 33-page document, unveiled by the US administration this week, suggests Europe is facing “civilisational erasure” and does not cast Russia as a threat to the US.

Combatting foreign influence, ending mass migration, and rejecting the EU’s perceived practice of “censorship” are mentioned as other priorities in the report.

Several EU officials and analysts had pushed back on the strategy, questioning its focus on freedom of expression and likening it to language used by the Kremlin.
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Steven Beschloss: Do You Support the Global Expansion of Democracy?

A Saturday Prompt

In less than a month, it will be 2026, the 250th anniversary year of our nation’s founding and the beginning of an extraordinary democratic experiment. Given the anti-democratic regime controlling our White House, it’s going to be quite a year filled with cognitive dissonance.

That became even more obvious with the release yesterday of the 33-page “National Security Strategy,” which seeks to set out the foreign policy agenda and guiding principles of this second Trump term. In this brief prompt, I won’t explore the document in detail, but note some of the overarching worldview, including its hostility to “the trajectory” of Europe and its assertion that the European continent is facing “civilizational erasure” because of the flow of immigrants and the failures of its leaders.

It goes on to suggest the revival of Europe’s “former greatness” means supporting nationalism and far-right “patriotic” European parties, which would include, for example, Alternative for Germany (AfD), an extremist neo-Nazi party.
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Lisa Needham: A war criminal without a war

It’s just murder.
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It’s tempting to say that Hegseth is a war criminal committing an ongoing series of war crimes, with the killing of survivors being especially horrific. But as George Will — not exactly a liberal anti-war type — put it, he “seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”
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CNN: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers

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Reuters: Video shows final, confused moments of survivors of US boat strike in Caribbean, say sources

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They were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the U.S. military was weighing whether to finish them off.

“The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – December 4, 2025

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,… killed by the United States.”
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Brian Allen: Trump Hit With $310 Million Lawsuit Alleging “Epstein-Identical” Trafficking Network

A new lawsuit has landed in the American political bloodstream with the force of a seismic shock. It accuses Donald Trump of participating in a trafficking enterprise that plaintiffs describe as “identical in every material respect to the Epstein operation” (Doe v. Trump et al., 2025). The suit also names Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and several organizations connected to them.
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Jennifer Rubin: The ‘buck stops’ nowhere

President Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read “The buck stops here.” President Carter actually borrowed Truman’s sign. President Barack Obama said “The buck stops with me” after a failed terrorist attack. President Joe Biden said the same about the messy end of the war in Afghanistan. But in Donald Trump’s regime, bucks never get near the Oval Office. If you listen to the MAGA cult, neither Trump nor any regime official is responsible, accountable, or to blame for anything.

The killing of one national guardsman and severe wounding of another in D.C. was a tragedy and an outrage. The killer, of course, should be punished to the full extent of the law. But to ignore Trump’s egregious decision-making that brought us to this point of reckless political violence is to invite further tragedies and condone grievous incompetence.

No matter how furiously Trump and his minions try to spin the narrative, Biden cannot be blamed for this one. Trump’s crew granted asylum to the suspected killer this April. Most importantly, Trump and MAGA governors who comply with the president’s whims and who send national guardsmen around the country willy-nilly for tasks they are not trained to perform are responsible for their safety. The guardsmen who were attacked should never have been there.
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Rebecca Solnit: Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Park’s Historic Protest

… Seventy years ago today in Montgomery, Alabama, a Black civil rights activist and seamstress famously refused to yield her seat on the bus, which got her arrested, which got the town’s Black community organizing, which got a young minister there named Martin Luther King involved in political activism in a whole new way, which begat the Civil Rights Movement, which didn’t just change the United States but forged essential tools for rights and justice movements all over the world ever since. …
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Joyce Vance: The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come

“You must refuse illegal orders.” That’s what was said in the video made by six Democratic members of Congress. Trump accused them of seditious behavior. The FBI launched an investigation.

Then, on Black Friday, the Washington Post ran with an exclusive story about the September 2, 2025, attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, the first of a series of attacks that have involved strikes on at least 23 boats to date. The Post reported that in advance of the strike, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”

That’s what the special operations commander overseeing the attack did. After the initial hit, live drone feed showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. The commander “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions … The two men were blown apart in the water.” …
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