“President Trump put the affordability crisis squarely in his sights this week when he announced a major regulatory reform that will save American families billions of dollars on vehicles in the coming years. By rolling back onerous overreach from the Biden administration, Mr. Trump is ensuring consumers will be able to buy the cars and trucks they want, and at lower prices. The regulation concerned here is the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which are promulgated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. CAFE standards regulate fuel economy for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks. Under Biden, these standards were raised to completely unreasonable levels, forcing costly changes for consumers and automakers alike. The Biden-era regulation would’ve required automakers to meet a fleet average of more than 50 miles per gallon for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks in model year 2031, which is just a few years away.” (12/08/25)
Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas JS Davies
“Donald Trump campaigned on ending endless wars and now boasts that he has resolved eight wars. In reality, this claim is delusional, and his foreign policy is a disaster. The United States remains mired in ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and now Trump is careening blindly into new wars in Latin America. The dangerous disconnect between Trump’s delusions and the real-world impacts of his policies is on full display in his new National Security Strategy document. But this schism has been exacerbated by putting US foreign policy in the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose neocon worldview and behind-the-scenes maneuvering has consistently undercut Trump’s professed goals of diplomacy, negotiated settlements and ‘America First’ priorities.” (12/08/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“The blue whales have stopped singing / because the krill are vanishing / because the oceans are warming / because we are ruled by long-toothed liars / whose insides are full of dead leaves. / The great whales have gone silent / and my bird has gone blind / and there are chatbots in the basement / and corpses in the corn. / Under the overpass it is dry and still. / You would never know that everything is dying. / You should come and visit me. / Meet me over there under the sepia streetlights / with the strangleporn perverts and fentanyl fallen, / all the stillborn scar tissue extractions / from the wreckage of a banished womb, / the NAFTA-noosed factory towns full of deserted buildings / and the window-snarling meth towns full of deserted people, / where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle / with the cries of the last baby orangutan / ever born in the wild …” (12/08/25)
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is warning that Illinois officials are releasing violent criminal illegal [sic] aliens despite active immigration detainers, a move the agency says is putting the public at risk. In the letter shared with Fox News Digital, Todd Lyons, ICE’s senior official performing the duties of director, said Illinois has ‘tens of thousands of criminal illegal [sic] aliens’ in custody – individuals who, he noted, have committed crimes ranging from murder and rape to child pornography and armed robbery. Lyons said these offenders ‘should be swiftly removed from the United States … and not be returned to our streets to wreak havoc on law-abiding citizens’. According to data provided by ICE, Illinois has released 1,768 criminal aliens with active detainers since January 2025. ICE said the crimes tied to those offenders include homicides, assaults, burglaries, weapons offenses and sexual-predatory crimes.” (12/08/25)
“About 100 children who were abducted from a Catholic school in central Nigeria last month have been freed. They arrived in the Niger state capital, Minna, in a fleet of minibuses escorted by military vans and armoured vehicles, and were received by Governor Umar Bago. Details about their release remain unclear, including whether it was secured through negotiation or by force, and whether any ransoms were paid.” (12/08/25)
“A major theme of American politics over the past few decades is Democrats repeatedly bailing Republicans out from the political consequences of their own actions, particularly with health care. During the Obama years, House Republicans voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare, which Democrats blocked every time. During Trump’s first term, the GOP came within one vote of actually repealing it. Now, with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), Republicans have finally gotten what they wanted: namely, taking a trillion-dollar bite out of Medicaid, and allowing Biden-era Obamacare subsidies to lapse, meaning premiums on the exchanges are going to more than double. Except, whoops, it turns out that people don’t like this at all, and even the more dim-witted congressional Republicans are starting to fear this might blow up in their faces.” (12/08/25)
“The apparent leader of a failed coup in Benin remained on the run and the fate of hostages remained unclear on Monday, a day after a group of soldiers attempted to overthrow the government of the West African nation. The soldiers, calling themselves the Committee for Refoundation, stormed the national television station on Sunday morning. Led by Lt. Col. Pascal Tigri, eight soldiers appeared in a broadcast announcing the removal of President Patrice Talon, dissolution of the government and suspension of state institutions. Before the coup, Tigri was a member of Talon’s protection detail. As an artillery officer, he commanded a National Guard battalion between 2023 and 2025. By Sunday afternoon, the coup was foiled by Benin’s military, supported by Nigerian air and ground forces, which launched attacks against fleeing mutineers. At least a dozen soldiers were arrested, while others remained at large. Tigri’s whereabouts weren’t known.” (12/08/25)
“For years, Democrats assured us that expanding government programs was an act of moral heroism — that the only thing standing between America and utopia was more taxpayer money flowing through more ‘community-based’ nonprofits embracing ‘equity-centered’ missions. Then Minnesota happened, exposing a truth the radical left will never admit: The system isn’t broken. This is exactly how it’s designed to work. Over 70 people connected to the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future face federal charges in the country’s largest COVID pandemic fraud scandal. It was primarily Somali American defendants who allegedly stole funds meant for low-income children by submitting falsified invoices, fake meal counts and fabricated rosters. The organizations billed the government for tens of millions of unserved meals, using the stolen money for luxury cars, beachfront property and homes. It’s jaw-dropping — but it’s not surprising. And it happened because Democrats built a system practically engineered for abuse by the nonprofit industrial complex.” (12/08/25)
“Environmental and economic justice advocates alike have been sounding the alarm for months regarding the Trump administration’s push to built massive data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency in communities across the United States (regardless of local opposition) and on Monday Congress heard from a coalition of more than 200 groups demanding action to stop what they called ‘one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation’. Led by Food and Water Watch (FWW), which originally demanded a moratorium on new AI data centers in October, more than 230 organizations have signed a letter warning that thus far, Congress has failed to take action to stop the rapid expansion despite the fact that ‘the harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive.'” (12/08/25)
“Twelve former FBI agents fired after kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington sued Monday to get their jobs back, saying their action had been intended to de-escalate a volatile situation and was not meant as a political gesture. The agents say in their lawsuit that they were fired in September by Director Kash Patel because they were perceived as not being politically affiliated with President Donald Trump. But they say their decision to take a knee on June 4, 2020, days after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, has been misinterpreted as political expression. The lawsuit says the agents … became outnumbered by hostile crowds they encountered and decided to kneel to the ground in hopes of defusing the tension, the lawsuit said.” (12/08/25)
