“Owners of stolen Kia and Hyundai vehicles may be entitled to money after the vehicle manufacturers failed to install common anti-theft technology, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta. As part of a settlement with multiple state attorneys general, including Bonta, the makers of Kia and Hyundai vehicles will pay a settlement of about $9 million. In 2022 and 2023, a dramatic rise in stolen Hyundai and Kia vehicles were reported in the U.S., thanks in part to viral TikTok trends and easily bypassed security. In California, vehicle thefts came in just under 203,000 in 2023, with the Kia Optima, the Hyundai Sonata and Hyundai Elantra as the top three most stolen cars. The vehicles were manufactured with ‘easily bypassed ignition locks and without anti-theft devices called engine immobilizers’, according to a news release from Bonta. The engine immobilizers help keep cars from being hot-wired by preventing them from starting unless a car’s ‘smart’ key with the digital code is present.” (12/17/25)
“For over two decades now, Amazon has been seen as a one-stop shop to buy virtually anything, and get it delivered in no time flat. It’s been estimated that the platform has over 310 million active users, and just in the U.S. during 2023, sold over 4.5 billion items. Amazon claims to be guided by four principles: ‘customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking’. Certainly there is a very large quantity of retail items for sale on the platform, even if their quality or identity may be questionable. But in another much more obscure part of the business, Amazon’s supposed obsession with its customers and ‘commitment to operational excellence’ falls flat. Amazon Business, an operation under the umbrella of Amazon’s services, has grown as a popular procurement tool for businesses and organizations over the past few years.” (12/17/25)
“Any story about resistance within the military must begin by recognizing that it’s not an easy thing to do. Apparently, that’s true even for a much-decorated retired Navy commander, former astronaut, and sitting United States senator. I’m talking about Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. He was one of six Democratic legislators, all military veterans or former intelligence officers, who, on November 18th, released a 90-second video reminding members of the military that the oath they took on enlisting requires them to refuse illegal orders. The implicit context was the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, but their message took on added urgency after the Washington Post published an exposé about an order coming from high up to kill survivors of an airstrike in the Caribbean Sea.” (12/16/25)
“Within a day after two gunmen killed 15 people during a gathering for the Jewish holiday Hanukkah at Australia’s most famous beach, a very resilient country began to focus on ways to prevent a similar tragedy: Better gun regulations. A warm embrace of Jewish Australians. A sterner check on antisemitism. Tighter surveillance of potential terrorists. Yet a particular act of selfless heroism during the Dec. 14 mass shooting has offered up one more possible solution. A video shows Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim shop owner in Sydney, tackling and disarming one of the alleged Bondi Beach shooters, also a Muslim. This bystander, by bursting bravely into action, may have saved countless lives even as he was shot. ‘God gave me strength’, he reportedly told a cousin from a hospital bed. His father, Mohamed Fateh al-Ahmed, perhaps best described the motives of his son, who gained Australian citizenship in 2022 after fleeing conflict in Syria.” (12/15/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article titled ‘Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say’. Does anyone remember the 15 Palestinians who died on March 16, 2025? Does that day stand out in anyone’s memory as particularly significant in terms of mass murder? No? Same here. I honestly can’t remember it at all. This would have been during the tail end of the first fake ‘ceasefire’, a couple of days before Trump signed off on Israel resuming its large-scale bombing operations in Gaza, so this wasn’t one of those days with huge massacres and staggering death tolls. It doesn’t exactly stand out in the memory.” (12/16/25)
“When someone you disagree with politically dies, no matter the circumstances, should you be happy? That’s a rhetorical question; I don’t really care what your personal answer is. Everyone has weird thoughts that pop through their mind over which they have no control, most of which are fleeting and ignored. The problem occurs when those thoughts are followed by an ‘and the world needs to know this’ action. The world does not need to know your every thought, or even most of them. It’s hard not to laugh when you see someone in a ‘blooper’ video do something stupid or fall on their face somehow. You might feel phantom pain from it, but it’s still funny. It’s funny, at least in part, because we’ve all been there – there isn’t anyone who hasn’t done something stupid or clumsy.” (12/16/25)
“A wildlife photographer stumbled upon one of the oldest and largest known collections of dinosaur footprints, dating back about 210 million years to the Triassic Period, high in an Italian national park near the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympic venue of Bormio, officials announced Tuesday. The discovery in the Stelvio National Park was striking for the sheer number of footprints, estimated at as many as 20,000 over some five kilometers (three miles), and the location near the Swiss border, once a prehistoric coastal area, that has never previously yielded dinosaur tracks, experts said. … The dinosaur prints are believed to have been made by long-necked bipedal herbivores that were up to 10 meters (33 feet) long, weighing up to four tons, similar to a Plateosaurus, Dal Sasso said. Some of the tracks were 40 centimeters wide, with visible claws.” (12/16/25)
“Former President Joe Biden requested executive privilege amid the Congressional investigations into his administration’s use of the autopen, with the Trump administration rejecting the request Tuesday, Fox News Digital learned. ‘I am concerned that disclosure of these materials would damage important institutional interests of the Presidency, including by impairing the ability of future Presidents to receive robust, candid advice from their close advisers. For these reasons, I hereby assert executive privilege over the documents listed,’ Biden wrote in a letter to Archival Operations Division of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Oct. 1, 2025, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Fox News Digital. … White House Counsel David Warrington responded Tuesday to the request in a letter to NARA, denying the calls for executive immunity. Such immunity protects government officials, notably the president, from lawsuits or prosecution over actions conducted while performing official duties.” (12/16/25)
“In May 2013, as President Barack Obama delivered a major foreign-policy speech in Washington, I managed to slip inside. As he was winding up, I stood and interrupted, condemning his use of lethal drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. ‘How can you, a constitutional lawyer, authorize the extrajudicial killing of people – including a 16-year-old American boy in Yemen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki—without charge, without trial, without even an explanation?’ As security dragged me out, Obama responded, ‘The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to’. Perhaps my questions touched a chord in his conscience, but the drone attacks did not stop. Just before that incident, I had returned from Yemen, where a small delegation of us met with Abdulrahman’s grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki – a dignified man with a PhD from an American university, someone who genuinely believed in the values this country claims to represent.” (12/16/25)
“The Trump administration on Tuesday designated another Latin American drug cartel as a foreign terrorist organization, increasing financial pressure on its members and opening the door to potential military action against them. The U.S. State Department said Clan del Golfo, which is based in Colombia, has been listed both as a foreign and a global terrorist group, calling it a ‘violent and powerful criminal organization’ that uses cocaine trafficking to fund violent activities. ‘Clan del Golfo is responsible for terrorist attacks against public officials, law enforcement and military personnel, and civilians in Colombia’, the statement said. The designation comes after the Trump administration in September added Colombia to a list of nations failing to cooperate in the drug war for the first time in almost 30 years.” (12/16/25)
