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One person has died and two were injured after a single-vehicle crash in Lanark Highlands on Saturday afternoon. Police say the crash happened in a rural area on Black Creek Road near Loves Road, about 100 kilometres west of Ottawa at around 4 p.m. No details on the condition of the two injured were immediately available. The investigation into what led to the crash is ongoing. Roads in the area were closed for several hours on Saturday and have since re-opened. Shopping Trends The Shopping Trends team is independent of the journalists at CTV News. We may earn a commission when you use our links to shop. Read about us. Editor's Picks Our Guide To The Most Giftable Toys In 2024 17 Sweet Treats And Snacks That Make Great Stocking Stuffers The Best Gift Ideas From Canadian Brands For Everyone On Your List Home Our Guide To The Best Sectional Sofas You Can Get In Canada Our Guide To The Best Electric Snow Shovels In Canada In 2024 (And Where To Get Them) Our Guide To The Best Hydroponic Gardens In Canada In 2024 (And Where To Get Them) Gifts 20 Of The Best Gifts Worth Splurging On In 2024 Mary Berg's Favourite Kitchen Products To Gift This Holiday Season The Best Gifts to Give Your Dad in 2024 Beauty Our Guide To The Best Self Tanners You Can Get In Canada 20 Anti-Aging Skincare Products That Reviewers Can’t Stop Talking About 12 Budget-Friendly Makeup Brushes And Tools Worth Adding To Your Kit Deals Black Friday May Be Over, But You Can Still Take Advantage Of These Amazing Sales On Amazon Canada It's Officially Travel Tuesday: Here Are The Best Deals On Flights, Hotels, And Vacations The Waterpik Advanced Water Flosser Will Make Cleaning Your Teeth So Much Easier — And It's 40% Off For Cyber Monday Ottawa Top Stories Members who served in peacekeeping mission in Sarajevo gathering at Canadian War Museum Ottawa driver hits the road impaired despite winter driving conditions: OPP 1 dead, 2 injured in Lanark Highlands crash Here's how you can watch CTV News at Six on Sundays during the NFL season Slushy road conditions, rain showers or flurries in the forecast for Ottawa this Sunday Ottawa gets in the festive spirit with residents flocking Christmas markets What's happening in Ottawa this weekend: Dec. 6-8 Man suffers critical injuries after crash during snowstorm in Ottawa's south end CTVNews.ca Top Stories Russian state news agencies say ousted Syrian leader Bashar Assad is in Moscow and given asylum Ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad fled to Moscow on Sunday, Russian media reported, hours after a stunning rebel advance took over the capital of Damascus and ended the Assad family's 50 years of iron rule. Baby found dead in south Edmonton parking lot: police Police are investigating the death of an infant in south Edmonton. Trump calls for immediate cease-fire in Ukraine and says a U.S. withdrawal from NATO is possible Donald Trump on Sunday pushed Russian leader Vladimir Putin to act to reach an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine, describing it as part of his active efforts as U.S. president-elect to end the war despite being weeks from taking office. Quebec Premier meets with Trump, Zelenskyy and Musk during Paris trip Quebec Premier François Legault met up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk while visiting Paris this weekend. A man, a bike and a gun: Police search for evidence to solve the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO on the streets of New York As the investigation into the fatal shooting of a health care executive in Manhattan enters its fifth day, New York City police are missing key pieces of evidence. Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly focused on re-election, doesn’t explicitly rule out future Liberal leadership bid Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly insisted she supports Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and is focused on her own re-election, but wouldn't explicitly rule out a future Liberal leadership bid, in an interview on CTV's Question Period airing Sunday. ‘Moana 2’ cruises to another record weekend and US$600 million globally The Walt Disney Co.'s animated film 'Moana 2' remained at the top of the box office in its second weekend in theatres as it brought in another record haul. Trump says he can't guarantee tariffs won't raise U.S. prices and promises swift immigration action Donald Trump said he can't guarantee that his promised tariffs on key U.S. foreign trade partners won't raise prices for American consumers and he suggested once more that some political rivals and federal officials who pursued legal cases against him should be imprisoned. Updated advisory urges Canadians to avoid all travel to Syria, leave if possible Ottawa is urging Canadians to avoid all travel to Syria and to consider leaving the country if it's safe to do so. Atlantic The 61st Annual Christmas Daddies Telethon raises more than $559,000 for children in need The 61st annual Christmas Daddies Telethon continued its proud Maritime tradition, raising more than $559,000 for children in need on Saturday. Federal Government announces more than $1 billion to meet New Brunswick’s electrical needs Natural Resources Canada announced it will spend more than $1 billion for the province of New Brunswick to meet growing electricity demands in a news release Sunday. Actor visits Halifax mission with socks for those in need Canadian actor and singer Tom Jackson delivered socks to the Souls Harbour Rescue Mission on Friday as part of a campaign to save lives this Christmas. Toronto Ontario saw the highest number of whooping cough cases in the last 17 years: report The number of whooping cough cases in Ontario this year has reached a level that hasn't been seen in 17 years. Car crash sends at least 2 to hospital and leaves debris on Mississauga Road At least two people were taken to the hospital after their vehicle crashed into a pole near Winston Churchill Boulevard at Derry Road overnight. Hwy. 401 westbound shut down in Ajax due to police investigation The westbound lanes of Hwy. 401 have been closed in Ajax due to a police investigation. Montreal Quebec Premier meets with Trump, Zelenskyy and Musk during Paris trip Quebec Premier François Legault met up with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk while visiting Paris this weekend. Rosemont family event Shake La Cabane cancelled after pricing policy backlash A community centre in Montreal's Rosemont neighbourhood cancelled a family event that was meant to take place Sunday after its pricing policy sparked a heated debate. After $80 million Lotto Max, another lucky Lotto 6/49 ticket sold in Quebec Lotto-Québec announced on Sunday that "the classic jackpot of $5 million, offered in yesterday's (Saturday) Lotto 6/49 draw, was won thanks to a ticket sold in Quebec." Northern Ontario Canada Post strike: Union 'extremely disappointed' in latest offer, negotiator says A negotiator for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) says the latest offer from Canada Post to end the ongoing strike shows the carrier is moving in the "opposite direction." Canada's air force took video of object shot down over Yukon, updated image released The Canadian military has released more details and an updated image of the unidentified object shot down over Canada's Yukon territory in February 2023. How the combination of diapers and splash pads led to 10K illnesses New research is raising concerns about the safety of splash pads, which can be ground zero for germs and greatly increase the risk of spreading disease. Windsor What’s lowering Detroit River water levels? If you’ve noticed the current along the Detroit River sitting lower than usual, you’re not alone. Ontario saw the highest number of whooping cough cases in the last 17 years: report The number of whooping cough cases in Ontario this year has reached a level that hasn't been seen in 17 years. Windsor police continue search for fugitive Windsor police are still searching for 34-year-old Phillip Grant, who is now ranked as Canada's fifth most wanted fugitive. London Hotel roof collapses in Bayfield The roof of the Albion Hotel in Bayfield has collapsed. On the Bright Side with Julie Atchison To brighten your week with good news, CTV London Meteorologist Julie Atchison is showing us the sunny side of things. Digging themselves out: With Santa Claus parade cancelled, Londoners make best of snowy situation Londoners continue to dig themselves out from this week’s massive snowstorm. Kitchener Police looking for missing 16-year-old Waterloo Regional Police are asking for the public’s help in locating a missing 16-year-old. Hotel roof collapses in Bayfield The roof of the Albion Hotel in Bayfield has collapsed. Wet week ahead with rain and snow in southern Ontario's forecast You’ll want to bundle up and bring along an umbrella when heading out the door this week. Barrie Driver charged after passing snow plow in front of oncoming OPP vehicle A driver was pulled over and charged after passing a snow plow in front of an oncoming OPP vehicle. Pair of sleeping drivers charged in drug bust Two drivers are facing charges after they were allegedly found sleeping in their respective vehicles and possessing a quantity drugs Saturday afternoon in Waubaushene. Driver charged after sliding onto someone’s lawn: OPP Caledon OPP charged a driver after they allegedly slid their vehicle onto someone’s front lawn earlier this week. Winnipeg Wintery weather warnings in effect for southern Manitoba Environment and Climate Change Canada has issued several snowfall, winter storm and freezing rain warnings for much of southern Manitoba. Manitoba legislative building holds annual holiday open house The provincial legislative building opened its doors to Manitobans Saturday, inviting everyone to get a glimpse of where major decisions are made. Major Manitoba fossil milestones highlight the potential for future discoveries in the province A trio of fossil finds through the years helped put Manitoba on the mosasaur map, and the milestone of those finds have all been marked in 2024. Calgary Calgary police stage checkstop on National Impaired Driving Enforcement Day Calgary police launched their first holiday checkstop Saturday night on Stoney Trail. Calgarians flocking to markets with local vendors for Christmas Shopping As Christmas is on the horizon, Calgarians headed to the markets across the city on Saturday to get some shopping done while also supporting local businesses. Russian state news agencies say ousted Syrian leader Bashar Assad is in Moscow and given asylum Ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad fled to Moscow on Sunday, Russian media reported, hours after a stunning rebel advance took over the capital of Damascus and ended the Assad family's 50 years of iron rule. Edmonton McDavid, Skinner help Oilers beat Blues 4-2 Connor McDavid had a goal and an assist and Leon Draisaitl had two helpers as the Edmonton Oilers won their second game in a row, defeating the St. Louis Blues 4-2 on Saturday. Baby found dead in south Edmonton parking lot: police Police are investigating the death of an infant in south Edmonton. Russian state news agencies say ousted Syrian leader Bashar Assad is in Moscow and given asylum Ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad fled to Moscow on Sunday, Russian media reported, hours after a stunning rebel advance took over the capital of Damascus and ended the Assad family's 50 years of iron rule. Regina Sask. RCMP arrest 1 suspect in White Bear First Nation killing, 1 still at large Saskatchewan RCMP have arrested one suspect in connection to the Dec. 3rd death of Talon Lonethunder on White Bear First Nation. The remaining suspect in the killing remains at large. Updated advisory urges Canadians to avoid all travel to Syria, leave if possible Ottawa is urging Canadians to avoid all travel to Syria and to consider leaving the country if it's safe to do so. Regina holiday market booming as vendors encourage local shopping amid postal strike The holidays are the busiest time of year for countless businesses, but many Regina vendors are hoping Christmas shoppers will come to them this year amid ongoing job action at Canada Post. Saskatoon Saskatoon under winter storm warning with freezing rain, heavy snow forecasted A winter storm warning has been issued for the city of Saskatoon and parts of west central Saskatchewan by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Sask. RCMP arrest 1 suspect in White Bear First Nation killing, 1 still at large Saskatchewan RCMP have arrested one suspect in connection to the Dec. 3rd death of Talon Lonethunder on White Bear First Nation. The remaining suspect in the killing remains at large. Sask. RCMP investigating homicide on Onion Lake Cree Nation Saskatchewan RCMP is investigating a homicide on Onion Lake Cree Nation after a 37-year-old man died early Friday morning. Vancouver End of the Eras Tour, with Taylor Swift to take final bow in Vancouver After 149 shows, an estimated US$2 billion in revenue and countless outfit changes, Taylor Swift takes to the stage tonight in Vancouver for the final show of her record-smashing Eras Tour. Updated advisory urges Canadians to avoid all travel to Syria, leave if possible Ottawa is urging Canadians to avoid all travel to Syria and to consider leaving the country if it's safe to do so. Coquitlam RCMP seek help identifying suspect who sexually assaulted 7 women Mounties in Coquitlam say they’re looking for a man accused of committing a string of sexual assaults in the city over the past few days. Vancouver Island B.C. NDP provincial director hospitalized after 'serious medical emergency' The former B.C. NDP MLA for Chilliwack and newly appointed provincial director, Dan Coulter, is in hospital after suffering a “serious medical emergency,” according to the party. Prince George Taylor Swift fans rent car after flight to Vancouver cancelled A diehard Taylor Swift fan who lives in Prince George, B.C., says a flight cancellation forced her and a group of other Swifties to rent a car and make the near 800-kilometre journey to Vancouver to catch the last dates of the Eras Tour. Canada Post strike: Union 'extremely disappointed' in latest offer, negotiator says A negotiator for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) says the latest offer from Canada Post to end the ongoing strike shows the carrier is moving in the "opposite direction." Kelowna Study of 2023 Okanagan wildfires recommends limiting development in high-risk areas A study into the devastating wildfires that struck British Columbia's Okanagan region in 2023 has recommended that government and industry limit development in high-fire-risk areas. Kelowna, B.C., to host the Memorial Cup in the spring of 2026 The Western Hockey League's Kelowna Rockets will host the Memorial Cup in the spring of 2026, the Canadian Hockey League said Wednesday. 545 vehicles impounded in 332 days: BC Highway Patrol pleads for drivers to slow down Mounties with the BC Highway Patrol in Kelowna say they've impounded more than 545 vehicles for excessive speed and aggressive driving so far this year. That works out to more than 1.6 per day. Stay Connected

KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 28 — Malaysia’s private medical healthcare, which has become a significant tourism draw and revenue generator for the country, appears to be increasingly out of reach of many citizens. It came to a point where Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim had to weigh in and said that private healthcare costs needed to be regulated as they were “too high and unreasonable”. Bank Negara Malaysia data showed a 12.6 per cent medical cost inflation rate in 2023 — more than double the global average of 5.6 per cent and an increase from 12 per cent in 2022. And so earlier this month, Health Minister Datuk Seri Dzulkefly Ahmad touted the plans to roll out the Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) pricing system by the second quarter of 2025. But what is DRG? Simply put, the DRG is a pricing system that charges a fixed rate for certain medical procedures. Say you are a patient, the DRG is a way for hospitals to get paid a fixed amount for treating you based on your specific illness or condition. It doesn’t matter how long you stay or how many tests you have — once your condition is identified, the hospital gets a set amount from your insurance or government programme, based on the typical cost for treating that condition. This helps hospitals manage costs and keeps payments predictable for everyone. How is it different from the medical billing system now? Currently, private hospitals here use a fee-for-service system (FFS), whereby each service is itemised. This means that as a patient, you are charged separately for each individual service or procedure you receive, like a hospital stay, doctor visits, lab tests, or surgeries. So, if you need more tests or treatments, your bill can keep growing, and the cost depends on what and how much you get. In contrast, under the DRG system, the hospital gets a fixed amount based on your diagnosis, no matter how many services you use or how long you stay. This makes your costs more predictable in the DRG system, whereas in FFS, you're billed for each thing separately. The DRG model is implemented in developed nations like Germany, the United States, South Korea, and Japan. What is the purpose? The DRG is said to enhance the transparency of medical fees and to address the hike in private healthcare costs which contributed to the recent rise of medical insurance premiums, which has been generating a lot of buzz recently. This is also good news for patients because private hospitals might be required to bear the costs of additional treatment if complications arise, according to Dr Yap Wei Aun, chief executive of the Health Ministry’s Health Transformation Office, in a news report published by healthcare portal CodeBlue after an August 27 meeting with the Health Parliamentary Special Select Committee. Under DRG, unnecessary hospital stays and curb the sharp incline of healthcare costs, benefiting not just patients but hospitals, Affin Hwang Investment Bank Bhd analyst Tan Ei Leen told Business Times on December 14. But not everyone is convinced. Potential downsides to DRG Hong Leong Investment Bank (HLIB) Research cautioned that the DRG system could reduce profit margins for private hospitals. With a standardised payment model, HLIB Research said some private hospitals might be tempted to cut corners, discharge patients prematurely, or be selective in admitting low-cost cases. This is because the cost structures among Malaysia’s private hospitals vary widely due to different room configurations, staff-to-patient ratios, and adoption of advanced medical technologies. HLIB Research expects Putrajaya to repurpose the DRG payment system as part of a future national health insurance (NHI) scheme, consistent with global practices outlined in the Health White Paper. A NHI scheme usually requires citizens or residents to contribute a portion of their salaries and receive standardised healthcare services. RHB Investment Bank Bhd analyst Oong Chun Sung warned that Malaysia needs a robust data and technical management system to effectively implement the DRG mechanism. Galen Centre for Health and Social Policy founder and chief executive officer Azrul Mohd Khalib highlighted that the current framework in Malaysia cannot effectively support the implementation of the DRG. He emphasised that the system would require vast data about the patients and would rely on detailed clinical coding and reliable cost data, Business Times reported. Azrul said that the information technology infrastructure in the Malaysian healthcare system is irregular and decades behind, adding that Malaysia also struggles with noting granular cost data. He said that hospitals must be able to break down their expenditures-staff time, pharmaceuticals, consumables, and equipment usage-per episode of care. Further training would be required to interpret DRG-based performance indicators and to adjust internal processes accordingly, he said. What needs to be done for a smooth rollout? Azrul also underlined that consultations, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory and legislative amendments would be crucial to implementing the DRG system. He said that engagement and trust from consumers, hospital administrators, clinicians, and professional bodies were pertinent to ensure a smooth sailing system. The Association of Private Hospitals Malaysia president Datuk Dr Kuljit Singh said its members are not against cost containment, but called for a transparent and collective discussion with all stakeholders to address the issue of rising healthcare costs without delay.By Nicholas Tan Many are hoping that the looming TikTok ban could be stopped by Donald Trump or Joe Biden. On Friday, December 6, a U.S. federal appeals court upheld the TikTok ban law introduced by The Department of Justice and signed by Biden in April. This means that ByteDance, the Chinese owner of the popular social media app, will need to divest its stake in the platform by the deadline of January 19, 2025 or be banned. Here’s whether Trump or Biden can do anything about the TikTok ban before (or after) that happens. While it will be tough for Donald Trump to overturn the TikTok ban through legal action, he could affect how the law is enforced. Biden can also extend the deadline by up to 90 days, though this doesn’t seem likely given that he is responsible for the legislation in the first place. As pointed out by Reuters , ByteDance would have a “heavy burden” to show the Biden administration that it had made “significant progress toward a divestiture needed to trigger the extension.” Barring that, it would fall upon Trump to reverse the decision in some way. One of the main difficulties of Trump halting the ban comes from the January 19 deadline coming a day before his official inauguration, as noted by Al Jazeera . While Trump attempted to ban the platform outright by executive order in 2020, it faced numerous legal challenges and by the time it reached the Biden administration it was transformed into the law in question. Since then, though, Trump stated during his 2024 presidential campaign that he has vowed to save it and even joined the platform , where he has over 14 million followers and more than 100 million likes. In addition, his nominees of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence are both on TikTok and don’t agree with the ban. If Trump wants to follow through with his promise, he has several options in preventing TikTok from being banned outright over time. Anupam Chander, an expert on global tech regulations at Georgetown Law, says that in the long term the president-elect could help ByteDance change its policies on TikTok to consider security concerns. Trump could also assist in having the company find a US buyer to comply with the law. Another expert, staff attorney George Wang at Columbia University, similarly told Vox that the language in the ban law is broad enough that it grants “the president some leeway to decline to enforce the ban if TikTok or ByteDance comes to some sufficient solution.” Chinese officials would be more open to a sale if Trump lowers his threat to impose additional tariffs on China , according to James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studios via NPR . Trump could also greatly influence how the TikTok ban law is enforced, effectively neutering its effect. Civil liberties director David Greene from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the incoming president could “instruct the US Justice Department to drop or modify its defense in the lawsuit with ByteDance or instruct the US Department of Commerce not to enforce the law.” TikTok is expected to appeal this decision by the federal appeals court to the Supreme Court. Free speech organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union says that the ruling “blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.” It’s unclear, however, whether the Supreme Court would be able to hear the appeal and decide on the case before the January 19 deadline comes to pass. Still, if the appeal is granted, Trump could influence and modify how the DOJ argues its case before the Supreme Court in its defense. Nick Tan is a SEO Lead Writer for GameRevolution. Once upon a time, his parents took away his Super Nintendo as a punishment. He has sworn revenge ever since. Share article

This is CNBC's live blog covering Asia-Pacific markets. Asia-Pacific markets opened mixed Monday as traders assessed revised economic growth data from Japan and awaited China's November inflation data. > Philadelphia news 24/7: Watch NBC10 free wherever you are Japan's Nikkei 225 was up 0.15%, while the Topix gained 0.2%. Japan's third-quarter GDP was revised to 0.3% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, up from 0.2% and above estimates from a Reuters poll that predicted no change. South Korea's Kospi was down 1.3%, while the Kosdaq dropped 2.8% amid the ongoing political turmoil in the country. Over the weekend, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol survived an impeachment vote in parliament, but the leader of his party said the president would eventually resign. Hong Kong Hang Seng index futures were at 19,821 lower than the HSI's last close of 19,865.85. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.3%. In the U.S. on Friday, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite rose to fresh records after November jobs data came in slightly better than expected , but not so hot as to deter the Federal Reserve from cutting rates again later this month. The broad market S&P 500 climbed 0.25% to 6,090.27. Tech-heavy Nasdaq advanced 0.81% to 19,859.77, bolstered by gains in Tesla , Meta Platforms and Amazon . The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 123.19 points, or 0.28%, to close at 44,642.52. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq went on to their third straight positive week as well, rising 0.96% and 3.34%, respectively. The Dow slipped 0.6% during the period. — CNBC's Sean Conlon, Lisa Kailai Han and Pia Singh contributed to this report. CNBC Pro: Five global stocks the pros are buying before the start of 2025 2024 has seen some massive stock rallies, as investor interest in themes such as AI has shown little sign of waning. As the year-end nears, CNBC Pro asked three fund managers what global stocks they are buying in the lead-up to 2025, as they attempt to get ahead of the curve. CNBC Pro subscribers can read more here. — Amala Balakrishner S&P 500 to hit 6,700 by year-end 2025, says HSBC The S&P 500 is set for more gains in 2025, according to HSBC. The firm said it expects the broad market index to hit 6,700 by the end of next year, which implies more than 10% upside from Thursday's close. The index has already risen more than 27% this year. "While this year's equity rally was a mix of both earnings growth and a valuation re-rating (c50/50), we expect next year's equity returns to be focused on earnings growth as valuations are more stretched," analyst Nicole Inui told clients in a Friday note. "Overall, we expect earnings to grow by 9% incorporating a slower but still resilient US economy and some margin expansion." Inui also said she expects the U.S. economy to slow over the course of the next year but remain resilient as inflation eases. That would enable the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by another 125 basis points, she forecast. — Sean Conlon UBS says 'a constructive stance is warranted on global equities' next year Despite the threat of tariffs next year, investors should stay bullish on stocks in 2025, according to UBS. "Heading into 2025, we think a constructive stance is warranted on global equities, and on U.S. stocks in particular," the bank wrote in a Friday report. "We note that historically U.S. equities tend to rally into presidential elections and after, with the average gain in the 150 trading days following an election averaging near 5% in data going back to 1928 for the S&P 500." UBS added that the U.S. sectors it views as most attractive are the technology, utilities and financial sectors. — Lisa Kailai Han November jobs report beats expectations The U.S. economy added 227,000 jobs in November, marking a sharp rebound from the previous month. Economist polled by Dow Jones expected an increase of 214,000 jobs for the month. Jobs growth for October was revised to 36,000 from 12,000. The unemployment rate came in at 4.2% for November, as was expected. — Fred ImbertBayern Munich jump to 3rd place in EuroLeague after defeating Barcelona 100-78

Can Trump persuade the Supreme Court to stand aside so he can solve the TikTok problem?ADEMOLA LOOKMAN FIRED Atalanta top of Serie A with the late, decisive goal in Friday’s 2-1 win over AC Milan which moved them two points ahead of Napoli. Nigeria forward Lookman continued his superb form by nodding in his 10th goal of the campaign with three minutes remaining at the Gewiss Stadium in Bergamo. The 27-year-old met Sead Kolasinac’s flick-on from a corner to give Atalanta a club-record equalling ninth straight win in Italy’s top flight and further boost hopes of a first-ever Scudetto for the traditionally small, provincial club. Alvaro Morata had looked to have earned seventh-placed Milan a point in a fiery atmosphere with his 22nd-minute leveller after former Rossoneri flop Charles De Ketelaere had crashed Atalanta ahead in the 12th minute with a thumping header. Napoli host Lazio on Sunday night and Antonio Conte’s team will have to beat the team who knocked them out of the Italian Cup if they are to reclaim their narrow league lead. Atalanta now turn their attentions to Tuesday’s visit of Real Madrid in the Champions League when they can strengthen their case for direct qualification for the last 16 and get revenge for defeat in the European Super Cup in August. Few would be surprised with an Atalanta win over Madrid, who will have Vinicius Junior back from injury, just as no-one would be shocked if they were to be crowned Italian champions come May. Brilliantly taken goals either side of half-time from Italian internationals Federico Dimarco and Nicolo Barella and Marcus Thuram’s neat volley in the 67th minute were enough for Inter to beat Parma 3-1. The reigning champions are four points behind Atalanta but have a game in hand after having to abandon last weekend’s fixture at Fiorentina due to Edoardo Bove’s harrowing collapse. Inter are unbeaten in 14 matches in all competitions and travel to Bayer Leverkusen on Tuesday knowing that a win would almost certainly ensure a Champions League last-16 with two matches remaining. “We scored some great goals today... The only disappointing thing is that we conceded. We didn’t deserve to given how we played over the 94 minutes,” said Inzaghi to DAZN. Parma, who netted through a late Matteo Darmian own goal, sit 12th in Serie A, but Inzaghi still picked his best available XI even with a big European fixture around the corner, selecting captain and star striker Lautaro Martinez for his 300th Inter appearance. Martinez has struggled in front of goal this season and as well as having a first-half strike rightly ruled out for offside the Argentina forward also wasted three good opportunities to score. The 27-year-old had his head in his hands when he poked wide a great chance one-on-one with Parma goalkeeper Zion Suzuki, six minutes after Thuram lashed home his 10th league goal of the season. France attacker Thuram was born in Parma where his father Lilian played for five seasons, winning the UEFA Cup and Italian Cup in 1999 as part of a star-studded outfit which also featured Italian icons Gianluigi Buffon and Fabio Cannavaro.

You cannot make this up : “ OpenAI’s Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) 1 benefits all of humanity, with three objectives”. Yes, a $157 billion company board is still “evaluating” its corporate structure! OpenAI is in a mess because most of the founding partners are those who believe in the unalloyed supremacy of technology above all things. Yes, provided they can extend the Pythagorean postulation that the universe is numbers, and can pursue its practicalization in fixing market frictions, everything will fall into place. Unfortunately, that is an illusion, and OpenAI is learning the hard way. If they had incorporated this company as a for-profit company, the generative AI pioneer will not be going through this paralysis. But that was not the case as they went non-profit, and now want to evolve, and morph, into another species of companies. Unfortunately, that is not an easy thing, because the law is clear: if you are to dissolve that non-profit, the assets move to another non-profit or to the state for public good. Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025 ) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts. Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here. Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and i nvest in Africa’s finest startups here . Of course, how do you hand over $157 billion to the government? That is why the Board is still “evaluating” because they have no clear answers. When they are done, a simple suit will bring them to order. Many years ago, to fund my personal non-profit on electronics in Africa (via African Institution of Technology , a 501c3 charity, which has supported electronics education in 112 universities, click afrit.org for photos), I read the ordinance with the US Internal Revenue Service. Quickly, it became clear that it is better to go and make money, and use the profit to support any charity of interest, than setting up a non-profit directly for its purpose. That is what lawyers will tell you because you never know tomorrow. So, you will have Mastercard Foundation, Intel Foundation, etc funded by Mastercard, Intel, etc. The creator of ChatGPT cannot use ChatGPT to discover the right corporate structure because that is above the pay-compute-grade of ChatGPT. But if they had asked a recent law graduate, they possibly might have been saved from this. And that takes me to the message: use those lawyers, pay them, because they will save you from troubles. Today, I sent two documents to two different lawyers (yes, I use two ), and was happy when they independently returned: “Prof, it’s ready to go”, “Sir, everything looks nice”. Good People, respect lawyers because they serve as high priests on the altars of governments even if you are a tech prodigy. Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here .Clarification: Banker Scammed story

Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti said star forward Vinicius Junior will be back from injury quicker than expected to face Atalanta in the Champions League on Tuesday. The Brazilian winger suffered a hamstring injury in November which was expected to keep him out until the Intercontinental Cup final on December 18. However Vinicius was able to train on Friday and Ancelotti said he would return next week, missing today’s La Liga visit to face Girona. “Vini has recovered from his injury very well, he will not be ready for tomorrow but he will be for the next Champions League game,” Ancelotti said. Vinicius’ return bolsters a Madrid side which has suffered three defeats in their opening five European matches, sitting 24th in the Champions League group table. The coach said defender David Alaba, who also trained with the team, was finding fitness after a long-term knee injury and could return in January. With Vinicius sidelined, even more focus has been cast on misfiring superstar striker Kylian Mbappe after his arrival from Paris Saint-Germain in the summer. The French forward missed penalties in defeats by Liverpool and Athletic Bilbao in the past fortnight and is struggling to find his best form, with 10 goals in his first 20 matches across all competitions. Mbappe posted on social media network Instagram to say he would “change this situation” and show his true colours. “He is conscious (of it), the post he put out after the game is that of a player who knows what he is doing and also what he can do, and will do,” said Ancelotti. “Obviously we’re with him, he’s not at his best level, but there are many players who are not at their best levels and don’t know it – he does know it.” Ancelotti said he was encouraged by Mbappe’s performances in recent La Liga matches against Getafe and Athletic. “In the last couple of games in terms of intensity he improved a lot,” said the coach, citing Mbappe’s sprinting statistics. However Ancelotti accepted resting the 25-year-old might also help him at some point. “We have to support him, but supporting him does not mean he has to play all the games. Sometimes it could be that a day of rest could be good for him.” The coach felt he himself was also being attacked too much over Madrid’s recent form, although admitted he had “to accept” some criticism. “Like stress, criticism is fuel to try and do better,” added Ancelotti. Leaders Barcelona visit Real Betis earlier today, aiming to move seven points clear of Madrid before kick-off at Montilivi. Diego Simeone’s in-form Atletico Madrid, third, welcome Sevilla on tomorrow night. Fixtures (all times GMT): Saturday: Las Palmas v Valladolid (1300), Real Betis v Barcelona (1515), Valencia v Rayo Vallecano (1730), Girona v Real Madrid (2000) Sunday : Leganes v Real Sociedad (1300), Athletic Bilbao v Villarreal (1515), Osasuna v Alaves (1730), Atletico Madrid v Sevilla (2000) Monday : Getafe v Espanyol (2000) Related Story Student-painted canvases to be showcased at Al Ghorrah festival Qatar joins Global Coalition for Digital SafetyCLEVELAND (AP) — Chase Robinson had 16 points in Cleveland State's 78-64 victory over Wright State on Sunday night. Robinson shot 6 of 9 from the field, including 2 for 3 from 3-point range, and went 2 for 4 from the line for the Vikings (9-6, 3-1 Horizon League). Dylan Arnett added 14 points while shooting 6 of 9 from the field and also had seven rebounds. Tevin Smith had 12 points and shot 4 for 10 (2 for 6 from 3-point range) and 2 of 4 from the free-throw line. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings. Get updates and player profiles ahead of Friday's high school games, plus a recap Saturday with stories, photos, video Frequency: Seasonal Twice a weekUnderstanding the science behind Hinton and Hopfield's Nobel Prize in physics

World's Busiest Airport To Launch 18-Month Centennial Celebration On New Year's EveAuthored by James Howard Kunstler, "A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above.” - Matt Taibbi, Racket News I would guess that you’re feeling as if anything might happen now. It’s hard to rule out even the possibility that we could all be vaporized before moving onto the next mundane chore of the day. The world order is dangerously in flux. America’s Woke-Jacobin “Joe Biden” regime was defeated in the 2024 election, but they were apparently just a front for the sinister entity we call the “blob” or the Deep State, which in recent years has consistently and garishly acted against our country’s interests. So, the blob abides, and it probably weaves schemes in the deep background of daily life even as a new government awaits. But if the Woke-Jacobin Biden-istas were tied-in with the so-called “globalist” enterprise centered around the EU bureaucracy, with assistance from the World Economic Forum’s network of zillionaires and bankers. . . well, that coalition looks rather broken now. It’s doing a hurt-dance. It’s on the run, a little bit. What is not broken for the moment — a tenuous moment — is the new Trump regime’s determination to correct the disorders of Western Civ, starting with the affairs of the USA, according to age-old reality-based norms of behavior and good-faith relations between the people and their government. Trust was broken and must be restored. The President-elect has assembled an extraordinary team of reformers, if they can get to their posts without subversion. And, of course, Mr. Trump himself has to evade further attempts to rub him out, to knock him off the game-board before he can take office, and then he must survive the months beyond his inauguration. So, you are correct to be nervous. Paradoxically, Mr. Trump has to initially manage the US government as if it deserves a sense of reassuring continuity, which, in many respects it does not deserve. So many institutions and relationships between them have been perverted and damaged. How do we pretend that the upper layers of management in any federal agency — the strata who really run things below the top “political” appointees — can continue in-place as if all that perversion never happened? The Department of Justice and the FBI are filled with lawyers and agents who abused their power egregiously and went to war against the American people. The agency’s work will just have to stop for a while. The nation can probably endure if investigations and prosecutions are suspended for sixty days while the personnel issues get sorted out — who goes and who stays. But what about the Defense Department and the CIA? The country must be able to defend itself. These departments are the lairs of the more dangerously entrenched blob actors. Both DOD and the CIA have come to be organized as racketeering operations. Both are involved in domestic money-laundering activities at the giant scale, and in rackets abroad — such as the many grifts around Ukraine, in which giant financial entities like BlackRock are partnered-in. (You know, for instance, don’t you, that BlackRock was poised to acquire control of Ukraine’s natural resource base, until Mr. Putin’s resolve ended that fantasy.) And the CIA is suspected of being deeply involved in the Mexican crime cartel operations, both around drugs and human trafficking. The imputations are sickening. The DOD and the CIA will fight desperately to preserve their perqs and projects, and to stay out of jail. But until now they have not really been challenged. The public health agencies, FDA, NIAID, CDC, NIH, and so on have become outright mafias, with labyrinths of money-laundering channels, government grant-grifting, and pharma phuckery, not least around the still-mysterious, homicidal Covid-19 prank, with the deadly mRNA vaccine program piggybacked onto it. Their nemesis, RFK, Jr., is coming on-board to oversee exactly what happened in these corrupt fiefdoms. If you have read his books about Dr. Anthony Fauci, you know that he is adequately prepared to discover what took US public health off-the-rails. Don’t forget, also, that the entire medical profession lies in a slough of dishonor for going along with the fake-and-deadly Covid-19 treatment protocols (intubation, remdesivir, midazolam, and morphine) that killed so many people needlessly. Plus, the doctors’ dishonest demonization of ivermectin and other viable treatments, plus the disgraceful, mendacious behavior of the medical journals in the whole filthy scam. Next, consider the rickety, cruel, Kafkaesque US health insurance system that is now all but running the doctors’ practices. It is an unholy mess. What can you do but wish Mr. Kennedy God-speed in beginning to unravel it all? Surely, a lot of people involved deserve to go to prison. For all you know, the heavyweights of blobdom might be plotting some sort of coup during the Holiday season to prevent Mr. Trump from taking power on January 20. Failure to mount a coup would actually signal some essential weakness in the blob’s own enterprise architecture. The blob has certainly tried everything so far up to an actual coup, that is, a sharp discontinuity in constitutional government — like, with tanks around the US Capitol and generals in the Oval Office. The blob’s other problem is that it has no powerful individual leader to rally behind, no one with charisma. It has only its multifarious tentacles — departments, agencies, offices, and operations — which Mr. Trump and his lieutenants can lop off in broad strokes. They can cashier generals, defund projects, shut-down offices and programs, send US Marshals into CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, to lockdown document archives while flushing out employees. Early on, the Trump team has got to assess the patriotism of individuals in these departments. Based on blob behavior of the past decade, no one’s fidelity to the constitution can be taken-for-granted. It will surely be necessary to begin open inquiries into the recent behavior of some prominent political figures in order to demonstrate a serious intent to reform. For just one example, Alejandro Mayorkas , the Homeland Security chief who threw the US Border wide open for four years, presents a probable cause case for treason. Perhaps the new Attorney General can convene a grand jury away from the blob-dominated DC federal court district, say in Texas where these crimes on the border were actually committed — crimes such as ordering the US Border Patrol to stand down while whole caravans waded the Rio Grande. Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to answer publicly for his coordination of a massive DOJ lawfare conspiracy. How exactly did Deputy US AG Matthew Colangelo end up in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office? Who green-lighted the harsh prosecutions of Jan 6 suspects by Matthew Graves, in particular their long pre-trial detentions in solitary confinement? Who in the White House confabbed with attorney Nathan Wade to manage the Fulton County case against Mr. Trump and eighteen other defendants? Why did Delaware federal attorney David Weiss allow the statute of limitations run out on Hunter Biden’s 2014 and 2015 tax evasion cases? Stuff like that. And, of course, FBI Director Christopher Wray needs to answer for the Jan 6 DNC / RNC pipe bomb caper, and the roles of “confidential human sources” in the Jan 6 Capitol riot — including the antics of the notorious Ray Epps. Plus, the three years of RussiaGate and his cavalier use of the FISA Courts. Please subpoena SC District Judge James Boasberg on that, too, while you’re at it. It will not take many inquiries like these to get the point across. The point will be that after many years of absence, consequence is back on the table for those who abuse power. During the transition — Nov 6 to Jan 20 — Mr. Trump has equivocated a bit about his intentions to bring back consequence in federal operations. On one hand he claims he’s “not interested in retribution,” while on the other hand he has named appointees such as Kash Patel at FBI and John Ratcliffe at CIA who are intimately acquainted with the illegal activities in those places and on-the-record as eager to set consequence in motion. It’s hard to imagine they will demur from getting answers about what has been going on and who is responsible, and take corrective measures. If he makes it through confirmation, it may be less difficult for a Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to straighten out the Pentagon. The military is much more explicitly hierarchical, and orders are orders. Generals and bureaucrats will be ordered out of the building. But then there are large dark pools of activity hidden from the public, things like DARPA and its many offshoots, that may be harder to penetrate. You must imagine that there are operations hidden even from the SecDef. We keep hearing that the Pentagon can’t pass an audit and can’t account for trillions of mis-spent dollars. Guess what? Someone (or many someones) can be court-martialed for that. Again: consequence returns. Suddenly things are done correctly. Perhaps even a lost sense of honor is restored. Who knows what Elon & Vivek’s DOGE group can accomplish? But there are hard limits in the fiscal whoppers like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and veterans benefits that won’t yield much. Blogger David Stockman, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that even firing three-quarters of all federal employees would only save about $700 billion in savings, which is not enough to avoid a debt death spiral. The carried debt alone could sink whatever else Mr. Trump seeks to accomplish, especially as it can morph into a lethal currency crisis at any time — a runaway inflation and / or collapse of the bond market that would put a lot of people and enterprises out of business, bringing on a new great depression. There’s always talk about “growing” our way out of debt. I doubt we will be able to do that in the proposed way, based on economic dynamics we’ll get to further below. In his first term, Mr. Trump made noises about defaulting on US debt. I think you will hear chatter about doing just that in the early days of 2025. Though it sounds horrendous, default will happen one way or another: either an honest repudiation of treasury paper ( Sorry, we just can’t make the payments anymore ), or by allowing currency collapse to do the dirty work for us ( Sorry, but our money is worthless . Here’s a billion dollars. . . enjoy the bagel you get for it ). Much of the rest of the world is in similar straits debt-wise, especially Europe and China. The Bretton Woods system for regulating world money has been brain-dead for many years. It’s not hard to imagine something replacing it, including the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency (with all its exorbitant privileges). It remains to be seen what role, if any, cryptocurrencies might play in world trade. Many people are wowed by Bitcoin’s journey above $100,000 lately. I’m still not persuaded that it’s anything but a classic bubble in a speculation that represents nothing — except maybe the electricity expended in processing the math attached to its “creation.” A blogger friend makes this interesting point: What will matter is that one Bitcoin transaction is equivalent to about a month of electricity for the average US household. As Bitcoin grows, energy “consumption” grows exponentially. Note, I said CONSUMPTION, NOT PRODUCTION. If you believe in infinite cheap energy fueled by infinite free money and debt, then all the power to you! No pun intended. . . . — Wendy Williamson For all the “wow,” Bitcoin still lacks the principal properties of true money. It’s not a practical medium of exchange (buying stuff), it’s not a useful store of value (with its periodic crashes and zooms), nor a reliable index of prices (ditto). To me, it looks like a fugazy that has made a small number of people very rich within a limited window of history. Naturally, the people who got rich, who converted their Bitcoins into villas, yachts, and shares of Nvidia, are infatuated with Bitcoin and the phenomenon of crypto. If there is one thing that might characterize the new times we are entering, it will be the recognition that real things have more value than fake things. We have been traumatized by fakery, and going forward great effort will go into identifying it. Our survival depends on being able to discern the fake from the real. Does the world really need a certified universal money agreement? Nothing like Bretton Woods existed until eighty years ago, and it came into being only because the USA so dominated the globe after a ruinous war in Europe and Asia it could command the world’s obedience — at least the parts that weren’t communist. Before that, currencies, monies, and commodities existed, of course, and people took calculated chances trading in them. Usually, but not always, one nation’s currency dominated for a while, as the pound sterling did before World War Two. But paper currencies are a relative novelty. The US only started using paper money in the 1860s. When “money” was mostly gold or silver coin, exchange rates were easy to determine by the purity and weight of a coin. When paper entered the scene, bankers, speculators, and merchants had to do their own due diligence to discover whether X-tons of iron ore, tons of coal, or wheat were worth trading for X-amount of yen, deutschmarks, pounds sterling, and dollars. Those quandaries birthed hedging in currency and commodity trades — a device now wildly perverted, deforming the dynamics of risk and price discovery in everything. We are probably headed back into that world of diverse monies with inherent risks, part and parcel with a multi-polar world of regional hegemons. The US dollar can no longer act as the universal collateral guaranteeing all transactions. Hence, the trade in debt, bonds, and borrowing re-acquires layers of risk absent for a long time. Government borrowing — issuance of sovereign bonds — necessarily declines in that milieu as moral hazard reappears in financial affairs and governments can no longer promiscuously float their spending on debt. Other countries have already discontinued their purchases of US Treasury paper. Where will the customers for US debt come from? (Answer: nowhere.) It’s just another way that nations and their people are forced to get real in a new disposition of things. For now, it has probably been demonstrated that central bank digital currencies are unlikely to work. (Nigeria’s eNaira program, the world’s first large-scale experiment in CBDCs flopped miserably.) Along with the tyrannical surveillance issues, too many citizens rely on transacting business in cash, and if the cash turns no-good, they will find other instruments for transacting, perhaps even things as crude and straightforward as gold and silver, with no counter-party risk, no leverage, and no bullshit attached. To me, though, reversion to hard currency would imply a devolution to far less-complex economies and much lower standards of living. All that runs counter to the current excitement about technological advances compensating for declining systems of modernity — derived from the 20th century religion of endless, limitless progress — creating evermore available (fake) capital. These are the expectations for Artificial Intelligence, advances in “green technology” (especially enhanced electric batteries), next-generation nuclear power, and energy tech not yet achieved but dreamed about such as atomic fusion and zero-point energy. For now, the primary resource of our economy remains oil. All other technologies, including nuclear and “green” tech, still require oil for the production of their hardware and maintenance. US oil production reached an all-time high in late 2024 at 13.6million barrels a day — way higher than the old, pre-fracking era “peak oil” figure of 10-million b/d from 1970, and superficially impressive. Fracking has made all the difference the past two decades, but it is not a permanent installation in the human condition. The continuing production increase has come from enhanced drilling techniques even while the supply of tier-one “sweet-spots” in the Permian Basin of West Texas has markedly declined — and the Permian Basin is the last redoubt of economic shale oil (oil economically worth recovering) in the USA. Mr. Trump has promised loudly and often to “Drill, baby, drill.” Aggressive drilling and opening remaining frontiers like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil production could extend America’s oil abundance on the short end, but there are no meaningful “exploration” prospects left in North America beyond that. We’ll be fooling ourselves. It’s been a nice ride, but the end is in sight. In the Permian Basin, the best drilling locations are increasingly rare as the more productive areas have been exploited. Production In the Permian has declined by 15-percent since 2020, according to data from Enverus . Break-even costs are rising. New well productivity per lateral foot is declining. ZIRP is bygone and the cost of capital (interest on borrowed money) is up with inflation. From 2009 to 2020 — the ZIRP years — investors flocked to shale oil stocks since they couldn’t make a buck on bonds. But the shale producers had trouble making money, even though they produced a lot of oil. Many went bankrupt. After that, investors grew shy about investing in shale oil. Going forward, the capital might not be there for these capital-intensive operations. With the old oil — say, conventional oil in Oklahoma, 1950, where you just banged a pipe in the ground and oil gushed out — the cost of drilling a well was around $500,000 per well (in today’s money). They produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. Shale oil wells cost between $6-million to $12-million per well, with horizontal drilling and fracking (utilizing vast amounts of water trucked-in, plus chemicals and fracking sand to keep the fractures open). The shale wells produce far less per day than the old conventional wells and they decline by over 50-percent in one year. After three or four years, they’re done. Do you see the difference? Higher oil prices are required to justify new capital expenditure. Yet day-by-day the declining American middle-class steadily loses its ability to pay more for oil and individuals and households go broke under the strain of higher prices. The overall dynamic of our economy starts to wobble. Fewer people can qualify for car loans, which is mainly the way American acquire cars. Car-makers are stuck with excess inventory. Eventually the car-makers’ business model fails. And, by the way, it ought to be clear by now that we will not transition from oil-based cars to all-electric cars — surely not at the same scale of mass ownership. Electric cars just cost too much. What happens when mass motoring becomes incrementally less mass, less democratic, something only for the well-off? Answer: It stops. It becomes a focus of resentment and rage. It loses its government subsidies (highway repair, etc). It also leads to the demise of America’s premier living arrangement: suburbia. I have written about this quandary for years. It has been hanging over America’s head, and we are unable to imagine how it plays out — mainly because of the titanic sunk-costs involved. We’ve invested so much of our historic cumulative wealth in building the infrastructure for this living arrangement that letting go of it is unthinkable. Yet, it is already becoming severely dysfunctional. And, of course, as that happens, its components — the tract houses, the strip malls, the office parks — will lose their value, meaning that it will become ever-harder for many people to successfully cash out of it and move elsewhere. And even so, where would that elsewhere be? That problem is exacerbated by the ruinous condition of American cities and their future trajectory. Many US cities have already failed outright — Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo etc. They are abysmally governed and falling to pieces. They are filled with purposeless humanity, lost souls, dangerous criminals, and ever-fewer places of employment. Even the arguably still-successful cities — New York, Boston, Miami — have attained a scale of operation that is not sustainable, not consistent with the resource and capital scarcities to come. They will have to contract, drop services, lose population — and the process will be very messy. Eventually, they’ll be smaller, but they still occupy some of the best geographical sites, so they will not disappear altogether. The contraction will take a long time to resolve. For the present, that leaves the thousands of small towns across America that have been drained of vitality and investment for decades. Despite the damage, they have two big virtues: they already exist at a scale more congenial to redevelopment in a resource-and-capital constrained time; and many of them are geographically proximate to places where food can be grown for their own support. We will discover that this is where the action will move to. This is where much of the remaining population will resettle as the giant cities and suburbia enter their epic decline. The “Golden Age” euphoria is palpable in these weeks before the Trump inauguration . Wall Street is in a rapture imagining a renaissance of corporate enterprise as a punitive regulatory regime lifts. But, just as gigantic cities tend to fail on the issue of scale, the economy as a whole is in need of reorganizing at a finer grain of enterprise. Gigantism itself, gigantic corporations with their tropism for monopoly, have become increasingly ruinous for communities, households, and individual lives in our time. Americans need more autonomy in their economic lives. The trouble is, we might have to get there the hard way — via a general crash of things organized at too large a scale, which would force the necessary rebuild at a smaller and more local scale. This implies a coming second great depression. It’s not hard to imagine such a crash occurring in the first year of a Trump regime. For one thing, there are surely nefarious parties and persons who would like to see it happen, who might even seek to engineer a financial train wreck for revenge against Mr. Trump and his followers. Anyway, a severely overvalued stock market is begging for correction. Ditto the housing market (and the over-valued collateral it represents) that so much of finance rests on. Too many banks are insolvent. The debt quagmire ensures that government can’t rush to the rescue as it has in past emergencies to bail out the banks without destroying the dollar. You might also wonder about the proposition laid out in David Rogers Webb’s book, The Great Taking , about the meticulously planned scheme for central bankers to seize much of the collateral in the world, meaning all your stuff. Sounds a little grandiose and preposterous, perhaps, but the fact is that the regulatory authorities of Western Civ have rewritten the banking rules stealthily over the years so that anyone with a bank account is now considered just a low-order creditor whose assets can be taken in the event of a banking emergency. Your savings are just labeled “collateral,” and your “ownership” of the assets is not what you thought it was. The scam seems fantastic, but the rules are in place, waiting to be sprung. Mr. Webb’s concise 99-page book is available free as a pdf HERE . Of course, a global implosion of equity and bond markets would be the end of financial life as we’ve known it, and none of the abstract chatter about banking rules takes sufficient account of the grotesque social disorder that would attend such an event, so any Great Taking might end up being beside the point — the point being that everyone is broke, no one can transact, and things get awfully dire. But we get a bit ahead of ourselves going up that path. So, let’s return to things we know about. Mr. Trump’s proposed economic reforms have inescapable overtones of contraction. Paring down the federal government workforce may have many benefits, but it would likely cause a depression in the DC Metro area as jobs are massively eliminated, and the economic damage would radiate through the rest of the country as departments are trimmed and shut down, and the money flowing out of them stops. The effect of a tariff campaign could hurt American business in the short term. Import replacement is a laudatory goal, but it’s liable to be a rough road getting there. Supply lines will break. People and businesses will not get the things they need to do produce goods. It takes time and capital to set up new factories. The tendency will be to run production with robots as far as possible — so, where will the people earn a living? Robots will not become consumers . You must also wonder more generally whether it’s really possible to reenact the industrial orgy of the mid-20th century. Detroit will not be what it was in 1962. “Joe Biden” leaves behind an economy already auguring-in, concealed by monumental federal spending of money created out of thin air in the months leading up to the 2024 election to cover-up the failing private US economy. Also, all of the official reporting about jobs in 2024 was fake in order to juice the election for the party in power. US Government outlays for the year were $6.752 trillion against revenue of $4.919 trillion. Government can’t solve the problem of mass joblessness by giving everybody government jobs, and Mr. Trump is not philosophically aligned to that sort 20th century Big Government action. Anyway, too many jobs today are crap jobs toiling for merciless companies who mistreat their workers, so the very meaning of work has been degraded to a new kind of slavery. Plus, too many Americans do not work at all, but subsist on government hand-outs or on crime. How does this change? First, it doesn’t change without the nation going through a period of disorder, discontinuity, and distress. When it does change, the change will be systemic and emergent. It will not come from any top-down government or managerial process. It emerges from the circumstances that reality presents — specifically, the need for people to support themselves, to make themselves useful to their fellow humans, which relationships form into networks of business and work that become a social ecology, a community. So, the second Trump term could usher in a period of deep economic hardship as we try to figure out how to remake an American economy and rebuild those local ecologies of business. Can Mr. Trump assume a role anything like Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s? A paternal voice speaking directly to the people and offering them reassurance in a troubled time? They are obviously very different personalities. Also, the lingering political opposition to Mr. Trump is far more noxious on the Left than anything FDR faced from the Right in 1933. Today’s Left is still functionally insane, sunk in Marxian-Woke delusions, race-and-gender animus, and an intemperate libido for power, all of it boding ill for political stability. Americans are used to relying on faceless, distant authorities to take care them, to solve their problems: Social Security, Disability, Medicaid, insurance companies, courts. It all works very poorly now, and before long a lot of it may not work at all. We will have to take care of each other. There have never been so many single-person households as there are now. Loneliness and anomie are epic. When the Boomers are gone, that will likely be the end of nursing home care and assisted living at the cost of many thousands of dollars-a-month. The Boomers’ replacement generations are not nearly as wealthy. They missed the window for being able to buy McMansions that could be liquidated for millions to support end-of-life care. We’ll probably see the rise of households made of unrelated people. But the default setting for humans is the family and the extended family. Some human relations that were common in earlier eras of history, and absent in our time, could return. A little over a century ago, ten percent of the people employed in America were household servants, including what were then middle-class households. Today, only the very wealthy have servants. What hasn’t changed is that people need a place and a purpose, and a purposeful place in a household is not necessarily a bad deal in a civilized society. We just haven’t experienced it in many decades and many Americans would probably find the proposition ridiculous. Yet too many have no place in society and nothing to do, including activities that might be considered duties to one another. Many towns in the 19th century had institutions called the Poor Farm. Sounds terrible, perhaps, but it was a way of providing a place and real duties for people who had nowhere else to go and nothing to occupy them. It was generally organized as a local charity. Residents were expected to work to their ability, raise their own food in gardens, take care of livestock, do laundry and cleaning chores. Today, that might be considered “cruel,” but really, is it as bad as just letting many thousands camp-out on the streets, sunk in drug addiction? What it requires is the political will to organize useful, properly-scaled institutions around these needs. To get there, we must drop a lot of ideological pretenses. We face very serious problems with agriculture organized at the gigantic scale, utilizing multi-million-dollar machines (usually mortgaged), giant loans to put in crops, huge “inputs” of chemicals and fertilizers. That is probably coming to an end, too, despite the current techno-narcissistic fantasies of Agribiz. We’re probably going to need more human beings working directly on farms, smaller farms, with fewer giant machines, less borrowed money for putting in crops, and fewer chemical inputs. Which is to say, we’re probably going to see a larger percentage of the population at work growing our food than has been the case for a long time. I suppose it’s hard to grok our society becoming reorganized so differently, of reviving ways of living and working together that are consistent with human nature, proven over time, but considered out-of-date now. Obviously resurrecting relations like these requires major changes in our national psychology. Today, it is impossible to persuade a lot of citizens that they need to do something useful for a living. Or, to look at it differently, that there might be activities to fill their days that would interesting, satisfying, and rewarded with pay — rather than just loafing, getting high, and watching canned entertainment. Today, we lack countless occupational niches in society that used to allow people of very different abilities to find a place and a purpose, especially, now, people of low ability. If I am correct that the macro trend is to re-scale our economy and re-localize it, those places and purposes can return. It will probably also require a return of the eternal verities, too, as a means of managing social relations: truth, beauty, liberty, brotherly love, trust, fairness. . . conditions and behavior that we should at least agree to aspire to in a common culture worthy of our allegiance. I doubt that the incoming Trump administration sees things developing in the direction of downscaling, decomplexifying, and localizing. Rather, they seem to expect ever more grandiose enterprise, at least in what’s known as the private sector, even while they pare down government. But, really, everything in the everyday life of this nation will have to scale down and happen differently. We’re going to need fewer giant entities like Walmart and more local commercial networks of small businesses geared to local communities. As you may have inferred, I believe that circumstances will deliver us to that new disposition of things in any case, whether political leaders agree or not. If Mr. Trump is wise, he will recognize the trend and go with the flow. As I write, governments are falling all over the place. Olaf Scholz cannot form a governing coalition in Germany. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s ruling faction lost bigly in snap elections last summer with no clear majority for any coalition, and also in the EU parliamentary elections. Both countries are using lawfare to defeat their opponents. Mr Scholz’s and his allies are trying to outlaw the rising opposition Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) party, especially after the AFD showed growing strength in state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia. The Paris prosecutor’s office is trying to nail Marine LePen on embezzling EU funds to pay staff salaries in her National Rally Party. Germany, the largest economy in the EU, has been busy committing suicide for the past decade. The country shut down its nuclear power reactor fleet entirely and went all-in for a “green” energy program (wind and solar) that has fallen far short of being able to supply its needs. It had just gotten ready to receive a reliable supply of cheap Russian natural gas in 2022 when somebody — probably the USA — blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines. Joe Biden declared in so many words that he was going to “stop” the Nord Streams months earlier, so why not believe him? The Germans just rolled over for what would normally be construed as an act-of-war against it, by a NATO ally no less. Consequently, overnight Germany’s advanced industrial economy, its automakers, chemical companies, machine tool-makers, became uncompetitive in global markets and the German economy entered a slow death spiral. Europe is now supposed to be happy to get American liquified natgas, which is much more costly to transport and offload than Russian pipeline gas would have been. France was only marginally better off with its robust nuclear energy production to supply electricity, but it, too, lost access to cheap Russian natgas needed for industry and home heating. Meanwhile, the other nations of the EU have all to one extent or another joined the European suicide pact. The EU has been at war against its own farmers for years for reasons that appear completely insane — perhaps driven by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum. The regulatory architecture of the European Commission is crushing business under its “green” energy and climate change mitigation agenda. Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV) unexpectedly won the most seats in the last election, but not an outright majority, and could not form a working coalition. Wilders did not become prime minister —the job was assigned instead to one Dick Schoof, a career bureaucrat who most recently ran the Netherlands’ Intel service. Canada, entered political limbo in mid-December when Deputy Prime Minister and Finance chief (and WEF board member) Chrystia Freeland suddenly resigned and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looked like he was fighting for his political life in parliament. Mr. Trudeau had only days before made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for talks with Donald Trump, who mocked him most severely down there, calling Canada “our fifty-first state” and referring to Mr. Trudeau as “governor.” The Canadian dollar has been tanking since then and stands at 69 cents to the US dollar as I write. Mr. Trudeau will be gone early in the new year at the latest. He’ll be replaced by the Conservative party leader, Pierre Poilievre, who demonstrates an ability to think straight. The European Union regulatory overlayment has become an intolerable burden for the EU member nations. The EU seemed like a good idea at the time, and for many years basic operating principles like a common currency (the Euro) and the Schengen Agreement (free movement of member state citizens and goods across national borders) made daily life easier. But in recent years the EU bureaucracy adopted a set of insane polices: the programmatic destruction of farms and farmers; mass unregulated immigration from third world failed states; and antipathy to petroleum resources for the sake of debatable climate change. Aggravating all this is the unelected EU Commissioners’ lack of accountability to the public. Other technical issues, such as the EU’s lack of fiscal control over individual members and the problems that causes for bond issuance appear irresolvable. Once before, in 2012, financial turmoil has threatened the EU’s existence. But that crisis — the collapse of Greece and its ramifications — got “papered over” with bail-outs and accounting fraud. Now, Europe enters an era not just of critical financial imbalances, but of severe dislocations in the on-the-ground economy of real production. The flood of migrants continues and their aggressive antagonism to age-old European culture is on the rise with calls for Sharia law and a European caliphate. It’s getting to look like a tragi-farcical reenactment of the Mohammedan conquests of the Middle Ages. It’s draining EU members’ treasuries while they go broke from de-industrializing. And countless humiliations are heaped on the people: mass murders, beheadings, constant insults, street violence all over and, just last week, the Christmas market murders in Magdeburg. It’s at a breaking point. As Europe watches Mr. Trump successfully commence deportations, Europe will eventually follow — but not before a tumultuous period in early 2025 when rebellion sweeps away Leftist governments. The European Union could be swept away with them. Borders will harden, national currencies might return, and drastic realignment awaits. The United Kingdom looks like a lost cause due to the utter collapse of the conservative party, leaving Labor temporarily alone on the field, with the monumentally incompetent PM Keir Starmer in charge and an all-out Orwellian regime severely abusing the indigenous British people while it coddles hostile immigrants. That will not last a whole lot longer. Starmer will be chased out in the first half of 2025, just as Liz Truss (remember her?) got dumped in 2022. Waiting to enter at stage-right is Nigel Farage, a genuinely charismatic leader who is destined to become Britain’s Trump. After successfully leading the Brexit charge, he sojourned in the political wilderness like Churchill did between 1929-39. Now he leads the Reform UK Party, which is in the process of utterly eclipsing the broken Tories. Look for Farage to make his move quickly in 2025. Then there is the woeful situation in Ukraine. I’ve written about it often and will recapitulate it as succinctly as possible: The Ukraine War was an American neocon project to destabilize Russia and probably an attempt to gain control of its resource assets. Mr. Putin refused to get rolled and fought back. It has been a hugely costly disaster for Ukraine in blood, capital, and infrastructure. Not a cake-walk for Russia, either. But Mr. Putin will probably attain his objectives, which are: annexation of Donbas and Crimea and establishment of what’s left of Ukraine as a neutral, non-member of NATO. Mr. Trump is eager to end what he calls “this stupid war.” The catch is, how can he settle it expeditiously without appearing to capitulate? Mr. Putin will not budge from retaining Crimea and the Donbas provinces (“oblasts”). That is the condition for even entering talks. The humiliation associated with this project should be all Joe Biden’s, and in some respects certainly will be when his family’s entanglements and machinations are fully exposed, as they are certain to be. Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will solve the puzzle by pretending to negotiate over the port of Odessa, which will eventually be awarded to the rump Ukraine so it can have access to the sea for its essential grain shipments. They’ll tussle for a while over that but it will be all for show. The war will end. Ukraine will finally hold elections and Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be cast out like a dog that has peed on the rug too many times. I doubt he will survive the year. Both America and Russia pony up money to rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, but not much more. The world will come to understand exactly what happened. NATO will be a shadow of what it was, if it does not collapse altogether due to the rising political upheavals all over Europe. I am not on the bus with the mob shouting about Israel as a perpetrator of “genocide.” Our own General Sherman put it succinctly 160 years ago: War is hell . Hamas should not have started one on October 7, 2023. For that, the Palestinians got hell. Hamas fighters should not have (literally) dug itself in amongst the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, with its labyrinth of war tunnels that the Israelis had to destroy if there would be any end to the strife emanating out of them. The essential problem in that corner of the world is that the region cannot support the huge and still-growing populations of most of the Arab states in it. It is mostly desert. The fantastic wealth of the oil age combined with other circumstances, such as the increase in grain production, to grow these populations. Tragically now, all that has reached a limit and things are going in the other direction: toward collapse. This slow-motion collapse expresses itself in political friction, mass migration, violence, and religious zealotry. The Jihadis are serious about murdering non-Muslims. Considering the action in Europe lately, the truculence of Muslim migrants towards their hosts there, it’s obvious that Jews and Christians are on equal footing as targets. The population Israel of Israel is 9.4 -million. The total population of Palestinians worldwide is estimated to be around 14.8 million as of mid-2024. This includes Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within Israel, and in the diaspora across various countries. The population of countries adjacent to — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria — is 145-million. Much of that Arab population subscribes to annihilating the state of Israel, and declares as much publicly all the time. Is Israel not supposed to take those threats seriously? Considering these odds, are you shocked and offended that the United States is an ally of Israel? Do you think that the United States has no strategic interest in any counter-balance to opposing interests in the Middle East? Grow up. The American Woke-Marxists want you to think that this relationship is illicit, unjust. They want you to hate the Jews and hate Israel. You’d better ask yourself: who do these Woke-Marxists serve? Not our interests, not American interests. Israel has managed to make its tiny desert country blossom over the past seventy-five years while also building a manufacturing and tech economy. Due to the constant threats against it, much of the wealth generated by that economy must be directed into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). It is quite an accomplishment for this tiny state to stand-up against so many enemies. They have won two major wars against them in modern times as well as many periodic border clashes, intifadas, and skirmishes. Their enemies are deeply resentful and probably jealous of Israel’s economic success. The Oct 7, 2023, rape, torture, and murder attack by Hamas prompted Israel to mount an existential defense against an obdurately and garishly murderous enemy. Israel won the Gaza Strip territory from Egypt in the 1967 War. In 2005 it turned over governance of Gaza to the Palestinians. Among other things, the Palestinians could have turned Gaza’s twenty-five-mile-long beach-front into a premier Mediterranean resort. Instead, the Hamas government used the international aid funds they received to build miles and miles of war tunnels. Bad choice. They used Gaza as a launching pad for missile attacks and intifadas. More bad choices. 10/7/23 was a crossed red line. Now there is no more Gaza. The civilians will have to find somewhere else to go, and if their Arab neighbors won’t take them, then blame their Arab neighbors. They have been cast out for atrocious behavior. The Jihadis’ publicists want you to think that Israel has behaved badly. No doubt, the action by the IDF in Gaza was brutal. War is hell. In war, everywhere and always, soldiers act savagely. Americans did, at times, in Vietnam and Iraq. It is the reality of war. One lesson is that wars should not be started casually. Israel’s motive in this war is to put the war parties of its enemies out-of-business. It is close to succeeding now, with Hamas scattered, Hezbollah cut off from its sponsor, Iran, and Assad gone in Syria. Israel accomplished this with the “Joe Biden” regime pretending to support both sides in the conflict and finally having less influence than ever over the outcome. This is where things stand in December, 2025, but it is a very lively game-board, and there is much potential for new action and the entry of other players, which we’ll turn to now. Well, that was fast! Took twelve days (Nov 27 to Dec 8). Phhhhht!!! Assad, gone (to Russia). How’d that happen? Begin with the population problem I cited above: the region is poor. Expanding population against a contracting resource base will create great political and social stresses. Syria’s population grew dramatically from 7-million in 1972 to 22-million in 2022. Syria is a large country with distinct territories. Its easternmost region bordering Iraq and Turkey, Jazira, with the city of Raqqah, straddles the Euphrates River, a grain-growing corridor that used to feed the Syrian people. Many years of drought and botched irrigation projects have wrecked farming there. That was one factor in the mass migrations to Europe the past decade. Altogether, 6-million Syrians have fled the country since the Arab Spring in 2011. Jazira is also the location of Syria’s oil, which was grabbed by the US in 2019 when the country was racked by civil war. The region is a cultural crossroads, with a significant Kurdish population, bleeding over to Greater Kurdistan into Iraq and Turkey. Long story short: Assad’s Syria was badly weakened by food shortages, revenue shortage, and long-running civil war. He could barely pay his Army, and when the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel forces pushed across the country this fall, his soldiers melted away. HTS has its origins in al Qaeda, and al Qaeda has its origins in the US intel blob and its neocon strategists. You can be sure that the US was involved in rooting out Assad. As we have seen before, these kinds of operations tend to be double-edged swords, which end up stabbing America in the back later on. In this case, imagine that by chasing Assad out we may have succeeded in turning Syria into Jihad Central of the Middle East. As soon as HTS was in control of Damascus, the capital, Israel sent its air force in and destroyed every military target, airfield, tank park, munitions depot in Syria so that it would not fall into the hands of Hezbollah, Israel’s Iran-backed enemy. Israel controls a small area of southern Syria near the Golan Heights. Israel had already done severe damage to Hezbollah earlier this year by methodically killing off its leadership, one-by-one. The exploding pager op also did enormous operational damage to Hezbollah. For now, Israel benefits from broken Syria. Iran has lost its geographical conduit for arms supply to Hezbollah. The HTS forces are Sunni and Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, is Shia, with all the built-in conflict that implies. All of a sudden, Iran has lost its influence in this region adjacent to Israel, the enemy it declares it wants to “wipe off the map.” The Turks were involved in the Syrian regime change, too. Turkey currently hosts millions of Syrian refugees from the chaos of the Syrian civil war. The Kurds in Syria are also a problem, linked to the PKK, a terrorist terror group inside Turkey. Turkey’s pugnacious president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pivots between its alliance with NATO, its off-and-on strategic relations with Russia, and the Arab world with its cultural affinities. Turkey is a disgruntled NATO. For decades, it was openly and often derided by other nations in the west as “the sick man of Europe.” Yet, it controls the entrance to the Black Sea, which has always been a problem for Russia — they have gone to war several times — though Russia engages in development projects in Turkey these days. Don’t forget, Turkey’s Ottoman Empire controlled all of the Middle East and North Africa from the 16th into the early 20th century and its influence ranged into Europe as well. This was the time long before oil wealth juiced the Arab world. Populations were sparse then across what was then called The Holy Land. The indigenous Arabs still wandered the desert on camels and lived in tents. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in the First World War, and what you see on-the-ground over much of the region are artificial boundaries created by the British after the war for administrative efficiency. Mr. Erdoğan may harbor ambitions for Turkey to once again play a larger role in world affairs. It has the region’s largest standing army. For now, Turkey and Erdoğan enjoy somewhat enhanced regional influence. The counter to him has been the US’s penchant for creating failed states via CIA involvement with rebel and Jihad movements. Mr. Trump has dropped the hint that he’s inclined to keep the US involvement in Syria to a minimum. He begins his administration with a declared aversion to all the world’s current wars. I’d forecast the HTS government not being able to control much of the country and a continued arc toward failed nationhood, with friction and violence between many of the different groups still residing there. I doubt Israel wants to try to control it, since it is an obvious quagmire. Russia appears to be bowing out of direct involvement, too, but is rumored to be negotiating with HTS to maintain its presence at the Khmeimim Air Base and the Tartus Naval Base. The macro trend in many parts of the Middle East is a return to pre-modernity. The last hundred years of jet planes and Range Rovers will look like a strange, anomalous blip in history. Whatever is going on in China, her leaders like to play the long game, looking ahead decades, fifty and a hundred years, while everyone else struggles to strategize from month to month. It doesn’t mean that China comes out a winner, though. Some of that long game is just hubris and pretense. China has plenty of problems. It developed into an industrial colossus overnight, and now the global techno-industrial economy it found such a big role in is wobbling, especially in Europe, which puts a huge strain on China’s export-oriented system. Its financial architecture has always been janky because CCP is so entangled with the banks, bourses, and giant business enterprises — and if it doesn’t like how things are going, the Party just pretends that everything’s great. Nothing can be allowed to challenge the CCP’s dominance. Eventually things break, though, and the Party has to create some new narrative to explain the breakage. Lately there are rumors of mass layoffs, and of many young people leaving the cities to return to the countryside. The population is skewed to the elderly, due to the many years of China’s one-child policy. There is, of course, the disastrous real estate bubble which continues to destroy the savings of households, since many Chinese did not trust banks or stock and bond markets, and instead invested in enormous apartment complex property development projects have been failing one after another. The CCP’s response has been to screw down CCP control over the people and their activities ever-harder. The party fears its own people and no regime has a guarantee to go on forever. Expect turmoil there in 2025 as economic depression creeps across the global economy. America’s problems with China over trade and manufacturing are likely to be eclipsed in 2025 by the gross intrusions and subversions that China has been allowed to make in US institutions and our economy with the assistance of the “Joe Biden” administration . The Chinese have infiltrated America’s research universities, telecommunications (especially the hardware for cell phones and 5-G microwave transmission), US Intel, and the corporate sector, stealing intellectual property and our manufacturing secrets. And, of course, China has deeply involved itself in elected officialdom — the Biden family’s grifting operations and Rep Eric Swalwel’s romance with the spy Fang-Fang, among the most notorious. Senator Diane Feinstein employed a Chinese spy as her limo driver and go-fer for twenty years, including the years 2009 to 2015 when she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. You can be sure that Congress is well-larded with Chinese money and the influence it buys. Expect to find out a lot more in 2025. It is one of the things that binds elected officials so tightly to the DC blob. Two other matters involving China require urgent attention and the waiting Trump admin is already talking about them. One is China’s large, recent purchases of US land, both prime farmland and real estate around US military bases. It looks like they are going to be ejected from these holdings, with or without compensation is not known yet. We might see inquiries as to how these purchases were allowed to happen. The second issue is the number of Chinese nationals, especially men of military age, who came across the border along with the millions of other illegal aliens that “Joe Biden” allowed into the country with zero vetting. In fiscal year 2023 — Oct 1, 2022 to Sept. 30, 2023 — that number was about 24,100. In fiscal year 2024 it was 24,400. You should assume that US intel knows something about some of them, but not most of them, and what they are up to here. Several Chinese “police stations” — that is, offices set up in US cities to control Chinese migrants in the US — have been discovered and busted the last several years. And then there was the case of the Chinese high-altitude “weather balloon” (actually suspected of being a military surveillance balloon) that the “Joe Biden” admin allowed to sail completely across the USA from the Pacific to the Atlantic before shooting it down offshore of the Carolinas. These Chinese activities around the USA in aggregate suggest a kind of stealth warfare aimed at eventually getting control of the North American continent and its resources. This would be consistent with fifty-to-a-hundred-year long-range strategic thinking. And it was apparently working pretty nicely until the elections of 2024. It should be pretty alarming, but somehow the alarm bells have not gone off until a couple of months ago. Questions, anyone? I’d forecast that the US and China will not go to war with China over Taiwan in 2025. It is too much of a losing proposition for all concerned. Both China and the USA will be preoccupied with domestic problems and trade negotiations in the year ahead. Keep your eye on Argentina and its president, Javier Milei. Argentina was the world’s seventh-wealthiest nation in the early 1900s, and from 1930s on, after many coups, the country slid into chronic decline, badly aggravated by the long-running dictatorships of Juan and Eva Peron, and followed buy decades more revolving military coups, Peronista governments, and neoliberal finance mischief that left the resource-rich nation broke. Enter Javier Milei (Mee-lay) in 2023 as Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” president, who ran the promise to “take a chain saw” to the parasitical bureaucracy. In year one of his admin (essentially 2024), Milei got rid of 35,000 government employees and balanced the budget for the first time in decades. Inflation is finally falling. The Argentine people have awakened from the successive Peronista / neoliberal zombie comas they have been in for decades. Prediction: in 2025 Argentina sets the pace for the revolution in Western Civ government. Melei has another successful year in downsizing oppressive, useless bureaucracy. He begins a pioneering national nuclear power program. Argentina begins to emerge as a major player on the world stage. El Salvador is ruled, shall we say, by the eccentric and very interesting President Nayib Bukele-Ortiz (known simply as Bukele), now in his second term. His campaign against gang violence that made El Salvador such a savage place has produced spectacular results. His new “Terrorism Confinement Center” is one of the largest and most modern prisons in the world. It was built to house 20,000 inmates. He has arrested an estimated 86,000 hardened gang-aligned criminals. El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world — which is what happens after allowing criminal gangs to hold the country hostage for decades. From 2022 to 2023, the murder rate fell by approximately 69-percent. (Data for 2024 is not complete.) Mr. Bukele enjoys a 91-percent favorable rating among voters. In 2021, El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal tender alongside the US dollar. Mr. Bukele’s “Bitcoin Law” requires businesses to accept Bitcoin in transactions. (As I said above, Bitcoin as “money” is deeply problematic.) The government itself has been purchasing Bitcoin as a long-term investment strategy. The verdict is out as to how Mr. Bukele’s fate might be chained to Bitcoin. For now, he has managed an epic turnaround in a country that had been lost to anarchy and crime for virtually all its previous existence. Forecast: El Salvador will continue to thrive due to Mr. Bukele’s Napoleonic organizational skills, even if Bitcoin falters. That is all I have for you in this end of year forecast for the year to come. I will be amazed to hear if any of you read this document to its bitter end. For each of you personally: do your best to lead purposeful, ethical lives in 2025. Refrain from trying to push other people around. Take care of your own bidness. . . And, above all, stay calm and cheerful!

Boopie Miller scored 24 points and Yohan Traore added 20 points and 11 rebounds as SMU was at its best after halftime in a 98-82 win over Longwood on Sunday afternoon in Dallas. The Mustangs (11-2) have won seven straight games but this one was not without a serious scare from Longwood. SMU led by just a bucket after a seesaw first half but took charge with a 15-3 run to open the second. The Lancers pulled to within 69-62 on a tip in by Elijah Tucker with 11:37 to play before SMU put away the game with a 14-1 run capped by Chuck Harris' 3-pointer with 6:57 remaining. Matt Cross added 19 points while Harris hit for 12 for the Mustangs, who shot 62 percent from the floor. Tucker led Longwood (11-4) with 20 points, with Colby Garland adding 19 and Emanuel Richards scoring 12 points in the loss. The Lancers allowed their most points of the season and surrendered 32 points more than their season average. The teams went back and forth in a contentious first eight minutes that featured 11 lead changes and three ties with neither team up by more than three points. Harris' jumper with 11:55 left in the first half pushed the Mustangs to a 21-19 lead but that was quickly answered by a 3-pointer from Jefferson to put Longwood back on top at 22-21. SMU then reeled off 17-4 run, with Kario Oquendo contributing two free throws, a 3-pointer and a bucket to that surge and two free throws from Traore put the Mustangs up 38-26 with 5:34 to play in the half. Just when it seemed like SMU had found the formula to dispatch the feisty Lancers, Longwood rallied to tie the game at 43 on pull-up jumper by Garland with 8.9 seconds left before halftime. That gave Harris enough time to get down the floor and into the paint for a short jumper that gave the Mustangs a 45-43 lead at the break. Traore led all scorers with 15 points and seven rebounds before halftime while Miller added 11 for SMU. Garland and Tucker had 10 points apiece to pace the Lancers. --Field Level Media

Donald Trump 's showering praise on the late Jimmy Carter ... saying he did his best to improve the lives of his fellow Americans -- and, the country owes him a debt. The president-elect posted to his social media platform, Truth Social, Sunday ... only about an hour after the Carter Center announced the former president had passed away at 100. In his message, Trump writes that anyone who has been president knows it's a very exclusive club ... and, only members in its ranks can understand the responsibility of leading the country. DJT says JC faced numerous issues when he was president ... and, he did everything he could to "improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude." Trump says he and his wife Melania are thinking of the Carter family at this difficult time ... and, he urges his followers to keep them in their prayers. It's a stark change to Trump and Carter's relationship while the latter was still alive ... just two months ago, on Carter's 100th birthday , Trump called Joe Biden the worst president ever -- before saying Jimmy was "the happiest man because Carter is considered a brilliant president by comparison.” Carter passed away surrounded by family Sunday night after spenging nearly two years in hospice care. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, passed away last year at the age of 96. Tributes from all over the political world are pouring in for Carter ... including from President Joe Biden who called him an "extradordinary leader" and former president Barack Obama who wrote Jimmy taught the world "what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service." It seems Jimmy's bringing people from all sides of the political spectrum together.None

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump's supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump's movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump's Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer , a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer's comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks , whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government , weighed in, defending the tech industry's need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump's world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift. His presidential transition team did not respond to questions about positions on visas for highly skilled workers or the debate between his supporters online. Instead, his team instead sent a link to a post on X by longtime adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller that was a transcript of a speech Trump gave in 2020 at Mount Rushmore in which he praised figures and moments from American history. Musk, the world's richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect , was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump's movement but his stance on the tech industry's hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry's need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent," he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump's own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration , including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order , which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump's businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club , and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country" and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," he told the “All-In" podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump's budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.This letter is in response to Frank Dare’s letter to the editor of Dec. 13. He states he was a counselor at Maple Lane, that neither Maple Lane or Green Hill was a “school.” I beg to differ with him, because between 1966 through 1975, I worked for the Chehalis School District, which administered the school at Green Hill. We had principals, teachers, counselors, a librarian and myself. My duty as secretary was security, making sure a student was in attendance, then sending him back to either his cottage, the hospital or wherever he was assigned to be next. If necessary, I notified security. At that time, many students had not completed their high school requirements for graduation, so the intent was to see that they either graduated or fulfilled requirements for a GED. There was a library. Art and music were offered, plus vocational classes: print shop, metal shop, floral and garden, culinary arts, etc. Each of these classes provided the student with a skill that they could use after their stay at Green Hill. Some of their completed work was sold. Many years before, students learned to take care of the cows and acquired skills to be a farmer. Green Hill was a correction school. Not a prison. There were many students who came to the office between classes to just talk. One day, I asked a student why he thought it was OK for him to break into someone’s home to take whatever he wanted. His answer was, “Why not? Your insurance will replace anything I take, newer and better.” I replied, “maybe what he was taking had meaning to me, like it belonged to my family or was a special gift.” He had no concept of my answer. When I read their files, I found 95% of the time they didn’t have a chance to learn right from wrong. Either they didn’t have parents who had parenting skills or even cared. But, for me, what was even worse was that all of them had been before judges not just one, two or three times, but many eight, 10 or 12 times. What sense does that make? So, for those of you who are doing the blame game of liberals, Democrats, governors and attorneys general, take a second look at the judicial system. Make laws that allow for second chances, but then enforce the laws to full measure. Note: While at Green Hill, a group of cottage parents went to Seattle to see what it would look like to actually live on the streets for one week. They came back and called for a meeting at the auditorium where we learned that they concluded we were all one week away from living like animals. If that was evident 50 years ago, how can anyone be appalled at what is happening today? Rose Spogen ChehalisPundit slams Hibs star Elie Youan for ‘not acceptable’ red card reaction – but fans insist ‘it’s not that deep’