Important Takeaways:
- Scientists have warned that an underwater volcano off the coast of the northwestern US is likely to blow sometime in 2025.
- The volcano, called Axial Seamount, is more than 3,600-feet-tall and sits half a mile underwater just 300 miles off the coast of Oregon.
- Experts made the prediction on December 10 after detecting seafloor swelling around Axial that mimicked a level seen immediately before an eruption in 2015.
- Seismic activity has also increased, with hundreds of earthquakes generated around the volcano per day and earthquake swarms greater than 500 per day.
- ‘Based on the current trends, and the assumption that Axial will be primed to erupt when it reaches the 2015 inflation threshold, our current eruption forecast window is between now (July 2024) and the end of 2025,’ researchers said in the new study.
- The team first noticed the swelling in November using a suite of tools to meticulously monitor this volcano’s activity, collecting real-time data about its rumbling, shaking, swelling and even tilting.
- Located on the Juan de Fuca ridge, Axial is the most active underwater volcano in the northeast Pacific.
- Because Axial erupts with some regularity, it provides a unique opportunity for scientists to study the warning signs leading up to an eruption, and learn how to forecast one.
- Fortunately, eruptions from Axial pose little threat to people and infrastructure on the West Coast.
- That’s largely because it is a shield volcano, which generally do not have very explosive eruptions.
- What’s more, the seismic activity around it is too minimal to cause a tsunami or a major earthquake.
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Important Takeaways:
- A mobile communications system that can move through complex terrains has been developed by Chinese scientists
- China has unveiled the world’s first mobile 5G base station, which, after passing rigorous tests, is now poised for deployment on the battlefield.
- Jointly developed by China Mobile Communications Group and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it can provide unprecedented high-speed, low-latency and extremely secure and reliable data exchange services to at least 10,000 users within a 3km (1.8 mile) radius.
- Even when PLA troops are advancing at 80km/h (50mph) in complex terrains, such as mountains or cities, and are subjected to electromagnetic interference, the system can still maintain an uninterrupted total throughput of 10 gigabits per second and a latency of less than 15 milliseconds.
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Important Takeaways:
- Beijing’s newly revealed experimental aircraft sends a strong signal to competitors, Dmitry Stefanovich has told RT
- The images of China’s latest warplanes, which appeared online this week, are a bold “invitation” to an arms race for a next-generation fighter, Dmitry Stefanovich, a military researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has told RT.
- The videos and photos posted to social media on December 26 show two previously unseen tailless jets – a larger diamond-shaped aircraft, and a smaller plane with an arrow-wing-shaped airframe. While Beijing has not spoken publicly on the matter, the display sparked discussion in the international media, with some observers suggesting the aircraft could be the first sixth-generation fighter planes.
- So far, we have only seen two variants of experimental aircraft,” Stefanovich said. “Presumably, one of them can be tailored for strike missions that involve attacks on ground and, perhaps, naval targets, while another one is tasked with dominating the skies and controlling the airspace.”
- The footage “demonstrates the general state of the development” of Chinese aircraft rather than sixth-generation planes specifically, the expert argued, noting that ‘sixth generation’ is a “loosely applied term.” Therefore, it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the capabilities of the new planes, he cautioned.
- Beijing will have to compete with American next-generation fighter programs, Stefanovich noted. “While there are no game-changers on the horizon, China is explicitly inviting to participate in an arms race, at least in terms of quality.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Some 175,000 people now actively work for Mexico’s smuggling cartels, according to a shocking new estimate that would make them the country’s fifth-largest private employer.
- The cartels’ secret is their viciously efficient ability to recruit, said Rafael Prieto-Curiel, who led the researchers and who said the cartels are the country’s top recruiter at more than 350 new people each week.
- That helps them counter their massive losses thanks to arrests, killings and dropouts.
- “Cartels, they need to have roughly 175,000 members. They cannot be much smaller because they would have collapsed. They cannot be much bigger because they would have grown so fast,” Mr. Prieto-Curiel said. “So they have to be roughly 175,000 members, which means roughly, just to put it into context, the fifth-largest employer in the country.”
- He and his fellow researchers used computer models to peer into the country’s notoriously secretive cartels, running millions of permutations on the 150 different cartels, evaluating their recruiting and losses to arrests, killings and dropouts.
- He called recruiting the “secret of the success of a cartel.”
- President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take a heavy hand with the cartels.
- That includes designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and potentially tasking the U.S. military to conduct some counter-cartel operations.
- Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has bristled at those ideas, calling them “interference” in her nation’s affairs.
- The cartels have their hand in drug manufacturing and smuggling, money laundering, sex trafficking, human smuggling and other assorted mayhem. During the Biden border surge, experts said their income from moving people across the border topped even their income from drugs.
- S. officials also blame them for the epidemic of fentanyl deaths, saying the cartels have taken over the production and smuggling business after Chinese syndicates were pushed out of business in the last decade.
- ZME Science said Mr. Prieto-Curiel also calculated that 60,000 cartel members died over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022. Another 60,000 have been “incapacitated.”
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Important Takeaways:
- The U.S. government is currently constructing the most colossal monument in the history of the world.
- Our national debt has already surpassed the 36 trillion-dollar mark, and according to usdebtclock.org at our current rate of spending our national debt will surpass the 51 trillion-dollar mark four years from now.
- In January, Donald Trump will be faced with some very difficult decisions regarding our debt as soon as he is inaugurated…
- It’s going to be an urgent issue for Trump as soon as he takes office. The federal government will resume the cap on its borrowing authority on Jan. 1, as the U.S. sits on a national debt of more than $36 trillion, though the Treasury Department can buy time for a number of months with so-called extraordinary measures. The fiscal time bomb illustrates the struggle Trump and Republican leaders face heading into 2025, as they consider whether to court Democrats who will want concessions or their own conservatives who are known for rigidly sticking to their demands to cut funding.
- If Trump decides that it is time to cut spending, that will make our short-term economic problems even worse.
- Let me give you another illustration.
- If you were alive 2000 years ago and you started spending one million dollars every single day when Christ was born, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
- That is how large one trillion dollars is.
- But the United States is not one trillion dollars in debt.
- The United States is 36 trillion dollars in debt.
- A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times. That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off one-third of the U.S. national debt.
- If you can believe it, the government is actually taking online donations that will be used to help pay off the national debt. https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/23779454/
- Or at least that is what they are claiming.
- Something has got to change, because if we stay on the path that we are currently on we will be 51 trillion dollars in debt four years from today.
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Important Takeaways:
- President Joe Biden said Monday that the United States will send nearly $2.5 billion more in weapons to Ukraine as his administration works quickly to spend all the money it has available to help Kyiv fight off Russia before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
- The package includes $1.25 billion in presidential drawdown authority, which allows the military to pull existing stock from its shelves and gets weapons to the battlefield faster. It also has $1.22 billion in longer-term weapons packages to be put on contract through the separate Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, or USAI.
- Biden said all longer-term USAI funds have now been spent and that he seeks to fully use all the remaining drawdown money before leaving office.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Treasury Department said Monday China hackers broke into its systems earlier this month.
- In a letter informing lawmakers of the breach, the department said Chinese hackers remotely accessed Treasury workstations and stole unclassified documents.
- The hack is being treated as a “major cybersecurity incident.”
- The Foreign Ministry in Beijing said China “has always opposed all forms of hacker attacks, and we are even more opposed to the spread of false information against China for political purposes.
- “We have stated our position many times regarding such groundless accusations that lack evidence,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.
- The department said it was working with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to assess the exact scope of the hack.
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Important Takeaways:
- According to the National Weather Service, the arctic blast will affect a large swathe of the country, arriving in the northern Rockies and expected to have spread to the East Coast by New Year’s Day.
- ‘A significant pattern change is expected across much of the country as an Arctic Outbreak is forecast to spread form the Northern Plains to the south and east, leading to exceptionally high probabilities of below-normal temperatures expected across much of the East’, the NWS said.
- The plunge will bring wind chills across the Midwest with temperatures dipping below zero in at least 30 states.
- ‘The coldest air of the season to date and dangerous wind chills are likely across many areas of the Southeast’, the NWS warned.
- In some areas, temperatures are forecasted to reach an average of around 20 degrees, while freezing conditions in the Gulf coast and even Florida could be expected.
- Snowfall is also possible across parts of the Southern Plains and the Southeast with the potential for heavy snowfall expected in the Appalachians, Ohio Valley, the Great Lakes and the Northeast.
- A further drop in temperatures is expected next week, and below normal temperatures are predicted to affect central and eastern US during much of January.
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Important Takeaways:
- Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, passed away Sunday at age 100.
- When he took the oath of office in 1977, James Earl Carter Jr. brought a breath of fresh air to Washington. The only Georgian to occupy the White House, Carter helped the nation recover from a government plagued by scandal. But his single term also suffered from a sick economy and serious foreign policy threats.
- A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher and peanut farmer, the Georgia governor came from nowhere in 1976 to defeat President Gerald Ford. On Inauguration Day, when he shunned a limo and walked to the White House with his wife Rosalynn, it felt like times had really changed.
- Almost overnight, scandal-weary Americans could put Watergate and the Nixon-Ford years behind them.
- After leaving the White House, the former president drew admiration for his charity work with Habitat for Humanity. He told CBN’s Gordon Robertson it was his way of putting his faith in action.
- The 39th president was happily married to his wife Rosalynn for more than seven decades. Before she passed away on November 19, 2023, she was always at his side. In 2018, the couple had joined four other living presidents to say farewell to President George H.W. Bush who was born the same year as Carter.
- Two years prior, Carter announced he had melanoma that had spread to his brain and liver. But just months later, after surgery, radiation, and immunotherapy treatments, he announced he was cancer-free.
- “A lot of people prayed for me and I appreciate that,” he said.
- He handled his battle with cancer with grace and thankfulness, leaning heavily on his faith. “I think I have been as blessed as any human being in the world,” he said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Homelessness in the U.S. jumped 18.1% this year, hitting a record level, with the dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in some regions of the country, federal officials said Friday.
- More than 770,000 people were counted as homeless in federally required tallies taken across the country during a single night in January 2024, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in its new report. The estimate likely undercounts the number of unhoused people given that it doesn’t include people staying with friends or family because they don’t have a place of their own.
- Vulnerable Americans have been hard hit during the post-pandemic years as many government supports ended, including the eviction moratorium. At the same time, housing costs are surging, causing a record number of renters to be cost-burdened, or paying more than 30% of their income on housing, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
- California, the most populous state in the U.S., continued to have the nation’s largest homeless population, followed by New York, Washington, Florida and Massachusetts.
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