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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Important Takeaways:
- The shelves and prices at your local grocery store could look a little different soon.
- The Colorado River, which provides water for about 15% of our country’s agriculture, is shrinking, and the current agreement that divvies up the water usage ends in 2026.
- The Imperial Valley in Southern California relies 100% on the Colorado River for its water.
- This valley receives less than three inches of rain a year, yet still produces about two-thirds of the country’s winter produce.
- Farmers in the valley say the shrinking water levels and competing interests over river usage will badly impact the nation’s food supply.
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Important Takeaways:
- Fears are growing over the spread of a violent Venezuelan gang across the US, with experts warning the mobsters could have a foothold in more than half the country by February next year.
- It emerged earlier this month that Tren de Aragua, which has been dubbed the ‘epitome of evil’ and ‘MS-13 on steroids’, is already operating in 18 states.
- This includes some of the most remote corners of America in Colorado, North Dakota, Montana, Nevada and Wyoming. The bloodthirsty criminals also maintain strongholds in major cities across Texas as well as New York and Chicago.
- Known as TdA to law enforcement, the gang originated in a Venezuelan prison.
- Members of the South American mafia have since crept into the US via the southern border, hidden among the one million Venezuelan migrants who have entered the country under the Biden administration.
- They can often be identified by telltale tattoos, including a train (‘tren’ is Spanish for train), a crown, a clock and an AK-47.
- Earlier this year, Daily Mail revealed how the gang set up its new headquarters in the Mexican city of Juarez on the US border, just across from El Paso, Texas.
- And startling police investigations have showed how the mob is behind a spiraling crime wave across America, with gangsters accused of murders, violent attacks on cops and sex trafficking.
- A Venezuelan dissident running for office in Salt Lake City, Utah, has warned that the gangsters have been linked to at least two separate crimes in the state – including an alleged prostitution ring and shooting.
- Carlos Moreno told the New York Post: ‘Our law enforcement people are not ready. They are not ready yet to face these kinds of gangs in Utah because the way that they do things are totally different than criminals here in the United States.’
- ‘That’s why people right now are very afraid,’ he added.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel conducted a commando raid on an underground Iranian missile production facility near the city of Maysaf in Syria in early September, the Jerusalem Post learned in later September, but was only allowed to confirm now after KAN News was permitted to publicize the IDF officially taking credit late Sunday.
- That a raid took place, but without Israeli confirmation, was first reported by Axios on September 12, with the Post receiving secret confirmation shortly after, but not permission to publicize the information.
- It appears that Israeli censor and secrecy rules regarding operations in Syria have become more flexible given the huge increase in IDF operations in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime.
- With the fall of the regime, information security officials likely view any threat of retaliation from Syria as being at a much lower risk level.
- The raid targeted two significant sites, which were the Syrian defense industry’s Scientific Studies and Research Center and the underground missile production facility run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
- The decision to carry out the strike was believed to be influenced by concerns over the ongoing war, along with the potential risk that the Iranian missile factory would begin mass-producing missiles.
- …weapons were reportedly intended to be used as a supply for Hezbollah.
- The operation occurred approximately 200 kilometers from Israeli territory and was deemed urgent to prevent the facility from reaching full production capacity.
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Important Takeaways:
- The 10 costliest climate disasters in 2024 racked up damage totaling more than 200 billion US dollars, Christian Aid has warned.
- A report from the charity on hurricanes, floods, typhoons and storms influenced by climate change warns that the top 10 disasters each cost more than 4 billion US dollars in damage (£3.2 billion).
- The figures are based mostly on insured losses, so the true costs are likely to be even higher, Christian Aid said…
- The single most costly event in 2024 was Hurricane Milton, which scientists say was made windier, wetter and more destructive by global warming, and which caused 60 billion US dollars (£48 billion) of damage when it hit the US in October.
- That is closely followed by Hurricane Helene, which cost 55 billion US dollars (£44 billion) when it hit the US, Mexico and Cuba just two weeks before Milton in late September.
- The US was hit by so many costly storms throughout the year that even when hurricanes are removed, other storms cost more than 60 billion US dollars in damage, the report said
- The 10 costliest climate disasters of 2024 were:
- – US storms, December to January, more than 60 billion US dollars;– Hurricane Milton in the US, October 9-13, 60 billion US dollars (£48 billion);– Hurricane Helene in the US, Mexico, Cuba, 55 billion US dollars (£44 billion);– China floods, June 9-July 14, 15.6 billion US dollars (£12.4 billion);– Typhoon Yagi, which hit south-west Asia from September 1 to 9, 12.6 billion US dollars (£10 billion);– Hurricane Beryl, in the US, Mexico and Caribbean islands from July 1-11, 6.7 billion US dollars (£5.3 billion);– Storm Boris in central Europe, September 12-16, 5.2 billion US dollars (£4.1 billion);– Rio Grande do Sul floods in Brazil, April 28-May 3, 5 billion US dollars (£4 billion);– Bavaria floods, Germany, June 1-7, 4.45 billion US dollars (£3.5 billion);– Valencia floods, Spain, on October 29, 4.22 billion US dollars (£3.4 billion).
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