Tuesday, December 30, 2025
■ Today's Top News
"2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now."
By Brett Wilkins
Climate change driven by human burning of fossil fuels helped make 2025 one of the hottest years ever recorded, a scientific report published Monday affirmed, prompting renewed calls for urgent action to combat the worsening planetary emergency.
Researchers at World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that “although 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024 globally, it was still far hotter than almost any other year on record,” with only two other recent years recording a higher average worldwide temperature.
For the first time, the three-year running average will end the year above the 1.5°C warming goal, relative to preindustrial levels, established a decade ago under the landmark Paris climate agreement.
“Global temperatures remained very high and significant harm from human-induced climate change is very real,” the report continues. “It is not a future threat, but a present-day reality.”
“Across the 22 extreme events we analyzed in depth, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires claimed lives, destroyed communities, and wiped out crops,” the researchers wrote. “Together, these events paint a stark picture of the escalating risks we face in a warming world.”
The WWA researchers’ findings tracked with the findings of United Nations experts and others that 2025 would be the third-hottest year on record.
According to the WWA study:
This year highlighted again, in stark terms, how unfairly the consequences of human-induced climate change are distributed, consistently hitting those who are already marginalized within their societies the hardest. But the inequity goes deeper: The scientific evidence base itself is uneven. Many of our studies in 2025 focused on heavy rainfall events in the Global South, and time and again we found that gaps in observational data and the reliance on climate models developed primarily for the Global North prevented us from drawing confident conclusions. This unequal foundation in climate science mirrors the broader injustices of the climate crisis.
The events of 2025 make it clear that while we urgently need to transition away from fossil fuels, we also must invest in adaptation measures. Many deaths and other impacts could be prevented with timely action. But events like Hurricane Melissa highlight the limits of preparedness and adaptation: When an intense storm strikes small islands such as Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, even relatively high levels of preparedness cannot prevent extreme losses and damage. This underscores that adaptation alone is not enough; rapid emission reductions remain essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of 1.5°C, WWA co-founder Friederike Otto—who is also an Imperial College London climate scientist—told the Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”
The WWA study’s publication comes a month after this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP30—ended in Brazil with little meaningful progress toward a transition from fossil fuels.
Responding to the new study, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt said in a statement that “2025 was full of stark reminders of the urgent need to cut climate pollution, invest in clean energy, and tackle the climate crisis now.”
“Today’s report is a wake-up call,” Alt continued. “Unfortunately, [US President Donald] Trump and Republicans controlling Congress spent the past year making climate denial official US policy and undermining progress to stave off the worst of the climate crisis. Their reckless polluters-first agenda rolled back critical climate protections and attacked and undermined the very agencies responsible for helping Americans prepare for and recover from increasingly dangerous disasters.”
“Across the country, people are standing up and demanding their leaders do better to protect our families from climate change and extreme weather,” Alt added. “It’s time those in power started listening.”
"If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
By Brad Reed
President Donald Trump and his administration have been openly plotting to scrap the nation’s top consumer protection watchdog, but a federal judge has at least temporarily put those plans on hold.
US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Tuesday that the US Federal Reserve must continue providing funds to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), rejecting the Trump administration’s claims that the nation’s central bank that the nation’s central bank currently lacks to “combined earnings” to fund the bureau’s operations.
The administration had argued that the Federal Reserve should not be making payments to the CFPB because it has been operating at a loss since 2022, when it began a series of aggressive interest rate hikes aimed at taming inflation.
However, Jackson rejected this reasoning and accused the administration of using it as a cover to defund an agency that the president and top officials such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, had long expressed a desire to abolish.
“It appears that defendants’ new understanding of ‘combined earnings’ is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding,” the judge wrote.
The CFPB must now be funded at least until the DC Circuit of Appeals weighs in on an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) against Vought over layoffs at the agency that is scheduled for hearings in February.
The NTEU took a victory lap in the wake of the ruling and taunted Vought for his defeat.
“Yet another loss for Rusty Vought,” the union posted on Bluesky. “Wonder how much longer Donald is going to put up with this?”
While it will continue to receive funding for the time being, the CFPB has still seen its ability to fulfill its mission severely diminished during Trump’s second term.
A Tuesday report from Reuters claimed that the CFPB is “on the brink of collapse” given that the Trump administration, congressional Republicans, and industry lawsuits have “undone a decade’s worth of CFPB rules on matters ranging from medical debt and student loans to credit card late fees, overdraft charges and mortgage lending.”
The report also noted that, during Trump’s second term, the CFPB has “dropped or paused its probes and enforcement actions, and stopped supervising the consumer finance industries, leading to a string of resignations” at the agency.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who first drew up plans to create the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, explained the agency’s importance in an interview with Reuters.
“I was stunned by the number of people in financial trouble who had lost a job or got sick but who had also been cheated by one or more of their creditors,” she said. “For no agency was consumer protection a first priority, it was somewhere between fifth and 10th, which meant there was just no cop on the beat. If the CFPB is not there, people have nowhere to turn when they get cheated.”
UN officials said they were "still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained."
By Julia Conley
After weeks of pushing for access to el-Fasher, the city in Sudan’s Darfur region that was taken over by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in October, United Nations officials reported on Tuesday that their recent visit to the city showed evidence of a “crime scene,” with the few people remaining there showing signs of trauma from the mass atrocities they suffered and witnessed.
UN humanitarian workers gained access to the city last Friday, two months after the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) lost control of el-Fasher to the United Arab Emirates-backed RSF.
The city was the SAF’s last major stronghold in Darfur, and fighting has now escalated in the Kordofan region.
Reuters reported that the RSF has attempted to portray el-Fasher as “back to normal” since its takeover, even as the Yale Humanitan Research Lab published a report earlier this month on the mass killings that the paramilitary group have sought hide evidence of “through burial, burning, and removal of human remains on a mass scale.”
Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, told Reuters that the few people remaining in el-Fasher are living in empty buildings or tents made of plastic sheets. A small market was operating, but was selling only locally grown vegetables.
“The town was not teeming with people,” Brown said. “There were very few people that [we] were able to see... We have photos of people, and you can see clearly on their faces the accumulation of fatigue, of stress, of anxiety, of loss.”
Healthcare staff were seen at Saudi Hospital in el-Fasher, where 460 people were killed in an RSF attack, but they were working without medical supplies, Brown said.
Yale’s report earlier this month relied partially in satellite imagery taken between October 26-November 28, which showed clusters of what researchers said were consistent with human remains in and around el-Fasher. More than 70% of the clusters had become smaller in satellite images by late November, and 38% were no longer visible.
The researchers said the RSF has used particular patterns of killing, including murdering people as they flee attacks, door-to-door and execution-style killings, and mass killings at detention centers and military installations.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, said the UN’s discovery of few signs of life in el-Fasher corroborated the lab’s findings.
Brown said the UN team is “still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained,” and told Reuters the officials plan to return to assess water and sanitation access.
About 100,000 people fled el-Fasher in October, and about three-quarters of those forced to leave the city were already internally displaced people who had fled violence as many as three or more times. In total 1.17 million el-Fasher residents have been displaced.
Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), released a short documentary detailing the experiences of people who left the city and are sheltering in Chad.
“They call it Paris, and now it is destroyed,” a man named Noor told MSF of el-Fasher. “In the past it was a good city with all its lights on.”
An estimated 30.4 Sudanese people are now in need of humanitarian assistance, and on Monday the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported unprecedented levels of child malnutrition in the Um Baru locality in northern Darfur.
More than half of children there are suffering from acute malnutrition, and 1 in 6 are severely, acutely malnourished—a condition that could kill them within weeks if left untreated.
“When severe acute malnutrition reaches this level, time becomes the most critical factor,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Children in Um Baru are fighting for their lives and need immediate help. Every day without safe and unhindered access increases the risk of children growing weaker and more death and suffering from causes that are entirely preventable.”
Many of the families observed by UNICEF fled el-Fasher in recent weeks.
In-depth reporting from the Washington Post found the Social Security Administration is dealing with "record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers."
By Brad Reed
An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”
The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.
This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”
The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.
However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”
One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”
Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.
Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.
An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.
Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”
Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.
The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.
“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”
Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
"The humanitarian response in Gaza is already highly restricted, and cannot afford further dismantlement," the renowned organization warned.
By Jake Johnson
The Israeli government said Tuesday that Doctors Without Borders, one of the largest medical organizations currently operating in Gaza, is among the 25 humanitarian groups that will be suspended at the start of the new year for their alleged failure to comply with Israel’s widely criticized new registration rules for international NGOs.
According to the Associated Press, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs “said the organizations that will be banned on January 1 did not meet new requirements for sharing staff, funding, and operations information.” The Israeli government specifically accused Doctors Without Borders, known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), of “failing to clarify the roles of some staff that Israel accused of cooperation with Hamas and other militant groups,” AP reported.
In addition to providing medical assistance to desperate Palestinians, MSF has been an outspoken critic of what has it described as Israel’s “campaign of total destruction” in Gaza. The group said in a report released last December that its teams’ experiences on the ground in Gaza were “consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Doctors Without Borders warned that the looming withdrawal of registration from international NGOs “would prevent organizations, including MSF, from providing essential services to people in Gaza and the West Bank.”
“With Gaza’s health system already destroyed, the loss of independent and experienced humanitarian organizations’ access to respond would be a disaster for Palestinians,” the group said in a statement last week. “The humanitarian response in Gaza is already highly restricted, and cannot afford further dismantlement.”
“If Israeli authorities revoke MSF’s access to Gaza in 2026, a large portion of people in Gaza will lose access to critical medical care, water, and lifesaving support,” the group added. “MSF’s activities serve nearly half a million people in Gaza through our vital support to the destroyed health system. MSF continues to seek constructive engagement with Israeli authorities to continue its activities.”
Pascale Coissard, MSF’s emergency coordinator for Gaza, noted that “in the last year, MSF teams have treated hundreds of thousands of patients and delivered hundreds of millions of liters of water.”
“MSF teams are trying to expand activities and support Gaza’s shattered health system,” said Coissard. “In 2025 alone, we carried out almost 800,000 outpatient consultations and handled more than 100,000 trauma cases.”
Israel’s announcement came shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with US President Donald Trump in Florida, where both dodged questions about their supposed “peace plan” for Gaza after more than two years of relentless bombing. The Israeli military has been accused of violating an existing ceasefire agreement hundreds of times since it took effect in October.
Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that “Israeli forces have carried out strikes across the Gaza Strip as they continue with their near-daily violations of the ceasefire agreement, with Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged enclave continuing apace and displaced Palestinians enduring the destruction of their few remaining possessions in flooding brought about by heavy winter rains.”
One expert called the reported drone strike a "violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution."
By Jake Johnson
The US Central Intelligence Agency reportedly carried out a drone strike earlier this month on a port facility inside Venezuela, marking the first time the Trump administration launched an attack within the South American country amid a broader military campaign that observers fear could lead to war.
CNN on Monday was first to report the details of the CIA drone strike, days after President Donald Trump suggested in a radio interview that the US recently took out a “big facility” in Venezuela, prompting confusion and alarm. Trump authorized covert CIA action against Venezuela in October.
According to CNN, which cited unnamed sources, the drone strike “targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that the US government believed was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to store drugs and move them onto boats for onward shipping.”
To date, the Trump administration has not provided any evidence to support its claim that boats it has illegally bombed in international waters were involved in drug trafficking. No casualties were reported from the drone strike, and the Venezuelan government has not publicly commented on the attack.
“This is an act of war and illegal under both US and international law, let’s just be clear about that,” journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in response to news of the drone strike.
Brian Finucane, senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, called the reported drone attack a “violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.”
“Seemingly conducted as covert action and then casually disclosed by POTUS while calling into a radio show,” he added.
CNN‘s reporting, later corroborated by the New York Times, came after the Trump administration launched its 30th strike on a vessel in international waters, bringing the death toll from the lawless military campaign to at least 107.
The Times reported late Monday that “it is not clear” if the drone used in last week’s mission “was owned by the CIA or borrowed from the US military.”
“The Pentagon has stationed several MQ-9 Reaper drones, which carry Hellfire missiles, at bases in Puerto Rico as part of the pressure campaign,” the Times added.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.