Rixi Moncada, candidate of Honduras' ruling Liberty and Restructuring Party (LIBRE), won Sunday's presidential election. This is according to exit poll data from Poll HN, published on the LIBRE party's Facebook page. According to the table, Moncada received 38.06% of the vote. Salvador Nasralla of the center-right Liberal Party of Honduras is second with 32.40%. Nasri Asfura of the conservative National Party of Honduras is third with 23.38%.
...and thieves
President Donald Trump on Sunday said he's invited the family of a National Guard member fatally shot last week to the White House, saying he spoke to her parents and they were "devastated." U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom died after the Wednesday shooting in Washington, D.C., while her seriously injured colleague, U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, remained in critical condition.
The letter congressional cowards will never send.
Mike Plante could hardly believe his eyes when he discovered how much his health insurance premiums will go up next year. The 64-year-old public relations consultant is paying $400 a month. But this will jump to $1,965 -- a nearly 400 per cent increase -- if he renews his existing plan. "Me and some 65,000 other West Virginians are about to be run off a cliff," he said. Plante is one of nearly 22 million Americans enrolled in health insurance under the Affordable Care Act -- or Obamacare -- who will see their premiums soar next year if their tax credits expire as expected on December 31. "It's a full-blown crisis," said Mike Pushkin, chair of the West Virginian Democratic Party. "Ours will be one of the states hardest hit by the failure of Congress and the Trump administration to extend these subsidies."
For a brief period, it looked like JaQuon Stembridge had a promising future within the Republican Party. He turned 19 this past July and was already the youngest member ever of the Georgia State GOP Executive Committee where he served as assistant secretary for the state convention. He was also the leader of the Georgia Teen Republicans. His rapid rise in state politics appears to have come to a quick end. He resigned just hours after a video was released online purporting to show him attempting to meet with a 14 year old boy from a dating app.
25,000 antifa volunteers converged on the western city of Giessen to protest the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) which set up its new youth organization there, leading to clashes with police who deployed 5,000 officers to contain violence.
Using the Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral win as a pretext to expand the police state in his jurisdiction, Nassau County Executive MAGA Bruce Blakeman is directing authorities to needlessly install hi-tech cameras and surveillance systems along the border with NYC.
this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say "at best" because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats " without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act or war " are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict. (See my Saturday column, with links to prior posts on this subject.) Read more
When a presidential administration abruptly stops releasing the most important economic indicators -- GDP, inflation, jobs, consumer spending -- Americans must ask a blunt question: What are they trying to hide?
David W. Chen talked to voters and Republican and Democratic activists in Hogansville, LaGrange and Valdosta, Ga., to unpack the recent elections for the Georgia Public Service Commission. Read more
The picture of weed shared by many older Americans, drawn from their own college years, helped ease the path of legalization. Weed, the mellow drug. The Cheech-and-Chong drug. The Grateful-Dead-road-trip drug. The munchies drug. The drug that, if anything, makes you overly cautious behind the wheel. Dowd thought of marijuana along similar lines " that is, until she tried the legalized stuff for herself and nearly lost her ever-loving mind. Since then, weed potency has only intensified, with some concentrates reaching near-pure levels of THC, the plant's primary psychoactive compound. Only now are policy makers and opinion elites reckoning with what Big Weed has wrought: "turning a drug that used to be 5% THC, and made people pass out for a few hours and eat Cheetos, into one that triggers psycho killers," as Kevin Sabet, a former drug adviser in successive Democratic and GOP administrations, tells me. Read more
Companies that have collaborated with immigration enforcement agencies in various ways to aid Trump's mass deportation initiative"whether through allowing ICE to raid their parking lots, taking on contracts with DHS, or a variety of other actions"are starting to feel the rumblings of a consumer revolt. Home Depot is possibly the most visible case after the company's parking lots became a familiar setting for shocking viral clips and local news segments depicting federal agents' aggressive attempts to apprehend unsuspecting day laborers. The home-improvement chain now faces the prospect of a national boycott. But that's not the end of their troubles: A particularly headline-grabbing protest was staged last weekend at the Home Depot in Monrovia, California, a location picked because it's where Roberto Carlos Montoya Valds, 52, from Guatemala died on the freeway after being hit by an SUV while running from an ICE raid.
"President Trump has set free a private equity executive who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of victims," the New York Times reports. "David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y., had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday." Mr. Gentile and a co-defendant, Jeffry Schneider, were convicted in August 2024 of securities and wire fraud charges, and sentenced in May. Unlike a pardon, the commutation granted to Mr. Gentile will not erase his conviction. Mr. Schneider, who was sentenced to six years, does not appear to have received clemency from Mr. Trump Read more
Donald Trump's administration promised that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would save America trillions by slashing federal contracts, eliminating "waste," and shrinking the federal workforce. In reality, we got hack squads of political enforcers who rummaged through government systems, torched veteran-owned business contracts, fired thousands of veterans from federal service, and dismantled Department of Veteran Affairs programs designed to protect both veterans and taxpayers. So it's fitting, if tragic, that DOGE has itself been dissolved eight months before its chartered end. Named after Elon Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, DOGE was never about efficiency. It was the shotgun marriage of Project 2025 and "We need something for Elon to do." America's veterans paid the heaviest price for this Frankenstein's monster, which spent months clumsily strip-mining the federal government in order to make the rich richer. Read more
The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state's generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality. Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota's Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars' worth of social services that were never provided... Read more
