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TRUMP BANS FOREIGN AID

Elon Musk and President Donald Trump shut down the embattled government agency tasked with humanitarian relief overseas after they agreed that the organization was beyond repair.

Elon Musk is quoted as having said of the agency,” It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm in it. What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to get rid of the whole thing.

It is beyond repair.”Workers of the 6-decade Agency for Development woke up to emails that had locked them out of the agency's computer systems. Around 60 senior USAID staff were put on administrative leave last week on accusations of trying to block the executive order to freeze foreign aid for 90 days.

USAID was established in 1961 under President J F Kennedy’s administration and has since been dispensing billions of dollars annually across the globe to alleviate poverty, treat diseases, and respond to famines and natural disasters.

USAID also promotes democracy building and development by supporting non-government organizations, independent media, and social initiatives.

According to experts, the consequences of this order will be significant for programs that play a crucial role in education, health, access to basic resources, and local economic development. The Trump administration's decision to suspend USAID funding could seriously impact future relations according to Development Aid.

USAID a key partner in economic development and humanitarian aid operates on a memorandum of understanding that commits state parties to multi-year projects.

By canceling these commitments through a unilateral executive order, Washington is sending a contradictory signal, weakening the trust of partner governments and making them reluctant to engage in future relations with the agency.

However, there has been some pushback from some of the members of the senatorial committee who feel that this shouldn’t be Trump's sole decision but something to be discussed thoroughly before coming to pass. There is still some small hope for things to get better.

Justin Trudeau resigns

After weeks of suspense, Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau has resigned. He announced his decision to resign in Ottawa on Monday after months of criticism from his party's lawmakers. However, Trudeau won't step down immediately since he has to stay until his party finds a new leader.  In his speech, Justin Trudeau mentioned his party's rebellion saying that if he's fighting internal battles he can't be the best candidate and that those weaknesses could aid another candidate to win the election. In his own words, he said he had told his kids about his decision to step down over dinner on Sunday night. He went on to say he intends to resign as party leader and prime minister after the party selects its next leader through a Nationwide competitive process which he had already requested the president of the Liberal Party of Canada to begin.  Trudeau is currently leading a minority government in Canada since the opposition is planning to oust him later this month plus his own party wants him gone. The Liberals have around one hundred and fifty members of Parliament of which fifty of them roughly one-third want Trudeau out.

On Wednesday which is today, the liberals have a scheduled meeting whose optics would have looked bad if he resigned then. It would look like the party forced him out during the meeting which is why he resigned on Monday.  Justin is however not leaving in a flash, he wants to stay in the chair until a new leader is elected which can take between three to four months. The Liberals may not have that sort of time. Canada's parliament was supposed to convene later this month and the opposition had planned a no-confidence vote but Trudeau is trying to delay it. Trudeau asked Canada's governor general to prorogue the upcoming session basically to suspend it. Chances are this decision will be challenged in court but if he succeeds the parliament will only convene in March and not in January.   The idea is to give the liberals which is his party some more time to hold a contest and find the best replacement for Trudeau. However, even if he is successful the liberals will still have a hard time in the competition as predicted by the poll numbers. Trudeau's liberal party is at 21% and the Conservatives are at 44% which is a massive lead for the opposition. Trudeau's replacement therefore will need a lot of luck since they'll have one month to overcome this lead.  But where did things start going wrong in Justin Trudeau's career one may ask. In 2015 Justin Trudeau rose to global fame when he won Canada's election in a landslide. He had everything going for him from youth to a famous surname and surging popularity exactly what the media wanted. Vogue called him Canada's politician dreamboat. Justin Trudeau announced a cabinet with an equal number of men and women, he advocated for minority rights and he fought for climate action. Naturally people like him but if you look past the activism one thing becomes quite clear, he was not a good administrator nor a practical politician. 

In 2017 we saw evidence of that when Trudeau and his family vacationed with spiritual leader Aga Khan but his office kept it a secret. Canada's ethics commission later called out Trudeau saying he should not have taken the trip bringing the vacation to an end. Justin Trudeau lost his majority in the 2019 general election and he gambled by calling snap polls in 2021 which again had the same results. Trudeau was left at the mercy of another party called the New Democratic Party led by Jagmeet Singh.  Justin Trudeau's third term hurt him a lot since his handling of the pandemic came under criticism especially, his vaccine mandates. Anti-vaccine truckers began protesting on the streets where Justin Trudeau responded by cracking down hard yet he had asked India to negotiate with protesting farmers but had chosen violence at home. The pandemic also saw rising inflation in Canada reaching more than 8% by mid-2022 which led the opposition to blame the inflation on Trudeau's signature policies, especially his carbon tax. A carbon tax is a price levied on energy from fossil fuels for example if you fill up your car at the gas station a fixed amount must be paid as a carbon tax.  The opposition however says this is why prices are rising and their leader Pierre is running a campaign around it to the extent of having t-shirts that say axe the tax.

He's also calling the upcoming election the carbon tax election which Trudeau chose to fight by having enemies outside Canada in hopes of derailing the public's attention. In 2023 Justin Trudeau accused India of murdering someone in Canada whose name was Hardip Singh. Trudeau gave no intelligence reports yet he wanted the world to believe him in a strategy as old as politics itself where if you fail at home just blame external forces.  He also did the same in late 2024 when Donald Trump won the United States election and was threatening Canada with tariffs which Trudeau saw as an opportunity. He flew down to Florida to meet trump branding himself as a leader who could handle Trump and protect Canadian businesses but Trump being Trump started mocking him. Today Trudeau has possibly run out of tricks.

32 killed in Western China Tibet earthquake

A 7.1-magnitude quake was felt in neighboring Nepal. Chinese state media said there had been deaths in at least three towns 32 people were killed after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit the place of Tibet in western China near the border with Nepal on Tuesday, according to the United States Geological Survey. The quake hit shortly after 9 a.m. at a depth of 6.2 miles in Dingri County in Tibet, The Chinese state media announced. The state-run news agency Xinhua said at least 32 people had died. China’s State broadcaster reported that more than 1,000 houses had collapsed in Dingri County. Several after-hits were felt in the area, including in Nepal. The nearest city to the earthquake’s epicenter was Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet, with a population of 640,000 The Himalayan region is prone to powerful earthquakes.

In 2015, a quake in Nepal with a magnitude of 7.8 killed nearly 9,000 people. In Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, residents streamed out of their homes in the morning as the earthquake rattled buildings. “Based on the magnitude of the earthquake, there could be some damage in the mountains of eastern Nepal,” said Lok Bijaya Adhikari, a senior seismologist at Nepal’s National Earthquake Monitoring and Research Center. Most residents from Nepal’s high mountain regions such as Everest, Makalu, Rolwaling, and Kanchenjunga have migrated to lowland areas to avoid the extreme cold of winter. Although most people migrated to lower land during the winter season, some are still there,” said Ang Tshering Sherpa, the former chief of the Nepal Mountaineering Association. “There’s always the risk of avalanche and glacial lake outburst floods after earthquakes.

Kenya Village Hit By Space Junkk

Imagine sitting at home when a massive piece of metal falls the sky and crashes nearby. Sounds like a far-fetched story, perhaps? Well something of that sort happened to the residents of a village in Kenya. According to the Kenya Space Agency (kSA), fragments of metal which are believed to be from a rocket crashed into Mukuku village at around 3:00p.m. local time on the 30th of December. When the Kenya Space Agency official was interviewed he stated that they had located the object and the local people in the area shouldn't be scared. He further went on to say that the item was part of a space object in form of a metallic ring possibly from a rocket separation stage. He concluded by saying that they will be assessing the debris impact to the area, identify which company or country is responsible so that the existing legal mechanisms under international law as far as the outer space treaty can be used. A separation ring is a part of a space craft that drops away when it has fulfilled it's role in the launching process since rockets typically come in stages. In the last few years a menace of space debris has started to affect people on earth. Last year NASA was hit with a lawsuit by an American family when a piece of falling metal punched a hole in the roof of their Florida home. Also in February of 2024 the European Space Agency stated that a satellite weighing as much as an adult male rhino crushed and re-enterd the Earth's atmosphere over the North Pacific ocean between Alaska and Hawaii

Last month media reports claimed that the accumulation of debris had raised the possibility of a collision cascading effect called the Kessler syndrome. It is a hypothetical scenario proposed by NASA scientist Donald J Kessler in 1978. It predicts that when the density of objects in low earth orbit which is roughly 1200 miles above our planet reaches a certain critical level, it could lead to a chain of reactions leading to collision which could render the orbit unfit for human use and halt the space age. This leaves us the question are space events such as falling space debris going to become the new normal? Scientist's reportedly fear that could be the case given the rise in number of objects in the space in the last four years

South Korea Crash Another Boeing Disaster

The South Korean plane crash has caught the world’s attention, particularly shining a light on American aerospace giant Boeing. As some of you may know, this year hasn't been that great for Boeing since the company has been under heavy scrutiny over the safety of its aircraft. The Jeju airplane that crashed in South Korea was a 737-800 Boeing jet which doesn't make things any better for the company. The year 2024 began with a major aircraft incident involving a Boeing jet. It was the Alaska Airlines midair blowout incident that took place on the fifth of January this year. A Boeing Max 9 was midway in flight when an emergency door randomly flew away sucking the oxygen out of the opening. People were also being pulled towards the emergency door and even one teenager lost the shirt off his back but thankfully no one was seriously injured.

This incident then sent alarm bells ringing and brought intense scrutiny upon Boeing. Now in South Korea two Boeing Jets have crushed back-to-back in two days. The first incident took place on Sunday when the plane was making an emergency landing and the landing gear failed to be deployed. The wheels failing to come out has left speculators wondering if this was due to human error or because the Boeing plane did not let them. It will take weeks or maybe months for the answers to come out but until then Boeing will be under scrutiny especially because of the second incident which took place yesterday. Another Jeju 737800 same as the model that crushed on Sunday faced an issue earlier

yesterday. It faced some landing gear issues and the airlines said it was a mechanical defect. The second incident ended on a much better note since the plane detected the issue shortly after takeoff so it's turned around and made an emergency landing safely. People however have lost trust and faith in Boeing due to two incidents in 2 days. In fact people are now checking to see if a Boeing is their next flight or not. This was witnessed yesterday when the Jeju air passengers were being transferred to another flight and 21 people declined to go because the next plane was a Boeing as well. Over the years the company has transformed from a company once held for innovation and world class Jets to now being more famous for crashes and manufacturing defects.

In 2018 and 2019 there were two major crashes both involving the Boeing 737 max. These crashes led to an investigation where Boeing was found to cut corners. 2024 has further buried the company's reputation, share prices declined by about 32% this year. The latest incidents could send them further down the drain since the company also faced a major labor strike this year. This strike went on for about seven weeks, ending only last month. It seems everywhere you look there is chaos at Boeing, the company needs a revamp to focus on innovation and stop cutting corners. The only way this can happen is if the pressure continues, if people boycott the company or if investors keep pushing its share down since Boeing is a business and only understands the language of money hence ensuring global air safety.

China Unveils Largest Attack Ship

China's military has been facing intense scrutiny in the news lately, from disappearing Generals to firing top officials in the army and persistent corruption. Nevertheless, Beijing military expansion continues. Yesterday they unveiled a new warship called Sichuan an amphibious assault vessel. From the pictures of the vessel that were released in the press, it is quite imposing, with a total weight of around 40,000 tons and apparently the world's largest amphibious assault ship. However, although the vessel has been unveiled, it is not yet ready for deployment. Further tests and sea trials are necessary before the Sichuan is deployed. At first glance, the vessel looks a little bit like an aircraft carrier with the same long runway but the missions differ. An aircraft carrier is basically a floating air base that is used to establish supremacy over far-off areas, the decks can launch and land fighter jets. An amphibious ship on the other hand is different with its main purpose as the transportation of troops for example the Chinese want to land soldiers in Taiwan, an aircraft carrier alone wouldn't be of much use but their new vessel would get the job done.

Conventional aircraft carriers are limited to launching and landing helicopters and fighter jets, but China's Sichuan can do both. It is fitted with an electromagnetic catapult which means it can launch and land fighter jets including the heavier ones. Beijing may even have something impressive up its sleeve, a sixth- generation fighter jet. Residents in the city of Changu recorded a mysterious plane flying over the city. The new aircraft isn't shaped like a normal jet but a diamond. In China nothing is usually accidental, it's likely that the video released was carefully choreographed before circulation yesterday, which also happened to be Mao Zedong's birthday leading experts to believe that it could be intentional. Reports also say the jet could be the J36 a sixth generation fighter jet made by China with significantly cutting edge technology. The jet has enhanced stealth mode, can endure high speeds, can operate at higher altitudes and it has extended range meaning you can strike a- distant targets without refueling. This new ability is something that's not currently possible because the current cream of jets is fifth generation like America's F35 and Russia's Sukhoi Su-57. The fifth-generation jets are often accompanied by tankers and carriers since they need to stop, refuel and then strike but a 6th generation jet may not have to.

Americans and Europeans are also making such jets but the Chinese are flaunting it. The jets shape is really mysterious, it does not have a tail nor does it have any 90° shapes which is important because radars can easily detect 90° shapes. Clearly the focus in the manufacturing of this jet was stealth which makes that two major military leaps for the China army in two days. The question on the table is why now? why is China suddenly flexing it's military muscles? There are a number of reasons speculators say, one is to fight the perception going around of Xi Jingpings military purges that had dominated the headlines which many experts have questioned what impact they have on China's military modernization. The South China Sea is also heating up since Beijing aggressively pursued its claim on the waters this year. The claim has faced a lot of pushback for instance, we have seen multiple standoffs with the Philippines plus Donald Trump takes charge next year. In Trump's first term, he focused heavily on the South China Sea increasing United States patrols to record highs. American allies have been doing the same, for instance, Australia is investigating more than 7 billion dollars in its navy for the purpose of doubling its fleet size.

China's long-term goal has always been to overcome America's military edge and in pure numbers they have already done it for example it has around 234 Warship where as the United States have only 219 warships. The quality on the other hand is debatable noting that the United States has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers that don't have to stop and refuel. These carriers can be deployed for extended periods of time in far-off waters where as China does not have any nuclear carrier. Experts have often joked that Beijing's long-term plan is to project power beyond its region and achieve superiority over the United States Army, but as always quality remains the concern. Non of China's new battle weapons have been tested, their navy is not used to distant deployments and they haven't fought a war in 5 years.

Mozambique's Prison Break

In Africa Mozambique has been in the headlines lately and not for the right reasons. It is a country in the southeast of the continent well known for its beautiful coastline and natural resources. Mozambique has been dealing with a variety of challenges from economic struggles to nation wide protests and now a prison break on Christmas has been added to the country's woe's. 

The massive prison break took place in the capital city of Maputo on Christmas day where more than 1500 inmates escaped and most of them are still on the lose. Footage from the prison showed the inmates gathering in the open then they started running towards the same direction where a prison wall was knocked down and hundreds managed to escape. It wasn't a simple getaway where at least 33 people died during the prison riot and  15 others were injured.  The riot and the subsequent Prison break took place at a high security facility that holds dangerous criminals and terrorists. Mozambique's police chief gave an update on the situation saying that 150 inmates had been recaptured and we're currently in several police stations. He also added that the crime rate in the city of Maputo is expected to rise in the next 40 to 48 hours. A big percentage, about 90% of the inmates are still on the loose in Mozambique as of last night and the police are preparing for a spike In crime and terror since at least 30 terrorists were among the people who escaped.

But how did this happen, how did the wall at a high security prison get knocked down. Well their are two versions of the story, one from Mozambique's Justice minister states that the riot started inside the prison and then inmates escaped in the disruption but the police Commander had a different outlook. According to him, a group of subversive protestors from outside approached the vicinity of the prison making noise demanding to release the prisoners serving their time and they were successful in breaking them out. This is a serious allegation especially, considering the situation in Mozambique where the country has been in turmoil for weeks since the general election that took place on October the 9th. The ruling party won the election but the opposition said it was rigged. The party that came second said they were the real winners and that their candidate Banio Monan should be the next President. His supporters have been protesting against the election results but to no avail, since the country's top court confirmed Frelimo's victory on Monday. 

The ruling party has governed Mozambique since it became independent in 1975 which makes it 49 years in counting and with their latest win they have extended their rule. The final ruling of Mozambique's top court came on Monday sparking a fresh round of protests which have led to the death of at least 21 people in total just over this week. The total death toll since the election is around 150 people. There has also been a wide spread of violence, looting, and occasional border closures as well. The opposition candidate Monan fled the country but is still calling for more protests as he says the latest violence is a plot by the ruling party to declare a state of emergency. He says the police who were murdering before are almost encouraging people to attack and steal which is clear that this vandalism has something to do with a plan to declare a state of emergency  that was already tried but wasn't successful and now they were trying it again.  Both the government and the protesters accuse each other of fueling the violence leaving the country crippled by the unrest and now it has to deal with criminals on the loose as well.

A cosmic visitor Is set to crash this year's Christmas party, as a 120 foot asteroid has been seen moving towards the Earth and is scheduled for a close pass on 24th December.

Scientists are closely monitoring a 120 foot asteroid set to pass by our planet on Christmas Eve. Unlike other smaller asteroids that occasionally pass by, this one is gigantic. The asteroid has been identified as 2024 xn1 and was first spotted by NASA's tracking system which keeps a close watch on any impending threat to the planet. NASA's tracking system monitors the track of several asteroids on the flight path toward Earth through a dashboard.

The asteroid measures about 120 ft in size which is equal to the size of a 10 story building. It's also said to travel at a speed of 14747 Miles per hour which is roughly 6.59 Km/s. The asteroid will pass at a distance that is equivalent to 16 times the distance between the Earth and the moon. Scientists believe that the asteroid is expected to speed by Earth in its closest approach at 2:57 a.m. December 24th. The event has been considered a near miss by scientists. In recent times alerts for multiple astroids approaching the Earth have been raised. According to reports, a total of five asteroids are supposed to make close approaches to the Earth in the coming days of which 2024 xn1 is considered the largest.