$60 silver is here!  The exponential rise in the price of silver that we have witnessed in recent months is astounding experts all over the globe.  So far in 2025, the price of gold is up about 60 percent, but the price of silver is up more than 100 percent.  We have never seen anything like this before, and there are some very specific reasons why this is happening.  Fortunately for silver investors, it appears that conditions will continue to be very favorable as we roll through the early months of 2026.

Many of us had been anticipating that the price of silver would smash through the $60 threshold and stay there this week, and that is precisely what occurred on Tuesday…

This is amazing news for silver investors.

But hardly anyone is talking about the real reasons why this is happening.

Right now, hundreds of giant AI data centers are being constructed all over the United States.

Hundreds of others are going up in various other nations around the world.

Many of these AI data centers are powered by solar energy, and approximately 300 metric tons of silver are required for just one 500 megawatt solar array…

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 Europe's Brown New Deal Authored 

by Dmitry Orlov via ForumGeopolitica.com,

As living standards in Europe decline, the elites are inventing a fictional enemy: Russia. With staged provocations and historical distortions, they want to divert people's anger and justify higher military spending.

The result of the Green New Deal is steadily decreasing living standards throughout Europe stemming from the root cause of lower amounts of affordable energy per capita. In turn, it is superficially stable but steadily worsening living conditions, much more so than an outright crisis, that cause populations to rebel and to overthrow their ruling elites. The ruling elites of Europe know this, do not fancy being strung up on lampposts all over Europe, and seek to at least deflect the blame and, better yet, to engineer an outright crisis which they can then pretend to mitigate.

Their manufactured crisis of choice is the entirely fictional yet imminent attack on the European Union by the Russian Federation. The risible lie used to support this argument is that should the Ukrainian army be routed and should the Kiev regime fall, Russian tanks will then roll across Europe... just like they did in 1945! The thorny question of why Russia would ever be interested in such an escapade is avoided through anti-Russian bigotry: the very fact that the Russians happen to be Russian is taken as sufficient to guarantee their propensity for such insane and self-defeating behavior.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/europes-brown-new-deal

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Over the past five years, some of the world's most technologically advanced campuses in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — including MIT, Oxford and McGill — have relied on taxpayer funding while collaborating with artificial-intelligence labs embedded in Beijing's security state, including one tied to China's mass detention of Uyghurs and to the Ministry of Public Security, which has been accused of targeting Chinese dissidents abroad.

That is the core finding of Shared Labs, Shared Harm, a new report from New York–based risk firm Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation. After reviewing tens of thousands of scientific papers and grant records, the authors conclude that Western public funds have repeatedly underwritten joint work between elite universities and two Chinese "state-priority" laboratories whose technologies drive China's domestic surveillance machinery — an apparatus that, a recent U.S. Congressional threat assessment warns, is increasingly being turned outward against critics in democratic states.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/western-colleges-help-build-chinas-digital-dragnet-taxpayer-funds-study-warns

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What will it take to get crime under control in our subways and public transit systems?

On Monday, Dec. 1, news broke of another passenger set on fire in New York City’s subway—although this story wasn’t all it seemed.

The homeless man who at first said he was the victim of an attack turned tight-lipped when police pressed him about what happened.

Had he set his own clothes ablaze to attract attention?

In the wild environment our subways have become, a malicious attack or a madman’s self-inflicted injury are both all too believable.

Most trips on the New York City subway or Washington’s Metro system don’t resemble a clip from “Mad Max,” but sooner or later anyone who rides the rails of our cities regularly encounters insanity, aggression, and the prospect of violence—or actual violence, including the murderous kind.

The life-changing and very nearly life-ending attack on Bethany MaGee, the woman set aflame on a Chicago Blue Line train last month, was no hoax.

Nor was the assault that killed Iryna Zarutska on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina, this summer.

Nor was the burning alive of Debrina Kawam on the New York City subway in December 2024.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/irynas-law-and-bad-decisions-make-it-necessary

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The Roman Catholic Church in New York and more than 1,300 people who have accused its priests and lay employees of sexual abuse have agreed to enter mediation to resolve the claims.

Announcing the negotiations on Dec. 8, the Archdiocese of New York said it hopes to reach a global settlement that would provide victim-survivors with “the most financial compensation possible.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-york-archdiocese-agrees-mediation-settling-1300-claims-sexual-abuse

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Two US Navy F/A-18 fighter jets were spotted by flight trackers on Tuesday flying deep inside the Gulf of Venezuela, a body of water surrounded by Venezuelan territory on three sides, marking the latest US provocation amid threats of a potential regime change war aimed at ousting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

The flight appears to be the closest US aircraft has gotten to Venezuela’s coast since the US military began its major buildup in the Caribbean a few months ago. Since October, US bombers have regularly flown to the north of Venezuela’s coast, and F/A-18s have begun flights near the country since the USS Gerald Ford, the US’s largest aircraft carrier, arrived in the Caribbean last month.

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/12/09/us-flies-two-fighter-jets-deep-into-gulf-of-venezuela-in-closest-approach-to-countrys-coast/

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On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration released a document claiming to herald a “Golden Age of Peace”; yet a careful reading reveals an entirely different picture: a roadmap for institutionalizing chronic militarism and perpetuating conflict in a new form. The new U.S. National Security Strategy portrays Trump as the “Peace President” who has allegedly “achieved peace in eight global conflicts,” yet the same document simultaneously authorizes the use of “lethal force” in other countries, the expansion of military deployments at borders, and the weaponization of economic tools. This apparent contradiction is not accidental; it is part of a structural logic that links claims of non-interventionism with the reality of expanding military dominance.

The 2025 National Security Strategy reveals this operational redefinition of “peace through strength”—which in practice means the continuation of militarism, though no longer through direct occupation but through more complex mechanisms of regional control and economic coercion—across three key dimensions: first, the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Western Hemisphere America’s “natural sphere of influence” and justifying military intervention against any “foreign threat”; second, the securitization of migration, transforming borders into military frontlines and legitimizing armed force deployment; and third, the legitimization of unilateral military operations on foreign soil under the banner of counter-terrorism and anti-cartel operations – all of which, beneath the rhetoric of peace, institutionalize the continuation of American militarism in a new guise.

https://original.antiwar.com/Peter_Rodgers/2025/12/09/militarism-without-strategy-how-the-2025-national-security-document-institutionalizes-perpetual-conflict/

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1,000 Christian Zionist Pastors from the US Visit Israel on Trip Funded by the Israeli Foreign Ministry

A group of more than 1,000 American Christian Zionist pastors and influencers has spent a week in Israel on an all-expenses-paid trip that was funded by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Tuesday.

“This is the first time in history that the state of Israel has officially partnered with 1,000 strategic pastors to commission them as ambassadors to combat antisemitism and reach the youth of their generation,” Mike Evans, an evangelical pastor who helped organize the trip, told CBN News.

“Right now there’s an ideological war that Israel is losing, so they need the evangelicals, they need the Zionists to fight an ideological war,” Evans added.

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/12/09/1000-christian-zionist-pastors-from-the-us-visit-israel-on-trip-funded-by-the-israeli-foreign-ministry/

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An amendment to the Military Selective Service Act to direct the Selective Service System (SSS) to try to register all potential draftees in the USA automatically has been included in the version of this year’s military authorization bill agreed to by a House-Senate conference committee and likely to be enacted into law within the next few weeks.

This doesn’t mean that a draft is being activated right away, or that any or all of those “automatically” registered will be sent induction orders – although preparing to do so is the sole purpose of registration with or by the SSS. This will, however, be the largest change in Selective Service law since 1980. More importantly, it will move the USA closer to activation of a draft, or at least to being able to claim to be ready to activate a draft “on demand” of Congress and the President, than at any time in the half century since draft registration was suspended and draft boards were deactivated in 1975.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2025/12/09/house-and-senate-agree-to-make-draft-registration-automatic/

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Thousands of children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition in Gaza since an October ceasefire that was supposed to enable a major increase in humanitarian aid, the U.N. children's agency said on Tuesday.

UNICEF, the biggest provider of malnutrition treatment in Gaza, said that 9,300 children were treated for severe acute malnutrition in October, when the first phase of an agreement to end the two-year Israel-Hamas war came into effect.

While this is down from a peak of over 14,000 in August, the number is still significantly higher than during a brief February-March ceasefire and indicates that aid flows remain insufficient, UNICEF spokesperson Tess Ingram told a Geneva press briefing by video link from Gaza.

"It's still a shockingly high number," she said.

"The number of children admitted is five times higher than in February, so we need to see the numbers come down further." Ingram described meeting underweight babies weighing less than 1 kilogram born in hospitals "their tiny chests heaving with the effort of staying alive."

UNICEF is able to import considerably more aid into the enclave than it was before the October 10 agreement but obstacles remain, she said, citing delays and denials of cargoes at crossings, route closures and ongoing security challenges.

https://archive.vn/WL5WM

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Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida 

Spencer Ackerman, foreverwars.com

A CIA medical officer—don't be fooled by the title into thinking they were there to help the detainees—cabled that Abu Zubaydah's liturgy of torture "progress[ed] quickly to the water board after large box, walling and small box periods." ("Walling" is using a rolled-up towel, positioned behind someone's neck and held on either side by someone in front of them, to slam someone's head into a wall.) The large box was the coffin. According to the Senate report, during those twenty days, "Abu Zubaydah spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet."

Imagine being made to spend 11 days inside a coffin. Imagine being made to spend more than a day inside a box barely two feet large in any direction. Imagine having to curl up, unable to extend any of your extremities, in the claustrophobic conditions of such a box, for more than a cumulative day. You can see pictures Abu Zubaydah drew of himself in the small box. Now imagine this being done to someone you love.

I say all this because the following description appears in an Amnesty International report released Friday into the conditions of confinement for migrants at Alligator Alcatraz:

The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty.

The CIA also wanted to put insects inside the confinement box, as it happens. Ron DeSantis' people figured out how to do it.

https://www.forever-wars.com/torture-techniques-from-cia-black-sites-were-used-at-alligator-alcatraz/