5: What’s Christmas Like If You Choose to Spend It Alone?
We asked a few people for their stories of solitary Christmas days.
If charity Christmas adverts tell us anything, it’s that this is a hard time of year to be alone. Think of the poor and needy, they say, the homeless in the cold, older people with no friends and family to celebrate with, the refugees in camps across Europe.
Vice News
4: ‘Let it be an arms race’: Trump appears to double down on nuclear expansion
The president-elect Donald Trump has stunned nuclear weapons experts by appearing to call for a renewed arms race on his Twitter feed and in a TV interview.
“Let it be an arms race,” the president in waiting was reported to have told Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe programme, in an early phone call on Friday.
According to Brzezinski he went on to say: “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
The Guardian
3: A QUARTER OF FLORIDA’S BLACK CITIZENS CAN’T VOTE. A NEW REFERENDUM COULD CHANGE THAT.
FOR MORE THAN a century, the state of Florida has presided over one of American history’s single most effective and enduring efforts to disenfranchise voters. By far the most populous of the three states that strip lifelong voting rights from people with felony convictions, Florida is home to some 1.5 million residents who can never again cast a ballot unless pardoned by the state’s governor, according to a calculation by The Sentencing Project.
Florida’s legions of disenfranchised voters are disproportionately Democrat-leaning minorities — including nearly a quarter of Florida’s black population — numbers that advocates say amount to a long-standing and often ignored civil rights catastrophe. This racial skew means that the state’s mass disenfranchisement could have changed the outcome of some particularly important elections — such as Bush v. Gore — and thus the direction of modern American history itself. Most recently, after the state’s Republican governor clamped down on the ability of ex-felons to have their rights restored, Donald Trump won the crucial swing state by a margin less than a tenth the size of the state’s disenfranchised population, leading some to question the effect that felony disenfranchisement may have had on the size of Trump’s Electoral College win.
In spite of the state’s eye-popping voting statistics, national groups, including the Democratic Party, have shown little interest in placing real resources behind recent efforts to roll back the country’s most impactful voting restriction.
Yet in recent weeks, even without any significant organizational backing, a coalition composed largely of disenfranchised Floridians quietly reached a new landmark in a long and laborious fight to overturn the state’s law. On Monday, after organizers had spent years gathering the requisite 68,314 petition signatures, Florida’s high court announced it had set a March date to consider the proposal to allow a referendum on the 2018 ballot asking voters to roll back the state’s felony voting restriction.
The Intercept
2: “Absolutely Frightening”: Greenpeace Responds to Trump’s Call for a New Nuclear Arms Race
President-elect Donald Trump raised the prospect of a new global arms race on Thursday, after he suggested on Twitter he would increase the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Trump’s tweet read, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” Trump’s tweet came on the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country needed to “strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces.” This morning, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said Trump told her today, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” We speak to Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA.
Democracy Now
1: UN again set to vote on ending Israeli settlements
The UN Security Council will vote on Friday on a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements, a day after Egypt withdrew the measure under pressure from Israel and US president-elect Donald Trump.
New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal, who were co-sponsors of the draft resolution, have requested the vote, which diplomats said was to take place at 1900GMT.
The 15-member council had been due to vote on Thursday and western officials said the United States would allow the draft resolution to be adopted, which would be a major reversal of US practice of protecting Israel from action.
Aljazeera
