Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In a stunning victory against bloated bureaucracy, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), originally spearheaded by Elon Musk, has slashed an eye-popping $214 billion from federal spending in less than a year.

Official figures from DOGE’s own tally reveal a relentless assault on waste, including terminations of thousands of contracts, grants, and leases that were draining resources without delivering value.

From bloated defense deals to questionable health programs, the cuts are stacking up, proving that an America First approach can rein in the deep state’s excesses.

? A WIN! DOGE just hit $214,000,000,000.00 in taxpayer savings in only 11 months!

That’s $1,329 for every taxpaying American.

Elon and team delivering America a win! !pic.twitter.com/s33BjKLKJY

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) December 22, 2025

The milestone comes amid widespread praise for Musk’s no-nonsense tactics, even as legacy media nitpicks the details. According to DOGE’s breakdown, contract cancellations alone account for around $61 billion, targeting over 13,000 agreements like a $3.9 billion aircraft maintenance boondoggle and multi-billion-dollar health service pacts that ballooned under prior administrations.

Grants saw $49 billion axed, hitting everything from foreign aid handouts to domestic epidemiology programs that critics argue fueled unnecessary spending.

Leases weren’t spared either, with $113 million clawed back from underused federal spaces across the country—think vacant offices in California and North Carolina that taxpayers were footing the bill for.

Beyond that, DOGE claims broader impacts through asset sales, fraud crackdowns, interest reductions, and workforce streamlining, pushing the total to that landmark $214 billion.

Dividing the savings by roughly 161 million U.S. taxpayers gives a saving of $1,329 for every taxpaying American, a direct hit against the endless tax hikes peddled by big-government advocates.

This triumph throws a harsh spotlight on the left’s double standards. As X user MAZE notes: “Democrats used to preach about the need to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse from the system. Now they enable it and cover it up.”

Democrats used to preach about the need to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse from the system.

Now they enable it and cover it up. pic.twitter.com/ocNF1DgPxw

— MAZE (@mazemoore) December 22, 2025

It’s a damning indictment—while DOGE was busy slashing redundancies, Democrats in Congress and their media allies dragged their feet, defending the very pork-barrel projects that Musk’s team eviscerated.

Recent reports confirm the context: DOGE’s efforts, though now wound down after achieving key goals, targeted sacred cows like USAID’s $1.75 billion grant to the GAVI Foundation and the Department of Energy’s half-billion-dollar handouts for dubious “decarbonization” schemes. These weren’t just cuts—they were a rejection of globalist agendas that prioritize foreign interests over American workers.

The raw impact is undeniable. Musk himself reflected that DOGE was “somewhat successful,” but the $214 billion speaks volumes, far exceeding initial lowered projections and delivering on President Trump’s promise to drain the swamp.

The ripple effects are already showing. Positive market indicators, as highlighted in recent Fox Business segments, point to a “bountiful” 2026 fueled by these efficiencies. Stock futures are climbing, cryptos are steady, and investor confidence is rebounding.

This isn’t about austerity—it’s about smart governance. By dismantling the layers of fraud and inefficiency that Democrats once railed against but now protect, DOGE has handed everyday Americans a massive return on their tax dollars.

This isn’t just numbers on a page—it’s real relief for every taxpaying American fed up with Washington’s endless money pit.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

While admittedly extremely lagging, the preliminary OCTOBER durable goods orders print was a big disappointment after a rebound in the summer with the headline falling 2.2% MoM (far worse than the 1.5% MoM decline expected). However, while this disappointment dragged down the YoY growth to 4.7%, it was still well above inflation…

Source: Bloomberg

Core Orders (ex Transports) rose 0.2% MoM (notably slower than the 0.7% MoM in September and below the +0.3% MoM expected)…

Source: Bloomberg

That was the 7th straight monthly gain and lifted core durable goods orders up 3.57% YoY, near the highest since Nov 2022.

Finally, core capex remains solid with new orders ex-air up 0.5% (4th straight monthly gain) and shipments continue to significantly stronger than expected.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is offering triple the amount of cash to illegal immigrants who willingly leave the United States through a smartphone app as part of a “holiday deal.”

“Since January 2025, 1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported and tens of thousands have used the CBP Home program,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Dec. 22 statement.

“During the Christmas Season, the U.S. taxpayer is so generously TRIPLING the incentive to leave voluntarily for those in this country illegally—offering a $3,000 exit bonus, but just until the end of the year.”

DHS earlier this year unveiled a plan for illegal immigrants to self-deport through the CBP One app, which allows them to receive $1,000 from the federal government upon leaving the United States. It also forgives any immigration-related fines or penalties they may have incurred.

Noem added, “Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport because if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return.”

The Trump administration has said the CBP Home app is a way for people to leave without having to deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The app replaced the CBP One program that was used under the Biden administration, which allowed people to schedule hearings with immigration judges and to enter the United States before it was suspended by the White House in January.

A news release issued by DHS this past week said that more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second time, with 1.9 million voluntarily leaving and more than 600,000 deportations.

Trump, who promised record levels of deportations during the 2024 campaign, has ramped up enforcement actions and signed numerous orders related to both immigration and border security. The president has said that it’s needed after record numbers of illegal immigrants were encountered by agents or entered the United States under the Biden administration.

The Trump administration is preparing for a new push against illegal immigration in 2026 with billions in new funding, and officials have said they plan to hire thousands more immigration agents, open new detention centers, and partner with outside companies to track down people who are in the country illegally.

ICE and the Border Patrol will receive around $170 billion in additional funds through September 2029 as part of a funding package that was passed and signed into law over the summer.

White House border czar Tom Homan said on Monday that Trump had delivered on his promise of a historic deportation operation and removing criminals while shutting down illegal immigration across the U.S.–Mexico border. Homan said the number of arrests will increase sharply as ICE hires more officers and expands detention capacity with the new funding.

“I think you’re going to see the numbers explode greatly next year,” Homan said, adding that there will be more enforcement activity at workplaces next year.

Some of the immigration-related orders have faced legal pushback. A federal appeals court in late November, for example, declined to clear the way for Trump to expand a fast-track deportation process to allow for the expedited removal of illegal immigrants who are living far away from the border.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Coffee is a daily ritual for millions of people around the world. Yet the price of a simple cappuccino can vary dramatically depending on where you order it.

Local wages, rents, taxes, and currency strength all shape what consumers ultimately pay for their caffeine fix.

This visualization ranks the most expensive cappuccinos among the 69 major cities covered in Deutsche Bank’s Mapping the World’s Prices 2025 report.

It covers cappuccino prices in 2025, expressed in U.S. dollars for comparability.

Swiss and Nordic Cities Lead the Rankings

Zurich and Copenhagen share the top spot, with an average cappuccino price of $6.77. Switzerland’s high wages and cost of living, combined with a strong currency, push everyday purchases higher.

Geneva also ranks among the most expensive cities at $5.86, reinforcing Switzerland’s position as one of the costliest places in the world for daily consumption.

U.S. Cities Cluster Near the Top

Several U.S. cities appear prominently in the rankings. New York ($5.95) and San Francisco ($5.90) lead the pack, followed closely by Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston.

Despite differences in geography and culture, cappuccino prices across these U.S. cities fall within a relatively narrow range, suggesting similar cost structures in large urban markets.

Europe’s Price Range—and Italy’s Exception

European cities show a wider spread. While London ($5.19), Stockholm ($5.10), and Helsinki ($5.13) rank among the pricier options, Vienna and Amsterdam sit below $5.00.

Notably, Italy stands apart. Even the most expensive cappuccino in Italy—found in Milan—costs just $2.15, while in Rome the average price is only $1.79.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Which Countries Drink the Most Wine? on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The year 2025 ends for the slap-prone German Chancellor with a resounding smack in Brussels. After the failed raid on Russian assets at Euroclear, Berlin now turns its gaze to the hoped-for comeback of the German economy. Yet here too awaits the next bitter realization for naïve statisticians: wealth cannot be printed with debt.

Whether the Chancellor finds any sense of fulfillment—or even joy—in his current job is difficult to discern. Not that Friedrich Merz, with his numerous political sleights of hand, has preserved any claim to professional happiness. And yet curiosity remains: what must the psyche of a man be like, who for nearly eight months has been led by social-democratic buccaneers such as Lars Klingbeil and Bärbel Bas by the nose through the political circus—exposed, humiliated, and repeatedly made ridiculous?

March into Command Economy

Merz’s grandiose promises of cutting bureaucracy, unleashing the economy in a vitalizing fall of reforms, and his bizarre economic patriotism à la “Made for Germany” evaporate at the slightest breeze of intra-coalition opposition. It reads like a naive comedy: the CDU and SPD camouflage reform policies, only to steer the central plan of transforming society and the economy into a green command economy with a military-industrial complex through increasingly rough seas to a safe harbor. The good old Erich—what would he have thought of what the old “FRG” has become?

The ongoing public humiliation of former BlackRock breakfast director Friedrich Merz reached a temporary peak on Friday in Brussels. At the EU summit, he received a resounding slap from the small Visegrád coalition led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, ultimately preventing the expropriation of Russian assets at Euroclear.

For those who understand the significance of Euroclear and even vaguely grasp what it means to damage a pillar of the trust-based international financial market architecture, a sigh of relief was inevitable.

What threatened here was nothing less than a reckless kick against a system’s foundation—whether from ignorance, political incompetence, or an almost manic denial of reality regarding the long-lost war in Ukraine. Panic replaces reason, EU-Europe digs deeper into the spiral of debt and recession, whose accelerating spin now lifts once-prosperous cities like Stuttgart and Wolfsburg off their fiscal saddles.

In Brussels, Merz and his allies were shown a boundary—unmistakably. Thus, the circle closes on a disagreeable year 2025 for him. And everything suggests the coming year will offer little cause for optimism.

Toward the Sunset

The German economy alone ensures that 2026 will seamlessly continue the disaster of 2025. An honest economic assessment requires a willingness for an honest inventory. The state’s share of German GDP has long surpassed the magic mark of 50 percent. New borrowing next year—adjusted for the federal government’s accounting tricks—will amount to roughly 5.6 percent.

Merz’s relentless fight against the debt brake now forces even Bundesbank economists to a sober assessment. For the coming year, they forecast an official budget deficit of 4.8 percent—a figure indirectly confirming our estimate of actual new borrowing.

If one views the state as a consumer filling its deficits with a debt printer, then statistically reported zero growth means nothing more than the private economy—producing goods and services for real consumers—is shrinking dramatically.

To counteract this economic erosion, the federal government, in addition to its already high-deficit budget, channels special funds into two artificial economies: the green disaster economy and the freshly revitalized war sector. Over €50 billion per year is borrowed on the credit market for this purpose.

It is this mixture of economic ignorance, historical oblivion, and near-childlike faith in miracles that leaves one speechless. One can safely assume that no cabinet member comprehends that only capital saved from the economic process and transformed into investments on a free market creates wealth.

The Merz–Klingbeil duo is building a bubble economy ideologically committed to the green transformation and geopolitically following a historically fatal idea: the growth of a war economy.

The Silent Erosion of the Real Economy

This policy may further swell the public sector. Merely distributing these massive debt and credit programs puts tens of thousands to work at the expense of the productive population. The high regulatory tempo in Brussels and Berlin has forced the German economy to create roughly 325,000 new administrative positions over the past three years—solely to handle the flood of documentation and regulatory requirements. Paper piles upon paper: absurd, Kafkaesque, and economically destructive.

The state thus effectively outsources its own bureaucracy and distorts statistics on multiple levels. While administrative apparatuses grow, hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs have already been lost. The consensus estimate for economic growth in 2026 of just about one percent is the true disaster Berlin must now digest.

It matters little how much credit the state withdraws from the capital market or which incentives it creates to direct private capital into industrial wastelands—green steel or wind energy. In this environment, the private sector will shrink by at least four percent next year.

The Turning Point

For Friedrich Merz, this economic catastrophe is no longer merely a domestic political time bomb. If the downward spiral continues, media spectacles, ritualized bashing of entrepreneurs, hollow site patriotism, and endless “persevere” slogans will not suffice to explain to citizens why their exsanguination through taxes and labor markets continues to rise while no one addresses the causes.

At its core, this crisis is about correcting two fundamental ideological misdirections. The moment will come when Germany must abandon the leftist illusion of permanently acting as the world’s social office. This cut will coincide with the end of destructive climate socialism, which is either bankrupting German industry or pushing it into the arms of rationally managed locations.

The Visegrád group delivered a demonstrative kick to Merz’s shins. But the real dynamics extend further: a powerful opposition of conservative parties and governments—from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Italy—is forming. They will eventually behead the climate-socialist Medusa of central planners. Yet, given the stiff headwinds and fierce resistance of Brussels’ powerful core, the birth of the liberating European Perseus may be a long and difficult labor.

Via Remix News,

Starting in January 2026, a second NATO hub will begin operating in Romania, doubling the transit of weapons to Ukraine, including through the PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List) mechanism.

Right after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a similar hub was opened in Jasionka, Poland, to serve as a key logistics center for all international aid flowing to Kyiv — military, humanitarian, and medical. Funds flow into Jasionka from Europe and the United States, writes Do Rzeczy.

The opening of the second hub reporting directly to NATO was confirmed by NATO’s deputy commander for support to Ukraine, General Mike Keller, who also informed press that in the past year, Ukraine received around 220,000 tons of military aid – approximately 9,000 trucks, 1,800 railway cars, and some 500 aircraft carrying weapons and military equipment.

“This is actually quite positive news, considering the independence of arms supplies to Ukraine from a single logistics center in Poland. This concerns urgently needed air defense assets, and above all, missiles, ammunition, etc.,” Defense Express experts assessed.

The current hub in Poland is located approximately 80 kilometers from the Polish-Ukrainian border. From there, goods, previously subjected to security checks, including explosives and counterintelligence equipment, are transported to the Ukrainian border.

For over two years, all these tasks were performed by a special support inspectorate – a team of four services under the overall leadership of the Military Counterintelligence Service – the police, the Central Bureau of Police Investigation, the Military Counterintelligence Service, and a dozen or so officers of the Military Gendarmerie.

Read more here…

Lately headlines have been filled with developments of the United States targeting Venezuelan-linked tankers, or sanctioning Russia’s so-called Shadow Fleet, or else intercepts of Iranian oil shipments on the high seas. Such country names on the receiving end of Washington’s punitive measures have become commonplace, but it is surprising to see the EU country of Spain pop up as potentially next on the target list. Sanctions on Spanish-flagged vessels?

The US is actually mulling it, based on Madrid having blocked vessels carrying weapons bound for Israel since last year, even including refusals for American ships to dock.

Maritime monitoring source Freight Waves reported of several incidents last year, “Spain refused docking privileges at APM terminals in Algeciras, Spain in November 2024 to three U.S. flagged vessels operating under the MSP: Maersk Denver, Maersk Nysted, and Maersk Seletar.”

The Federal Maritime Commission conducted a formal investigation and this month confirmed the anti-US and anti-Israel actions by the Spanish government did take place, in line with Spain’s recent boycotting of Israel (specifically arms and military equipment) policy due to the Gaza war.

Spain has made clear it has recently codified a “multi-faceted policy” to ban ships and aircraft carrying weapons headed for Israel or tankers carrying fuel for use by the Israeli military from using Spanish ports or even flying in its airspace.

The US Federal Maritime Commission within the last days issued a statement confirming that it is considering “remedies the commission can implement to adjust or meet unfavorable conditions to shipping in the foreign trade of the United States include adopting regulations restricting voyages to or from US ports, imposing per voyage fees, limiting amounts or types of cargo, or taking ‘any other action the commission finds necessary and appropriate to adjust or meet any condition unfavorable to shipping the foreign trade of the United States’.”

There has long existed routine coordination between Spanish and American military officials, however, the relationship is becoming increasingly tense, given port blockage issue reflects a serious political divergence amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

The Rota base, near Cádiz on the Atlantic coast, is under Spanish control but heavily utilized by American forces. Also, the Morón air base, which is near Seville, is a key hub for US military operations, with American forces long operating with a broad degree of freedom there.

Madrid has defended its decision as rooted in Spain’s sovereignty and terms outlined in a 1988 bilateral defense agreement, amid the past couple years of European scrutiny of Israeli military action against Palestinians, especially in war-ravaged Gaza.

Authored by Chris Morrison via DailySceptic.org,

In a couple of weeks’ time, the Met Office is likely to announce another ‘hottest year evah’ in the UK. The message will be broadcast faithfully by trusted messengers in mainstream media, keen to prop up the fading Net Zero fantasy, but greeted with howls of derision across social media. Eye-opening investigative research over the last two years has revealed a national temperature network mainly composed of ‘junk’ inappropriate sites and massive data inventions across over 100 non-existent stations.

Now the British Government has stepped in with the suggestion that questioning the Met Office’s shoddy measuring systems “weakens trust in science”. Misinformation is said to have proliferated on “conspiracy networks”.

Step forward Lord Patrick Vallance, the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser at the heart of the Covid lockdown panic but now an unelected Science Minister in the Labour Administration.

“There has been a growing online narrative in some online and social media spaces attempting to undermine Met Office observations and data,” he observes.

Vallance’s conspiracy claims echo similar comments made earlier in the year by the Met Office. The investigative efforts of a small number of people were said by the state meteorologist to be an “attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world ‘s changing climate”.

Only in the world inhabited by Vallance and the Met Office can a conspiracy be whipped up when rigorous examination and questioning is applied to scientific data.

From Covid to climate, it seems the scientific process is a closed book to state scientists following the settled political narrative. One of the ‘conspirators’ is citizen sleuth Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of nearly 400 individual Met Office recording stations. Commenting on the official ministerial response, he observed that not one word constituted a scientific approach. “It is a political monologue of the lowest order,” he opined.

Regular co-conspiratorial readers will of course be aware of the reporting problems at the Met Office.

Over the last 18 months, the percentage of sites in junk CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ due to nearby unnatural obstacles of 2°C and 5°C respectively has climbed from 77.9% to over 80%. In that period, the number of pristine Class 1 sites capable of measuring an uncorrupted ambient air temperature over a large surrounding area has fallen from 24 to just 19. Ray Sanders has catalogued most of the unsuitable sites producing measurements taken by airport runways, in walled gardens, near main roads and in the middle of solar farms. Daily high unnatural heat spikes, amplified by the recent introduction of more accurate electronic devices, are an obvious unaddressed problem, but they are often fed into the official statistics. One such 60-second spike in July 2022 pushed the temperature at RAF Coningsby up to 40.3°C, a declared national record that is widely publicised.

Meanwhile, temperature databases are awash with non-existent stations and invented data. Explanations that the ‘estimates’ are taken from ‘well-correlated neighbouring stations’ might be more convincing if those stations could be identified. Freedom of Information (FOI) efforts by Ray Sanders seeking such details have been dismissed as “vexatious” and “not in the public interest”. The picture has emerged of a very rough-and-ready network, suitable for specific local temperature reporting at places such as airports, but unconvincing in promoting widespread average temperatures down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade.

The Vallance explanations are contained in a letter written to the Conservative MP Sir Julian Lewis following concerns raised by Derek Tripp, a local councillor in his constituency. He notes that in September, the Met Office decided to remove estimated data from three non-existent stations on its historic temperature database.

“They recognised that confusion could be caused when there appears to be a continued flow of data on this website from stations that have closed,” he said.

In fact the confusion was caused by the Daily Sceptic seeking FOI details in November of well-correlated neighbouring stations responsible for data at one of the stations, namely Lowestoft. The well-correlated explanation is often used by the Met Office and formed the basis of an earlier ‘fact check’ by Science Feedback that seems to have relied exclusively on text provided by the Met Office. Sanders had earlier determined that there were no such stations within a reasonable distance of Lowestoft. The Met Office admitted under FOI that it did not use such stations but rather made estimates using its HADUK-Grid. This was little more than passing the buck since HADUK-Grid inputs temperature information from nearby stations, none of which it seems can ever be identified.

Vallance went on to note that the historic dataset was for “general interest only and is not intended for climate monitoring purposes”.

Curiously, Vallance failed to point out that this was a very recent explanation since it only appeared on the Met Office historic page after the Daily Sceptic submitted its FOI.

On the 80% junk nature of the Met Office’s temperature sites, Vallance rushes to the aid of the party.

“It is misleading and inappropriate to interpret the CIMO classifications in isolation to question the quality of the Met Office’s observing network or the integrity of the UK’s climate record,” he states.

What pompous piffle.

In-house activists have been allowed to leverage the reputation of the Met Office to produce a flood of dubious measurements and statistics designed to create mass climate psychosis with the aim of promoting a hard-Left Net Zero agenda. The World Meteorological Organisation could not be clearer in stating that a CIMO Class 1 location can be considered as a “reference” site giving a true air temperature over a wide surrounding area. “A Class 5 site is a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area,” it notes. A site with a poor class number can still be valuable for a specified application, it adds.

In other words, a Class 5 is useful for giving jet pilots a vital runway temperature, but less so for telling us that the annual temperature in the UK was 0.06°C cooler in 2023 than the ‘record’ year of 2022.

Vallance also claims that the Met Office “follows a structured, requirements-driven process to identify and establish new land observing stations”. It is reasonable to ask what “requirements-driven” process is being used by the Met Office, given that a large majority of sites started over the last 30, 10 and five years are to be found in the junk 4 and 5 Classes.

Even worse, the Daily Sceptic has disclosed using FOI information that 20 new sites have opened since April 2024, and of the 17 that have received CIMO classifications, a frankly incredible 64.7% started life in the Class 4 and 5 junk lane.

And they say we are the conspiracy nuts.

There are over 8,500 potentially polluting wrecks (PPWs) across the world’s ocean. These shipwrecks may hold as much as 20.4 million metric tons of oil and toxic substances, according to estimates.

This graphic, produced by Visual Capitalist’s Cody Good in partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, shows the global density of World War II wrecks. It uses data from Paul Heersink’s Sunken Ships of the Second World War database and oil estimates from Michel et al., 2005, presented at the International Oil Spill Conference.

Where Toxic Shipwrecks Are Found

World War II battles sank over 75% of PPWs, concentrating most in regions such as the South Pacific (32% of PPWs, 25% of oil) and the North Atlantic (25% of PPWs, 38% of oil).

Here is a table that shows the concentration of PPWs by ocean region and their estimated oil content:

These wrecks remain under the ownership of the original flag states, who have no legal obligation to intervene. As a result, proactive international cooperation is urgently required.

The Environmental Threat

Many PPWs lie in the waters of small island states reliant on fishing and tourism. Even minor oil spills in sensitive marine areas can be devastating.

Here is a table showing the top 10 countries with the most PPWs located in their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), ranked by GDP:

Source: Shipwreck locations – Paul Heersink, 2025; EEZ file – Flanders Marine Institute, 2023

Because these nations often lack the resources to respond, they remain especially vulnerable to emerging threats.

The Malta Manifesto: Charting a Path Forward

The Malta Manifesto, launched by Project Tangaroa, calls for a global framework to address the PPW threat. It outlines key actions, from identifying high-risk wrecks to supporting coastal nations with limited capacity.

By recognizing that even a single leak in the wrong location can have far-reaching impacts, the Manifesto pushes for equitable, science-based solutions to this overlooked legacy of conflict.

Read the Malta Manifesto here…