https://apnews.com/article/sweden-online-vendors-illegal-sex-doll-f1a046354b1c0129319f8f1ba0bda86a

BERLIN (AP) — The Swedish government promised on Friday to fight the sale of childlike sex dolls online after instances of such commerce had been reported earlier in the country.

“I think I react on behalf of all parents when I say that, as a mother, your heart really breaks watching these images and pictures of these dolls,” Sweden’s Minister for Social Services, Camilla Waltersson Grönvall, told The Associated Press.

The Swedish government wants “to make sure these products cannot any more be sold and bought anywhere,” she said.

She spoke after a meeting which the Swedish government convened on Friday “in response to several notable cases of e-commerce companies selling childlike sex dolls,” according to a statement by her ministry. Child protection groups, online vendors and government agencies participated.

The online platforms described the measures they are taking to make sure these kinds of products are no longer sold online, Waltersson Grönvall said.

Captain Fatbeard The Fat Fear of the Seven Reeeees is resorting to commerical piracy and raiding of merchant vessels
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5643019-us-seizes-venezuela-tanker/
Trump says US has seized oil tanker near Venezuela

President Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, the latest escalation in what has become an increasingly tense relationship between the two countries.

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela. A large tanker, very large,” Trump told reporters. “And other things are happening.”

Trump did not provide additional details about the seizure, and he told reporters they would hear from “the appropriate people” about it.

“It was seized for a very good reason,” Trump said.

Asked what would happen to the oil on the tanker, Trump said, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Associated Press reported that the U.S. Coast Guard led the seizure of the tanker, with support from the Navy.

Donald Trump saved the life of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado by helping her flee to Norway from the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
Trump assembled an expert team of contractors skilled in extraction operations as well as select members of the US military and helped her get through 10 government checkpoints undetected and eventually flee the country by boat.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5644246-maria-corina-machado-venezuela-norway-trip/
Trump administration helped Venezuela’s Machado escape to Norway: Report

The Trump administration reportedly aided Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado in her secret travel from Venezuela to Norway for the award ceremony in Oslo.

Venezuela’s opposition leader has been in hiding since Jan. 9, shortly after President Nicolás Maduro started his third term following a disputed election.

Leaving her location on Monday, she first managed to get through 10 military checkpoints undetected, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the operation.

She next headed to Curaçao on Tuesday. Her path through the Caribbean Sea was flanked with danger in waters ripe with attacks from the Trump administration in recent weeks. The Journal reported that the group helping Machado reached out to the U.S. military so it would not strike her boat. In addition to Machado, two people were on board the fishing skiff that skipped across the sea after a two-month planning process.

“We coordinated that she was going to leave by a specific area so that they would not blow up the boat,” said the person close to the operation, according to the Journal.

“The Trump administration was aware of the operation, said people familiar with the matter, but the extent of its involvement was unclear,” the Journal reported, but it noted the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon declined to comment and the administration “denied accuracy of the military contact.”

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/09/politics/james-comey-dan-richman-justice-department-prosecuting

The Justice Department said in court documents on Tuesday that it plans to continue its efforts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey.

The department’s stance was revealed in a lawsuit brought by the former FBI’s director’s friend and former lawyer Dan Richman. It comes two weeks after Comey’s previous indictment was dismissed and after a judge put temporary limits on the evidence prosecutors can use in future grand jury proceedings.

In the documents filed Tuesday — in a fast-moving court battle over evidence used to investigate Comey over his statements to Congress five years ago — the Justice Department refers to the situation as both a “pending criminal investigation” and “a potential federal criminal prosecution.”

The DOJ wrote to a federal judge that Richman’s lawsuit shouldn’t be able to stymie a criminal prosecution.

The lawsuit, the Justice Department wrote, “is actually a collateral motion aimed at hindering the government from using (Richman’s) property as evidence in a separate criminal proceeding.” The court that temporarily locked down evidence the Justice Department had from Richman “has effectively enjoined the government from investigating and potentially prosecuting Comey.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-plans-envision-major-us-investment-russia-restoring-oil-flows-europe-wsj-2025-12-11/
U.S. President Donald Trump's plan for peace in Ukraine includes proposals to restore Russian energy flows to Europe, major U.S. investment in Russian rare earths and energy, and tapping frozen Russian sovereign assets, the Wall Street Journal said.

The newspaper said the plans were detailed in appendices to peace proposals handed to European counterparts over recent weeks.

They include a plan for U.S. financial firms and other businesses to tap $200 billion of frozen Russian sovereign assets for projects in Ukraine, including a major new data center powered by the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant now controlled by Russian forces, the paper said.

U.S. companies would invest in Russian strategic sectors such as rare-earth extraction and oil drilling in the Arctic, while Russian energy flows to Western Europe and the world would be restored, it added.

The paper said one unidentified European official compared the proposed U.S.-Russian energy deals to an economic version of the 1945 Yalta conference.

At that meeting, the victors of World War Two, the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain, divided up their spheres of interest in Europe.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, formed of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

https://www.axios.com/2025/12/11/impeachment-haley-stevens-rfk-democrats-trump

One of Democrats' most fraught internal fights of the year resurfaced Wednesday after Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) introduced articles of impeachment against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Why it matters: Stevens is part of a growing group of House Democrats effectively going rogue by mounting impeachment efforts without support from party leadership, to the frustration of many of their colleagues.

The Michigan Democrat stressed in an interview with Axios that she "worked closely" with the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees HHS.

But Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), the top Democrat on the panel, told Axios she "approached us about joining her, and then in the end we declined."

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told Axios he hasn't taken a look at Stevens' measure, adding: "You know what I'm focused on? Making sure that the American people don't have their health care ripped away from them."

State of play: Stevens is one of a handful of House Democrats who have tried to impeach Trump or one of his officials this year.

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has introduced impeachment measures against President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) forced a vote on impeaching Trump in June, with most House Democrats joining Republicans in blocking the measure.

In each case, many House Democrats fumed that the impeachment efforts were pointless distractions that divert from party messaging.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-flips-history-by-casting-europenot-russiaas-villain-in-new-security-policy-cbb138fa
BRUSSELS—For years, the U.S. government has published an annual National Security Strategy that lays out how Washington sees the world and its approach to dealing with looming threats, from China to Russia to drug-traffickers in Latin America.

This week, the Trump administration’s version seemed to reserve its harshest tone for a new target: America’s closest allies in Europe.

The 30-page document painted European nations as wayward, declining powers that have ceded their sovereignty to the European Union and are led by governments that suppress democracy and muzzle voices that want a more nationalistic turn.

It says the continent faces “civilizational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognizable” in two decades—as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies.”

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals. European leaders reading the document need “to assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” said Katja Bego, a senior researcher at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

Timothy Garton Ash, a prominent British historian, described the document “as the mother of all wake-up calls for Europe.”

“We’re in this extraordinary position where the U.S. is still objectively an ally of Europe, but subjectively at least in the Trump administration and the view of many Europeans we’re no longer seeing each other that way,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-epstein-grand-jury-unsealed.html

A Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday granted the Justice Department’s motion to unseal the records of the grand jury investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking a minor and other counts.

The ruling by Judge Paul A. Engelmayer cited a new law passed by Congress requiring the Justice Department to release all its files on Mr. Epstein by Dec. 19.

But the opinion makes it clear that grand jury transcripts will be only a small part of a huge trove of materials that the Justice Department has said it intends to release under the new law.

The department also asked Judge Engelmayer to modify a protective order issued at the beginning of Ms. Maxwell’s case that maintained strict confidentiality over materials turned over to defense lawyers, known as discovery. “A paramount goal of the protective order,” the judge wrote, was “to protect the privacy interests of Maxwell’s and Epstein’s victims.”

In his 24-page opinion on Tuesday, Judge Engelmayer wrote that the new law, known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, “unambiguously” applied to the discovery materials in the case. Modifying the protective order, he added, was necessary to enable the Justice Department “to carry out its legal obligations under the act.”

Such discovery includes materials gathered from searches of physical spaces, like Mr. Epstein’s house and island, and the contents of computers and other electronic devices seized from those spaces.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-threatens-new-icc-sanctions-unless-court-pledges-not-prosecute-trump-2025-12-10/
President Donald Trump's administration wants the International Criminal Court to amend its founding document to ensure it does not investigate the Republican president and his top officials, a Trump administration official said, threatening new U.S. sanctions on the court if it did not.

If the court does not act on this U.S. demand and two others - dropping investigations of Israeli leaders over the Gaza war and formally ending an earlier probe of U.S. troops over their actions in Afghanistan - Washington may penalize more ICC officials and could sanction the court itself, the official said.

Sanctioning the court would significantly escalate the U.S. campaign against the ICC, which has long been criticized by U.S. officials including both Republicans and Democrats, who say the court infringes on U.S. sovereignty.

The Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Washington has communicated its demands to ICC members, some of whom are U.S. allies, and has also made them known to the court. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 2002 as a court of last resort, with the power to prosecute heads of state.

The demand and the threat to resume the U.S. sanctions campaign towards the court have not been previously reported.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5641032-rahm-emanuel-social-media/
ormer Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) is calling on the U.S. to follow Australia’s lead and ban children younger than 16 from using social media.

“When it comes to our adolescents, it’s either going to be adults or the algorithms. One of them is going to raise the kids,” Emanuel said in a video on the social platform X. “And I think we need to help the parents. It’s too much for a parent to push against Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, all the other social media apps.”

Down under, a law requiring social media companies to disable the accounts of Australian users under the age of 16 took effect on Wednesday. Failure to do so would in a fine of more than 49.5 million Australian dollars, equivalent to more than $32 million.

The law applies to Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Kick, Reddit, Twitch and X, and is the first of its kind globally.