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Friends of the Earth Launches Ad Campaign on Gov. Newsom's Push to Extend the Life of Diablo Canyon
Today, Friends of the Earth U.S. launched advertisements regarding Governor Gavin Newsom's administrative push to extend the operation of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. In these advertisements, Friends of the Earth demands that the Newsom administration proceed with the retirement of the plant as planned and withdraw his legislative request.
WASHINGTON
Today, Friends of the Earth U.S. launched advertisements regarding Governor Gavin Newsom's administrative push to extend the operation of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. In these advertisements, Friends of the Earth demands that the Newsom administration proceed with the retirement of the plant as planned and withdraw his legislative request.
"The Governor's decision to try and extend the life of Diablo Canyon is reckless beyond belief," said Erich Pica, President at Friends of the Earth U.S. "This ad campaign is meant to bring light to the serious problem that this administration has instigated. Governor Newsom should honor his and the State's commitment to retire the plant on the timeline that plant workers, environmentalists, Pacific Gas and Electric and the State of California has already agreed upon."
The Newsom administration has recently circulated a bill that overrides the groundbreaking 2016 Joint Proposal, which established the closure of Diablo Canyon for 2025. This provided the State of California time to procure greenhouse gas free replacement power, as well as provide a transition for workers and communities impacted by the closure. The new legislation threatens to undo more than 5 years' worth of agreements, while undermining environmental and safety reviews of the plant's reactors. This bill counters Newsom's previous support for a firm retirement plan for the plant, which is extremely vulnerable to earthquake damage. Furthermore, there are high costs associated with generating electricity from nuclear energy.
"The risks really outweigh the rewards here," Pica adds, "If the Newsom administration wants a safe and timely transition to clean renewable energy, then they should walk back this legislation as soon as possible."
See Environment California, NRDC, and Friends of the Earth's recent statement on the bill here.
More information can be found on Friends of the Earth's position on the closure of Diablo Canyon here.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
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US Troops Near Venezuela Reportedly Denied Holiday Leave as Fears Grow of Unpopular and Lengthy Trump War
Meanwhile, newly released documents suggest the administration is gearing up to have troops in the region until the end of Trump's term.
Nov 25, 2025
Following reports that the Trump administration is eyeing a "deadly new phase" of military actions against Venezuela, including land strikes, a new report suggests that the US troops stationed near the South American nation are being denied holiday leave in anticipation of immediate action.
On Monday, NewsNation White House Correspondent Kellie Meyer reported via social media that the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is "restricting/limiting leave over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in preparation for possible land strikes in the next 10 days to two weeks."
SOUTHCOM has denied the claim, with a spokesperson saying: "Our service members and civilian employees are always afforded the opportunity to take leave throughout the year, and that includes holiday periods."
As of yet, reports only suggest that the US may be planning imminent airstrikes against Venezuela. But as documents reported Tuesday by The Intercept revealed, the US is planning to maintain "a massive military presence in the Caribbean almost to the end of President Donald Trump’s term in office—suggesting the recent influx of American troops to the region won’t end anytime soon."
According to the report: "One spreadsheet outlining supplies for 'Puerto Rico Troops' notes tens of thousands of pounds of baked goods are scheduled for delivery from November 15 of this year to November 11, 2028. Foodstuff set to feed the troops include individually wrapped honey buns, vanilla cupcakes, sweet rolls, hamburger rolls, and flour tortillas." The food is slated to be delivered to every branch of the military, including the Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.
“The procurement’s length of time and the level of effort seemed to point to these operations continuing at the current level for several years,” said Mark Cancian, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s significant because it means that the Navy will maintain a large presence in the Caribbean that is far larger than what it has been in recent years. It further implies that the Navy will be involved in these counter-drug operations.”
The Pentagon currently has more than 15,000 troops stationed in the region, the most since 1989, when the US launched a land invasion of Panama to topple the drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega, whom it had previously supported.
The reports came shortly after the US State Department designated the so-called "Cartel de los Soles," which the US accuses Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading, as a "terrorist organization." This is despite the fact that it is not actually an organized cartel at all, but a media shorthand developed to refer to the alleged connections that high-level Venezuelan officials have to the drug trade.
“It is not a group,” Adam Isaacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America organization, told the Associated Press Tuesday. “It’s not like a group that people would ever identify themselves as members. They don’t have regular meetings. They don’t have a hierarchy.”
Colombian journalist Juan Esteban Silva explains that the terrorist designation, despite its factual flimsiness, "gives the US authority to conduct covert operations, bring terrorism and drug charges, issue international arrest warrants, freeze assets, and block transactions. It also enables extraterritorial prosecution, travel restrictions, broader law enforcement and military cooperation, and asset seizures."
Maduro's government called the designation an "infamous, vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela under the classic US format of regime change."
It comes after Reuters reported Sunday that “covert operations" in Venezuela "would likely be the first part of the new action against Maduro" and that the US was “prepared to use every element of American power” to achieve its goals in the region.
While stopping drug trafficking was the initial justification for the administration’s push for regime change, White House messaging has shifted in recent days, with officials telling Fox News that it "goes beyond the Maduro regime" and is also about "getting Russia, China, and Iran out of the Western hemisphere."
On Monday, US Rep. María Salazar (R-Fla.) gave a more candid explanation for the potentially imminent military action and the need for regime change on Fox Business.
Maduro, she said, "is understanding that we're about to go in." She went on: "Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix all the oil rigs and everything that has to do with the Venezuelan petroleum companies."
Prior to returning to office, Trump said at a rally in 2023 that he regretted not invading Venezuela during his first term: "We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door.”
Though the White House appears increasingly committed to military action against Venezuela, it is overwhelmingly unpopular among Americans.
A CBS News/YouGov survey published on Sunday found that 70% of Americans—including 91% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans—are against the “US taking military action in Venezuela,” and a majority don’t believe a direct attack on Venezuela would even achieve the Trump administration’s stated goal of reducing the flow of drugs to the United States.
The same poll found that just 13% of Americans consider Venezuela to be a "major threat" to "US security," while 48% consider it a "minor threat," and 39% consider it to be "not a threat."
Alfons López Tena, a former member of the Catalan parliament and an analyst on public and international affairs, expressed shock at the Trump administration's brazenness despite the total lack of public consent for war.
"The US doesn’t feel at all like a country marching into war, 70% oppose military action in Venezuela," he said. "The government's cursory explanations show they are so heedless of public opinion that they don't even feel the need to mount a proper propaganda campaign."
Nathan J. Robinson, the editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, meanwhile, said he's not surprised.
"It's no mystery to a leftist when the US government's foreign policy is out of step with popular opinion," he said, "because we understand foreign policy is shaped by narrow elite interests."
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Israeli Assault Has Plunged Gaza Into Worst Economic Collapse Ever Recorded: UN Report
"In an optimistic scenario... it will still take several decades for Gaza to return to pre-October 2023 welfare levels."
Nov 25, 2025
A United Nations report claims that Israel's assault on Gaza has led to "the most severe economic crisis ever recorded," with nearly seven decades' worth of economic development wiped out over the span of two years.
The report, which was released on Monday by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), found that all 2.3 million people in the exclave now live below the poverty line, with per-capita gross domestic product falling to just $161, one of the lowest figures in the world.
Additionally, the report found that the unemployment rate in Gaza was as high as 80%, while inflation in the exclave surged to nearly 240%, as the Israeli military blockade caused a widespread famine by preventing basic necessities from reaching Gaza residents.
One particularly striking metric flagged by the report was the precipitous drop of night-time luminosity, which fell by 73% in Gaza between September 2023 and May 2025, an indication that Israel had completely destroyed most of the exclave's power infrastructure and left the vast majority of its people without electricity.
In fact, a map showing the presence of night-time electric lights in Gaza in May 2025 showed that the only areas in the exclave that had power were ones in the very south on the border with Egypt and in the very north on the border with Israel.
The UNCTAD report also painted a very grim picture of what it will take to rebuild Gaza.
"In an optimistic scenario of double-digit growth rates facilitated by a significant level of foreign aid, it will still take several decades for Gaza to return to pre-October 2023 welfare levels," the report said. "The international community should act to ensure a permanent ceasefire immediately and, once recovery commences, prioritize life-saving interventions, including access to essential healthcare, both physical and mental, clean water, and the restoration of basic infrastructure."
While Gaza suffered the most devastation as a result of Israeli military operations, the UNCTAD report noted that the West Bank was also undergoing significant economic distress.
Specifically, the report said that the West Bank is suffering through "its most severe economic downturn on record, driven by heightened insecurity, movement and access restrictions, and the loss of productive opportunities in all sectors of the economy."
Israel's war in Gaza, which began after Hamas launched a surprise attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023 that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, has so far killed an estimated 70,000 Palestinians. A report released by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel last week also estimated that nearly 100 Palestinian detainees have died while being held in Israeli custody.
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'Terrible for Renters': Trump DOJ Settles Price-Fixing Case With RealPage
"Far from stopping illegal practices," said one critic, "it gives a green light to algorithmic price-fixing across the economy."
Nov 25, 2025
The Trump Justice Department on Monday announced a settlement with the real estate software giant RealPage, which the federal government and multiple states accused of illegally facilitating collusion between landlords to drive up rents.
The settlement, which must be reviewed by a court, would require RealPage to "cease having its software use competitors’ nonpublic, competitively sensitive information to determine rental prices," among other mandates.
Abigail Slater, head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division, cast the agreement as a win for competition and for renters. But RealPage downplayed the settlement's impact on its business model, saying the deal's terms "bless the legality of RealPage’s prior and planned product changes"—alluding to the company's voluntary decision last year to let its customers remove nonpublic data when using the software to calculate recommended rents.
The company emphasized that the settlement does not include any financial penalties or admissions of guilt.
"What a total farce," Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, said in response to the DOJ announcement. "This sham settlement violates the first thing we tell every lawmaker: Fixing prices based on public data sets is still price fixing!"
"This is lipstick on a pig and terrible for renters," Hepner added.
The Justice Department initially sued RealPage last year under the Biden administration, accusing the company of running an "unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments."
"RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software," the Biden DOJ said. "This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information."
The DOJ complaint used RealPage's own words against it, citing the company's description of its products as "driving every possible opportunity to increase price."
A White House report released late last year estimated that the kind of algorithmic pricing that RealPage enables cost renters across the US a total of nearly $4 billion in 2023 alone. The report characterized that estimate as conservative.
Basel Musharbash, managing attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, warned following Monday's settlement announcement that "far from stopping illegal practices, it gives a green light to algorithmic price-fixing across the economy."
The states that joined the DOJ lawsuit were not listed on the settlement.
Last week, California, North Carolina, and other states announced a separate settlement with the apartment management giant Greystar, one of the companies that used RealPage software to set rents.
Under the state deal, Greystar agreed to pay $7 million in penalties and stop using RealPage’s software or similar products for pricing.
"Whether it's through smoke-filled backroom deals or through an algorithm on your computer screen, colluding to drive up prices is illegal,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Families across the country are staring down an affordability crisis. Companies that intentionally fuel this unaffordability by raising prices to line their own pockets can be sure I will use the full force of my office to hold them accountable."
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