Raw Story

Immigrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border wall — which cost an estimated $20 million per mile to build — can wield simple power tools to saw their way through.

That's according to a new article in the Independent, which added that in some southern Arizona sections, severed pillars of the famous border wall can be pushed open by hand. In other sections of the state, the terrain is too rugged to build and the wall stands unconnected.

During Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, his favorite slogan, "Build the wall," never came up. Now, there's a question about whether he's giving up the cause.

The Independent recalled the longest government shutdown in history, triggered by Trump's demand for funding for his border wall. Ultimately, he got it. Still, the "wall" he promised hasn't been built. But it doesn't mean he will return to ensure the structure is built.

Instead of the wall, "Trump now wants a "bloody" mass deportation operation immediately removing millions of people, including by potentially reviving family separation," the report quoted.

ALSO READ: Trump planning ‘largest mass deportation operation’ — on day one

The report pointed to a local advocacy group in the Rio Grand Valley that says the "wall" has taken away the residents' little green space. Michelle Serrano, who runs Voces Unidas RGV, noted that another problem is that the "wall" has made local flooding worse and terrified its large Latino community with around-the-clock surveillance.

“This is like a rights-free area,” she told The Independent. “We’re talking about an area where they freely racially profile us. It feels like a separate but equal situation.”

The Republican Party still has building the wall as a key piece of its platform, but the topic isn't surfacing amid discussions about immigration.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden pledged not to build any more of the wall, but the efforts on the border continued. A court then told the White House they must spend the money allocated in 2019-20 on building the wall. There was then a problem with environmental disasters that the Biden White House tried to side-step, only to be told by the courts that they had to do the environmental cleanup prior to building the wall.

Also Read: People expecting Trump voters to turn on him are fooling themselves

While Trump wasn't in the White House, GOP governors funded their projects to build Trump's promised wall. In Texas, that's 50 miles of state-funded wall.

"It’s an incredible amount of effort and spending for a piece of border policy that hasn’t been shown to make any meaningful difference in reducing migration overall," the report continued.

Trump's new plan is to orchestrate the deportation of 11 million documentary immigrants. The Trump team claims they'll start with criminals. Crossing the border illegally is a crime, however. So, Trump's team will be able to argue that anyone who crossed without claiming asylum or beginning the immigration process is technically a "criminal."

Given the mass deportations are part of his flagship 2024 campaign promise, Trump could request funding for that over the wall when making his pitch to Congress.

Read the full report here.

A proposed deregulation of the home loan market that Donald Trump is widely expected to pursue could have massive consequences for new homebuyers — particularly those with low incomes, reported CNN on Monday.

Specifically, Trump is likely to try to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-backing giants that the federal government took a stake in following the 2008 financial crisis. He attempted to do this in his last term, but was unsuccessful.

Fannie and Freddie's function is to repackage existing mortgages to investors in order to ensure stable cash flow and allow loans to be issued affordably to people with lower incomes. They were brought under government conservatorship in order to stabilize the housing market during a period when the market had severely misjudged the risk of subprime loans.

The federal government's stake in these programs is worth billions of dollars, so re-privatizing them would be an immediate windfall — but it would also introduce significant new complexities into the mortgage market and, according to some economists, would result in homebuyers paying a lot more.

If the spinoff is not handled carefully, it could also scare off bondholders into seeing mortgages as riskier investments, driving up the price of 30-year fixed home loans for everyone.

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Mark Zandi, who heads up economic analysis at Moody's, "estimated that full privatization of Fannie and Freddie would cost the typical American taking out a new mortgage $1,200 annually." However, home prices and interest rates were lower back then — adjusted for today, it would be "between $1,800 and $2,800 per year for a typical mortgage holder, Zandi told CNN after updating his original paper’s calculations" — with the heaviest cost falling on people with lower incomes and credit scores.

Republicans have sought to privatize Fannie and Freddie for years, noting that the federal conservatorship was never intended to be permanent. They have also blamed these institutions, and their mandate of making home loans more accessible to lower-income people, for causing the 2008 financial crisis in the first place. This is not true, as Fannie and Freddie's share of the highest-risk category of mortgages actually decreased during the housing bubble.

Trump's re-election already injected new uncertainty into mortgage markets with, rates seeing a sharp uptick to 6.8 percent.

Solar panels and wind turbines give the world bountiful energy — but come with a conundrum. When it’s sunny and windy out, in many places these renewables produce more electricity than is actually needed at the time. Then when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing, those renewables provide little to no electricity when it’s sorely needed.

So for the grid of tomorrow to go 100 percent renewable, it needs to store a lot more energy. You’ve probably heard about giant lithium-ion batteries stockpiling that energy for later use. But when providing backup power, even a big battery bank will usually drain in four hours. The need for an alternative has the United States government, researchers, and startups scrambling to develop more “long-duration energy storage” that can provide a minimum of 10 hours of backup power — often by using reservoirs, caverns, and other parts of the landscape as batteries.

A new study from several universities and national labs in the United States and Canada shows that large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills. It looked specifically at the Western Interconnection, a chunk of the grid that includes the western U.S. and Canada, plus a bit of northern Mexico. The study found that building more long-duration energy storage there would reduce electricity prices by more than 70 percent in times of high demand.

“It’s like an orchestra,” said Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor of the paper published last month in the journal Nature Communications. “We need to think about all these factors, how they work. But bringing in more storage can only help in making this more cost-effective.”

The technologies already exist to hold renewable energy for at least half a day, with more on the way. One technique is known as pumped storage hydropower: When the grid is humming with renewable power, a facility pumps water uphill into a reservoir. Then, when solar or wind power drops off, the facility lets the water loose to flow back down into another reservoir, turning turbines that produce electricity. It’s exploiting energy from the wind and the sun, along with the power of gravity.

“Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important,” said Martin Staadecker, an energy systems researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study. “But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”

As of 2022, the U.S. had 43 pumped storage hydropower facilities with a combined generation capacity of 22 gigawatts. (For perspective, the U.S. has around 150 gigawatts of wind power and 140 gigawatts of solar.) According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has the potential to double its capacity for that kind of energy storage. In 2021, the Biden administration launched its Long Duration Storage Shot, part of the Energy Earthshots initiative, aiming to reduce the costs of the technology by 90 percent in a decade. And last year, it announced $325 million for 15 long-duration energy storage projects, including one that stores heat energy in concrete and others to make newfangled batteries made of iron, water, and air.

The researchers looked at long-duration energy storage without considering the particular technique involved, asking what would be the cheapest way to get the Western Interconnection to be 100 percent emissions-free. Their study found that long-duration energy storage would be particularly beneficial to a utility’s customers, reducing electricity costs in times of high demand on the grid, like in the late afternoon as people return home and switch on appliances at the same time that solar power on the grid is waning. More storage also means more backup power for ever-hotter heat waves, when whole regions flick on their AC units.

Companies are figuring out how to store energy underground, too. A company called Hydrostor, based in Toronto, Canada, uses excess renewable energy on the grid to pump compressed air into subterranean caverns filled with water. That forces the water aboveground into a reservoir. When the grid needs electricity, Hydrostor lets that water flow back into the chamber, pushing the air back to the surface to drive turbines. “We’re kind of creating a piston underground of water,” said Jon Norman, president of Hydrostor. “We’re actually building a cavity out using techniques that they use in the hydrocarbon storage industry to store propane and butane.”

If a region runs low on renewable power, like when the sun sets, it would have to import carbon-free electricity from elsewhere. But that requires transmission lines that cut through hundreds or thousands of miles of land, which are difficult to get approved and expensive to build. The new study found that it would cost between $83 billion and $130 billion to deploy the amount of long-duration energy storage in the modeling — depending on how the price of the technology declines as it matures.

With long-duration energy storage, utilities can deploy more solar panels and wind turbines locally and store up their energy, rather than having to ship it from somewhere else. Kevin Schneider, an electrical engineer who studies the grid at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory but wasn’t involved in the new research, said that could reduce the significant costs of building long-distance transmission lines. “Getting that flexibility in the system, where you can have a reservoir of electricity that you can store up and then release, that’s what allows us to not have to build as much infrastructure, and also be a little bit more resilient.”

The grid of tomorrow, then, may hum with renewable energy stored both in giant battery banks, but also stored in the landscape itself. Solar and wind power would be wasted no more.

Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip.

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.

Memories are malleable. Artur Debat/Moment Open via Getty Images

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.

Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.

Musical memories

Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.

While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.

For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.

Music could help reframe negative memories into something less painful. Delmaine Donson/E+ via Getty Images

On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music. The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.

The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.

Yiren Ren, Adjunct Researcher in Cognitive Brain Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fox News hosts Lawrence Jones and Steve Doocy argued that President-elect Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden after President Joe Biden did the same thing.

While reporting on the pardon Monday, Fox News correspondent Madeleine Rivera noted that Republicans in Congress "have found no concrete evidence of wrongdoing by the Biden family."

Host Lawrence Jones asserted that the president did not need to pardon his son.

"You know, as I think the fear may have been misplaced, though, I think that the Democrats, including the president, Joe Biden, thought that Donald Trump would treat them like they treated him with political prosecution," Jones said. "I think they're wrong. I think Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden."

"I think we would have gotten some type of report about the corruption and what's been happening in Department of Justice," he continued. "I think he's going to clean house when it comes to the FBI and Department of Justice, but I don't think he would have went after Hunter Biden."

Doocy agreed that the incoming president "probably would have gone ahead and pardoned him."

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

"The only difference is if Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden, you know, in 50-some-odd days, is it wouldn't be for that 10 year period," Doocy remarked. "It would just be for those two things that he's been convicted but not sentenced to a good point."

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Trump has previously said that he was open to pardoning Hunter Biden. But on Sunday, he called the current president's use of the pardon power "an abuse and miscarriage of Justice."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Donald Trump has nominated a Cabinet full of loyalists with questionable qualifications, but his critics predict they'll quickly become consumed by chaos and infighting.

Trump began his first term as a political newcomer surrounded by more experienced and conventional conservatives he eventually drove off, and the former president's critics told The Guardian his leadership will lead to predictable results.

“The same thing that happened last time will happen this time,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the anti-Trump conservative group the Lincoln Project. “He cannot resist chaos. It is his drug. He will eventually start doing what he always does and turn on different people and start sandbagging his own choices for these various jobs."

“It’s that pattern he has," Wilson added. "He comes out one day and says, ‘I love so and so,’ and then the next he’s talking to his friends saying, ‘Hey, you think Tillerson’s doing a good job or is he screwing me over?’ Those things are patterns we’ve seen in Trump’s personal life, his business life and his prior administration. An 80-year-old man is not going to be a changed person.”

The once and future president has assembled "a revenge team," according to one analyst, while another compared his Cabinet picks to the "wretched hive of scum and villainy" found in the Star Wars cantina, but it's not clear how the hodgepodge of missions and political ideologies will mesh with one another.

"Regardless of whatever individual ideological leanings these people have had at varying points in their adult lives, it’s largely irrelevant because the only litmus test we have seen put forward is absolute fealty to Donald Trump," said Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella. “As we have seen in the Republican party overall, absolute fealty to Donald Trump overshadows any ideological belief. We could take almost every issue that used to be a part of the Republican party and show how the party has moved to a diametrically opposite position. This is not a party governed by ideology any more. It is governed by personality. It is governed by loyalty to Donald Trump.”

"They’re all going to get in a room and they’re just going to go: ‘Here’s what we think – what do you think, boss? Oh, okay, well, that’s what we’re all going to do,’" added Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide. "The idea that there’s going to be ideologically rooted debate, vigorous debate happening in the Trump administration is absurd. It’s laughable.”

Some of Trump's nominees, like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as top diplomat and Wall Street billionaire Scott Bessent to head the treasury, are somewhat conventional picks for their roles, but seasoned Trump watchers believe he'll once again govern on impulse and thrive on conflict.

“I don’t think there’s any evidence that Trump has learned anything about governing since his first term," said Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers.

“There’s a lot of wishful thinking among a lot of commentators that, okay, he’s had four years in office, he learned a lot, he’s had all this time to plan with Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute and he’s got his act together," Whipple added. "I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t see any evidence that there’s any sort of plan here other than ‘this guy looks good for that job, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has got a cool last name.'"