The Republican Policy of Making More People Homeless

More people than ever are being forced into homelessness or are spending more than half their income on rent.


Social activists, including a coalition of homeless-serving organizations, homeless residents and supporters rally at the start of a 24-hour vigil to block a planned shutdown of a homeless encampment at Echo Lake Park in Los Angeles, California, on March 24, 2021, ahead of a half million-dollar cleanup and repair effort by the city due to begin early on March 25.
(Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)

Sonya Acosta
Dec 21, 2025

CBPP Blog


As Congress continues to negotiate the next set of funding bills before the upcoming deadline at the end of January, policymakers must ensure sufficient and timely funding for critical housing and homelessness programs. These programs help millions of people afford housing, a basic need. But proposed cuts could leave more than 600,000 people struggling to pay the rent — a sizable share of whom would then be at high risk of eviction and homelessness (see table here for details by state). Congress should instead use a final 2026 funding bill to keep people in their homes and support communities’ efforts to make housing more affordable for everyone.

The Administration and congressional Republicans already made deep cuts to health coverage and food assistance in their megabill enacted earlier this year. They could impose similarly harmful cuts to housing and homelessness assistance through the appropriations bill now under negotiation. It’s critical that no families lose assistance and communities have the resources to at least maintain current levels of assistance.

To make that happen, a final funding bill for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should:Help more than 170,000 formerly homeless people stay in their homes with access to services. HUD issued a funding notice for the Continuum of Care (CoC) program, the main homelessness solutions program, that would cap the percentage of funding that can be used to pair rental assistance with supportive services at 30 percent — compared to about 87 percent under current policy. That change alone would take housing assistance away from more than 170,000 formerly homeless people, HUD estimates.While HUD temporarily rescinded the notice, the department stated it will make “technical corrections” and reissue it. The funding notice includes other policy changes for the funding competition that are so drastically different from previous years that some communities could be left without any CoC funding in 2026 to connect unhoused people with housing.But the timing of the notice alone will cause chaos. Some communities are facing delays in their 2026 funding because HUD issued the new funding notice months later than the usual grantmaking timeline. CoC-funded projects are on a variety of funding timelines, so projects that are expecting money in January will receive nothing. The longer HUD takes to reissue a notice and complete the grantmaking process, the longer and more extensive the gaps in funding for housing and services for formerly and currently homeless people. Many communities do not have resources to fund these services in the interim, forcing them to scale back or end housing assistance and services, which will leave many people experiencing homelessness once again.Congress needs to ensure that communities have the funding they need. Congress can — and should — direct HUD in the final funding bill to renew existing grants for 2026 (which would complete the two-year grants that first provided funding in 2025). This would keep people stably housed, and prevent funding disruptions for communities across the country, all without any increase in funding.
Maintain assistance for the more than 50,000 households that use the successful Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) program to pay the rent each month. The EHV program has provided life-saving assistance to households at risk of or experiencing homelessness or fleeing domestic violence and trafficking, but its funding is expected to run out in 2026. While both the House and Senate include some helpful language in their HUD funding bills, neither proposal would fully address the funding cliff. A final bill should provide additional funding to ensure these households don’t lose assistance and the stability they’ve achieved.
Sufficiently fund the Housing Choice Voucher program, the country’s largest federal rental assistance program. Neither the House or Senate annual funding bills for HUD include enough funding to keep pace with inflation and maintain existing levels of assistance in the voucher program. Without adequate funding, many agencies would have to stop issuing vouchers to new families as a way to control costs, leading to fewer people getting the help they need. This has already happened to many agencies this year, so HUD and housing agencies have nearly depleted existing emergency resources.We estimate that, under the House bill, about 411,000 fewer people could receive assistance, and about 243,000 fewer people would receive assistance under the Senate bill. Housing Choice Vouchers are a critical tool for helping people with low incomes afford housing, including people experiencing homelessness. It’s particularly important to ensure the voucher program has robust funding given the other threats to assistance discussed above.

Taken together, these cuts would further limit who receives housing assistance, leaving up to 600,000 more people without an affordable, stable home in the coming year. Rental assistance is a critical, evidence-based solution to reducing and preventing homelessness, but already eligible households can’t access it due to chronic underfunding. More people than ever are being forced into homelessness or are spending more than half their income on rent. Taking the steps outlined above could keep these problems from getting worse.

Cuts to rental assistance, on the other hand, will leave more people waiting for help, especially because the deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in the Republican megabill passed in July will make housing even less affordable for millions of families. Both of these programs support housing stability by covering other basic expenses, allowing families more room in their budgets for rent. Moreover, access to health supports is a critical component of the highly effective strategies that pair rental assistance with personalized health and social services to help unhoused or formerly unhoused people — the very supports the Administration is also attempting to drastically scale back.

More people than ever are being forced into homelessness or are spending more than half their income on rent.

A final funding bill for 2026 must also protect against further partisan use of rescission authority and illegal withholding of funds by including language that ensures appropriated funding reaches the communities Congress intends, and that agencies have sufficient staff to manage these programs. Such guardrails along with the provisions described above would immediately benefit people across the country and are a necessary step for making housing and other basic needs more affordable.

Looking forward, Congress should do more to address housing affordability and homelessness. Housing costs are typically the single biggest part of a household’s budget, especially for people with low and moderate incomes. With record numbers of people being forced into homelessness and more than 24 million renters spending more than half of their incomes on rent, expanding rental assistance, in addition to increasing supportive services and the supply of affordable housing, are needed to make progress.


© 2023 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities


Sonya Acosta
Sonya Acosta is a Policy Analyst with the Housing Policy team. Prior to coming to the Center, she worked on disaster recovery, Native housing, appropriations, and benefits cuts at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She also worked at several fair housing organizations in the Chicago area and completed two terms of AmeriCorps service.
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No, We Can’t Deport Our Way Out of Gun Violence

Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies. But this is exactly the mindset that motivates mass shooters.


Emergency personnel work the scene, block off several buildings, and establish a crime scene security cordon at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Saturday, December 13, 2025, after a mass shooting that killed two people and wounded eight others.
(Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Robert C. Koehler
Dec 21, 2025

Common Dreams

I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country—the world—into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated... randomly,

On Saturday, December 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. Rhode Island. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia—in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.

So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?

Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the US, mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.

Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking.

But that ain’t gonna happen in the USA—not until God knows when, which seriously expands and intensifies the nature of the questions we must start asking. Yeah, there are an incredible number of guns in the United States. Some 400 million of them. And embedded into American culture along with the presence of guns is the belief that they are necessary for our safety, even as they also jeopardize it. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. What a paradox.

And here’s where the process of change must begin. Good guy vs. bad guy—good violence vs. bad violence—is the essence of linear thinking. One person wins, one person loses. And if I draw my gun first, yeehaw, I’m the winner. This simplistic mindset is, and has long been, part of who we are—ultimately resulting, good God, in stockpiles of nuclear weapons, giving humanity the opportunity to commit mass suicide.

And while nukes may be declared to be simply deterrents for our enemies—threatening mutually assured destruction (oh, the MADness)—the global, and especially the US, non-nuclear military budget is itself almost beyond comprehension: larger by far than what we spend on healthcare, education, diplomacy, or environmental salvation, aka, human survival.

As Ivana Nikolić Hughes writes at Common Dreams: “But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.”

And this thinking isn’t sheerly political. It permeates our social and cultural infrastructure. And it gets personal. “We live in a culture of violence, where weapons are a symbol of power,” Ana Nogales writes in Psychology Today. And having power—over others—also means having the ability, and perhaps the motive, to dehumanize them. And this is the source of human violence—both the kind we hate (mass killings) and the kind we worship (war).

All of which leads me to a quote I heard the other day, in regard to the Bondi Beach shootings, which left me groping for sanity. The speaker was Indiana Republican Sen. Jim Banks, speaking on Fox News. “In America,” he said, “we have to do more to deport terrorists out of the United States to make sure this doesn’t happen in the homeland, and root out antisemitism around the world as well.”

Flush ‘em out! All of them—you know, the ones that are different from us. Skin color, whatever. This is the essence of dehumanization, and it’s how we govern. Rather than embrace human complexity, we choose to create enemies and declare them... deportable, and if necessary, killable. This mindset is infectious. Just ask the students at Brown University or the Hanukkah celebrants at Bondi Beach.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post. Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler launched his column in 1999. Born in Detroit and raised in suburban Dearborn, Koehler has lived in Chicago since 1976. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Columbia College and has taught writing at both the college and high school levels. Koehler is a widower and single parent. He explores both conditions at great depth in his writing. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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Opinion - Trump wrongly inflicts collective punishment for shootings on millions

A. Scott Bolden, 

opinion contributor
Sun, December 21, 2025 


Collective punishment is a hateful and unjust practice that has been used by bigots throughout history to harm entire groups of people for the actions or alleged actions of a few individuals. President Trump is now cruelly imposing collective punishment on millions of people around the world in response to deadly shootings in Washington, at Brown University and near MIT.

Following the attack on two National Guard members near the White House in November, Trump imposed new restrictions to keep people from 39 countries out of the U.S.

An Afghan immigrant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, faces murder and other charges in the attack that killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom and gravely wounded guardsman Andrew Wolfe. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

After a December shooting attack at Brown University left two students dead and nine wounded, followed by the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, Trump suspended a diversity lottery program that awarded up to 50,000 green cards annually to enable people from countries (primarily in Africa) with few citizens in the U.S. to immigrate to America.

Portuguese immigrant Claudio Neves Valente, whom authorities said was responsible for shooting the Brown students and the MIT professor, was found dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound Dec. 18.

No one other than Lakanwal and Valente is believed by authorities to have been involved in the shootings.

Trump’s collective punishment of millions people for the alleged actions of two immigrants makes no sense

Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was born in Louisiana. Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was born in upstate New York. By Trump’s faulty logic, the millions of people living in Louisiana and New York should have been collectively punished following those heinous crimes.

Numerous studies dating back to 1870 have found that immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — are far less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. A Cato Institute study published in September found that among people born in 1990, “native-born Americans were 267 percent more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants by age 33.”

The overwhelming majority of immigrants coming to the U.S. are grateful for the opportunity and want to work hard, play by the rules and achieve the American Dream. About 52 million immigrants live in the U.S., including about 14 million who are unauthorized, and together they make up 19 percent of the nation’s workforce, the Pew Research Center reported in August.

Trump — whose mother, paternal grandparents and two of his wives all came to the U.S. from Europe — has spent years demonizing other immigrants, especially those from non-European nations. The shootings of National Guard members, Brown students and the MIT professor gave Trump just the excuse he needed to justify intensifying his anti-immigrant campaign.

The president has attacked nonwhite immigrants from Somalia and other countries with particular fury. He recently compared allowing Somali immigrants into the U.S. to taking “garbage into our country” and denounced Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a U.S. citizen who is a legal Somali immigrant. “Ilhan Omar is garbage,” Trump said. “Her friends are garbage.” He later falsely stated that she’s “here illegally” and said “we ought to get her the hell out.”

Trump’s bigoted characterization of human beings as subhuman garbage is dangerous and reminiscent of the way Adolf Hitler dehumanized Jews by referring to them as rats, lice, cockroaches, vultures and other animals. In the same way, enslavers of Africans in the United States considered them subhuman animals who could be owned like cattle or horses.

Categorizing people as subhuman means it is fine to deprive them of human rights and inflict unlimited collective punishment on them — up to and including murder.

Leaders around the world have scapegoated racial, religious, ethnic and other minorities since ancient times — collectively punishing vast numbers of people. Black Americans have been frequent targets.

For example, in 1921, a Black man in Tulsa, Okla., was falsely accused of attempting to rape a white female elevator operator. Whites then rioted in a Black neighborhood and in a horrific case of collective punishment killed up to 300 Black residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses, looting and burning them in what is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I’m well aware that xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and other forms of prejudice remain an ugly reality in America and around the world, used by the haters among us to justify all sorts of collective punishment. But until Trump came onto the political scene, I never imagined that a president of the United States would publicly embrace evil and immoral hatreds in the 21st century. Sadly, Trump has proven me wrong.

A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.

‘Stuck and Confused’ Waymo Robotaxis Snarl San Francisco Traffic During Massive Blackout

“During a disaster... Waymos would be blocking evacuation routes. Hard to believe no one asked these questions, until you realize that good governance is suspended when billionaires knock on the door,” said one observer.


A long line of Waymo autonomous taxis compounds San Francisco traffic gridlock caused by a Pacific Gas & Electric blackout on December 20, 2025.
(Photo by @AnnTrades/X)

Brett Wilkins
Dec 21, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


A citywide Pacific Gas & Electric power outage Saturday in San Francisco paralyzed Waymo autonomous taxis, exacerbating traffic chaos and prompting a fleet-wide shutdown—and calls for more robust robotaxi regulation.

Around 130,000 San Francisco homes and businesses went dark due to an afternoon fire at a PG&E substation in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. While most PG&E customers had their electricity restored by around 9:00 pm, more than 20,000 rate-payers remained without power on Sunday morning, according to the San Francisco Standard.

Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers: Report


The blackout left traffic lights inoperable, rendering much of Waymo’s fleet of around 300 robotaxis “stuck and confused,” as one local resident put it, as cascading failures left groups of as many as half a dozen of the robotaxis immobile. In some cases, the stopped vehicles nearly caused collisions.

On a walk across San Francisco on Saturday night prior to the fleet grounding at around 7:00 pm, this reporter saw numerous Waymos stuck on streets or in intersections, while others seemed to surrender, pulling or even backing out of intersections and parking themselves where they could.

“There are a lot of unique road scenarios on the roads I can see being hard to anticipate and you just hope your software can manage it. ‘What if we lose contact with all our cars due to a power outage’ is something you should have a meeting and a plan about ahead of time,” Fast Company digital editor Morgan Clendaniel—a self-described “big Waymo guy”—said Sunday on Bluesky.

Clendaniel called the blackout “a predictable scenario [Waymo] should have planned for, when clearly they had no plan, because ‘they all just stop’ is not a plan and is not viable for city roads in an emergency.”

Waymo—which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google—said it is “focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work.”

Oakland Observer founder and publisher Jaime Omar Yassin said on X, “as others have noted, during a disaster with a consequent power outage, Waymos would be blocking evacuation routes. Hard to believe no one asked these questions, until you realize that good governance is suspended when billionaires knock on the door.”

“Waymo’s problems are known to anyone paying attention,” he added. “At a recent anti-[Department of Homeland Security] protest that occurred coincidentally not far from a Waymo depot, vehicles simply left [the] depot and jammed [the] street behind a police van far from [the] protest that wasn’t blocking traffic.”

Waymo came to dominate the San Francisco robotaxi market after the California Public Utilities Commission suspended the permit of leading competitor Cruise to operate driverless taxis over public safety concerns following an October 2023 incident in which a pedestrian was critically injured when a Cruise car dragged her 20 feet after she was struck by a human-driven vehicle. The CPUC accused Cruise of covering up the details of the accident.

Some California officials have called for more robust regulation of robotaxis like Waymo. But last year, a bill introduced by state Sen. Dave Cortese (D-15) that would have empowered county and municipal governments “to protect the public through local governance of autonomous vehicles” failed to pass after it was watered down amid pressure from industry lobbyists.

In San Francisco, progressive District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder said during a press conference last month after a Waymo ran over and killed a beloved Mission District bodega cat named KitKat that while Waymo “may treat our communities as laboratories and human beings and our animals as data points, we in the Mission do not.”

Waymo claimed that KitKat “darted” under its car, but security camera video footage corroborated witness claims to Mission Local that the cat had been sitting in front of the vehicle for as long as eight seconds before it was crushed.

Fielder lamented that “the fate of autonomous vehicles has been decided behind closed doors in Sacramento, largely by politicians in the pocket of big tech and tech billionaires.”

The first-term supervisor—San Francisco’s title for city council members—is circulating a petition “calling on the California State Legislature and [Gov. Gavin Newsom] to give counties the right to vote on whether autonomous vehicles can operate in their areas.”

“This would let local communities make decisions that reflect their needs and safety concerns, while also addressing state worries about intercity consistency,” Fielder wrote.

Other local progressives pointed to the citywide blackout as more proof that PG&E—whose reputation has been battered by incidents like the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in Butte County and led to the company pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter—should be publicly run, as progressive advocacy groups have urged for years.

“Sacramento and Palo Alto don’t have PG&E, they have public power,” progressive Democratic congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti said Sunday on X. “They pay about half as much as us in utility bills and do not have weekend-long power outages. We could have that in San Francisco.”

Opinion: Sometimes it feels like humans were never quite meant to fit into this wild, spinning world


By Paul Wallis
EDITOR AT LARGE

DIGITAL JOURNAL
December 19, 2025


Russia has more forest than any other country on Earth - Copyright AFP Yuri KADOBNOV

It’s obvious, really. Imagine 8 billion totally maladjusted idiots in a world they can barely survive. Who’d a thunk it? Zurich and Loughborough Universities, that’s who.

A study by Colin Shaw and co-author Daniel P. Longman has come up with the environmental mismatch hypothesis. Euphemistic as this may sound, this idea comes with some solid facts.

For example, a species evolved in a nature-rich environment can have trouble adjusting to an almost totally unnatural environment. People who grew up physiologically in low-stimulus environs have to adjust to high-stimulus.

They cite a lot of prevalent health conditions like inflammation, low fertility, and environmental toxins as additional physical stresses. Quite a bit of physical research into blood pressure, cortisol, and other physical indicators were mapped out.

In natural environments, many of these indicators reduced. According to the researchers, it’s a matter of “evolutionary fitness,” aka what you’re evolved to be.

That’s a pretty strong argument. They also point out that humans evolved to manage high-stress issues like predators and natural phenomena. No, not stresses like electricity bills, the news, or a mindless culture.

However, humans react to stress as if these things were predators. The combination of adrenaline and cortisol creates the normal response, which is out of whack with the actual issues.

Psychiatry may have to adapt to these ideas. Stress evasion is the absolute unchallenged big deal in human mental health at the moment. “Escapism” isn’t so much a mental issue as a multi-billion-dollar industry.

I’ve often wondered what was so wrong about people trying to escape environments they loathe. Seems pretty normal to me.

Stress crashes the hormonal balance, affects the immune system, and surprise, surprise, you get a lot of sick, overstressed people.

Sound familiar? Cities are a major part of the problem. 4.5 billion people live in these highly stressful environments. Add noise, pollution, constant stress in human interactions, packed close together, it’s a mess.

The solution is to redesign human environments.

It’d be a lot cheaper and safer to demolish these hellholes.

Modern architecture can easily create far more space in smaller footprints.

Most of these unhygienic toxic waste dumps need bulldozing anyway.

The positive effects of natural environments aren’t exactly unknown. It’s recreating those environments and preserving them that’s the issue.

OK, natural environment good, hellhole bad. Now lets make the human environment bearable.

________________________________________________________________________

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

REST IN POWER

Pulitzer-winning combat reporter Peter Arnett dies at 91


By AFP
December 18, 2025


Peter Arnett posing when he was a reporter for Associated Press in Vietnam - Copyright AFP Handout

Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who became one of the world’s foremost combat correspondents, died Wednesday at 91, according to US media reports.

He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The Associated Press, rose to international fame in his decades-long career covering conflicts from Vietnam to El Salvador to the Gulf.

He broke onto the international scene as a wire-service correspondent in Vietnam from 1962 until the war’s end in 1975, dodging bullets as he accompanied troops on missions.

He was among the last reporters in Saigon as it fell to the communist-backed North Vietnamese.

Arnett stayed with the AP until 1981, when he joined CNN and would soon rise to broadcast stardom.

In 1991, Arnett landed in Baghdad for the outbreak of the first Gulf War, where he interviewed then-president Saddam Hussein.

His live front-line broadcasts — in some cases relayed by cell phone — would make him a household name.

He resigned from CNN in 1999 after the network retracted a report Arnett narrated claiming deadly Sarin nerve gas had been used on deserting American soldiers in Laos in 1970.

He went on to cover the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic.

Arnett left NBC in 2003 after giving an interview to Iraqi state television in which he was critical of the US military’s strategy.

Arnett was born on November 13, 1934 in Riverton, New Zealand.

Arnett, who later became a naturalized American citizen, began his career as a reporter working for a local newspaper, the Southland Times, before going on to work for an English-language paper in Thailand.

In 1995, he published his memoir, “Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.”

Arnett, who lived in Southern California since 2014, is survived by his wife, Nina Nguyen, and their children, Elsa and Andrew, US media said.

Europe’s pre-owned car market shifts up a gear

By Dr. Tim Sandle

SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

December 18, 2025


US consumers will be hard in the wallet with importers having to pay a 25 percent tariff for cars produced outside the US - Copyright AFP LUIS ROBAYO

According to a December 2025 report on pre-owned car markets, Germany is the best country in Europe to buy a used vehicle. The study by the B2B car company eCarsTrade examined European countries based on resale pricing and vehicle selection.

The report reveals that Germany has the best market for buying a used car, with reasonable prices around €20K and the largest selection of nearly 1.7M vehicles.

The research analysed three factors across 20 European markets: average used car prices, the number of vehicles available on major platforms, and lookups from potential buyers. Each country received a score from 0 to 100, where higher numbers indicate favorable conditions for purchasing a used vehicle.

The top 10 countries for buying a used car

Country	Car Price Average in €	Number of Used Cars Available  (one platform)	Google Search Volume	Best Market for Buyers(Score)
Germany	€19.95K	1.69M	41.23K	88
Italy	€17.60K	981.41K	25.50K	81
France	€19.09K	1.15M	28.65K	77
Spain	€18.00K	617.34K	30.62K	68
Poland	€18.50K	505.26K	19.47K	62
Czech Republic	€17.43K	151.69K	13.23K	58
Belgium	€17.65K	187.38K	17.36K	58
Slovakia	€21.86K	58.35K	10.29K	52
Netherlands	€20.51K	533.39K	44.11K	51
Portugal	€18.81K	132.81K	18.90K	49

From the table it is apparent that Germany is Europe’s best market for buying a used car. The country has the largest selection on the continent, with close to 1.7M vehicles available, giving customers far more options than anywhere else. Prices here are also affordable, with typical cars selling for under €20K. This is €5K cheaper than what buyers would have to pay in other European countries.

Italy comes second, offering the cheapest used cars in Europe. The average vehicle costs just €17.6K here, around €2K less than in Germany. Italy is also one of the biggest pre-owned car markets, with nearly 1 million vehicles currently listed for sale. And demand for them is strong too, with about 25,000 buyers checking local auto platforms each month.

Next on the list is France, where used cars sell for €19K, right between German and Italian price levels. With 1 million+ vehicles up for sale, France is the second-largest automotive resale market in Europe. It’s also among the most popular choices for purchasing a pre-owned car, attracting around 30,000 potential buyers every month.

Spain takes fourth place as one of Europe’s most active used car markets, with 30K monthly lookups from customers. With an average price of €18K, cars here cost less than in France or Germany. The country also has over 617K pre-owned vehicles on offer, which is about half of Germany’s inventory, but still a good selection.

Poland rounds out the top five with a smaller but growing used car market. Pre-owned automobiles in Poland sell for around €18.50K on average, making it a more interesting choice for customers with lower budgets. The local inventory isn’t small either, with sellers currently offering more than half a million used models.

Environmentally sustainable buildings are losing their appeal


By Dr. Tim Sandle

SCIENCE EDITOR

DIGITAL JOURNAL

December 19, 2025


Eco-building, Hampstead, UK. Image by Tim Sandle.

A new sustainability report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) reveals that the green buildings market is losing momentum.

The demand for sustainable real estate appears to be cooling in most regions, many projects are stalling over high upfront costs and uncertain payback, and almost half of construction professionals still do not measure carbon on their projects – a share that has actually grown over the past year.

Energy-efficiency experts from Exergio, a company developing AI tools for energy efficiency in real estate, say the sector is stuck not for lack of ambition but because three systemic failures remain unresolved:

Stalled demand,

Unclear financial value,

Weak operational follow-through.

Donatas Karčiauskas, CEO of Exergio, explains to Digital Journal that without scalable, AI-driven optimisation of day-to-day operations, even certified or renovated buildings will keep missing climate and performance targets.

Karčiauskas explains that the global demand for sustainable buildings has been sliding for several years now, with the latest RICS report showing another drop from 41% to 30%. Investors and developers mostly blame unclear returns: 35-46% cite uncertain ROI, payback periods or operational savings as their main barrier to investing.

“Investors aren’t against building sustainably – they just need proof it pays back. If a project requires expensive materials, equipment and certifications but the real-world performance doesn’t translate into measurable savings, why would anyone scale it? Until buildings can demonstrate clear, verifiable returns, demand will keep sliding,” Karčiauskas explains.

Drawing on his own company’s approach, Karčiauskas says that by using AI to optimise existing systems, Exergio typically cuts energy use in large commercial buildings by up to 30% and that translates to more than €1 million in annual savings – the kind of proof investors are looking for. But money isn’t the only problem, the report shows.

RICS data reveals a growing split between what occupiers value and what investors prioritise. Occupiers favour performance – 94% cite indoor environmental quality and 88% name energy efficiency as top priorities – while investors still focus on certification (86%) and resilience features (78%).

The market talks about sustainability as if it were one thing, but in practice, different players are chasing different goals, according to Karčiauskas.

“Occupiers care about how a building works; investors care about how it’s labelled. Until performance and certification point in the same direction, we’ll keep building assets that look sustainable on paper but don’t deliver it in practice. The real solution is to measure what happens inside the building, every day – that’s when both groups finally get what they’re paying for,” Karčiauskas clarifies.

The RICS report shows that this kind of measurement is still the exception, not the rule. Across regions, roughly half of respondents don’t measure embodied carbon at all, and only about 16% say their assessments change design choices. Just 17% believe the industry has enough sustainability knowledge, and only 10% are very familiar with whole-life carbon methods.

Karčiauskas believes this is because the respondents do not know how to measure the emissions:

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t have the skills to assess. Right now, most carbon decisions are built on assumptions instead of real evidence.”

In his opinion, the combination of missing carbon data, limited expertise, and inconsistent measurement is precisely where AI can accelerate progress. AI systems can gather performance data automatically, interpret it without specialised training, and adjust building systems continuously – something human teams cannot do at scale.

“AI closes the gap the industry can’t close on its own. It proves ROI with real performance data, aligns what occupiers want with what investors pay for, and automates optimisation that today requires scarce expertise. If we want sustainability targets to become real outcomes, this is the only lever big enough to work at scale,” concludes Karčiauskas.

Global nuclear arms control under pressure in 2026

NEEDED NOW MORE THAN EVER


By AFP
December 21, 2025


The Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons takes place every four or five years - Copyright AFP ANGELA WEISS

Fabien Zamora

The fragile global legal framework for nuclear weapons control faces further setbacks in 2026, eroding guardrails to avoid a nuclear crisis.

The first half of the year will see two key events: the US-Russia bilateral treaty, New START, expires on February 5, and in April, New York hosts the Review Conference (RevCon) of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) — the cornerstone of global nuclear security frameworks.

The RevCon, held every four to five years, is meant to keep the NPT alive. But during the last two sessions, the 191 signatory states failed to agree on a final document, and experts expect the same outcome in April.

“I think this is going to be a difficult RevCon,” said Alexandra Bell, head of US-based global security nonprofit the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, at a UN-hosted online conference in early December.

“In terms of the current state and near future prospects of nuclear arms control architecture, things are bleak,” she added.

Anton Khlopkov, director of Russian think-tank the Center for Energy and Security Studies (CENESS), took an even starker point of view, saying at the same event that “we are at the point of almost complete dismantlement of arms control architecture”.

“We should be realistic in the current circumstances. At best, I think we should try to preserve what we have,” he said.



– ‘Crumbling’ safeguards –



From US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites to Russia’s test of the new Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile and US President Donald Trump’s remarks about possibly resuming nuclear tests — the international nuclear landscape darkened in 2025.

At the same time, “the arms control architecture is crumbling”, Emmanuelle Maitre of France’s Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS) told AFP.

A key challenge hinges on a shift in global relations.

Nuclear control had been built over decades around a Moscow-Washington axis, but China’s growing power and rapid technological advances have shifted the international playing field, which is simultaneously increasingly strained.

“The growing interlinkage between nuclear and conventional forces and the emergence of disruptive technologies (such as the US Golden Dome defence system and new hypersonic weapons) have transformed traditional nuclear deterrence into a multi-domain concept, especially in a multipolar world,” said Peking University’s Hua Han.

“This trilateral configuration introduces complexities far beyond the Cold War-era bilateral model. Increasing China-Russia cooperation further complicates deterrence calculations, particularly in the two main theatres of concern: Europe and the Asia-Pacific,” she added, according to the minutes of an April event held by Pakistan’s Center for International Strategic Studies.

A likely result of the changing landscape is the lapse of New START, which sets weapon limits and includes inspection systems.

“The entire inspection component is no longer functioning, the notifications when a missile is moved, etc, all of that has vanished. What remains is only the voluntary commitment to stay within the limits,” said Maitre.



– ‘Collective solutions’ –



But allowing New START to lapse is “in American interest”, according to Robert Peters of the influential Heritage Foundation, reflecting the stance of much of the US strategic community to avoid tying Washington’s hands to Moscow alone.

Beijing, which currently has fewer weapons, has so far refused to engage in trilateral disarmament talks.

“China is the fastest growing nuclear power on the planet. It’s building 100 new warheads a year and now has more ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos than the US has active Minuteman III silos,” Peters said at a recent online International Institute for Strategic Studies event.

“New START does nothing to address” that issue, he added.

However, Maitre said, a New START lapse doesn’t mean the world should expect serious consequences as early as February 6.

In both Washington and Moscow, “there is a small margin to bring some weapons back into service, but the numbers cannot be very significant. There are bottlenecks” that will slow any buildup, she said.

Nor will the lack of a final document from the RevCon cause “immediate or damaging consequences” to the NPT, she said.

But, she warned, fewer safeguards risks leaving the world without diplomatic tools to resolve tensions.

“The less functional the NPT becomes, the harder it is to forge collective solutions in the event of a crisis.”

Banned film exposes Hong Kong’s censorship trend, director says


By AFP
December 21, 2025


Hong Kong director Kiwi Chow says the local film industry has stepped up self-censorship after Beijing imposed a strict national security law - Copyright AFP Holmes CHAN
Holmes Chan

After four months of restless waiting, filmmaker Kiwi Chow received a dreaded, but not altogether unexpected, message: Hong Kong censors had banned his new movie from reaching the big screen.

The 46-year-old’s career, which took off in 2015 with an award-winning dystopian tale, encapsulates how a film industry once known for its audacious spirit and sardonic humour has dimmed to leave artists describing a creative straitjacket.

His latest thriller “Deadline” tells the story of an elite school rattled by warnings of an impending suicide, Chow told AFP in an interview on Wednesday, describing the work as an allegory for hyper-competition under capitalism.

The movie was filmed in Taiwan but set in what Chow called an “imaginary world”.

“(Censors) determined that it was ‘contrary to the interests of national security’… But how? Nobody gave an explanation,” the director said, calling the decision “absurd”.

Beijing imposed a strict national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 after huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in the finance hub. Film censorship rules were tightened a year later.

After that, Chow said, the film industry stepped up self-censorship.

“If it involves Hong Kong’s real political situation, absolutely no one will make a movie about it,” he said.

Asked about “Deadline”, the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration said it would not comment on individual applications.

Censors banned 13 films, citing national security reasons, between 2021 and July this year, while 50 films were “required to be modified”, the office told AFP.

Hong Kong banned no films between 2016 and 2020, but that figure jumped to 10 in 2023.

Chow said he believes his film was rejected not because of its content, but because his years flouting Beijing’s taboos have put him on an informal blacklist.

“I want to collaborate with actors, seek out locations and investors, but it is very difficult,” he said.

“I felt so lonely,” he said of making “Deadline”.



– Decade in hindsight –



On December 17, 2015, “Ten Years” premiered in Hong Kong and showcased five dystopian vignettes — including one directed by Chow — at a time when many residents feared Beijing’s growing political influence in the semi-autonomous city.

Speaking to AFP exactly 10 years later, Chow recalled how crowds flocked to community screenings after some mainstream cinemas refused to show the film.

“Many people felt that ‘Ten Years’ depicted Hong Kong’s predicament… and how freedoms could be lost. (They felt) this was prophesied in the film and it came true,” Chow said.

Chow’s segment of the film, titled “Self-immolator”, ends with a fictional elderly woman dousing herself in petrol and flicking a lighter.

“The self-immolator was a symbol of sacrifice. I wanted to ask Hong Kongers: ‘How much are you willing to sacrifice for values like freedom and justice?'” he said, adding that his ideas on sacrifice are shaped by his Christian faith.

He said he got his answer during the 2019 pro-democracy protests, which were unprecedented in scale and ferocity and led to more than 10,200 arrests and more than 2,000 people sanctioned by law.

In 2019, Chow was near the end of the production cycle of a romantic drama film, but he also shot extensive footage of the protests that would become the documentary “Revolution of Our Times”.

The documentary premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in July 2021, but Chow never tried to screen it in Hong Kong and kept the entire production team anonymous.

“After making ‘Revolution of Our Times’, I expected not to be able to make movies for quite a long time, and was mentally prepared to go to jail,” he said.



– ‘Risk’ –



While the documentary did not land Chow in prison, the filmmaker said he paid a steep price as investors and collaborators deserted him, almost dooming “Deadline”.

Chow said he could not secure a single Hong Kong school as a filming location, prompting him to move the production to Taiwan, where the film was released last month.

The long-awaited Hong Kong censorship decision came as a blow, particularly for the film’s commercial prospects.

“The government took an official stance that this film was contrary to the interest of national security, which could be a first (for me), and adds some level of risk and anxiety,” Chow said.

Some of Chow’s supporters in Hong Kong travelled to Taiwan for special screenings of “Deadline”, though one organiser said he was searched by customs upon his return.

Hong Kong customs declined to comment on individual cases.

Chow did not want to “abandon” his city despite feeling that political censorship was creating headwinds for his work.

“Maybe I will lower my budget or change the script,” he said.

“As long as (the film) can be made in Hong Kong, then I haven’t given up.”

Southeast Asia bloc meets to press Thailand, Cambodia on truce

ANOTHER TRUMP PEACE DEAL

By AFP
December 21, 2025


A bridge in Cambodia damaged it Thai air strikes, part of reignited clashes that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people - Copyright AFP STR

Martin Abbugao

Southeast Asian foreign ministers are set to meet Monday in Malaysia for crisis talks aimed at halting deadly border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia, which pressed on despite regional and international diplomacy.

Renewed fighting between the two neighbours this month has killed at least 22 people in Thailand and 19 in Cambodia, and displaced more than 900,000 on both sides, officials said.

Malaysia, which holds the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), expressed hope that the talks in Kuala Lumpur would help achieve a lasting ceasefire between the two countries, both members of the regional bloc.

“Our duty is to present the facts, but more importantly, to press upon them that it is imperative for them to secure peace,” Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said last week, adding that he was “cautiously optimistic”.

The reignited violence shattered a fragile truce reached after five days of clashes in July, with US, Chinese and Malaysian mediation.

In October, US President Donald Trump backed a follow-on joint declaration, touting new trade deals after they agreed in Kuala Lumpur to prolong their truce.

Each side has blamed the other for instigating the clashes, claiming self-defence and trading accusations of attacks on civilians.

On Sunday, both Cambodia and Thailand said Monday’s gathering could help de-escalate tensions. Both governments have confirmed they would send their top diplomats to the meeting.

Thai foreign ministry spokeswoman Maratee Nalita Andamo called it “an important opportunity for both sides”.

Cambodia’s foreign ministry said the talks aimed to restore “peace, stability and good neighbourly relations”.



– ‘Dialogue’ –



“Cambodia will reaffirm its firm position of resolving differences and disputes through all peaceful means, dialogue and diplomacy,” Phnom Penh added.

Maratee reiterated Bangkok’s earlier conditions for negotiations, including a demand that Cambodia be first to announce a truce, and cooperate in de-mining efforts at the border.

Those conditions, the spokeswoman told reporters, “will guide our interaction in the discussions tomorrow in Kuala Lumpur”.

The Thai government gave no guarantee that the meeting would produce a truce, saying in a statement that a “ceasefire can only be achieved when it is based primarily on the Thai military’s assessment of the situation on the ground”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week Washington hoped for a new ceasefire by Tuesday.

Trump, who helped broker an earlier truce, claimed this month that Thailand and Cambodia had agreed to halt the fighting.

But Bangkok denied any such truce existed, with clashes continuing for two weeks and spreading to nearly all border provinces on both sides of the frontier.

The conflict stems from a territorial dispute over the colonial-era demarcation of their 800-kilometre (500-mile) border and a smattering of ancient temple ruins situated on the frontier.

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