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US Monthly Headline News
By ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE

NEW YORK (AP) — Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City on Thursday, taking over one of the most unrelenting jobs in American politics with a promise to transform government on behalf of the city’s striving, struggling working class.

Mamdani, a Democrat, was sworn in at a decommissioned subway station below City Hall just after midnight, placing his hand on a Quran as he took his oath as the city’s first Muslim mayor.

After working part of the night in his new office, Mamdani returned to City Hall in a taxi cab around midday Thursday for a grander public inauguration where U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the mayor’s political heroes, administered the oath for a second time.

“Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try,” Mamdani told a cheering crowd.

“To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives,” he said.
Ana Faguy

Adrienne Martin and her family are starting the New Year off without healthcare.

The 47-year-old Texas mother had to make a difficult choice when she found out her monthly healthcare premium was increasing in 2026 from what she described as a manageable $630 (£467) to an unaffordable $2,400 (£1,781).

Her husband depends on an IV medication to treat a blood-clotting disease that costs $70,000 a month without insurance. Knowing their benefits would expire, the family stockpiled the drug to survive the first few months of the year.

"It would be like paying two mortgage payments," she said of the new monthly price for healthcare. "We can't pay $30,000 for insurance a year."

Ms Martin and her family are not the only ones facing this conundrum. Millions of Americans will see their healthcare bills skyrocket when these subsidies, which were provided through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, expire.

Some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle attempted to extend these subsidies into 2026, but Washington was gridlocked. A vote in the new year could offer hope, but until then, many like Ms Martin will have to live without insurance or see their bills steeply increase.
Americas

More than 20 million people in the United States will face sharply higher health insurance costs as of January 1 after enhanced tax credits that helped enrollees in the Affordable Care Act afford coverage expired overnight. The expiration of the subsidies will mostly affect families, small business owners and self-employed workers.     

Enhanced tax credits that have helped reduce the cost of health insurance for the vast majority of Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as "Obamacare") enrollees expired overnight, cementing higher health costs for millions of people in the United States at the start of the new year.

The change affects a diverse cross-section of the population who don’t get their health insurance from an employer and don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare – a group that includes many self-employed workers, small business owners, farmers and ranchers.

On average, the more than 20 million subsidised enrollees in the Affordable Care Act programme are seeing their premium costs rise by 114 percent in 2026, according to an analysis by the healthcare research nonprofit KFF.

The subsidies were first given to Affordable Care Act enrollees in 2021 as a temporary measure to help US residents get through the Covid-19 pandemic. Democrats in power at the time then extended them, pushing the expiration date to the start of 2026. Some lower-income enrollees received health care with no premiums, and high earners paid no more than 8.5 percent of their income. Eligibility for middle-class earners was also expanded.
Luke Garrett

Millions of Americans are facing higher health care premiums in the new year after Congress allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire. But earlier this week, a bipartisan group of senators worked to strike a compromise that could resurrect the enhanced ACA premium tax credits — potentially blunting the blow of rising monthly payments for Obamacare enrollees.

"There's a number of Republican and Democratic senators who are seeing what a disaster this will be for families that they represent," Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said on Morning Edition Thursday. "That's the common ground here, and it's a doable thing."

Welch said he joined a bipartisan call Tuesday — first reported by Punchbowl News — in which a handful of senators charted out a possible health care compromise.

"We could extend the credits for a couple of years, we could reform it," Welch said of the call. "You could put an income cap, you could have a copay, you could have penalties on insurers who commit fraud. You actually could introduce some cost saving reductions that have bipartisan support."

But according to Welch, this legislation is only doable with President Trump's blessing.
By Andy Rose

It may now be the most famous – or infamous – sign in the country. Posted above a door on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, the Quality Learning Center was missing an “n.”

For a conservative content creator attempting to call out fraud – and the supporters who made his video on day care centers in Minneapolis’ Somali community viral – it seemed too absurd not to mention.

“This is Quality ‘Learing’ Center,” Nick Shirley said, pointing to the sign. “They spelled ‘learning’ wrong.”

Shirley’s 42-minute video posted the day after Christmas quickly spread, prompting stepped up immigration enforcement, frozen federal funds and more biting rhetoric against the Somali community from President Donald Trump.

Although Shirley’s encounters with other businesses were often more dramatic, the misspelled sign and its locked door made Quality Learning Center a focus of criticism aimed at the state government and Gov. Tim Walz for a system opponents say has allowed fraud to run rampant in Minnesota.
The Trump administration is terminating the National Links Trust's lease agreement for three public golf courses in D.C., according to the Washington Post. National Links Trust is a non-profit whose goal is to make golf more affordable and accessible for everyone. Will Smith, co-founder of the organization, joins Laura Barrón-López to share his reaction to learning about the move, saying "we fundamentally disagree" with the move.
Story by Simon Marks

As 2026 gets under way, the closing weeks of the old year have suggested that over the next 12 months, Vice President JD Vance will become increasingly emboldened, promoting himself as the inevitable successor to Donald Trump.

While the current US President is still toying with the idea of trying to circumvent the constitution in order to seek a third term in office, Vance is sending his boss a series of increasingly unsubtle messages that the Make America Great Again revolution will be safe in his hands.

No issue animates Vance more than his hostility towards governments across Europe, including our own. Last February, he stunned European leaders by telling the Munich Security Conference that their continent faced a “threat from within”, and lectured them with the blistering claim that “democracy will not survive if…people’s concerns are deemed invalid or, even worse, not worth being considered”.

The speech served as the Vice President’s coming-out party in Europe, and with hindsight can be viewed as his opening salvo in a campaign that has now found full voice in the US government’s official National Security Strategy.

Vance, a political chameleon for much of his life, is a key influence behind the strategy’s argument that immigration will soon leave Europe facing “civilisational erasure”. But beyond his enthusiastic backing of the Trump administration’s masked agents seizing people off America’s streets, he is also the lead administration voice warning Europe over what he claims is the continent’s “backsliding” on freedom of speech.
Story by Silas Redmond

Tesla built one of the most valuable carmakers in history on a torrent of orders, a cult-like brand and a stock market valuation that once added hundreds of billions of dollars to Elon Musk's personal fortune. Now that edifice is wobbling, as political backlash, intensifying competition and a brutal market repricing collide to strip away demand and expose how fragile that empire can be. The headline's $800 million figure barely captures the scale of the damage when a single trading session can erase $152 billion in value, and I see the unraveling as a story about how quickly sentiment can flip when a company's identity is fused to its chief executive.

What is happening to Tesla is not a slow, orderly correction but a rapid loss of altitude that touches everything from showroom traffic to the company's role in the culture wars. Orders that once seemed automatic are now contested, and the market is forcing a reckoning with whether the business is priced like a durable manufacturer or a volatile political project. The stakes are not just financial, they reach into American politics, global climate goals and the future of autonomous driving.

The day $152 billion vanished
The clearest sign that Tesla's empire is far larger, and more fragile, than any $800 million shorthand came when the company suffered a record $152 billion one day crash in market value. That plunge followed an escalated feud between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, a reminder that when a company's valuation is built on expectations and personality, political conflict can vaporize tens of billions of dollars in hours. The selloff was not a rounding error, it was a shock that forced Investors to reconsider whether Tesla's stock price reflected durable cash flows or a leveraged bet on Musk's standing with the White House.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing today, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tried to blame the recent D.C. shooting on former President Joe Biden. Noem's blame game crashed into a dead end when Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called out the Trump Administration for approving the asylum application of the D.C. shooter.
Story by abitter@businessinsider.com (Alex Bitter)

As the US one-cent coin disappears from circulation, stores are putting up signs asking for exact change or advising customers that their change will be rounded.

Retailers from AutoZone to Whole Foods are putting up the signs at checkouts pointing to the penny shortage and outlining their response to it.

Though the US Mint struck the last pennies in November, Congress hasn't approved any laws around the denomination's phase-out, including how retailers should handle cash transactions that don't end in five or 10 cents. That's forced many retailers to implement their own policies, including rounding transactions up or down to a nickel or dime.

"When they don't have pennies, rounding comes into place," Dylan Jeon, the National Retail Federation's senior director of government relations, told Business Insider.

At a Whole Foods location in Brooklyn this week, Business Insider saw a sign saying that the store "is unable to receive new pennies to make change with."

"If you pay in cash, your change will be rounded up to the nearest nickel and may not match the amount you see on the receipt," the sign read.
Story by Trevor Jennewine

Key Points
The S&P 500 advanced 16% in 2025, notching double-digit gains for the third straight year.

Federal Reserve research suggests President Trump's tariffs will slow economic growth.

The S&P 500 trades at the most expensive valuation since the dot-com crash in 2000.

The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) added 16% in 2025, marking the third consecutive year in which the benchmark index has recorded double-digit gains. Unfortunately, investors have reason to think 2026 will more challenging. Evidence suggests President Trump's tariffs are hurting the economy, and the stock market just flashed a warning last seen during the dot-com crash in 2000.

Here's what investors should know.
President Trump's tariffs have coincided with reduced manufacturing activity, higher unemployment, and record-low consumer sentiment
In 2025, President Donald Trump broke with decades of trade-policy precedent and imposed sweeping tariffs that raised the average tax on U.S. imports to 16.8%, the highest level since 1935, per the Budget Lab at Yale. And Trump -- who once called tariffs "the most beautiful word" in the dictionary -- has made many misleading or inaccurate statements to drum up support for his signature trade policies.
Story by Alex Henderson

Within in the MAGA movement, a far-right legal doctrine known as the Unitary Executive Theory has become increasingly prominent. The theory claims that U.S. presidents have sole authority over the federal government's executive branch, and its critics argue that it ignores the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution.

One of those critics is Simon Lazarus, who was a domestic policy adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s but has spent most of his career working for Washington, D.C. law firms.

In an article published by The New Republic on January 2, Lazarus is highly critical of the Unitary Executive Theory and the U.S. Supreme Court — which, he argues, is helping to advance an idea that has no "grounding" in the U.S. Constitution.

The High Court recently heard oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, President Donald Trump's legal battle with former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) official Rebecca Slaughter (who he fired). Trump and his lawyers believe that under the Unitary Executive Theory, the president had a right to fire Slaughter. But Slaughter's allies are countering that the executive branch, under the Constitution, doesn't have nearly as much power as he says it does.
Story by Jeet Heer

On Christmas Day, Donald Trump delivered the most bizarre yuletide message ever offered by a US president. Complaining that he’s being unfairly linked to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Trump posted a long rant on Truth Social that began, “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein.” Trump went on to lament how he is being blamed for his ties with Epstein, protesting that he was “actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so.”

Trump’s claim to have dropped Epstein is partly true but obscures a crucial fact: that he and Epstein were close friends from the 1980s until their break at some point in 2003. Epstein had been barred from the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2003 and the two men seemed to have a more definitive break in 2004. The exact circumstances of the break remain mysterious, since Trump has offered conflicting accounts, sometimes claiming that he was mad that Epstein “stole” an employee from Mar-a-Lago and sometimes referring to competition the two men had over real estate in 2004.
Story by Diksha

Donald Trump had earlier said he underwent an MRI during his October health checkup at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. However, a new update contradicts that claim, with Trump now saying, “It wasn’t an MRI. It was less than that. It was a scan.”

Meanwhile, there have been rumors about his declining health. Some signs often cited online include bruises on his hands, swollen ankles, and a bulge in his pants that some have speculated could be from a catheter. He has also, at times, been heard slurring his speech. Some netizens have labeled him a “senile president” and suggested these signs point to dementia in progress.
How to steal an election: delay the date the ballots were mailed.

Story by Anna Liss-Roy

A recent change to how the U.S. Postal Service says it postmarks letters could discount the ballots of thousands of last-minute voters.

Many Americans have long assumed that tax returns, ballots and other mailed documents sent on deadline would be marked as sent the day they are dropped in a mailbox.

But the Postal Service announced Dec. 24 that it was making no such guarantees about postmarks. Its new guidelines say a postmark might come days later, when mail is actually processed at a regional facility, sometimes miles from a local mailbox.

Most states require mail ballots to be in the hands of election officials by Election Day. Fourteen states provide a grace period allowing mail ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day if they are postmarked by then, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than two dozen others provide grace periods for military and overseas voters.

A Postal Service spokesperson, Martha Johnson, said the new guidance does not actually signal a change to the current practice. It is merely putting that practice into the service’s written protocols. Voters can still get a postmark on the day they mail a ballot if they request one at a local post office.
Treasury data shows the national debt jumped $1 trillion in 82 days as persistent budget deficits continue. The Government Accountability Office warns higher debt translates to increased interest rates on mortgages, car loans, and credit cards.
Opinion by Thom Hartmann

The turn of the calendar is more than a ritual. It’s a reminder that democracy is not self sustaining, not guaranteed, and not permanent unless we choose it again and again.

If we want this new year to be about renewal rather than retreat, we need to give some serious thought to what it’ll take to reclaim and defend the democratic republic that generations before us fought, organized, and sacrificed to build.

The American Revolution was not just a revolt against British rule. It was a revolt against three ancient tyrannies that had dominated human society for thousands of years. Warlord kings. The morbidly rich. And theocrats.

The Founders knew exactly what they were fighting. They wrote about it constantly, in the Declaration of Independence and in decades of letters to one another. They believed those three forces were the natural enemies of freedom, and unless they were restrained, they would always claw their way back into power.

Today, every one of those tyrannies is back. And they’re not even pretending otherwise.

The first tyranny was the warlord king. For most of human history, power came from violence. Kings ruled because their ancestors slaughtered their neighbors, seized land, and enforced obedience at sword point. They claimed God had chosen them, demanded loyalty, and crushed dissent.
Story by Daysia Tolentino

Another government official has been busted, seemingly using their post in the Trump administration for personal gain.

Documents obtained by the New York Times found that the third-highest-ranking official in the Interior Department failed to disclose her family’s financial interest in a controversial government-approved lithium mine.

Frank Falen, who owns Home Ranch in northern Nevada, sold water to Lithium Nevada Corporation, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, for $3.5 million in 2018. The mining company was planning a new lithium mine near the ranch called Thacker Pass. Falen is the husband of Karen Budd-Falen, who currently serves as Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior.

At the time of the sale, Budd-Falen was deputy solicitor of the agency, which manages the country’s natural resources and land. Falen’s water contract was dependent on Thacker Pass securing a permit from the Interior Department, according to the New York Times. Budd-Falen met Lithium Americas executives for lunch in November 2019, although a company representative told the outlet that they had not discussed the mine.
During a roundtable discussion at the White House several weeks ago in late October, Donald Trump openly admitted that he pardoned billionaire and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao because "very good people" told him to.
Story by Max Rego

(The Hill) – A new report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee outlines crimes committed by Jan. 6 rioters since the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The report, shared with The Hill, notes that at least 23 individuals charged in connection with the sprawling Jan. 6 case committed new crimes between the attack and President Trump’s second inauguration last January. These crimes include plotting the murder of FBI agents in retaliation for investigating the case; violent assault; strangulation; possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless DUI homicide.

Trump pardoned nearly all Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office, after vowing to do so throughout his third presidential campaign.

Venezuela’s Maduro set for first court appearance after US capture
“What they’ve done to these people is outrageous,” Trump said at the time.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, has slammed the president for his role in Jan. 6 and for pardoning the individuals involved last year. The report echoes his rhetoric, saying that the attack “would never have happened without then-President Trump’s instigation and involvement.”
The House Judiciary Committee on New Year's Eve released a full transcript and video of former special counsel Jack Smith's closed-door deposition before the Republican-led panel earlier this month. The release consists of a 255-page transcript and more than eight hours of video. Smith sought to testify publicly, but his request was denied by Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. The Morning Joe panel discusses.
Story by Rodrik Cassel

American cattle ranchers face an unprecedented crisis as President Trump's sudden reversal of beef tariff protections in October 2025 triggered a devastating market collapse. With the national herd at its smallest level since 1951, just 86.7 million head, ranchers had finally begun recovering from years of losses.

Now, the announcement to quadruple Argentine beef imports threatens to erase gains and spark another contraction. The timeline reveals how fast it unraveled.

When Protection Turns Into Betrayal
Cattle ranchers across Texas and the Great Plains thought President Trump's tariffs finally turned luck around. In April 2025, the 10% reciprocal tariff on beef imports offered hope. By October 2025, Trump announced quadrupling Argentine beef quotas from 20,000 to 80,000 metric tons at reduced tariffs. Feeder cattle futures fell $41 per hundredweight, cutting $80 to $100 per head overnight. The reason shocked even loyal supporters.

A Herd Crisis Years In The Making
The U.S. cattle herd shrank to 86.7 million head by January 2025, the lowest since 1951, a 74-year low. Seven straight years of contraction came from drought, record input costs, and depressed prices that forced liquidation of breeding herds. Then, 2024 and early 2025 finally brought profitability. Ground beef hit $6.32 per pound in August 2025. Still, warning signs were quietly stacking up.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were all smiles as they met in Alaska for Ukraine ceasefire talks, with a lip reader detailing the moment the US President whispered "I'll help you" to his Russian counterpart
Liam Doyle

Donald Trump seemed to immediately back Vladimir Putin during their high-stakes meeting in Alaska tonight, with a lip reader revealing the moment he whispered, "I'll help you".

The two world leaders were all smiles as they landed in Anchorage this evening for Ukraine ceasefire discussions although meeting details were changed last minute. The duo looked like old pals as they walked down the red carpet to Mr. Trump's waiting Presidential limo.
Story by Charles P. Pierce

Everybody with any brains in this country has a pet paranoia these days. This is mine. The other day, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago made one of his funny jokes about cancelling this year’s midterm elections.

“I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election because the fake news will say ‘he wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
Well, if the armband fits...

Anyway, with Venezuela back in the news again, follow me down the rabbit hole for a while. Remember Sidney Powell, the bananapants election-denying lawyer who performed her duties so well that the president had to pardon her? Central to Powell’s pitch back then was her theory that, via complicated means that may have included dragon’s teeth and magic beans, Nicolás Maduro manipulated the Dominion voting machines in this country. From The New York Times:
Story by Adam Lynch

"It’s not just that American manufacturing under President Donald Trump is shrinking,” argued journalist David Shuster on his Blue Amp Substack. “It’s that U.S. manufacturing is shrinking under a lunatic who never tires of boasting that he alone can make U.S. manufacturing great again.”

Despite Trump hammering former President Joe Biden on his economy in the months leading up to Trump’s election, Shuster observed that U.S. manufacturing actually grew under Biden.

“Output climbed to record levels. Investment poured into factories, supply chains stabilized following the Covid hurdles, and the dull, unglamorous business of making things regained a measure of dignity. The boost in U.S. manufacturing was achieved not with chest-thumping speeches or tariff tantrums, but with policies designed for the real world—predictability, infrastructure, and a government that did not wake up each morning looking for a trade war to fight,” Shuster wrote.

But then came Trump 2.0 and his tariffs. Shuster – a former CNN, Fox News and NBC reporter – pointed out that manufacturing has yet to recover from the wave of tariffs Trump imposed last spring.
Story by David Edwards

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) lashed out at Republicans on the House Oversight Committee for jumping on alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota while ignoring President Donald Trump's pardons of fraudsters.

"And when people commit fraud, and people get hurt, there's going to be repercussions as there should be," Garcia said during a Wednesday hearing. "We want to hold fraudsters accountable. We want to protect the victims and innocent people."

"But we also know that's not how it should work according to President Trump," he continued. "President Trump granted a get out of jail free pardon to Philip Esformes. Now, Mr. Esformes is a nursing home mogul convicted of schemes who defraud Medicare and Medicaid of $1.3 billion. Where is that hearing?"

"Let's look at another case, another Trump case. Joseph Schwartz, he was sentenced for taking advantage of nursing home residents and workers and defrauding the government of $38 million."
"Put this in your primary ads, Dems."
Michaela Bramwell by Michaela Bramwell | BuzzFeed Staff

During Donald Trump's recent remarks at the House GOP Retreat, he became a little too candid about his views on healthcare — an issue that many of his supporters have been begging him to address.

After ranting about how "horrible" Obamacare has been, he said this:

"One thing I've learned, I've learned a lot about healthcare. I've found healthcare sort of like...not of tremendous interest. But it was very important."
BuzzFeed

Pamela Hemphill, aka the "MAGA Granny," is a former Trump supporter and J6 riot participant who rejected a presidential pardon in 2025 because she wanted to take full responsibility for her actions.

She told CBS News last summer, "How could you sleep at night taking a pardon when you know you were guilty? You know that everybody there was guilty. I couldn't live with myself. I have to be right with me. And with God."

Hemphill spoke at a hearing by House Democrats on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots on Tuesday, and her speech is going viral:
Story by Nick Allen and James Reinl

A ringleader of the $250 million Minnesota welfare fraud scandal has been ordered to forfeit her Porsche, diamond jewelry, Luis Vuitton bags, and millions of dollars in bank accounts. An order from a judge just before New Year's Eve was the latest ignominy for Aimee Bock (pictured), 44, who prosecutors declared was behind one of the biggest fraud schemes of the pandemic era. The vast majority of the more than 57 people so far convicted in the case are part of Minnesota's Somali community - Bock is not - and the case has exploded onto the national stage. On Monday, Minnesota governor Tim Walz announced he would not run for a third term after it happened 'on my watch' and admitted 'the buck does stop with me.'

Millions in assets seized
In a preliminary court order, reviewed by the Daily Mail, Bock was ordered to forfeit $3,506,066 seized from a Bank of America account in the name of her nonprofit Feeding Our Future, along with $179,455 in a personal account. She was also ordered to give up her Porsche Panamera, around 60 laptops, iPads and iPhones found at three addresses, along with a diamond necklace, bracelet and earrings, and her Louis Vuitton purse and backpack. Bock was found guilty in March after a six-week trial on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bribery, and conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery. She is being held in Sherburne County Jail in Minnesota awaiting sentence. The case rocketed back into the national consciousness over Christmas when independent journalist Nick Shirley conducted a series of visits to Minnesota daycares that serve the Somali community, attempting to interview the operators, and published his findings on X.
Story by Trevor Jennewine

Key Points
President Trump's tariffs have coincided with a sharp reduction in hiring and the highest unemployment rate in more than four years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release its November JOLTS report on Wednesday; the consensus estimate calls for 7.6 million job openings.

The BLS will release its December Employment Situation report on Friday; the consensus estimate says the economy will add 55,000 jobs while unemployment drops to 4.5%.

The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) has advanced 93% since entering bull market territory in October 2022. But the bull market is still quite young by historical standards. Since 1957, the average duration has been five years, during which the index added an average of 184%.

However, several headwinds threaten to derail the bull market this year. The S&P 500 tends to perform poorly around midterm elections, recording an average intrayear drawdown of 18%, according to CFRA Research. In addition, the S&P 500's forward price-to-earnings ratio is near the "upper end of its historical range," according to the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, President Trump's tariffs are a significant source of uncertainty for consumers and businesses. As a result, consumer sentiment recorded its lowest reading in history (since surveys started in 1952) last year, and businesses have pumped the brakes on hiring new employees.

On that front, investors will get several important pieces of information this week.
Story by Lisa Greene

FOX 17 Nashville investigative reporter Kelly Avellino says new state data has blown the lid off a problem that already looked bad. Tennessee now confirms 2,547 people have been arrested for DUI since 2017 even though their blood tests later came back negative for alcohol and drugs.

In Avellino’s report, the headline isn’t just the number. It’s the fact the total is more than four times higher than what officials previously disclosed – 609 – before a new transparency law forced a deeper look.

That kind of revision doesn’t feel like a small math correction. It feels like Tennessee found an entire hidden layer of arrests that weren’t being counted the same way the public thought they were.

And once you hear how people describe the fallout – mugshots, jobs at risk, reputations damaged – it’s hard not to think the state is dealing with more than a paperwork issue.

The Number Jumped From 609 To 2,547 – And That’s The Story
Kelly Avellino reports that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) is now saying the true total of these “sober DUI” arrests since 2017 is 2,547. That’s a massive leap from the earlier figure of 609, which had been shared with FOX 17 previously.
Story by Josh Campbell, CNN

One of the most notorious spies in United States history, responsible for the arrest and eventual execution of numerous Soviet and Russian officials secretly working on behalf of the US intelligence community, has died at the age of 84.

Aldrich Ames, a former CIA case officer arrested by the FBI in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison for espionage, died in custody on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the US Bureau of Prisons.

The official said a Maryland medical examiner will determine his cause of death.

Ames joined CIA in 1962 as a low-level document analyst, eventually working his way up through the ranks as a case officer and specializing in targeting the Soviet Union.

In 1985, Ames went to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, and volunteered to spy against the United States, according to his guilty plea agreement. Later that decade, alarm bells started going off within the CIA and FBI over the arrest and execution of numerous double agents feeding secrets to the United States.
During an announcement from the Oval Office last year in August, Donald Trump interrupted his remarks to needlessly show reporters a photo of Vladimir Putin. "I thought you'd all like to see it," Krasnov Trump excitedly stated.
Story by Bryan Brunati

Jeffrey Epstein sent a “massive” bodyguard to a photographer’s studio to retrieve images he didn’t want anyone else to ever see, Knewz.com can report.

Christopher Anderson — the photojournalist whose headline-making close-up Vanity Fair portraits of White House officials including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt sparked a firestorm in recent weeks — revealed the late financier once did all he could to get his hands on the photos he’d posed for inside his New York City mansion after successfully getting a magazine to scrap plans to run them.

Anderson’s Epstein encounter
Anderson took to Instagram to share photos of the late predator he snapped in 2015 after being hired to “make a portrait of Epstein to accompany an article” by vocal Donald Trump critic and author Michael Wolff for New York Magazine.

The photographer explained that he “didn’t know much” about Epstein at the time he was hired, “other than the fact that he had heavy connections to powerful men.”

Anderson recalled that when he got to Epstein’s seven-story home on the Upper East Side, “A young woman with an Eastern European accent answered the door (I would later see the same girl setting up a massage table in a room just off one of his offices) followed quickly by his private secretary, Lesley Groff.

“When Epstein arrived, his eyes sized me up like someone always looking for the angles. He quizzed me about my pictures, how the shoot would go, and how much I thought my pictures were worth,” he continued.

Epstein was very particular and “didn’t want anyone else to have the pictures after the magazine published them,” Anderson wrote, explaining how he “offered me $20K to own them after publication.”
Story by Pratik Sharma

Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, told the FBI in 2023 that his sibling was murdered because he was prepared to “name names.”

In a formal complaint, Mark alleged, “I have reason to believe he was killed because he was about to name names. I believe President Trump authorized his murder.”

The allegation appeared in a recent batch of files released by the Department of Justice under congressional orders to disclose Epstein-related records.

DOJ’s official response
The Department of Justice rejected the claim, noting some of the released documents included “untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump.”
Story by Sarah Rumpf

Two people were shot and injured in Portland, Oregon Thursday afternoon in an incident “involving” federal agents, the Portland Police confirmed in a press release.

According to the statement on the department’s website, Portland Police officers responded to ” a report of a shooting” at 2:18 pm PT and the officers “confirmed that federal agents had been involved in a shooting.”

“Portland Police were not involved in the incident,” the statement noted, and added more details:

At 2:24 p.m., officers received information that a man who had been shot was calling and requesting help in the area of Northeast 146th Avenue and East Burnside. Officers responded and found a male and female with apparent gunshot wounds. Officers applied a tourniquet and summoned emergency medical personnel. The patients were transported to the hospital. Their conditions are unknown. Officers have determined the two people were injured in the shooting involving federal agents.

“We are still in the early stages of this incident,” said PPB Chief Bob Day. “We understand the heightened emotion and tension many are feeling in the wake of the shooting in Minneapolis, but I am asking the community to remain calm as we work to learn more.”

The PPB released the map below showing the location of the shooting and where the individuals were located.
Story by John O'Sullivan & Amrita Carroll

Jesse Ventura has called President Donald Trump "a draft-dodging coward" and hinted he might make another run for Minnesota governor, in the wake of a wave of immigration enforcement raids sweeping through Minneapolis.

Ventura, who held the Minnesota governorship from 1999 to 2003, opted against seeking a second term. The Vietnam veteran and former Navy SEAL is perhaps best remembered by many for his wrestling days as Jesse "The Body" Ventura in the WWE.

While visiting his alma mater, Roosevelt High School, Ventura didn't hold back in his criticism of Trump, who avoided the Vietnam War draft through a medical exemption for bone spurs.

"He's the draft-dodging coward who, when it was his time to serve his country, did what all rich white boys did. I wasn't a rich white boy...We had to go...He's gonna tell me what courage is?" Ventura told local outlet Fox 9.
Story by Dan Mangan

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell focused on the $2.5 billion renovation to the central bank's headquarters in Washington, D.C., and his related testimony to Congress, he said on Sunday evening.

Powell said the probe is the result of longstanding frustration by President Donald Trump over the Fed's refusal to cut interest rates as quickly and as much as the president has demanded.

"The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President," Powell said in a video statement tweeted by the Fed's X account.

The chairman warned that the outcome of the investigation will determine the future of the central bank's decisions.

"This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation," Powell said.

Powell said the Department of Justice on Friday served the Fed "with grand jury subpoenas threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June."

"That testimony concerned, in part, a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings," he said.

The threat of indictment, Powell said, "is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings."
Story by John Bowden

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said on Sunday that Donald Trump had so far in his second term committed “10 times” the number of impeachable offenses as he’d committed in his first term and appeared to disagree with senior members of his party who’ve waved off impeachment efforts.

The Connecticut lawmaker has become an increasingly prominent voice among his party’s younger members, who favor a more forceful pushback against the president as his party looks toward 2026.

Murphy spoke Sunday with NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, where Welker asked him a question about former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s declaration late in 2025 that Trump’s conduct did not rise to the standard of impeachable so far under his second term. Murphy firmly disagreed.

“I know that this president has committed ten times more impeachable offenses in his second term as he did in his first term. He is stealing from the American people,” he said, calling his judgment a result of having “common sense”.

“The amount of corruption that he is involved in, taking a luxury private jet from Qatar, trading national security secrets to a foreign nation in exchange for a $2 billion investment in his cryptocurrency. That is wildly corrupt,” he said. “I don't think it's any secret that the president's level of corruption and illegality is nuclear grade in his second term compared to his first term.”
Story by Daniel Gura

Jeffrey Epstein once warned that Donald Trump would “misuse” his presidential pardon powers in a “childlike way” to make desperate offenders forever loyal to him, Knewz.com can report.

One of the president’s harshest critics made the claim about the late predator and the politician, explaining that as Epstein saw it, Trump would view his pardon power as a toy or tool of absolute, unquestionable authority.

Presidential pardons for sale?
Author Michael Wolff, who’s written extensively about both Trump and Epstein — who sat for more than 100 hours of interviews with Wolff mostly in 2017, the writer has said — told The Daily Beast‘s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast that the late financier previously told him Trump “loves having this kind of thing” and “loves showing the power that he has.”

Wolff said a presidential pardon can be bought as long as the price is right.

“There are no free pardons here,” he said, explaining that wealthy and high-profile offenders need to “know people who know people who know Trump, with an amount of money that has been passed along the line.”
Story by Matthew Chapman

A federal judge on Monday rejected the Trump administration's latest rationale for blocking an offshore wind project under construction by a Danish company.

According to Bloomberg News, "The Revolution Wind project, intended to power hundreds of thousands of homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, 'would be irreparably harmed' unless work was allowed to continue during the legal fight, US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth in Washington concluded Monday. The project is almost 90% complete."
Story by Karina Tsui, CNN

The Department of Homeland Security has altered its account of an immigration enforcement-related shooting in a Baltimore suburb on Christmas Eve after details in its initial statement were contradicted by local police.

On December 24, DHS issued a statement saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers “defensively fired” at a van occupied by two undocumented immigrants during an enforcement operation in Glen Burnie, Maryland, after the driver rammed ICE vehicles while trying to flee and “then drove his van directly at ICE officers, attempting to run them over.”

The driver was shot and wounded, and the passenger was injured when the van crashed seconds later, according to the original statement from DHS.

The department now says the injured man was not in the van but “was a passenger in one of the ICE vehicles that was rammed,” according to a new statement to CNN from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.

The changed account comes as DHS faces increased scrutiny over the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent last week – and more broadly over the veracity of the information the department puts forward regarding federal officers’ actions while carrying out President Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.

The new detail in the Maryland ICE shooting was first announced Thursday by the Anne Arundel County Police Department, which is investigating the incident.

“To clarify preliminary information released publicly on the shooting involving ICE agents in Glen Burnie, Maryland, on December 24, 2025: one ICE detainee who was injured during the incident was already in custody in an ICE vehicle, and the other individual injured was struck by gunfire while operating a separate vehicle,” the police department said.
Story by Hugh Cameron

President Donald Trump has been accused of releasing embargoed “market-sensitive data” before these were made public on Friday.

On Thursday evening, Trump posted a graph to Truth Social showing aggregate changes in private and government employment in 2025, which incorporated data from the jobs report the Department of Labor released the next morning.

“Donald Trump’s decision to leak market-sensitive data was nothing but an attempt to distract from his failing economy,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted to X on Monday.

One White House official called Trump’s post an “inadvertent public disclosure of aggregate data that was partially derived from prereleased information” in a statement to Newsweek.

Why It Matters
According to The Associated Press, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tightly restricts access to the data contained in its inflation and jobs reports. However, it provides advance copies to the White House under strict confidentiality agreements to prepare summaries for the president ahead of their official release. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget bars executive branch officials from commenting on this data ahead of time, while also forbidding any public commentary until at least 30 minutes after their publication.

This secrecy is intended to prevent the sensitive, nonpublic information from being disseminated and prematurely influencing financial markets. These early disclosure concerns are particularly acute in the case of the monthly Employment Situation report—considered one of the most closely watched economic releases worldwide.
Story by Phenix S Halley

When President Donald Trump‘s longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, declared he fit the definition of a fascist in 2024, Republicans called him crazy. They claimed there was no way fascism could’ve made its way to the U.S. But almost two years have passed, and fears of fascism continue to brew. Now, experts believe it’s finally time to call a spade a spade, bringing even more fears about the future of American democracy to the forefront.

The textbook definition of fascism emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism and suppression of opposition for the benefit of the government. According to The New York Times, Trump fits the category to a T.

“If anyone had predicted back in 2024 precisely what Trump’s return to the White House was going to look like, I suspect they’d have been accused of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote. “But the shrillest of Resistance libs have always understood Trump better than those who make a show of their dispassion.”

Take Trump’s recent capture of Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro. The president skipped over the Constitution, which demands he ask Congress’ approval for military use, and essentially took over the nation’s oil reserves. Trump has also flirted with taking over other sovereign countries like Greenland and Canada– straight out of the playbook of fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
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