Politics

Matt Pottinger, who served as a senior White House Asia advisor during Trump’s first term, told a congressional hearing that the administration is on the “wrong track” on AI and that its decision to allow the chip sales will damage its goal of winning the AI race.

A federal court in California on Wednesday refused to block new congressional maps approved by voters last year, clearing the way for the state to use them in upcoming elections.

A website dedicated to leaking personal information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents was reportedly subject to a cyber attack that its founder believes may have originated in Russia.

The Trump administration sent shockwaves through the U.S. mental health and drug addiction system late Tuesday, sending hundreds of termination letters, effective immediately, for federal grants supporting health services.

Federal officials are reinstating hundreds of U.S. health workers who were laid off last year from a small health agency that aims to protect workers.

The warrant says the search was related to an investigation into a system engineer and information technology specialist for a government contractor in Maryland who authorities allege took home classified materials, the Post reported. The worker, Aurelio Perez-Lugones, was charged earlier this month with unlawful retention of national defense information, according to court papers. He has not been charged with sharing classified information, and he has not been accused in court papers with leaking.

The State Department said Wednesday it will suspend the processing of immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and Somalia.

The US supreme court on Wednesday revived a lawsuit by a Republican congressman in Illinois that challenges a state law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted if they are received after election day.

The plane used by the U.S. military to strike a boat accused of smuggling drugs off the coast of Venezuela last fall was painted to look like a civilian aircraft, a move that appears to be at odds with the Pentagon’s manual on the laws of war.

The Trump administration on Tuesday dropped its appeal of a November court decision that blocked it from withholding transportation funding to states that refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement.

The American public will get a chance to hear directly from former Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Two US citizens who are employees of a Minnesota Target store were detained by federal immigration agents, then dumped in a different parking lot, community leaders and a Democratic politician have alleged.

Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.

Joe Thompson, the career U.S. Justice Department attorney best known for prosecuting social services fraud in Minnesota, has resigned along with other experienced attorneys at the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Federal agents make arrest in Minneapolis as protesters surround them

Over the summer, KING 5 revealed continued data sharing through the Department of Licensing’s driver and plate database, known as DAPS. The investigation found hundreds of searches of Washington records after Trump retook office, prompting outcries from immigration advocates.

Illinois and the City of Chicago filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration Monday, alleging unlawful activity and rights violations by agencies pursuing an immigration campaign in the city.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) filed a federal civil lawsuit against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Monday, saying the Defense Department’s retaliation against him for a video message to U.S. service members is unconstitutional.

“Renee Nicole Good was a wife, a mother of three, and a member of her community. She, and the dozens of other sons, daughters, friends, siblings, parents, and community members who have been killed by ICE, should be alive today,” Greenberg said in a statement on Friday. “ICE’s violence is not a statistic, it has names, families, and futures attached to it, and we refuse to look away or stay silent.”

The same day, The New York Times reported: “The investigation into the killing of Renee Nicole Good, 37, federal officials said, would be the exclusive province of the F.B.I., which is overseen by a director, Kash Patel, who has described President Trump as an unerring boss, and even a king.”

The move represents an unprecedented escalation in President Donald Trump’s battle with the Fed, an independent agency he has repeatedly attacked for not cutting its key interest rate as sharply as he prefers. The renewed fight will likely rattle financial markets Monday and could over time escalate borrowing costs for mortgages and other loans.

A U.S. judge on Friday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from freezing access by five Democratic-led states to more than $10 billion of federal funds for childcare and family assistance based on what it said were concerns about fraud.

The Trump administration and U.S. Congress are launching a plan this week to overturn former President Joe Biden’s mining ban in northern Minnesota and prevent future administrations from taking similar steps, according to officials and documents reviewed by Reuters.

The Trump administration is reportedly housing migrant youth in a Pennsylvania juvenile prison with a documented history of allegations of staff abuse towards children.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said during a trip to Brownsville on Wednesday that the Trump administration is working to deploy more than 500 miles of buoys in the Rio Grande — massively expanding the floating barrier first installed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2023.

The FBI has taken full control of the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Macklin Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officer in Minneapolis, it emerged on Thursday.

Forcing the issue to a vote came about after a handful of Republicans signed on to a so-called “discharge petition” to unlock debate, bypassing objections from House Speaker Mike Johnson. If approved, the bill would go to the Senate, where pressure is building for a similar bipartisan compromise. Without action, estimates are that millions will go uninsured this year.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has invited the bosses of commodity trading houses Vitol and Trafigura to the White House on Friday for talks on marketing Venezuelan oil, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Officials in Minneapolis gave a briefing after a shooting involving ICE left one woman dead.

In a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, the US president said he will be asking Congress to codify the measure and will be discussing additional housing and affordability proposals in a speech at the Davos World Economic Forum.

The US is carrying out an operation to seize a tanker linked to Venezuelan oil, an official tells CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.

Toppled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty on Monday to narcotics charges after President Donald Trump’s stunning capture of him rattled world leaders and left officials in Caracas scrambling to regroup.

Last year, Congress voted to cut funding to the CPB, a move supporters of public broadcasting said would heavily impact stations in smaller and more remote parts of the country.

“We should not have women in combat roles”

A week after immigrant groups filed a lawsuit, California said Tuesday it will delay the revocations of 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses until March to allow more time to ensure that truckers and bus drivers who legally qualify for the licenses can keep them.

Abortion will remain legal in Wyoming after the state Supreme Court struck down laws that include the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills, ruling Tuesday that they violate the state constitution.

.S. manufacturing activity contracted more than expected in December, extending its slump to 10 straight months as new orders fell again and input costs kept grinding higher as the sector continues to bear the imprint of President Donald Trump’s import tariffs.

A Wisconsin judge who was convicted last month of obstruction for helping a migrant appearing in her courtroom evade an immigration arrest submitted her resignation on Saturday, according to media reports.

It’s not that long, it seems to be doubled up and it’s from social media, so this is the only video I could find.

The northern California students are part of a group of 12 who were charged with felony conspiracy to trespass and felony vandalism in connection to an hour-long, June 2024 occupation during which the group barricaded themselves inside the university president’s office to demand Stanford consider a student resolution to divest from Israel, among other requests.

Q: There’s about $17 billion of oil reserves in Venezuela

By the end of the year, with the plan’s co-authors installed in key roles across the federal government, more than half of the items inside the Heritage Foundation’s mammoth wishlist have been implemented.

Just after midnight, Zohran Kwame Mamdani was sworn in as New York City’s first Muslim mayor in a modest ceremony held in a historic subway station under City Hall.

District judges and appeals courts have issued various rulings about the legality of the deployments. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block a lower court’s decision barring Trump’s use of the National Guard in Chicago.

“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions,” Smith tells lawmakers early in his deposition.

Here at NPR, we like to ring in the new year by looking at new state laws taking effect on Jan. 1.

The Trump administration has said it is freezing child care funds to all states until they provide more verification about the programs in a move fueled by a series of fraud schemes at Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents.

Enhanced tax credits that have helped reduce the cost of health insurance for the vast majority of Affordable Care Act enrollees expired overnight, cementing higher health costs for millions of Americans at the start of the new year.

The U.S. Postal Service has adopted a new rule that could create doubt about whether some ballots mailed by voters by Election Day will receive postmarks in time to be counted.

Hardman bested Republican Lucas Loftin by an overwhelming margin to win a seat representing parts of the Des Moines suburbs. The seat became vacant after the Oct. 6 death of state Sen. Claire Celsi, a Democrat.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a claim by President Donald Trump’s administration that it is legally barred from securing funding for the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, noting that a court order already bars the administration from shutting the agency down.

Never before has a president been so publicly, and relentlessly, critical of the country’s top monetary policymaker. For decades, successive administrations have allowed the Fed, as the institution tasked with steering the US economy, to function independently, without political interference. No longer.

Bottom line: Weiss was plucked from running a small, conservative-leaning newsroom and installed atop CBS when the network’s owner, David Ellison, was currying favor with the Trump administration. Then, right as Ellison needed Trump regulatory approval to merge, she yanked a story that the administration was bound to have complaints about.

The Trump administration said it has frozen child care payments for the state of Minnesota after a conservative YouTuber alleged that several centres run by Somali immigrants were taking public money without providing care.

The CIA and White House officials also declined to offer further comment on the matter. Col. Allie Weiskopf, a spokesperson for Special Operations Command, which oversees U.S operations in the Caribbean, said in a statement that “Special Operations did not support this operation to include intel support.”

The probes are being conducted under the False Claims Act, the report said, adding that companies under scrutiny include sectors like automotive, pharmaceuticals, defense, and utilities, and some have met in person with Justice Department officials.

The MAGA leader is unpopular in Europe, even among the supporters of right-wing populist parties he sees as allies, according to the new POLITICO Poll in partnership with Public First, which surveyed more than 10,000 people across five countries earlier this month. His biggest fans are in Britain, where 50 percent of Reform-aligned respondents had favorable views of Trump. However, in France and Germany, only about a third of people who said they had supported right-wing parties reported seeing Trump in a favorable light.

Cole told investigators that although he “has never really been an openly political person,” he felt “like something was wrong” in the 2020 election and began following discussions on YouTube and Reddit. He said that “the people up top,” including “people on both sides, public figures,” should not “ignore people’s grievances” or call them “conspiracy theorists,” “bad people,” “Nazis,” or “fascists.”

North Carolina voters have chosen Democrats in three straight elections for governor; the state’s Republican-led legislature has countered by siphoning off some of the powers that traditionally came with the job.

California this week dropped a lawsuit officials filed against the Trump administration over the federal government’s withdrawing of $4 billion for the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project.

And it isn’t only on the left that this trend can be seen. By the same token, localities that saw greater participation during the 2009 Tea Party protests also witnessed more Republican support during the 2010 midterms, one study finds. This shows the outsize impact a single protester can have, the study’s authors say. That’s because having one more attender at a demonstration rallies more support for a political cause than acquiring one more vote during an election does.

The Center’s website also already reflects the name change—but quibblers might note that the site’s actual domain does not. It remains “kennedy-center.org”. There’s a reason for this: the domains “trumpkennedycenter.org” and “trumpkennedycenter.com” are already taken. They’re owned by comedian and scriptwriter Toby Morton, who has written for South Park and Mad TV. In his downtime, Morton has made a habit of acquiring official-sounding domains for satirical purposes: he already owns around 50 such sites, including nancymace26.com (“I don’t legislate, I litigate grudges”) and mtg2026.org (“Building a whiter tomorrow!”).

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a March presidential memorandum to revoke the security clearance of prominent Washington attorney Mark Zaid, ruling that the order — which also targeted 14 other individuals — could not be applied to him.

In another assault on reproductive rights by the Trump administration, the US Department of Veterans Affairs sent out a memo on Monday announcing that it will no longer provide abortion or abortion counseling.

This month Australia imposed a social media ban for children under 16. New York joins states like California and Minnesota that have similar social media laws.

A US Department of Defense official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Associated Press that the United States worked with Nigeria to conduct the bombing, and that the government of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu—who is a Muslim—approved the attacks.

The Trump administration has ordered nearly 30 ambassadors in embassies around the world to return to the United States within weeks, a move that would leave a large gap in the American diplomatic corps even as President Trump has said he wants to resolve conflicts through diplomacy.

US authorities have discovered more than a million more documents potentially related to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein that they plan to release in the coming days and weeks, officials say.

A federal judge has blocked a new Texas law aimed at shielding minors from inappropriate online content from taking effect as scheduled on Jan. 1, ruling that it likely violates First Amendment free speech rights.

The first 4 paragraphs:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA00020517.pdf

“Welcome to hell,” one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.”

The administration’s new approach involves ICE attorneys asking immigration judges to dismiss asylum cases without hearing them on merit, the report said.

Donald Trump’s nemesis, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, has registered the highest approval rating among current political leaders, a new poll has revealed.

New York joins several other states across the country, including Texas, Maine, California, Minnesota, and Connecticut, that have passed versions of coerced debt legislation. The bill passed by Hochul this week will provide some of the most comprehensive protections in the nation for survivors of this kind of financial abuse.

The email was sent on 7 January 2020 and is part of an email chain which includes the subject heading: “RE: Epstein flight records.”

The U.S. military said Monday that it had conducted another strike against a boat it said was smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing one person.

The letter, which appears to have been signed from Epstein to Nasser, reads.

A detailed investigation published Monday shows that many wealthy and powerful contributors to US President Donald Trump’s staggering post-election fundraising haul—now at roughly $2 billion—have seen a return on their money in the form of pardons, corporate-friendly regulatory changes, government contracts, and dropped enforcement cases.

In 2022, after the measure was introduced in the House, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the federal government would spend nearly $250 million in providing health benefits to Lumbee Tribe members over four years through the Indian Health Service.

Gov Landry said in a post on X it was an honour to serve in a “volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the US”.

After their visit, the Illinois lawmakers reported that Monday seemed like an atypical day with only two people in custody. A day earlier there had been 20, according to Garcia.

The Trump administration on Monday suspended leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast due to what it said were national security risks identified by the Pentagon.

When the first wave of Epstein files appeared online, survivor Jess Michaels didn’t look for revelations — she searched for her own name.

When the first wave of Epstein files appeared online, survivor Jess Michaels didn’t look for revelations — she searched for her own name.

High interest led the Justice Department to regulate access to its Epstein files website for a time.

Last week, when Donald Trump announced a bailout for farmers hurt by his own economic agenda, the president boasted that the payments would be financed by revenue generated by trade tariffs. That was problematic for a variety of reasons, but primarily because the claim wasn’t true: The money was coming from a USDA fund, not tariff revenue.

Look up your prescriptions using the tool here.

The FTC alleges that Instacart falsely advertised “free delivery” on first orders while still charging mandatory service fees. Regulators also accused the company of misleading customers with claims of a “100% satisfaction guarantee,” saying shoppers who experienced late or poor service were often offered small credits instead of full refunds.

The FBI’s report included a map spotlighting FBI offices across the country with ongoing investigations. As of 31 October, the FBI said it had opened criminal and domestic terrorism investigations into “observed threats” against ICE activity across 23 of its field offices, spanning most regions of the country, including Washington state, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Kansas, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, New York and Maine.

It’s a scene that has played out across Chicago, Charlotte, and now New Orleans, where the Trump administration launched what it calls “Operation Catahoula Crunch.” When Customs and Border Protection and Commander Gregory Bovino move into town, so does Whistlemania. Activists create and distribute thousands of 3D-printed whistles, and their piercing cries are used to signal that immigration agents are nearby. Caravans of protesters follow agents around, raising the alarm as they drive through the streets.

The programme makes up to 50,000 visas available each year through a random selection process among entries from countries with low rates of immigration to the US.

The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking.

In an exclusive, CNN reports that the Justice Department is racing to redact thousands of pages in oder to protect victims, and address executive and legal privacy concerns. Per CNN, counterintelligence specialists “ were asked to drop nearly all of their other work”.

*Images, undated and uncaptioned, include Vladimir Nabokov lines written on women and show Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky*

The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to advance a $901 billion bill setting policy for the Pentagon, sending the massive piece of legislation to the White House, which has said President Donald Trump will sign it into law.

The FCC changed its website during a heated hearing with FCC chair Brendan Carr.

The Senate gave final passage to an annual military policy bill Wednesday that will authorize $901 billion in defense programs while pressuring Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide lawmakers with video of strikes on alleged drug boats in international water near Venezuela.

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview on Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press.