President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he's withdrawing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland but left the door open to sending federal forces "in a much different and stronger form."
His announcement comes after the US Supreme Court last week rejected his request to allow him to deploy the guard to Chicago to protect ICE agents as part of the administration's ongoing immigration crackdown.
"It hasn't started yet. It starts sometime in the next two months. It'll be great. Everyone loves it," Trump told POLITICO when reached by phone from Mar-a-Lago. "They love the ballroom too. But they love the Triumphal Arch."
The proposed structure " modeled loosely on European victory monuments " is one of several high-profile projects Trump has personally championed as part of the semiquincentennial celebrations, a sprawling effort expected to include national and local events across the country.
Elon Musk said on Tuesday his artificial intelligence startup xAI has bought a third building to expand its infrastructure, aiming to boost training capacity to nearly 2 gigawatts of compute power.
Demonstrations across Iran, initially sparked by economic hardship and the sharp fall of the national currency, continued for a third day on Tuesday, drawing in university students as authorities deployed force and made multiple arrests. Protests spread across Iran on Tuesday, with universities and commercial districts emerging as key hubs amid a widening strike by shopkeepers in Tehran and other cities. Human rights and student groups said at least 11 protesters were arrested near Tehran's Shoush Square. Five students were also detained at universities in the capital, four of whom were later released. Read more
The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report detailing Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Journal, Trump frequently arranged for spa employees""usually young women""to be sent on house calls to Epstein's mansion. While spa staff were occasionally sent to members' homes, Epstein was not a member; the visits occurred because Trump requested that Epstein receive special treatment. When one employee questioned why Epstein did not come into the spa like other guests, management warned her about Epstein's habit of exposing himself to employees. Despite repeated incidents, neither Trump nor Mar-a-Lago staff ever reported Epstein's criminal behavior to law enforcement. The Journal went on to report that the real reason that Epstein was finally banned from accessing club services after a teenaged employee complained to Human Resources that Epstein "had pressured her for sex".
How did so much get so terrible so rapidly? One simultaneous cause and consequence of the Minnesota swoon is outright fraud, the rotten fruit of a partnership between some of the state's leading politicians and sectarian interests that understand government not as a society's shared instrument to address its problems, but as a storehouse to pillage. Read more
Finnish police on Wednesday seized a ship sailing from Russia on suspicion of sabotaging an undersea telecoms cable running from Helsinki to Estonia across the Gulf of Finland, an area hit by a string of similar incidents in recent years.
Springfield town council rejected building a monorail and instead approved an AI data center.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) is accusing President Donald Trump of blocking a non-controversial water project affecting her district after the lawmaker challenged Trump to force the release of the Epstein files in November. " ... Trump decided to veto ... a bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says America First' like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections," Boebert said, according to Colorado news reporter Kyle Clark. " ... I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics." "I thought the [Trump] campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape," Boebert added.
The U.S. has surpassed 2,000 measles cases for the first time in more than 30 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of Dec. 23, a total of 2,012 cases have been reported in the U.S. Of those cases, 24 were reported among international visitors to the U.S. The last time the U.S. recorded more than 2,000 cases occurred in 1992, when there were 2,126 confirmed infections over the course of a year, CDC data shows. The CDC says 11% of measles patients in the U.S. this year have been hospitalized, over half of whom are under age 19. There have been 50 outbreaks reported across the U.S. in 2025, CDC data shows. By comparison, 16 outbreaks were reported during 2024.
Leavitt's comments signal a significant escalation in the federal government's response to pandemic-era fraud. The move prompts concerns about due process, potential targeting of immigrant communities, and the precedent such denaturalization efforts may set for U.S. citizens nationwide. Tensions are rising both locally and nationally as leaders debate appropriate measures, legality, and the impact on one of America's largest Somali diaspora communities. Read more
President Donald Trump has moved to declare the National Links Trust in default on its 50-year lease with the National Park Service, a step that could allow his administration to seize control of Washington, D.C.'s public golf courses.
A CNN poll conducted earlier this month found that just 22 percent of Republicans support Vance's bid for the presidency. They cited his "intelligence" as a key factor in his potential success with American voters, as well as the likelihood that he would continue Trump's agenda.
Three men were found dead on Mt. Baldy on Monday, days after a winter storm blanketed the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains with snow. At around 11:30 a.m., search and rescue teams responded to a request to find an injured man, 19, who had fallen 500 feet while hiking near Devil's Backbone, a sharp ridge flanked by steep drops that leads to the summit, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in a news release. A friend who had been traveling with him had hiked to an area with cell service and provided GPS coordinates to rescuers, officials said. A sheriff's air rescue team recovered the bodies Tuesday at about 2 p.m., the department confirmed Tuesday evening. Read more
A major link in Tesla's 4680 battery supply chain has just snapped. South Korean battery material supplier L&F Co. announced today that the value of its massive supply deal with Tesla has been slashed by over 99%, signaling a catastrophic drop in demand for the automaker's in-house battery cells. Read more
President Donald Trump has been mocked online after he appeared to confuse a bald eagle with a falcon. Trump shared a post on Truth Social on the evening of Tuesday, December 30, which showed a dead bird lying in front of a windmill. The post read, "Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!" However, the image used in that post was taken in Israel, rather than the United States, and shows a falcon, rather than an eagle, and is dated to 2017. In response to the post, there has been a wave of criticism and mockery directed at Trump. The left-wing media network MeidasTouch replied directly to the U.S. Department of Energy and wrote, "Why are you posting images of dead falcons in Israel from 2017?" Spencer Hakimian, the founder of Tolou Capital management, meanwhile, wrote on X in a post viewed over 140,000 times, "Grandpa is drinking again."
