Pope Leo XIV stands in front of a Christmas nativity scene at Paul-VI hall in the Vatican on December 15, 2025. (Andreas Solaro / AFP via Getty Images)

As John Fugelsang, who runs the risk of becoming this era’s ablest political commentator, reminds us, “The Christmas economy depends on people buying possessions to celebrate the birthday of the man who renounced possessions.”

A still from the 60 Minutes segment held by Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News.

The Cottonwood-Oak Creek Elementary District in Arizona agreed in January to undergo federal monitoring after investigators uncovered racial and sexual harassment of students there. But the district has not heard from the U.S. Department of Education since President Donald Trump took office. Jesse Rieser for ProPublica

In Colorado, students taunted their Black classmates by playing whipping sounds on their cellphones and saying they should be shot “to make us a better race.”

A hearing in a domestic violence case at the Scott County Justice Center in Huntsville, Tennessee, in 2024. The county has implemented a number of reforms that inspired a proposed state law and policy changes in other Tennessee courtrooms. Stacy Kranitz for ProPublica

Judges across Tennessee are now demanding greater accountability from people who have been ordered to give up their guns, a shift aimed at strengthening protections for domestic violence victims.

This morning, four vulnerable Republicans signed onto the discharge petition all House Democrats have signed to force Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring a bill to extend the premium tax credits for purchasing healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) markets to the floor for a vote. The proposal extends the credits for three years.

The Trump FBI is drawing up an enemies list that could encompass well over half the US public: Do you “advance…opposition to law and immigration enforcement”? Do you have “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders”? Show an “adherence to radical gender ideology,” meaning you think trans people exist? Do you exhibit (what the Trump administration would interpret as) “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-Christianity”? Do you display “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion and morality”?

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo published here exclusively.

The target is those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

ICE has arrested nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records, data shows

Move Comes as Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Block Cancer Patients’ Lawsuits Against Glyphosate-maker Bayer

Housing is a central need that provides us a place to call home. In the cold winter months, it is more critical than ever to be safe from the weather, and for families with young children, housing contributes to a thriving future.  

Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.

The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

One noontime a few weeks ago, I went to lunch with a colleague from the University of Minnesota. We strolled around the corner from our offices to a mutually favorite spot, the Afro Deli, for a hybrid meal of gyro, samosas, falafel, and chai.

I don’t know why this wasn’t above-the-fold news all across the country over the past few days as the details of the “peace plan” Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff took to Putin this week came out.

Kushner, it appears, had added in a provision that would have forced both Ukraine and Russia to take actions that would specifically benefit Saudi Arabia, a country that is paying the presidential son-in-law at least $25 million a year.

Flood waters submerged residential buildings in Hat Yai in Thailand’s southern Songkhla province on November 26, 2025. Tens of thousands of people in Thailand and neighbouring Malaysia were displaced by widespread flooding, with streets submerged, homes inundated and at least 34 dead (AFP via Getty Images).

In the wake of yesterday’s report from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations to kill the survivors of a September 2 strike on a small boat off Venezuela, the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees have announced they intend to conduct “vigorous oversight” and “gather a full accounting” of the operation. The two committees referred to the Department of Defense by that name, rather than by the “Department of War” rebrand Hegseth and Trump have pushed.

Can one eulogize a federal agency that never existed? The question has the quality of a Zen riddle. But Reuters informs us that the phantasm known as the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE, n’existe plus. “That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, Director Scott Kupor told Reuters’s Courney Rozen when Rozen inquired about DOGE’s status.

Trump just called for the execution of American veterans — all of them also elected members of Congress — because they reminded our active duty soldiers that it’s a violation of both American and international law to commit war crimes.

If that’s not impeachable, what is?

A U.S. federal judge ruled Thursday that members of the so-called National Guard occupying Washington, D.C., do so only by obeying illegal orders. At Nuremberg, the U.S. and its allies tried and convicted Nazis despite their defense that they had been obeying orders, and despite some of the crimes having been invented after the fact for the prosecution.

In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”