TikTok faces a likely US shutdown after the Supreme Court rejected its appeal.Brands and marketers are preparing contingency plans to shift content from TikTok.Managers shared their plans, including new clauses in their campaign contracts. Creators are finalizing their post-TikTok plans. TikTok is hurtling toward a US shutdown after the Supreme Court rejected its appeal of a divest-or-ban law. The app may "go dark" entirely on Sunday. Read More

Readers, Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight. Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence. Read More

Israeli Government Press Office Israel's government has approved the new Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas, paving the way for it to take effect on Sunday. The decision came after hours of discussions that continued late into the night. Two far-right ministers voted against the deal. Read More

CNBC's Jim Cramer on Friday guided investors through next week on Wall Street, highlighting President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration and earnings from companies including Procter & Gamble and American Express. Cramer mused about what Trump's administration will mean for the market, noting that Wall Street believes him to be more pro-business than his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Read More

Thao, 39, removed from office in November recall, accused of key role in sprawling corruption and bribery scheme. Sheng Thao, the former mayor of Oakland, and three others have been indicted for a slate of federal charges including conspiracy and bribery. The indictment, which was unsealed and announced in California on Friday, is the culmination of an investigation led by the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, and the US Internal Revenue Service. Also charged in the indictment were Andre Jones, Thao’s longtime romantic partner, and David and Andy Duong, a father-son business duo who own Cal Waste Solutions, the company that picks up the recyclables of Oakland’s more than 436,000 residents. The foursome are accused of orchestrating a scheme in which Thao allegedly extended contracts for Cal Waste Solutions, appointed high-level officials who would allegedly help the Duongs’ business interests, and bought housing units from another company owned by the Duongs. Read More

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Bill Burns has spent much of his nearly four-decade career in government arguing about words. As he was packing up his office this week at CIA headquarters, the language of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which he had toiled over for the past 15 months, was at the top of his mind. If the parties agreed to the deal, as he was cautiously confident they would, Israeli hostages in Gaza would go free and Palestinians would receive vital humanitarian aid. “In many ways, this [negotiation] was the hardest” of his long career, Burns told me in one of two recent conversations—harder even than the secret talks with Iran that he helped lead and that eventually produced the 2015 agreement placing restrictions on the country’s nuclear program. For starters, Hamas’s military leaders were hiding in Gaza, making communications with them cumbersome. The parties debated for months over the presence of Israeli military forces on the Gaza side of the border with Egypt, a stretch through which Israel said Hamas was smuggling weapons. “And this had such an intensely human dimension to it,” Burns said, speaking of the Israeli hostages as well as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes have been turned to rubble in Israel’s campaign against Hamas. Burns told me that he had worked to ensure that these people were not mere “brackets in text” of an official peace plan. Words matter, but looking back on his time as the head of the world’s most important spy agency, Burns also had numbers on his mind. By his own count, he had made 84 trips overseas during his four years as director of the CIA. Even for a peripatetic former diplomat, that’s a busy travel schedule. For the chief of an intelligence agency, it’s extraordinary. [William J. Burns: The blob meets the heartland] Burns has brought an unusual synthesis of diplomacy and spycraft to the role of CIA chief.  You can tell the story of sequential crises that beset the Biden administration by his itinerary. Burns went to Moscow in November 2021 to tell President Vladimir Putin that the United States knew he was preparing to invade Ukraine. More than once, President Joe Biden has tasked Burns with delivering forceful messages to the Kremlin, because Burns knows the country, and its leader, better than anyone else in the Cabinet. On his tenth trip to Ukraine—one of 14 in total—President Volodymyr Zelensky joked that Burns now qualified for a free upgrade on the train from Poland, which shuttles world leaders and VIPs across the border because air travel is too dangerous. Burns made 19 trips to participate in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the majority of them to the Middle East, working with his colleagues from Israel, Qatar, and Egypt. In May 2023 he went to Beijing, the highest-level visit by a Biden-administration official since the U.S. military had shot down a Chinese spy balloon that floated across the continental United States three months earlier. He went back last year to meet his counterpart, the minister of state security, and open a channel of communication between rival powers that seem at times to be drifting toward military confrontation.   The Biden administration is stocked with former generals, diplomats, and strategists. And yet Burns often got the hardest assignments, the ones with big potential rewards but that were more likely to end in disappointment, or at least ambiguity. This is not the CIA director’s traditional portfolio. But in Burns—a 33-year veteran of the Foreign Service, only the second career diplomat to become deputy secretary of state, a former ambassador to Russia and Jordan—Biden got a spymaster with an unusual set of skills. So he used him. Burns seemed as surprised as anyone when Biden chose him for the job. “Honestly, when the president called me, I almost fell off my chair,” Burns told me. He would be the first career diplomat to serve as CIA director, but that was hardly disqualifying. Plenty of his predecessors had never worked in intelligence but were reasonably successful in the role: Leon Panetta and Mike Pompeo come to mind. Burns had been considered for the top job in the State Department; he had retired from the Foreign Service in 2014. But the more he thought about running the CIA, the more it made sense. “Diplomats and intelligence officers, in all those years I spent overseas, worked together more closely than any other two parts of the U.S. government,” Burns said. Intelligence and espionage are built on human relationships, establishing trust, and maintaining credibility. So is diplomacy. Most of Burns’s travel was devoted to CIA business, visiting stations overseas and meeting with personnel. But a sizable portion of the 1 million miles that Burns says he logged on the road as director was in the service of building new relationships with world leaders and using the ones he had already established. Thirty-plus years in diplomacy tend to fatten the Rolodex, and as several of his close aides told me, “Bill knows everybody.”   Under Burns’s watch, the CIA’s record wasn’t spotless. Critics, including some recently retired intelligence officers, have said that a top-heavy bureaucracy has at times produced sclerotic analysis that lacks depth and timeliness. Although the CIA and other agencies accurately forecast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they overestimated the invading military’s ability to swiftly conquer the country. Among CIA employees, Burns is widely admired and, early in his term, earned plaudits for ensuring that officers afflicted by the so-called Havana syndrome received adequate medical care, which they hadn’t had under his predecessor. But some of those victims were deeply disappointed that Burns, who’d initially suspected that Russia was to blame for the malady, ultimately sided with analysts who said it was not the handiwork of a foreign power.   Still, he will be remembered as a successful director, and not just for how he did the basic job of leading the CIA. He also opened doors with other leaders, cleared up miscommunications, and delivered hard messages to difficult people. The White House found this arrangement especially helpful, not least because it’s sometimes easier to send a spy to do a diplomat’s business. Burns went to Afghanistan in August 2021, shortly after the fall of Kabul, to meet the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Sending a senior diplomat, perhaps the secretary of state, might have signaled that the Biden administration was conferring official recognition on the militant group, which had seized the capital days earlier and ordered the Americans to leave the country. This was one of several instances where the Biden administration took advantage of Burns’s diplomatic acumen without actually employing him as a diplomat.   Burns was also there to do CIA business. The United States was racing to evacuate its citizens and Afghan allies, including those who had worked with the military and the agency, amid the collapse of the Afghan government. Burns had been to Afghanistan four months earlier, when the government was just barely holding on against the Taliban, and he knew that once the United States withdrew, it would have little influence over the country’s new rulers. In April, he had warned members of Congress that a pullout would pose “significant risk” to U.S. interests, and that intelligence agencies would have a harder time monitoring terrorist groups that might reemerge in America’s absence. Intelligence analysts, including at the CIA, said the government could collapse quickly, within months or even a few weeks of a U.S. withdrawal. But no intelligence agency accurately foresaw how rapidly it would dissolve, or that the country’s leader would flee. Burns’s talks with the Taliban helped provide the necessary “top cover to get our people out of Afghanistan,” a CIA paramilitary officer who has worked closely with the director told me. He credited Burns with helping to marshal the bureaucracy back in Washington, so that the agency’s Afghan partners and their families could obtain U.S. visas and get seats on military aircraft. Biden has called the withdrawal from Afghanistan “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” It was also a chaotic and dangerous mess in which the CIA, working alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan forces, had to secretly evacuate U.S. citizens, Afghans, and other foreign nationals using an agency compound known as Eagle Base—hardly the orderly departure that administration officials wanted. The U.S. withdrawal marked a violent end to the longest war in the nation’s history. Thirteen troops were among the more than 180 people who died in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. As disastrous as it was, the fall of Kabul gave Burns the chance to demonstrate his commitment to the CIA’s people and its mission. [George Packer: Biden’s betrayal of Afghans will live in infamy] The paramilitary officer called Burns’s efforts in Washington and support of operations on the ground “morally courageous.” Embracing the agency’s employees and demonstrating solidarity with them made Burns a popular and successful leader despite his outsider status. His predecessors who failed to endear themselves in this way (Porter Goss and David Petraeus come to mind) found their time at Langley rocky and brief.   Three months after Burns’s trip to Kabul, the president again sent Burns on a sensitive mission that required the finesse of a diplomat and the discretion of a spy. Burns went to Moscow with a message for Putin, who had retreated to the seaside resort of Sochi amid a spike in coronavirus infections in the capital. From a phone in the Kremlin, Burns listened to the Russian leader recite his usual bill of grievances—an expansionist NATO threatened Russian security; Zelensky was the illegitimate leader of a non-country. Burns, the administration’s de facto Putin whisperer, had heard it all before and understood that the Russian leader’s paranoid obsession with Ukraine was real and unshakable. But this time he had a message of his own: If you invade, you will pay an enormous price. Burns left a letter from Biden affirming that there would be consequences. In the run-up to the February 2022 invasion, Burns and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, helped coordinate an unusual process of declassifying intelligence about Russian military activities and intentions, in order to preempt the false narratives that Burns knew Putin would try to spin—including that Russia was attacking Ukraine in self-defense. Once the war began, some administration officials believed that Kyiv might fall within three days, a judgment that proved to deeply misunderstand Ukraine’s will to fight. U.S. officials thought that Zelenksy might have to govern in exile, if he could make it out of the capital alive. CIA officers, who had spent years helping Ukraine build its own modern intelligence system, wanted to stay at their posts. Burns backed them up, and persuaded the White House. The CIA is the only U.S. government organization whose personnel were on the ground in Ukraine before the war and never left. Agency officers there have played central roles in the United States’ assistance to Ukraine. Russia stumbled in the first year of the war. For a time Ukraine seemed poised to repel the invasion. But as Burns leaves office, Putin is gaining ground, slowly and at extraordinary cost. At least 700,000 Russian troops have died or been wounded since the invasion, more than 10 times the Soviet casualties during a decade of war in Afghanistan, Burns said. Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day. But to do that, Putin would have to be willing to negotiate. And Burns doesn’t think he is. “He’s put all his chips on the table,” Burns said. “He believed then, and he believes to this day, that he cannot afford to lose. So it’s a huge mistake for anybody to underestimate that.”   When two countries are at odds, their leaders often find it easier for the spies to talk, and not the diplomats or the heads of state. Wars have arguably been averted that way. “Even in the worst of the Cold War with the Soviets, when I was a young diplomat, you did have all sorts of channels” to communicate frankly, Burns said, including through intelligence agencies. “I think some of those now have been reestablished or created with the Chinese.” China has been Burns’s long-term strategic focus as CIA director, even as he has spent time on Ukraine—and in it—and shuttling around the Middle East. And paying more attention to China has meant paying more attention to technology. From the beginning of his tenure, Burns put special emphasis on both how the agency used technology and the areas where China and other adversaries could pull ahead of the United States, such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. “I do believe this is one of those plastic moments that come along two or three times a century, where there’s some fundamental changes on the international landscape,” Burns told me. “In this case, it is the reality that we’re no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block.” In the fall of 2021, the CIA established a new China Mission Center, to focus exclusively on gathering intelligence about the country and countering its pervasive spying on the United States. The center is the only one of its kind at the CIA, devoted to a single country. China-related work now consumes about 20 percent of the agency’s budget, a threefold increase from the start of his tenure, Burns said. [William J. Burns: The United States needs a new foreign policy] China’s advances in technology—many of them thanks to years of hacking and stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies—have allowed Beijing to create a virtual surveillance state. Those conditions have complicated the CIA’s efforts to recruit spies inside the country and keep their work for the United States a secret. In the past decade, the agency lost most of its agents in the country after they were discovered by Chinese authorities. While the United States tries to spy on one of the hardest targets, Burns has also tried to reopen a dialogue with Beijing, including via his counterpart, Chen Yixin, the security minister. (The head of the China Mission Center, a career CIA officer fluent in Mandarin, accompanied Burns on one of his trips to Beijing.) Burns is accustomed to having conversations that his political bosses can’t. But he said he was mindful that, as the head of an intelligence agency, he was not the one making foreign policy. “My job is to support policy makers, not become one.” But, he noted, if the president asked for his opinion, “I’ll tell him.” And he did. One longtime aide who has known Burns since his time at the State Department reminded me that he and Biden “go way back,” and that the two men have shared a bond over their Irish Catholic upbringing. In Burns’s 2019 memoir—called, unsurprisingly, The Back Channel—he calls Biden “bighearted” and “a significant and thoughtful voice at the table” when Biden was the vice president and Burns was No. 2 at the State Department. Burns stayed in his lane as Biden’s CIA director. But the president handed him one hard diplomatic problem after another, leading many observers to wonder when Biden would make things official and nominate Burns for secretary of state. That probably would have happened in a second Biden term or a Kamala Harris administration. But Burns will have to settle for the unique hybrid position he created: Call him the diplomatic spy. The model may or may not be replicable. Or even advisable. Diplomats are expected to operate with a degree of transparency that doesn’t apply to spies. Reporters do not travel with the CIA director as they do with the secretary of state. In many of the Middle Eastern countries Burns knows well, intelligence chiefs conduct foreign relations not just out of a need for secrecy, but because they maintain their own power centers, even independently of the governments they serve. Burns saw diplomats and spies work closely together throughout his career, but he said their jobs shouldn’t be confused. “Having experience on the other side of the table helped,” he told me, “but I’ve been very careful to immerse myself in this agency and move away from my old world.” On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas finally reached the cease-fire agreement that Burns and his foreign colleagues had helped design. He was reluctant to celebrate the achievement, at least outwardly. There were no champagne corks popping or high fives, he told me. Burns has seen deals fall apart before, and this one has entered only its first phase. By its nature, intelligence work is secret, which usually makes it thankless. “People here don’t expect to get public praise or acknowledgment,” Burns said. Nevertheless, the cease-fire he helped devise is the high note on which he might end his long career in public service. The deal was hard-fought and hammered out in secret, and its future remains uncertain. In that respect, it was typical intelligence work. “I’ll miss that,” Burns said. “There’s no substitute for that kind of satisfaction.” Read More

Severancefan theorists, step aside. Severance star Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan G., has a theory of his own. As The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott dives into Season 2 of Apple TV+'s acclaimed workplace thriller, Stiller and Scott have started a segment where Cherry — whom Stiller and Scott jokingly describe as "a clairvoyant" — shares his theories about what will happen in the show's next episodes. Read More

On his X account, Sam Altman posted a letter signed by Democratic senators concerned about the ways tech companies appear to be bending to Trump's wishes. Read More

Musk’s company has been accused of manipulating systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility. The European Commission has asked X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, as it steps up its investigation into whether Elon Musk’s social media platform has breached EU rules on content moderation. The EU’s executive branch told the company it wanted to see internal documentation about its “recommender system”, which makes content suggestions to users, and any recent changes made to it, by 15 February. Read More

William Elisabeth Cuthbert. A nonprofit is trying to get the FDA to approve crucial methods of gender-affirming care. Its battle will be even more important in Trump’s second term. The post Trans Healthcare Is Under Siege. These People Are Fighting Back. appeared first on The Nation. Read More

The Biden administration will leave it to Trump to enforce the TikTok ban.Congress ruled last year that Chinese firm ByteDance should sell TikTok or see it banned.Trump takes office on January 20, the day after the deadline for ByteDance to sell. President Joe Biden's administration is not planning to implement the TikTok ban set to take effect on Sunday. Read More

Verdicts against trio suggest legal representatives are latest target of Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent. Russia has sentenced three lawyers who had defended Alexei Navalny to several years in prison for bringing messages from the late opposition leader from prison to the outside world. The case, which comes amid a widespread crackdown on dissent during the Ukraine offensive, has alarmed rights groups that fear Moscow will ramp up trials against legal representatives in addition to jailing their clients. Read More

Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Market moves: Stocks were poised to close out the week on a strong note. Friday's gains put the S & P 500 on track for a weekly gain of more than 3%, a feat it hasn't done since the election. There was a lot of angst in the market last Friday about inflation and rising interest rates after the Labor Department reported a big increase in jobs for December. The resilience of the labor market and concerns about sticky inflation even led some prognosticators to suggest the Federal Reserve may be forced to raise interest rates at some later this year. But what a difference a week makes — the market breathed a sigh of relief after back-to-back days of cooler-than-expected inflation reports, which caused the 10-year Treasury yield to plummet and stock to soar. Winners: Cyclicals and economically sensitive stocks were the big winners this week. The top-performing sectors were materials, energy, and financials. The two materials stocks in the portfolio — DuPont and Linde — both outperformed the broader S & P 500. Linde caught an upgrade to buy from hold from TD Cowen on Monday. The stock has gained over 4% year to date after a 2% advance in 2024. DuPont said Wednesday it moved up its breakup timeline to Nov. 1 but will only separate its electronics business. The company, which won't spin off its water operations after all, also reaffirmed its fourth-quarter outlook, an update we viewed positively because the stock was acting like a miss was coming. Wolfe Research upgraded its DuPont rating to an outperform buy on Friday. DuPont has gained more than 2%... Read More

Officers said pilot had bloodshot eyes and smelled of alcohol before planned flight from Savannah to Chicago. Police at a Georgia airport arrested an airline pilot on a DUI charge as he was making pre-flight checks aboard a Southwest Airlines flight with bloodshot eyes and reeking of what smelled like alcohol, according to a police report. Passengers had boarded the Southwest Airlines flight from Savannah to Chicago and were awaiting takeoff on Wednesday morning when police boarded the plane and took the pilot away in handcuffs. Read More

A rocket from Elon Musk's SpaceX exploded spectacularly during a test flight on Thursday. As one might expect, that caused some issues with air travel. The Federal Aviation Administration told TechCrunch that it briefly had "slow and divert a number of aircraft" that were flying near the area. Flightradar24 data showed a number of aircraft slowing or changing course in airspace near Puerto Rico. Jet Blue had to delay a couple of flights to San Juan while American Airlines had to divert fewer than 10 flights, CNBC reported. Read More

Culture secretary announces investment in arts at Gateshead summit and accuses Tories of stifling creative industries. • UK politics live – latest updates. Arts and the creative industries will be a key part of the UK government’s drive for economic growth, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has said as she promised to “bulldoze” barriers that hold back potential. Nandy gave a speech in Gateshead where she vowed to “turbocharge” the nation’s creative industries, whether film, television, music, fashion, theatre or video games. Read More

Number of families that are still separated remains unclear, and a previous ruling offers separated families few protections from future deportation. In summer 2017, the Trump administration began quietly separating families at the US-Mexico border. Under the “zero-tolerance” policy formally announced months later, federal immigration authorities removed children as young as four months old from parents or adults who were seeking asylum. The administration didn’t announce any plans for reunification. As Trump 2.0 grows closer and closer, so does the unease of the lawyers and advocates who have spent years locating, representing and reuniting these families. Organizations Justice in Motion, Kids in Need of Defense and the Women’s Refugee Commission, along with the global private law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, formed a court-appointed steering committee after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the 2018 class action lawsuit Ms L v US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop separations at the southern border. While a judge halted Trump’s policy, some families still remain separated. Read More

Aides signal his address will be noticeably more upbeat compared to grim ‘American carnage’ speech in 2017.Who’s on the Trump inauguration guest list? Donald Trump’s aides have signaled that Monday’s inauguration speech will strike a noticeably more upbeat tone than his equivalent address eight years ago, when he talked darkly about “American carnage” and depicted the US as a country riddled by violent crime, drugs and economic degradation. News website Axios cited Trump associates as saying “light” and “unity” would be the guiding themes – exemplified by a “one America, one light” prayer service for donors. Read More

Tech might not be the first thing that comes to mind when one pictures Phoenix. The city is better known for its golf courses, Major League Baseball's Spring Training, retirement appeal and scorching heat. But its growth into an innovation hub has been quietly playing out over several decades. Arizona's largest city has, for a variety of reasons, become the epicenter for semiconductor manufacturing, and testing self-driving cars and drones. Read More

TikTok said its services will go dark Sunday unless the Biden administration gives a definitive statement providing assurances for the app's service providers. Read More

BBC As Mzwandile Mkwayi was lowered into the South African mine in a red metal cage attached to a hoist above ground, the first thing that struck him was the smell. "Let me tell you something," he tells the BBC, "those bodies really smelled bad". Read More

Scientists who recently discovered that metal lumps on the dark seabed make oxygen, have announced plans to study the deepest parts of Earth's oceans in order to understand the strange phenomenon. Their mission could "change the way we look at the possibility of life on other planets too," the researchers say. Read More

Many modern and popular parenting techniques place a high emphasis on attending to our kids' emotions.I give my daughter space when she experiences big emotional outbursts.I want her to learn that emotions are passing sensations. I could see the emotional monsoon coming from a mile away. That's why, as we approached the house, I gently warned my daughter that we would need to take her rainboots off before going inside. She continued splashing through the puddles in our driveway, either unable or unwilling to hear me. Sure enough, when we entered the garage and sat down to take off our shoes, a torrent of tears erupted. Read More

Starship test sent orange-glowing shards streaking over northern Caribbean and forced airlines to divert flights. The US Federal Aviation Administration and officials from the Turks and Caicos Islands have launched investigations into SpaceX’s explosive Starship rocket test that sent debris streaking over the northern Caribbean and forced airlines to divert dozens of flights. “There are no reports of public injury, and the FAA is working with SpaceX and appropriate authorities to confirm reports of public property damage on Turks and Caicos,” said the FAA, which oversees private rocket launch activity. Read More

Getty Images The Israeli and Hamas negotiators never came face to face - but by the end, just one floor separated them. Ceasefire talks via middlemen from Qatar, Egypt and the US had been dragging on for several months, at times without hope. Now the key players were all inside one building in Doha and the pace was frantic. Read More

When you buy through our links, Business Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more From the casinos to the shows, shops, and museums, there are many reasons more than 40 million travelers are drawn to Las Vegas every year. But while hotels are often right in the action, Airbnbs in Las Vegas offers perks not in traditional accommodations. From gourmet kitchens and quiet cul-de-sacs to group-friendly homes with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, the right Airbnb can give travelers a comfortable home base to venture from. And, in some cases, Airbnb can be more affordable than the cost of a Vegas strip hotel. Read More

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian) So, because Washington is going to be in the deep freeze on Monday, they're swearing him in at a podium in the Capitol rotunda, the place that his more fervent fans desecrated on January 6, 2021. History is playing a joke on us all, a prank that echoes through the sad history of the last decade of American politics. Maybe he could dress up with a buffalo-head hat and a spear. He could hand out zip ties as souvenirs. From Politico: Read More

Doctors say the flu season is probably the worst it's been in a decade. The CDC says at least 12 million illnesses and 6,600 deaths have been reported. And hospitals are feeling the strain of treating seriously ill patients. NBC News' Anne Thompson went inside an intensive care unit in Nashville. Read More

"Back in Action" is Cameron Diaz's first film role in over a decade.Unfortunately, it's a poor comeback vehicle with rough dialogue and a thin plot.The film works fine as a casual watch, but not much else. "Back in Action" is Cameron Diaz's first film role in over a decade. She should have made a better choice for a comeback. Read More

A patriot and leader, Mr. Paul Mango touched the lives of many, leaving behind a tremendous legacy and an inspiring beacon for all fighting for a healthy America. Read More

Doorbell camera captures footage of space rock hitting house entranceway, producing cloud of smoke and crackle. A doorbell camera on a Canadian home has captured rare video and sound of a meteorite striking Earth as it crashed into a couple’s walkway. When Laura Kelly and her partner returned home after an evening walk, they were surprised to find their walkway littered with dust and strange debris, according to the Meteoritical Society, which posted the video with its report. Read More

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images The Department of Justice said Friday that it sued pharmacy giant Walgreens for allegedly dispensing millions of unlawful prescriptions. The DOJ said that Walgreens from August 2012 until the present "knowingly" filled those prescriptions, which "lacked a legitimate medical purpose, were not valid, and/or were not issued in the usual course of professional practice." Read More

Each year I dust off my crystal ball and attempt to divine what lies ahead for the healthcare industry. With an eye toward assessing the state of the industry and fine-tuning my crystal ball, I’ve decided to revisit my predictions about what we could expect in 2024. What I’ve discovered is that I’m sometimes wrong, sometimes right, and always surprised by the rate of change in what is undoubtedly one of America’s most dynamic industries. So, without further ado, let’s see which of my bold predictions hit the mark and which ones were as off-target as a broken stethoscope. Read More

The US has grounded SpaceX's giant Starship rocket while an investigation is carried out into why it exploded during its latest test flight. The rocket's upper stage dramatically broke up and disintegrated over the Caribbean after launching from Texas on Thursday, forcing airline flights to alter course to avoid falling debris. Read More

As fears grow of a possible bird flu pandemic in humans, the federal government is pouring more money into the development of new vaccines, including an mRNA shot. Read More

Populist leader allegedly had a child with a teen girl in 2016, which would constitute statutory rape under Bolivian law. A Bolivian judge has ordered the arrest of the former president Evo Morales over his alleged abuse of a teenage girl while in office, raising the stakes in the state’s months-long showdown with the former leader. The judge in the southern city of Tarija called for Morales, 65, to be arrested after Bolivia’s first Indigenous president ducked out of a hearing on his possible pretrial detention for a second time. Read More

The billionaire Frank McCourt is launching a “people’s bid” to buy the app, replace its addictive algorithm, and give users greater control of their data. Is it a publicity stunt or a sincere attempt to reform the digital age? Read More

Extension keeps Staley at South Carolina until 2030Gamecocks have won three NCAA titles under coach Coach Dawn Staley received a contract extension on Friday that South Carolina said will make her the highest paid college women’s basketball coach of all time at a total value of about $25m. Staley is signed through the 2029-30 season, earning $4m a year to start with an annual $250,000 escalator. There’s also a $500,000 signing bonus, the school announced. Read More

Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Equifax $15 million over errors tied to consumer credit reports, alleging the company failed to conduct proper investigations of disputed information, the federal watchdog announced Friday. Equifax is one of three major credit reporting agencies in the U.S., a group that also includes Experian and TransUnion. Read More

The Biden administration announced Friday that a record 24.2 million Americans enrolled in individual coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said 24.2 million selected plans through the individual-market marketplace, also known as Obamacare, for plan year 2025 coverage. Last year, more than 21 million people signed up for coverage for 2024, setting a record. Read More

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Digital Currency Group, the crypto firm founded by Barry Silbert, and the former executive of a defunct unit are paying the SEC $38.5 million for misleading investors. In a statement on Friday, the agency said that DCG and Soichiro "Michael" Moro, the ex-CEO of crypto lender Genesis Global Capital, will pay the civil penalties to settle charges for misleading investors about Genesis's financial condition." Read More

The FAA grounded SpaceX's Starship pending an investigation into the failure that caused the rocket to break apart midflight after launching on Thursday. Read More

Katie Rose Quandt. They believe a new sentence of life without parole will hurt their legal chances. The post “Death Is Different”: Why 2 Men Are Fighting Against Biden's Commutation appeared first on The Nation. Read More

DETROIT -- A Chicago man has been convicted in the theft of $700,000 from a Michigan casino, a brazen scheme in which an employee was tricked over the phone into stuffing the cash into a designer bag and driving 85 miles (137 kilometers) to deliver it. “This case underscores the need for businesses, organizations and citizens to be diligent and cautious about phone and internet scams,” U.S. Attorney Mark Totten said. Read More

SAVE 75%: As of Jan. 17, score a two-pack of Skullcandy Indy Evo true wireless Bluetooth earbuds for $34.99. That's a 75% discount or $104.99 off the list price. What’s better than owning one pair of wireless earbuds? Getting two for the price of one. Read More

Asset management giant Vanguard has been fined more than $100 million to settle charges related to disclosures around target date investment funds, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Friday. The violations stem from a 2020 change where Vanguard lowered the minimum investment requirement for its institutional target date funds. The SEC order found that the change spurred redemptions as Vanguard customers moved from other target date funds into the institutional versions, creating taxable distributions for some of the remaining shareholders. The SEC said Vanguard failed to properly disclose the nature of those distributions. Read More

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images The Federal Trade Commission said Friday that it is suing PepsiCo for illegal price discrimination, alleging the food and beverage giant gave an unnamed retailer more favorable prices than its competition. Walmart is the unnamed retailer, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Read More

GET DOUBLE KINDLE POINTS: As of Jan. 17, get double Kindle Points for each Kindle purchase, today only. Are you a voracious reader? Looking to get paid back for some of the money you spend on Kindle books? Amazon's Kindle Rewards program lets you earn points per dollar spent on Kindle e-books, and print books as well. You can redeem earned points for rewards and discounts (to buy even more books)/. And today, you can stock up on Kindle books and earn more points right now. Read More

Trump will be sworn in for his second non-consecutive White House term in the Capitol Rotunda, as a result of expected frigid weather in Washington, D.C. Read More

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