Politics

Mr. Carr said that NPR and PBS stations operate as noncommercial broadcast organizations, but that they may be airing “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” Mr. Carr wrote, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”

The letter is the latest action from President Trump’s allies to target NPR and PBS stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a taxpayer-funded organization that backs them. Executives at NPR and PBS stations have been bracing for a potential battle over government funding, gaming out financial worst-case scenarios.

Trump administration to cancel visas of international students involved in pro-Palestinian campus protests

The tragedy comes less than a month after the start of his presidency and just days after the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of Defense. The Federal Aviation Administration is, at the moment, leaderless.

Michael Whitaker assumed the post in 2023 and announced his intention to resign back in December following Trump’s victory. Whitaker was a vocal critic of SpaceX and had chastised Elon Musk’s space program for skirting safety regulations. The only way to bring them to heel, he said, was to levy massive fines. Musk told him to resign from the FAA in a post on X. Whitaker did just that, leaving his post on January 20.

On ballots that went out last week, voters have two choices to make to determine the future of Seattle’s newest plan for housing.

The first is whether the developer should be funded at all. The next choice — regardless of the previous answer — is how.

Option 1A is with a new employer tax on all salaries over $1 million a year. Backers hope the 5% tax would raise as much as $50 million a year to be spent on buying and, eventually, developing housing that would be cost-controlled and owned by taxpayers.

Option 1B is to fund the developer with $10 million a year in existing city funding — specifically the city’s JumpStart tax on large corporations in Seattle.

In collaboration with the White House, Republican leaders in the Florida Legislature revamped and approved a bill on Tuesday that seeks tougher penalties on undocumented immigrants that commit crimes — and removes much of the governor’s authority over immigration, an issue that Ron DeSantis has made a cornerstone of his legacy in Florida.

The legislation — nicknamed the TRUMP Act — was amended to include several new provisions that House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton said were suggested by the Trump administration. They said the changes will align the state’s immigration laws to the new changes ushered in by President Donald Trump to identify and deport scores of people who are in the country illegally.

Notably, Republican leaders are stripping much of the governor’s immigration oversight authority and giving it to Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, a Republican statewide elected official. DeSantis has railed against this move, saying that putting the official who oversees farming in charge of immigration would be like putting the “fox in charge of the hen house.”

Federal agencies must "temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance," and any other programs that included "DEI, woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal," Vaeth wrote.

Vaeth suggested that the pause would last until at least mid-February, asking agencies to provide a detailed report on the programmes that have been affected by 10 February.

He specifies that Medicare and Social Security benefits are not included in the pause. Other programmes through which aid "is received directly by individuals" are also exempt.

But it remains uncertain how much money is involved. The memo suggests that the federal government spent $10tn (£8tn) in fiscal year 2024, more than $3tn of which went to federal financial assistance. But the source of those numbers is unclear. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the government spent $6.7tn that year.

More than two years after ProPublica sued the Navy over its failure to provide public access to military courts, the Department of Defense has for the first time directed U.S. military branches to give advance public notice of preliminary hearings, a crucial milestone in criminal cases.

These “Article 32” hearings end with a recommendation about whether the case should move forward, be dismissed or end in a nonjudicial punishment.

DOD General Counsel Caroline Krass issued the guidance earlier this year, directing the secretaries of the Navy, Army, Air Force and Homeland Security (which oversees the Coast Guard) to post upcoming preliminary hearings, provide access to certain court records and publish results of military trials — known as courts-martial — on a public website.

But legal experts say the new guidance falls short of the conditions laid out in a federal law requiring the military to dramatically increase public access to its justice system.

Workers at a Whole Foods in Philadelphia are on track to be the first in company history to be represented by a labor union after a majority voted Monday to join the local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

According to the National Labor Relations Board, 130 workers voted to be represented by UFCW, while 100 voted against, out of nearly 300 eligible employees. Now, said NLRB's Teddy Quinn, "The employer must begin bargaining in good faith with the union."

A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.

Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.

The new rules would require legal guardians to provide proof of citizenship to enroll their students in Oklahoma's public school system.

It will also require schools to document how many students could not provide proof of citizenship.