President says morality ‘the only thing that can stop me’ in New York Times interview on limits to his authority

Ever since the final episode of Stranger Things streamed on Netflix on New Year’s Eve, a fan theory dubbed “Conformity Gate” has been circulating on social media.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: if a broadcaster or newspaper had started publishing thousands of non-consensual, sexually explicit images of women or — even worse — of children, politicians and regulators would be out for blood. It would be a front-page, ongoing scandal and the organization responsible would be quickly brought to heel because it would be so outrageous. But when Elon Musk and his chatbot Grok do it, there’s somehow little more than crickets. Politicians are alarmed and say something needs to be done, but can’t quite say what that something is. Regulators say they’re investigating, as thousands more women and children are victimized while the richest man in the world continues treating the whole situation like a big game — or simulation. Since Musk took over Twitter and mutated it into X back in 2022, the platform has taken a hard turn to the right, blasting conspiratorial and right-wing opinions into its users feed and encouraging the kind of vile discourses Musk seems to delight in consuming and engaging with. It has restored far-right accounts and sought to explicitly shape the narratives on issues to align with Musk’s increasingly extreme political positions. There has been reason to take action against X for a long time. But if spinning up a chatbot that enables the creation of child pornography and for any user to undress any woman on the platform at their whim isn’t enough to finally ban it, what will ever force regulators and political leaders to take action?

Minneapolis Public Schools on Wednesday canceled classes district-wide for the remainder of the week “due to safety concerns,” following the killing of a woman Wednesday by an ICE agent. The district said it was acting “out of an abundance of caution.” The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 is Jonathan Ross, the same officer who was dragged and injured by a fleeing driver in a separate incident last year, according to a person with knowledge of the case and verified by court documents. Little public information is available about Ross, described only by federal officials as “an experienced” officer. On Wednesday morning, Ross was embedded with a group of federal agents on a targeted crackdown in south Minneapolis when Renee Nicole Good was shot. ICE has not reported the identity of the shooter and did not respond to request for comment for this story.

Law enforcement has more tools than ever to track your movements and access your communications. Here’s how to protect your privacy if you plan to protest.

The New York Times published a story covering the death of trans athlete, Lia Smith, but takes no responsibility for the ways their coverage of trans issues has fed the moral panic that caused it.

Federal authorities say an ICE agent, “fearing for his his life” killed a protester during a confrontation Wednesday in south Minneapolis. City officials are expected to speak at 12:15 p.m. A witness to Wednesday’s shooting in south Minneapolis told MPR News that she saw a federal agent shoot a woman several times. Emily Heller lives near 33rd and Portland and said she woke up to a commotion outside her home. She said she saw a car blocking traffic on Portland Avenue that appeared to be part of a protest against federal law enforcement operations. Heller said she heard ICE agents telling the driver, a woman, to “get out of here.” “She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” Heller said.

The U.S. Department of Justice has suffered another setback in its efforts to subpoena providers of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in order to obtain patient information and details about the treatments they were provided. U.S. Magistrate Judge Cyrus Chung in Denver on Monday recommended that an administrative subpoena the Justice Department served on Children’s Hospital Colorado in July be quashed because it was issued for the improper purpose of pressuring the pediatric hospital into ending transgender care. "The Executive Branch cannot engage in new lawmaking on its own and, thus, until and unless Congress creates a statute justifying it, a purpose of investigating the legal activity of gender-affirming care — let alone ending it — cannot ground a legitimate investigation," he wrote. Chung said he was joining a "chorus" of judges nationally who have blocked the Justice Department's efforts to subpoena providers of gender-affirming care, after at least five other judges in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington state ruled against it in similar cases.

Austin Peay State University will pay one of its professors $500,000 after initially firing him for a social media post made in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death.

If you made a million dollars robbing a bank, and were caught by the police, would you get away with merely promising never to do it again? Forget about how you would probably have to spend time in jail: Would you be able to keep the million dollars? Unfortunately for you, intrepid bank robber, you are not a corporation with a phalanx of lobbyists and a law enforcement adversary that doesn’t want to crimp your style. On Monday, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division issued a holiday news dump, settling with algorithmic price-setting company RealPage, which was accused of colluding with landlords to raise rents. None of the nearly dozen states that have sued RealPage agreed to the settlement, and for good reason: It does not ask for any disgorgement (a fancy term for giving back ill-gotten gains), nor does it include an admission of guilt. The settlement superficially adds restrictions to RealPage’s use of nonpublic information to raise prices. But again, this is the bank robber promising not to do it again, rather than returning the loot. And RealPage has already explored new horizons in creative price-setting maneuvers. In fact, RealPage’s attorney said that the settlement “bless[es] the legality of RealPage’s prior and planned product changes.”

State officials are failing to protect the health and safety of thousands of young field laborers, an investigation has found.

A new book explores the long-festering neo-Nazi subculture of Southern California — and its accelerating creep across the country.

A treatment that blocks an age-related protein restored cartilage in aging and injured joints by reprogramming existing cells rather than using stem cells. Researchers at Stanford Medicine report that blocking a protein linked to aging can restore cartilage that naturally wears away in the knees of older mice. In the study, the injectable treatment not only rebuilt cartilage but also stopped arthritis from developing after knee injuries similar to ACL tears, which are common among athletes and active adults. A pill-based version of the same therapy is already being tested in clinical trials aimed at treating muscle weakness associated with aging. Human knee tissue collected during joint replacement surgeries also responded positively to the treatment. These samples, which include both the joint’s supporting extracellular scaffolding, or matrix, and cartilage-producing chondrocyte cells, began forming new cartilage that functioned normally. Together, these findings point to the possibility that cartilage lost through aging or arthritis could one day be restored using a localized injection or an oral medication, potentially eliminating the need for knee or hip replacement surgery.

The new U.S. guidelines recommend all children get vaccines for 11 diseases, compared with the 18, including Covid, previously on the schedule.

A Chicago-based McDonald’s is facing a class-action lawsuit over the McRib sandwich, accusing the corporation of misleading customers with claims that it contains actual pork rib meat. The lawsuit, filed on Dec. 23, 2025 in U.S. District Court in Chicago and viewed by Global News, said that McDonald’s has “cultivated a sense of anticipation around the McRib, leveraging its scarcity to drive sales across its many locations.”

An apartment in Trois-Rivières, about two hours east of Montreal, has been nicknamed the "ice castle" after a tenant left the property and turned off the heat.

Not one but two letters were sent from the Pentagon to a Toronto-based sex toy store, found inside the boxes of returned adult items that had somehow made their way to a U.S naval base in Bahrain. The letters were received over the span of about a month over the summer, Bonjibon co-founder Grace Bennett recalled, amusedly. “We didn’t even know it (the product) was going to Bahrain until it came back to us months later, and it just kind of unraveled this whole … hilarious moment,” the 34-year-old said in an interview with CTV News Toronto. The online sexual wellness store shipped worldwide when they first launched in 2019, but Bennett says they now mostly service Canada, the United States, South America, Europe and Asia due to various laws and regulations about what items can be imported to countries—including Bahrain.

A stolen Cinnamon Capuchin monkey that caused chaos inside a business in Tennessee has been captured and is on his back home, authorities say. Hamblen County Animal Control told NBC affiliate 10News that the monkey, whose name is Chester, was recovered after spending several hours loose in Morristown, Tenn.

Amid a wave of hype for OpenAI's chatbot, the newly reported death shows stark risks