As a welcome gift, the prime minister presented the US president with 250 cherry trees to commemorate the upcoming 250th US anniversary. This is a guy who paved over the Rose Garden, commented Kimmel. What is he going to do with 250 cherry trees? He'll probably use them to build a Waffle House or something.
Extreme flexibility will be required this championship season. Participating schools should expect 100% screening, catering for flights over three hours, and assigned departure date and times based on game date and aircraft efficiency, for the first week of the tournament.
Too many travelers are having to wait in extraordinarily long and painfully slow lines at checkpoints, wrote the CEOs of American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Alaska Airlines and others in an open letter to Congress. They added: First, leaders should immediately come together to reach an agreement to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Then they need to act so this problem never happens again.
U.S. economic growth cooled significantly in the fourth quarter of 2025, which the Trump administration attributed to last fall's record-long federal government shutdown and softer consumer spending. Gross domestic product rose at a 1.4 percent seasonally adjusted, inflation-adjusted annual rate in the final three months of last year, the Commerce Department said Friday, well below the 2.5 percent pace expected by economists.
A dispute over whether federal immigration agents should be allowed to wear masks during enforcement operations has become one of the biggest obstacles to keeping the Department of Homeland Security funded, pushing the government toward a partial shutdown early Saturday. Democrats have described the practice as corrosive to public trust, arguing that masked agents create the appearance of a "secret police" force. Republican lawmakers, President Trump and his top advisors, meanwhile, have drawn a hard line against requiring officers to remove their face coverings, insisting that doing so would expose them to harassment, threats and online doxxing.
A likely partial government shutdown after Friday would impair the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's operations, leading to diminished capabilities in critical areas including cyber response, security assessments, stakeholder engagements, training exercises and special event planning, a top official said this week. CISA would furlough a majority of its workforce and just one-third would remain on the job under shutdown conditions, agency acting director Madhu Gottumukkala told House appropriators on Wednesday.
The monthly jobs report, a Friday tradition, is coming out this morning, five days later than originally scheduled due to the partial government shutdown. Economists expect the US added 65,000 jobs in January and unemployment remained at 4.4%. Investors are looking at the January jobs report to see if the job market has continued stabilizing following a difficult 2025. The US added only 584,000 jobs last year, the lowest employment growth since 2003, excluding recessions.
A fiscal centerpiece of President Donald Trump's agenda so far has been his pledge to lower taxes, and Americans are close to seeing healthy refunds from their 2026 filings. But actually seeing those returns show up on time might not be so straightforward, according to a recent federal watchdog report, largely due to another of Trump's signature policy stances. The Trump administration's purge of the federal bureaucracy last year did not spare the Internal Revenue Service, the agency responsible for collecting taxes and processing returns.
The US dollar traded in a consolidation phase on Wednesday, as a partial government shutdown continues to delay key economic releases and keeps investors in a wait-and-see mode. With job data postponed, markets are temporarily deprived of fresh evidence on the health of the US labour market, limiting directional moves in the market. Markets could react to new data, including the ISM Services PMI figures release later today.
During the previous government shutdown, President Trump reveled in the chance to fire federal workers, expand his executive authority, and steer taxpayer dollars toward his allies and away from his perceived political enemies. After a record-setting 43 days of gridlock-during which Trump pursued those goals with varying degrees of success-several Democrats abandoned their quest to force Republicans to negotiate a health-care deal, and voted to end the shutdown.
Ben Casselman reporting for the New York Times: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release monthly jobs numbers on Friday as scheduled because of the partial government shutdown, said Emily Liddel, an associate commissioner for the bureau. The report, one of the most closely watched economic indicators each month, would have provided data on job growth, unemployment and wages in January, as well as annual revisions to employment estimates from 2024 and 2025.
Trump weighed in with a social media post, telling them "There can be NO CHANGES at this time." "We will work together in good faith to address the issues that have been raised, but we cannot have another long, pointless, and destructive Shutdown that will hurt our Country so badly - One that will not benefit Republicans or Democrats. I hope everyone will vote, YES!," Trump wrote on his social media site.
The Senate passed a federal funding bill package on Friday, but temporarily blocked any additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), triggering another government shutdown. But unlike the shutdown that began in October, which lasted a record 43 days, this one won't force the Smithsonian Institution or the National Gallery of Art to close-and it's expected to be resolved quickly.
