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This year’s job market has been bleak, to say the least. Layoffs hit the highest level in 14 years; job openings are barely budging; and quits figures are plummeting. It’s no wonder people feel stuck and discouraged—especially as many candidates have been on the job hunt for a year.

But some mid-career professionals are working with the cards they’ve been dealt by going back to school. Many are turning to data analytics, cybersecurity, AI-focused courses, health care, MBA programs, or trade certifications for an “immediate impact on their careers,” Metaintro CEO Lacey Kaelani told Fortune.

But while grad school can certainly offer the opportunity to level-up your career once you’ve completed a program, it comes with financial and personal sacrifices, like time. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, one year of grad school, on average, costs about $43,000 in tuition. That’s nearly 70% of the average salary in the U.S.

Tech billionaires are making plans to bail on California ahead a possible ballot measure that would tax their assets to help pay for healthcare.

Sources told the New York Times that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has explored spending more time outside California and opening an office for his Los Angeles-based personal investment firm, Thiel Capital, in another state.

US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.

Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.

“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”

An Oklahoma man who was doing target practice in his backyard on Christmas is believed to have shot and killed an elderly woman a few blocks from his home, authorities said.

Cody Wayne Adams, 33, has been charged with first-degree manslaughter in connection with the deadly shooting, court filings show.

The victim was on a covered front porch with family members at a residence in Comanche when she was shot Thursday afternoon, according to the probable cause affidavit. She was holding a baby in her left arm while seated on a love seat when she was struck in her right upper arm, according to the affidavit. The bullet then entered her chest cavity, it said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s complaint about being under a gag order on Saturday in its case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the Trump administration illegally deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador earlier this year, likely violated the court order.

Tricia McLaughlin, the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the DHS, said that Abrego Garcia being able to make viral TikTok posts was unfair in a rant on X: “American justice ceases to function when its arbiters silence law enforcement and give megaphones to those who oppose our legal system.”

But this “gag order” isn’t specific to Abrego Garcia’s case. As a Saturday court filing states, local criminal rule in the Middle District of Tennessee already blocks DOJ and DHS employees from making extrajudicial remarks that will ‘have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing” a defendant’s right to a fair trial. In other words, it is not politically motivated.

McLaughlin’s post boosted another post calling Abrego Garcia an “MS-13 terrorist.” The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of MS-13, which a federal judge has ruled as unfounded.

It was a wake-up call for America. In January, Donald Trump took the oath of office, declared himself “saved by God to make America great again” and issued a barrage of executive orders. In the ensuing months the US president and his allies moved at breakneck speed and seemed indomitable.

But as 2025 draws to a close with Trump struggling to stay awake at meetings, the prevailing image is of a driver asleep at the wheel. Opinion polls suggest that Americans are turning against him. Republicans are heading for the exit ahead of congressional contests next November that look bleak for the president’s party.

“He came into office and, like a blitzkrieg, was violating laws and the constitution,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The American political process is slow-moving and so he was able to do things that were extraordinary.

“But this is a guy whose legacy may well be the political collapse of Republicans in this era. Put another way, rather than asking who is going to be the inheritor of the Trump mantle and the so-called Maga movement, we may be talking in a year or so about which candidates can escape the odious distinction of having been connected with Trump.”

A new study suggests that distressed borrowers using a simpler bankruptcy process are succeeding — and that more people like them should try.

The process which enables this was introduced during the Biden administration.

Here is an internet archive copy of the segment that aired in Candada.

Let's Streisand this.

A Virginia man was charged with planting the bombs outside Democratic and Republican headquarters. Court documents show he believed that the 2020 election had been “tampered with.”

THE HOUSE WAS debating a powerful National Security Agency spying program when Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., rose to side against privacy hawks.

The spring 2024 debate was over forcing the feds to get a warrant to search foreign communications for intelligence on Americans. Doing so would cost crucial time, Goldman said, citing his own tenure as a federal prosecutor.

“Based on that experience, I can say with confidence that requiring a warrant would render this program unusable and entirely worthless,” he said last year. “Even if it were possible, the time required to obtain a search warrant from a judge would frequently fail to meet the urgency posed by a terrorist or other national security threat.”

Goldman’s argument won the day.

With his election victory last November, Donald Trump would inherit the warrantless surveillance powers.

A drummer and vibraphone player, [Chuck] Redd has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William “Keter” Betts. In an email Wednesday to The Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the renaming.

Two helicopters crashed midair in New Jersey on Sunday, killing one person and critically injuring another, authorities say.

Hammonton Police Chief Kevin Friel said rescuers responded to a report of an aviation crash at about 11:25 a.m. Video from the scene shows a helicopter spinning rapidly to the ground. Police and fire crews subsequently extinguished flames that engulfed one of the helicopters.

The Federal Aviation Administration described the crash as a midair collision between an Enstrom F-28A helicopter and Enstrom 280C helicopter over Hammonton Municipal Airport. Only the pilots were on board each aircraft.

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/1Bu8V

The latest release of Jeffrey Epstein documents includes an FBI report about a caller's claim of a suspicious death in Kiefer, Oklahoma, in January 2000.

The caller said a woman was found with her head "blown off" in the small town in northeast Oklahoma days after reporting to police she had been raped by Epstein and Donald Trump. The caller described the death as a murder.

The FBI report was in the nearly 30,000 new documents released by the U.S. Justice Department on Dec. 23.

Elon Musk took to his social media site on Friday to decry New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s pick to lead the city’s fire department, claiming that she couldn’t do the job. The commissioner-to-be, Lillian Bonsignore, is a 31-year FDNY veteran who led the department’s emergency medical services during the Covid-19 pandemic. She will be the second woman to hold the position and the first openly gay person to lead the department.

That was enough for Musk to weigh in. “People will die because of this,” he wrote, adding, “Proven experience matters when lives are at stake.”

As Gothamist reported, before her retirement in 2022, Bonsignore was both the highest-ranking uniformed woman in FDNY history and the first woman to achieve a four-star rank. At the press conference announcing her appointment, Mamdani praised Bonsignore, saying that “her record speaks for itself,” before detailing her career in the city that spanned from before 9/11 through the worst of the pandemic.

Musk is the richest person on the planet and a rabid opponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures, or DEI. He appeared to be claiming that the new head of the FDNY was a diversity hire. He’s written: “Time for DEI to DIE,” “DEI has caused people to DIE,” “DEI is a Civil Rights Act violation,” “DEI kills art,” “DEI puts the lives of your loved ones at risk,” and “DEI is just another word for racism,” amongst his other previous observations about these efforts.