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A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter’s cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege.

The 15-year-old girl at the center of a case, which quickly gained national attention in the US over the weekend, was reportedly kidnapped in the Houston suburb of Porter. Her parents said she took her dog for a walk and had not returned by the time she was supposed to, according to a statement from the Montgomery county sheriff’s office.

Her father subsequently located her phone through the device’s parental controls, the agency’s statement said. The phone was about 2 miles (3.2km) away from him in a secluded, partly wooded area in neighboring Harris county.

Deputies said the father headed to that spot and found his daughter as well as her dog inside a pickup truck with a partly nude man inside. She then managed to escape with a hand from her father, who called law enforcement officials, said the statement from the Montgomery sheriff’s office.

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.

The Trump administration has launched investigations into the use of diversity initiatives in hiring and promotion at major U.S. companies, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Google and Verizon are among a list of companies that have received Justice Department demands for documents and information about their workplace programs, the report said, citing people familiar with the investigations.

The probes are being conducted under the False Claims Act, the report said, adding that companies under scrutiny include sectors like automotive, pharmaceuticals, defense, and utilities, and some have met in person with Justice Department officials.

The False Claims Act is a federal civil law that allows the government to recover funds lost due to fraud.

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.

A year after the state blocked transgender Texans from updating their state IDs, it has collected information on more than 100 people who have tried. Officials won’t say what they’re using the list for.

The state of Texas has continued collecting information on transgender drivers seeking to change the sex listed on their licenses, creating a list of more than 100 people in one year.

According to internal documents The Texas Newsroom obtained through records requests, the Texas Department of Public Safety has amassed a list of 110 people who tried to update their gender between August 2024 and August 2025. Employees with driver's license offices across the state, from El Paso to Paris to Plano, reported the names and license numbers of these people to a special agency email account. Identifying information was redacted from the records released to The Texas Newsroom.

The data was collected after Texas stopped allowing drivers to update the gender on their licenses unless it was to fix a clerical error. It is unclear what the state is doing with this information.

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.

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.

Built as a “flying mansion,” the first Boeing 747-8 BBJ flew just 30 hours before being scrapped in Arizona—showing how efficiency now outweighs extravagance in aviation.

#Aviation #Boeing747 #PrivateJets #LuxuryAviation #AircraftBoneyard

Russian pupils are being presented with an ultra-nationalist curriculum, full of militarism and hatred toward Ukraine. The young teacher Pavel Talankin filmed the indoctrination of Russian children and smuggled the footage abroad for a documentary.

With his camera, this teacher documents life at a school in the Russian provinces. He shows how, after the invasion of Ukraine, propaganda and nationalism gradually seep into education. He has now fled the country.

While recording how the school carries out the government’s directives, he realizes he now has unique footage. Through contacts he gets in touch with an American director. Together they decide to make a documentary: “Mr. Nobody Against Putin.”

Since the invasion of Ukraine, new textbooks have been written in Russia in which the war against Ukraine is justified and excused. President Putin is rewriting history and shaping a new generation of loyal Putin supporters.

Meanwhile, the performance of ordinary students is declining, as becomes clear during staff meetings.

Talankin films everything, including the visit from the controversial Wagner Group and the forced military drills, such as shooting practice and grenade throwing.

To make this film, he had to flee, because criticizing President Putin’s new education policy is simply not possible in Russia.

United States is offering Ukraine security guarantees for a period of 15 years as part of a proposed peace plan, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday, though he said he would prefer an American commitment of up to 50 years to deter Russia from further attempts to seize its neighbor’s land by force.

Donald Trump hosted Zelenskyy at his Florida resort on Sunday and insisted that Ukraine and Russia are “closer than ever before” to a peace settlement.

Negotiators are still searching for a breakthrough on key issues, however, including whose forces withdraw from where and the fate of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, one of the 10 biggest in the world. Trump noted that the monthslong U.S.-led negotiations could still collapse.

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.

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.”

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.”

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

Let's Streisand this.

HOW MANY PEOPLE will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)