The first round of December Social Security payments for retirees, now capped at $5,108, will be issued in five days. When will payments arrive? Retirees born on or before the 10th of a month will receive this payment on Dec. 10. The second round of payments will go out on Dec. 17 for retirees born […]
January 2026 Supplemental Security Income payments, worth up to $994, will be issued to recipients in 26 days. SSI payments are typically issued on the first day of a month, though January’s payment will go out on Dec. 31. When the first of a month falls on a weekend or holiday, the latter being the […]
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has had to contend with the rebellion of a handful of House Republican women in recent weeks, with several disagreements spilling into public view. Four Republican women have expressed a wide range of frustrations with the speaker over the last several weeks, including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Rep. Marjorie Taylor […]
A massive internet outage disabled major websites for the second time in about a month. The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare experienced an unexpected disruption on Friday morning, causing many of the world’s top internet sites to go down. Canva, Coinbase, LinkedIn, Shopify, Substack, and Zoom were among the sites reportedly affected. Users trying to access […]
House appropriators want to move forward with a smaller set of spending bills before the end of the year, fearing the larger package preferred by the Senate will create a last-minute fight for Congress in January. Appropriators in the lower chamber are eyeing a three-bill “minibus” that they could put on the floor in December, […]
Eleventh-hour negotiations are delaying the release of Congress’s annual defense bill, a sweeping policy blueprint for the Pentagon that leadership hopes to pass in the next two weeks. The National Defense Authorization Act was slated for release on Thursday, teeing up a final vote before the end of the year. But that timeline has slipped […]
The original conception of a Saudi Arabia–Israel rapprochement was roughly akin to a blockbuster three-way trade in professional sports, with the United States significantly involved, as well as the oil-rich de facto leader of the Arab world and the Jewish state. Think the epic Feb. 2 NBA deal, when the Utah Jazz got 2025 second-round […]
Affordability was the biggest issue in the 2025 off-year elections. In various forms, affordability played a major role in the winning state campaigns of center-left candidates such as Govs.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA). It also propelled a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, to the leadership of the largest U.S. […]
Utah‘s Republican-led legislature is set to convene a special session on Dec. 9 to review a judge’s ruling on congressional maps. The state’s congressional districts have been in legal limbo since 2018, when voters approved Proposition 4, which created an independent redistricting commission. The move comes amid a redistricting feud that has exploded into a […]
Tom Stoppard, who died on Nov. 29 aged 88, was the greatest living playwright in English. As a linguistic dazzler, onstage and off, Stoppard was a Wildean contriver of brilliant witticisms who also alchemized the heaviest of intellectual metals into the lightest repartee. Though his work indulged this English preference for making a joke out […]
