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US Monthly Headline News
By ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE

NEW YORK (AP) — Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City on Thursday, taking over one of the most unrelenting jobs in American politics with a promise to transform government on behalf of the city’s striving, struggling working class.

Mamdani, a Democrat, was sworn in at a decommissioned subway station below City Hall just after midnight, placing his hand on a Quran as he took his oath as the city’s first Muslim mayor.

After working part of the night in his new office, Mamdani returned to City Hall in a taxi cab around midday Thursday for a grander public inauguration where U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the mayor’s political heroes, administered the oath for a second time.

“Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try,” Mamdani told a cheering crowd.

“To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives,” he said.
Ana Faguy

Adrienne Martin and her family are starting the New Year off without healthcare.

The 47-year-old Texas mother had to make a difficult choice when she found out her monthly healthcare premium was increasing in 2026 from what she described as a manageable $630 (£467) to an unaffordable $2,400 (£1,781).

Her husband depends on an IV medication to treat a blood-clotting disease that costs $70,000 a month without insurance. Knowing their benefits would expire, the family stockpiled the drug to survive the first few months of the year.

"It would be like paying two mortgage payments," she said of the new monthly price for healthcare. "We can't pay $30,000 for insurance a year."

Ms Martin and her family are not the only ones facing this conundrum. Millions of Americans will see their healthcare bills skyrocket when these subsidies, which were provided through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, expire.

Some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle attempted to extend these subsidies into 2026, but Washington was gridlocked. A vote in the new year could offer hope, but until then, many like Ms Martin will have to live without insurance or see their bills steeply increase.
Americas

More than 20 million people in the United States will face sharply higher health insurance costs as of January 1 after enhanced tax credits that helped enrollees in the Affordable Care Act afford coverage expired overnight. The expiration of the subsidies will mostly affect families, small business owners and self-employed workers.     

Enhanced tax credits that have helped reduce the cost of health insurance for the vast majority of Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as "Obamacare") enrollees expired overnight, cementing higher health costs for millions of people in the United States at the start of the new year.

The change affects a diverse cross-section of the population who don’t get their health insurance from an employer and don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare – a group that includes many self-employed workers, small business owners, farmers and ranchers.

On average, the more than 20 million subsidised enrollees in the Affordable Care Act programme are seeing their premium costs rise by 114 percent in 2026, according to an analysis by the healthcare research nonprofit KFF.

The subsidies were first given to Affordable Care Act enrollees in 2021 as a temporary measure to help US residents get through the Covid-19 pandemic. Democrats in power at the time then extended them, pushing the expiration date to the start of 2026. Some lower-income enrollees received health care with no premiums, and high earners paid no more than 8.5 percent of their income. Eligibility for middle-class earners was also expanded.
Luke Garrett

Millions of Americans are facing higher health care premiums in the new year after Congress allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire. But earlier this week, a bipartisan group of senators worked to strike a compromise that could resurrect the enhanced ACA premium tax credits — potentially blunting the blow of rising monthly payments for Obamacare enrollees.

"There's a number of Republican and Democratic senators who are seeing what a disaster this will be for families that they represent," Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said on Morning Edition Thursday. "That's the common ground here, and it's a doable thing."

Welch said he joined a bipartisan call Tuesday — first reported by Punchbowl News — in which a handful of senators charted out a possible health care compromise.

"We could extend the credits for a couple of years, we could reform it," Welch said of the call. "You could put an income cap, you could have a copay, you could have penalties on insurers who commit fraud. You actually could introduce some cost saving reductions that have bipartisan support."

But according to Welch, this legislation is only doable with President Trump's blessing.
By Andy Rose

It may now be the most famous – or infamous – sign in the country. Posted above a door on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, the Quality Learning Center was missing an “n.”

For a conservative content creator attempting to call out fraud – and the supporters who made his video on day care centers in Minneapolis’ Somali community viral – it seemed too absurd not to mention.

“This is Quality ‘Learing’ Center,” Nick Shirley said, pointing to the sign. “They spelled ‘learning’ wrong.”

Shirley’s 42-minute video posted the day after Christmas quickly spread, prompting stepped up immigration enforcement, frozen federal funds and more biting rhetoric against the Somali community from President Donald Trump.

Although Shirley’s encounters with other businesses were often more dramatic, the misspelled sign and its locked door made Quality Learning Center a focus of criticism aimed at the state government and Gov. Tim Walz for a system opponents say has allowed fraud to run rampant in Minnesota.
The Trump administration is terminating the National Links Trust's lease agreement for three public golf courses in D.C., according to the Washington Post. National Links Trust is a non-profit whose goal is to make golf more affordable and accessible for everyone. Will Smith, co-founder of the organization, joins Laura Barrón-López to share his reaction to learning about the move, saying "we fundamentally disagree" with the move.
Story by Simon Marks

As 2026 gets under way, the closing weeks of the old year have suggested that over the next 12 months, Vice President JD Vance will become increasingly emboldened, promoting himself as the inevitable successor to Donald Trump.

While the current US President is still toying with the idea of trying to circumvent the constitution in order to seek a third term in office, Vance is sending his boss a series of increasingly unsubtle messages that the Make America Great Again revolution will be safe in his hands.

No issue animates Vance more than his hostility towards governments across Europe, including our own. Last February, he stunned European leaders by telling the Munich Security Conference that their continent faced a “threat from within”, and lectured them with the blistering claim that “democracy will not survive if…people’s concerns are deemed invalid or, even worse, not worth being considered”.

The speech served as the Vice President’s coming-out party in Europe, and with hindsight can be viewed as his opening salvo in a campaign that has now found full voice in the US government’s official National Security Strategy.

Vance, a political chameleon for much of his life, is a key influence behind the strategy’s argument that immigration will soon leave Europe facing “civilisational erasure”. But beyond his enthusiastic backing of the Trump administration’s masked agents seizing people off America’s streets, he is also the lead administration voice warning Europe over what he claims is the continent’s “backsliding” on freedom of speech.
Story by Silas Redmond

Tesla built one of the most valuable carmakers in history on a torrent of orders, a cult-like brand and a stock market valuation that once added hundreds of billions of dollars to Elon Musk's personal fortune. Now that edifice is wobbling, as political backlash, intensifying competition and a brutal market repricing collide to strip away demand and expose how fragile that empire can be. The headline's $800 million figure barely captures the scale of the damage when a single trading session can erase $152 billion in value, and I see the unraveling as a story about how quickly sentiment can flip when a company's identity is fused to its chief executive.

What is happening to Tesla is not a slow, orderly correction but a rapid loss of altitude that touches everything from showroom traffic to the company's role in the culture wars. Orders that once seemed automatic are now contested, and the market is forcing a reckoning with whether the business is priced like a durable manufacturer or a volatile political project. The stakes are not just financial, they reach into American politics, global climate goals and the future of autonomous driving.

The day $152 billion vanished
The clearest sign that Tesla's empire is far larger, and more fragile, than any $800 million shorthand came when the company suffered a record $152 billion one day crash in market value. That plunge followed an escalated feud between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, a reminder that when a company's valuation is built on expectations and personality, political conflict can vaporize tens of billions of dollars in hours. The selloff was not a rounding error, it was a shock that forced Investors to reconsider whether Tesla's stock price reflected durable cash flows or a leveraged bet on Musk's standing with the White House.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing today, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tried to blame the recent D.C. shooting on former President Joe Biden. Noem's blame game crashed into a dead end when Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called out the Trump Administration for approving the asylum application of the D.C. shooter.
Story by abitter@businessinsider.com (Alex Bitter)

As the US one-cent coin disappears from circulation, stores are putting up signs asking for exact change or advising customers that their change will be rounded.

Retailers from AutoZone to Whole Foods are putting up the signs at checkouts pointing to the penny shortage and outlining their response to it.

Though the US Mint struck the last pennies in November, Congress hasn't approved any laws around the denomination's phase-out, including how retailers should handle cash transactions that don't end in five or 10 cents. That's forced many retailers to implement their own policies, including rounding transactions up or down to a nickel or dime.

"When they don't have pennies, rounding comes into place," Dylan Jeon, the National Retail Federation's senior director of government relations, told Business Insider.

At a Whole Foods location in Brooklyn this week, Business Insider saw a sign saying that the store "is unable to receive new pennies to make change with."

"If you pay in cash, your change will be rounded up to the nearest nickel and may not match the amount you see on the receipt," the sign read.
Story by Trevor Jennewine

Key Points
The S&P 500 advanced 16% in 2025, notching double-digit gains for the third straight year.

Federal Reserve research suggests President Trump's tariffs will slow economic growth.

The S&P 500 trades at the most expensive valuation since the dot-com crash in 2000.

The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) added 16% in 2025, marking the third consecutive year in which the benchmark index has recorded double-digit gains. Unfortunately, investors have reason to think 2026 will more challenging. Evidence suggests President Trump's tariffs are hurting the economy, and the stock market just flashed a warning last seen during the dot-com crash in 2000.

Here's what investors should know.
President Trump's tariffs have coincided with reduced manufacturing activity, higher unemployment, and record-low consumer sentiment
In 2025, President Donald Trump broke with decades of trade-policy precedent and imposed sweeping tariffs that raised the average tax on U.S. imports to 16.8%, the highest level since 1935, per the Budget Lab at Yale. And Trump -- who once called tariffs "the most beautiful word" in the dictionary -- has made many misleading or inaccurate statements to drum up support for his signature trade policies.
Story by Alex Henderson

Within in the MAGA movement, a far-right legal doctrine known as the Unitary Executive Theory has become increasingly prominent. The theory claims that U.S. presidents have sole authority over the federal government's executive branch, and its critics argue that it ignores the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution.

One of those critics is Simon Lazarus, who was a domestic policy adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s but has spent most of his career working for Washington, D.C. law firms.

In an article published by The New Republic on January 2, Lazarus is highly critical of the Unitary Executive Theory and the U.S. Supreme Court — which, he argues, is helping to advance an idea that has no "grounding" in the U.S. Constitution.

The High Court recently heard oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, President Donald Trump's legal battle with former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) official Rebecca Slaughter (who he fired). Trump and his lawyers believe that under the Unitary Executive Theory, the president had a right to fire Slaughter. But Slaughter's allies are countering that the executive branch, under the Constitution, doesn't have nearly as much power as he says it does.
Story by Jeet Heer

On Christmas Day, Donald Trump delivered the most bizarre yuletide message ever offered by a US president. Complaining that he’s being unfairly linked to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Trump posted a long rant on Truth Social that began, “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein.” Trump went on to lament how he is being blamed for his ties with Epstein, protesting that he was “actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so.”

Trump’s claim to have dropped Epstein is partly true but obscures a crucial fact: that he and Epstein were close friends from the 1980s until their break at some point in 2003. Epstein had been barred from the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2003 and the two men seemed to have a more definitive break in 2004. The exact circumstances of the break remain mysterious, since Trump has offered conflicting accounts, sometimes claiming that he was mad that Epstein “stole” an employee from Mar-a-Lago and sometimes referring to competition the two men had over real estate in 2004.
Story by Diksha

Donald Trump had earlier said he underwent an MRI during his October health checkup at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. However, a new update contradicts that claim, with Trump now saying, “It wasn’t an MRI. It was less than that. It was a scan.”

Meanwhile, there have been rumors about his declining health. Some signs often cited online include bruises on his hands, swollen ankles, and a bulge in his pants that some have speculated could be from a catheter. He has also, at times, been heard slurring his speech. Some netizens have labeled him a “senile president” and suggested these signs point to dementia in progress.
How to steal an election: delay the date the ballots were mailed.

Story by Anna Liss-Roy

A recent change to how the U.S. Postal Service says it postmarks letters could discount the ballots of thousands of last-minute voters.

Many Americans have long assumed that tax returns, ballots and other mailed documents sent on deadline would be marked as sent the day they are dropped in a mailbox.

But the Postal Service announced Dec. 24 that it was making no such guarantees about postmarks. Its new guidelines say a postmark might come days later, when mail is actually processed at a regional facility, sometimes miles from a local mailbox.

Most states require mail ballots to be in the hands of election officials by Election Day. Fourteen states provide a grace period allowing mail ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day if they are postmarked by then, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than two dozen others provide grace periods for military and overseas voters.

A Postal Service spokesperson, Martha Johnson, said the new guidance does not actually signal a change to the current practice. It is merely putting that practice into the service’s written protocols. Voters can still get a postmark on the day they mail a ballot if they request one at a local post office.
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