After a six-year long legal battle, a court in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo has authorized a child to be officially registered as the child of three fathers and one mother.
Same-sex adoption has been legal in Brazil since 2010.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed,” the statement said.
Faithfull was known for her 1960’s hits including “As Tears Go By” which was written by The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, whom she also famously dated.
She was discovered at a party in London by The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964 and was just 16 years old when “As Tears Go By” was released, according to her biography on her official website.
She has been making music for over 50 years, and was also an actress in the film Girl on a Motorcycle which came out in 1968 as well as Hamlet in 1969 and others.
But at the end of the 1960s she had fallen into a deep battle with drug addiction which would endure for years, according to her bio, before mounting a series of creative comebacks in the following decades.
In 2020, it was announced that Bohemian Rhapsody star Lucy Boynton would play Faithfull in a biopic about her life. At the time Faithfull said she was “delighted that my story is finally being made with my dream team.”
In 2021 Faithfull wrote an album during Covid-19 lockdown, a period in which she also struggled with a severe Covid-19 infection.
Faithfull reflected on her extraordinary and turbulent life in a memoir released in 1994.
“Never apologize, never explain – didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t,” she wrote to readers in the book, titled Faithfull.
According to Reuters, Faithfull was 78 years old.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio embarks soon on his inaugural trip as the United States’ top diplomat. His first stop, Panama could prove to be the most contentious on the itinerary following President Donald Trump’s repeated demands for control of the Panama Canal.
“Panamanian sovereignty over the canal is clear. There is no discussion on this issue. The soul of a country is not up for discussion,” Panama President José Raúl Mulino emphasized on Thursday, just days ahead of his scheduled meeting with Rubio.
Yet the Trump administration doesn’t seem to be letting this go. In his inauguration speech, Trump mentioned Panama six times, more than any other foreign country. He and Republican allies are increasingly painting a dark scenario where the Panama Canal has secretly fallen under Chinese military control – arguing that’s why the US needs to seize the canal back from Beijing’s clutches.
“A foreign power today possesses, through their companies, which we know are not independent, the ability to turn the canal into a choke point in a moment of conflict,” Rubio himself insisted during his Senate confirmation hearings this month.
“That is a direct threat to the national interest and security of the United States,” he added.
As ominous as it all sounds, the reality is not so straight forward. Here is a fact check about claims Trump’s administration has made about the Panama Canal.
Trump has long complained about the “bad deal” Jimmy Carter made when he returned the canal to Panama in 1977. But he’s been ratcheting up the rhetoric and falsehoods from the very start of his second term.
“Panama’s promise to us has been broken,” Trump said during his inaugural speech. “Above all China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama and we are taking it back!”
On his Truth Social network, Trump has also claimed – without proof – that Chinese soldiers have been deployed to the canal and that “Panama is, with great speed attempting to take down the 64% of signs which are written in Chinese. They are all over the Zone.”
But the “Zone” – a former American enclave bordering the canal – hasn’t existed since 1979.
And if the scenario Trump describes sounds like the plot of a movie, well, it was. In the 2001 movie “The Tailor of Panama,” which starred Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush, the US invades Panama after receiving bogus intelligence that China is trying to secretly buy the canal.
In reality, since 2000 the canal has been operated by the Panama Canal Authority, whose administrator, deputy administrator and 11-member board are selected by Panama’s government but operate independently.
The majority of the canal’s employees are Panamanians and Panama designates which companies are awarded the contracts to run the ports near the canal. Ships transiting the 50-mile-long canal are required to be piloted by local captains that work for the Canal Authority.
While there is real concern about increased Chinese investment in Latin America, Panama included, to date there is no evidence of Chinese military activity in Panama. At his press conference on Thursday, Mulino said the US government has yet to provide his administration with any proof they had gathered of Chinese control of the canal.
The Trump administration seems to be pointing to the fact that Panama Ports – part of a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings – operates terminals on the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the canal. So do several other companies.
Hutchinson was first granted the concession over the two ports in 1997 when Panama and the US jointly administered the canal. That same year, control of Hong Kong – where Hutchinson is based – was transferred from the United Kingdom to China.
While falling under Beijing’s sphere of influence, Hutchison is hardly some murky Chinese military front company. It’s publicly traded, not known to be on any US blacklists and their subsidiary Hutchinson Ports is one of the world’s largest port operators, overseeing 53 ports in 24 countries, including for other US allies such as the UK, Australia and Canada.
Crucially, Hutchison does not control access to the Panama Canal. Workers at their two ports only load and unload containers onto ships and supply them with fuel. And they’re not the only ones – three other ports in the vicinity of the canal are operated by competing companies providing similar services.
Since Trump’s comments, Panama’s government has announced an audit of the Hutchison-owned Panama Ports. The company says it is complying fully and has even invited Rubio to visit its ports.
The State Department would not comment if Rubio planned to accept the invitation to visit what the Trump administration has described – incorrectly — as a de facto Chinese military outpost in Panama.
Under the 1977 treaty with Panama, the US returned the canal with the understanding that the waterway remain neutral.
According to the agreement, the US could intervene militarily if the canal’s operations were disrupted by internal conflict or a foreign power. This seems to be what Trump is referencing when he threatens to “take the canal back.”
But it would be hard to argue that the waterway’s operations are disrupted or endangered. Following the expansion of the canal, which began in 2007 and Panama financed at a cost of more than $5 billion, more cargo than ever runs through the canal than it did during the years of US administration.
A US occupation of the canal would fly in the face of international law and the treaty the US agreed to.
Since the 1989 US invasion that deposed dictator Manuel Noriega, Panama does not have an army but Panamanians are fiercely protective of the canal which is central to their national identity. And despite the saber rattling coming from the Trump administration, attempting to force the issue would pose major complications for two other top US priorities: migration and the economy.
The canal isn’t the only critical passageway that Panama controls. Threatening Panama militarily could throw open the Darien Gap, the jungle crossing where hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way north from South America to the US.
Mulino had promised to close the gap to northbound migrants with Trump’s help – but don’t count on him honoring old commitments if US boots touch Panamanian soil.
Americans would also feel the heat. At least 25,000 US citizens live in Panama who would likely be placed in harm’s way by any US military action to seize the canal. Disruption of the canal’s operations would likely send prices of US goods from automobiles to sneakers soaring – about 40% of US container traffic passes through the waterway.
And of course, backing out of a decades-old deal and trying to wrest the canal back by force from an ally would be a propaganda goldmine for Russia and China which have both called for maintaining neutrality in the canal.
Any US military action would also further inflame tensions in Latin America where mass deportations have already tested Washington’s partnerships in the region.
Trump’s dream of flying a US flag over the Panama Canal would come at a much higher cost than he appears to have calculated.
Khamis and Ahmad Imarah knew they wouldn’t find much more than rubble when returning to their home in northern Gaza. But they had to go. Their father and brother are still buried under the debris, more than a year after their home was struck by Israeli forces.
“I don’t want anything else. What I am asking for is to find my father and brother and that’s it, that’s all.”
The Gaza Government Office said Wednesday that some 500,000 displaced Palestinians — almost a quarter of the enclave’s population — had made the journey to the decimated north in the first 72 hours after Israeli forces opened the Netzarim corridor, which separates it from the south.
The two Imarah brothers walked 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) to reach Al-Shujaiya, a treacherous journey they made with several small children. They found their home almost completely gone, with just one room still partially standing.
Rummaging through the rubble, Khamis came across his mother’s green knitting bag, with a couple of balls of yarn and two crochet hooks still inside, as if she had only just put it down.
Khamis and Ahmad’s mother was injured in an Israeli strike and was later evacuated to Egypt, one of the few Palestinians allowed to leave the strip to get medical treatment before Israel closed the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt in May 2024. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that only 436 patients, most of them children, had been allowed to be evacuated since May, out of the estimated 12,000 who urgently need medical evacuation.
Israeli military strikes have turned most of Gaza to rubble. According to the UN, some 69% of all structures in the strip have been destroyed or damaged in the past 15 months, with Gaza City the worst hit.
Israel forced most residents of northern Gaza to leave the area early in the war, issuing evacuation orders and telling people to move south. Once people left, return was impossible, meaning that most of those coming back this week are doing so for the first time in more than a year. And while nine in 10 Gaza residents have been displaced during the war, those forced to flee the north have been homeless for the longest.
“You enter from one neighborhood to another and it’s all mounds of rubble that have not been cleared … and there were martyrs on the way, on the road where, until today, no one has picked them up. There are fresh bodies and bodies that have (decomposed) as well,” Khamis said.
He urged others looking to make the journey back north to reconsider. “Because there is no water, no electricity or even food, no tents, you sleep in the rubble,” he said.
Mohammad Salha, director of Al-Awda Hospital in Tal Al-Zaatar, said there is currently no space in northern Gaza to establish camps for displaced people returning home. The area was densely built-up before the war and the enormous scale of damage means there are now huge mountains of rubble and debris everywhere.
The situation in the north is so dire that some of those who have made the journey have had little choice but to turn back and return to the refugee camps down south.
Arwa Al-Masri, who was displaced from Beit Hanoun in the northeastern corner of the strip, said the men from her family went home in the past few days to see what is left of their houses.
But while she and her children cannot yet go back to her home in the north — or what remains of it — Al-Masri’s stay at the shelter is also uncertain, because of impending bans on UNRWA operations within Israel and on the prohibition of Israeli authorities from cooperating with UNRWA.
Discovering that the place they once called home was almost completely gone was just the latest in a series of heartbreaks Khamis and Ahmad Imarah have suffered over the past 15 months.
The two brothers said that of the 60 members of their extended family, only 11 have survived the war.
The family fled Al-Shujaiya after receiving text messages from the Israeli military telling them to leave the area. Khamis said the whole family — his brother and sisters and their in-laws — went to his brother’s house in Al-Mughraqa, just south of the Netzarim corridor.
“It was afternoon prayers time when our house in Al-Mughraqa was hit by a strike. I still don’t know how I got out of the house,” he said.
At one point during the interview, Ahmad’s son Walid came by. Asked by his father where his mom was, the child pointed up to the sky.
“Why did they tell us to go south? Imagine a four-year-old boy telling you here is my mother and here is my aunt, (their bodies) all ripped in pieces in front of him. I covered his face and he was screaming. His aunts, and uncles, his grandfather and an uncle, no one is left,” he said.
“We were very happy. I wish I had a picture of my newborn but I don’t have any. I waited a long time to have my daughter and then her and her mom vanished together,” he said, adding that their graves were destroyed by the Israeli military just days after the family buried them.
“You take them and bury them in the cemetery and then when you go a few days later to see the cemetery, you don’t find them because they have been erased by the bulldozers. The (Israeli forces) didn’t leave anything. Even the martyrs and the bodies they have dug up. They didn’t leave a thing,” he said, looking around the destroyed neighborhood.
“We came back to the north for nothing,” he said. But he quickly added that he was determined to stay and rebuild. “I am from Gaza and I won’t leave. Even if it was harder and more difficult than this, I want to live in Gaza and I won’t leave it. I will only leave Gaza to go to Heaven,” he said.
US President Donald Trump last week suggested Gaza should be “cleaned out” by removing Palestinians living there to Jordan and Egypt — either on a temporary or permanent basis.
The comment sparked outrage and rebuke across the Middle East, with both Egypt and Jordan rejecting the idea.
“This is ingrained in our minds, we will stay. We will not leave this place, because this land is not ours but our grandparents’ and our ancestors’ before us. How am I supposed to leave it? To leave the house of my father, and grandfather and brothers?” he said.
When US President Donald Trump signed a recent executive order that would deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, he took aim at what he suggested was a peculiarly American principle: Birthright citizenship.
“It’s ridiculous. We are the only country in the world that does this with the birthright, as you know, and it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” said the 47th president of the United States as he questioned a principle that some of his opponents say lies at the very heart of what it means to be called an American. For more than 150 years, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution has granted automatic citizenship to any person born on US soil.
As the courts moved to temporarily block his order, various media outlets pointed out that the president’s remarks were not entirely accurate. According to the Law Library of Congress, more than 30 countries across the world recognize birthright citizenship on an unrestricted basis – in which children born on their soil automatically acquire the right regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
Still, presidential hyperbole aside, the data from the Law Library does seem to suggest there is something particularly American (both North and South) about the idea of unrestricted birthright citizenship, as the map below shows.
Strikingly, nearly all of those countries recognizing unrestricted birthright citizenship are in the Western Hemisphere, in North, South, and Central America.
The vast majority of countries in the rest of the world either do not recognize the jus soli (Latin for ‘right of soil’) principle on which unrestricted birthright citizenship is based or, if they do, do so only under certain circumstances – often involving the immigration status of the newborn child’s parents.
So, how did the divide come about?
In North America, the ‘right of soil’ was introduced by the British via their colonies, according to “The Evolution of Citizenship” study by Graziella Bertocchi and Chiara Strozzi.
The principle had been established in English law in the early 17th century by a ruling that anyone born in a place subject to the king of England was a “natural-born subject of England.”
When the US declared independence, the idea endured and was used – ironically for the departing Brits – to keep out foreign influence, such as in the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen” of the US.
Still, it was not until the 1820s that a movement led by Black Americans – whose citizenship was not explicitly guaranteed at the time – forced the country to think seriously about the issue, according to Martha Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.
“They land on birthright in part because the US Constitution of 1787 requires that the president of the United States be a natural-born citizen. So, they hypothesize that if there is such a thing as a natural-born citizen, they, just like the president, must be natural-born citizens of the United States.”
The principle would be debated for decades until it was finally made law in 1868 after the Civil War, which resulted in the freedom of enslaved Black Americans, and formalized by the 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
But it wasn’t just the Brits in North America. Other European colonial powers introduced the idea in countries across Central and South America, too.
Driving the practice in many of these areas was an economic need. Populations in the Western Hemisphere were at the time much smaller than in other parts of the world that had been colonized and settlers often saw bestowing citizenship as a way to boost their labor forces.
“You had these Europeans coming and saying: ‘This land is now our land, and we want more Europeans to come here and we want them to be citizens of these new countries.’ So, it’s a mixture of colonial domination and then the idea of these settler states they want to populate,” said sociologist John Skrentny, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Later, just as the idea of ‘right of soil’ was turned against the Brits in North America, a similar reversal of fortunes took place in the European colonies to the south.
In Latin America, many newly formed countries that had gained independence in the 19th century saw ‘right of soil’ citizenship as a way to build national identity and thus further break from their former colonial rulers, according to the study by Bertocchi and Strozzi.
Without that principle, they reasoned, Spain could have claimed jurisdiction over people with Spanish ancestry who were born in former colonies like Argentina, said Bertocchi, a professor of economics at Universita’ di Modena e Reggio Emilia.
So what about all those countries in other parts of the world that were also colonized by Europeans but today do not recognize the ‘right of soil’?
Many of them – particularly those in Asia and Africa – also turned to citizenship laws to send their former rulers a message.
However, in most cases these countries turned toward a different type of birthright citizenship that has its roots in European law: jus sanguinis (‘right of blood’), which is generally based on one’s ancestry, parentage, marriage or origins.
In some cases, this system was transplanted to Africa by European powers that practiced it, Strozzi and Bertocchi wrote in their study. But in other cases newly independent countries adopted it on their own accord to build their nations on an ethnic and cultural basis.
Doing so was a relatively easy change. As Skrentny points out, in many of these places the ‘right of soil’ had never become as ingrained as it had in the Americas, partly because their large native populations had meant the colonizers did not need to boost their workforces.
Jettisoning the ‘right of soil’ sent a message to the former colonists that “they didn’t want to hear any more of it,” said Bertocchi, while embracing the ‘right of blood’ ensured descendants of colonizers who remained in Africa would not be considered citizens.
“They all switched to jus sanguinis,” said Bertocchi. “It seems paradoxical, right? This time, to build a national identity, you needed to adopt this principle.”
There’s one final twist that helps explain why the ‘right of soil’ principle seems today to be a largely American affair.
Over the years, the colonial powers that once followed the ‘right of soil’ have since moved either to abolish or restrict its use, much like some of their former colonies.
In the UK, it was scrapped by the British Nationality Act of the 1980s, which put in place several conditions to qualify for British citizenship – including some that relate to parentage, as in jus sanguinis.
Experts say the driving force for those changes – in Britain and elsewhere in Europe – was the concern that migrants could take advantage of the system by entering the country with the intent of giving birth to a child with automatic citizenship. In other words, the same concern being voiced by many of Trump’s supporters in today’s United States.
Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, ripped into ‘false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations’ from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
Patel, a former public defender and DOJ official, was grilled by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who accused Patel of having called for FBI headquarters to be shut down. That came on the back of a number of barbs coming from Democrats on the Committee.
Patel fired back with a fiery response.
‘If the best attacks on me are going to be false accusations and grotesque mischaracterizations, the only thing this body is doing is defeating the credibility of the men and women at the FBI,’ he said.
‘I stood with them here in this country, in every theater of war we have. I was on the ground in service of this nation. And any accusations leveled against me that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair,’ he said.
He then pointed to an endorsement by over 300,000 law enforcement officers to be the next head of the bureau.
‘Let’s ask them,’ he said.
Democrats had pointed to Patel’s record and a book, ‘Government Gangsters,’ released in 2023 that claimed that ‘deep state’ government employees have politicized and weaponized the law enforcement agency – and explicitly called for the revamp of the FBI in a chapter dubbed ‘Overhauling the FBI.’
‘Things are bad. There’s no denying it,’ he wrote in the book. ‘The FBI has gravely abused its power, threatening not only the rule of law, but the very foundations of self-government at the root of our democracy. But this isn’t the end of the story. Change is possible at the FBI and desperately needed.’
Patel received praise from Republicans on the Committee, with Chairman Chuck Grassley arguing he could help restore trust in the FBI.
‘Public trust in the FBI is low,’ Grassley said in his opening remarks. ‘Only 41% of the American public thinks the FBI is doing a good job. This is the lowest rating in a century.’
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, however, cited several Republican figures who have opposed Patel’s nomination, including former National Security Advisor John Bolton who he said had claimed was ‘forced to hire him.’
‘Former CIA director Gina Haspel was reportedly threatening to resign rather than have this nominee serve under her,’ Whitehouse said.
‘Former Attorney General Bill Barr said this nominee has virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency, end quote.’
Patel later accused Whitehouse of using ‘partial quotations’ in further criticisms about alleged intentions to ‘prosecute journalists’ and his so-called ‘enemies list’ – a term Patel said he does not endorse.
Fox News’ Charles Creitz and Emma Colton contributed to this report.
Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, pledged Thursday to work with a top Republican senator on exposing who worked with Jeffrey Epstein in trafficking and exploiting children.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., quizzed Patel about how he would handle the Epstein case. The sex-trafficking financier died in 2019 while awaiting trial. Nearly 200 names that had previously been redacted from court documents in a lawsuit against his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell were made public last year.
However, Blackburn said there is still more to be known, including the names of those who flew on his plane and accomplices.
‘I want to talk to you about the Epstein case. I have worked on this for years trying to get those records of who flew on Epstein’s plane and who helped him build this international human trafficking sex trafficking ring,’ she said.
She used her remarks to take a jab at former Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin.
‘Now, earlier, I urged then Chairman Durbin to subpoena those records, and I ended up being blocked by Senator Durbin and Christopher Wray. They stonewalled on this,’ she said. ‘And I know that breaking up these trafficking rings is important to President Trump. So will you work with me on this issue? So we know who worked with Jeffrey Epstein in building these sex trafficking rings?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely, Senator,’ Patel responded. ‘Child sex trafficking has no place in the United States of America. And I will do everything, if confirmed as FBI director, to make sure the American public knows the full weight of what happened in the past and how we are going to counterman missing children and exploited children going forward,’ he said.
Following the exchange between Blackburn and Patel, Durbin requested to respond to Blackburn’s jab at him and accused the Tennessee senator of ‘falsely’ accusing him ‘of preventing releasing the names of Jeffrey Epstein’s network.’
‘My office subsequently reached out to hers to try to identify what records she was actually seeking. We did not receive a response,’ he added.
Blackburn fired back and said she had ‘raised the issue with Chairman Durbin. I had raised it on the floor that we wanted to get these records… You sought not to recognize me.’
Patel’s nomination has sparked early criticism from some Democrats ahead of his confirmation hearing, who have cited his previous vows to prosecute journalists and career officials at the Justice Department and FBI that he sees as being part of the ‘deep state.’
Democrats had pointed to Patel’s record and a book, ‘Government Gangsters,’ released in 2023 that claimed that ‘deep state’ government employees have politicized and weaponized the law enforcement agency – and explicitly called for the revamp of the FBI in a chapter dubbed ‘Overhauling the FBI.’
Fox News’ Emma Colton and Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched an investigation into media outlets PBS and National Public Radio (NPR) over member stations potentially airing ‘prohibited commercial advertisements,’ according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.
‘I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,’ FCC chair Brendan Carr wrote, according to the Times. ‘In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.’
The FCC allows businesses to support noncommercial radio and television stations — such as NPR, PBS or college radio stations — via on-air announcements known as underwriting sponsorships. The sponsorships, though similar to advertisements, face different FCC rules than typical TV or radio ads.
Carr sent the letters Wednesday to NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger, according to the Times. He has been a member of the FCC since 2017, and was appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as the commission’s chair under his second administration.
Carr continued in his letter that he will alert Congress to the investigation, noting that lawmakers already are weighing whether NPR and PBS should receive taxpayer funds.
‘In particular, Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming,’ he wrote, according to the Times.
‘To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,’ he continued.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FCC regarding the letter and the Times’ report, but did not immediately receive a response.
NPR chief Maher said in response to the letter that NPR’s sponsorship practices ‘complies with federal regulations.’
‘NPR programming and underwriting messaging complies with federal regulations, including the FCC guidelines on underwriting messages for noncommercial educational broadcasters, and Member stations are expected to be in compliance as well,’ Maher said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital on Thursday.
‘We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules,’ Maher said. ‘We have worked for decades with the FCC in support of noncommercial educational broadcasters who provide essential information, educational programming, and emergency alerts to local communities across the United States.’
PBS added in comment to Fox Digital that it is also complies with ‘the FCC’s underwriting regulations.’
‘PBS is proud of the noncommercial educational programming we provide to all Americans through our member stations. We work diligently to comply with the FCC’s underwriting regulations and welcome the opportunity to demonstrate that to the Commission,’ a PBS spokesperson said.
NPR and PBS are both public broadcasting organizations, and both are bracing to potentially lose public funding under the Trump administration.
‘NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!’ Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social in April 2024, potentially previewing their fate under his second administration. ‘THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!’
Republican members of Congress also have introduced bills that would defund the public broadcasting organizations, such as Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy and Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry introducing the No Propaganda Act in December 2024.
‘The American Taxpayer is footing the bill for a woke media corporation that pretends to be impartial while pushing Chinese propaganda,’ Perry said when introducing the legislation. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting ‘cannot be allowed to keep using your hard-earned tax dollars to push a biased and political agenda that goes against what’s best for Americans.’
Carr’s name recognition grew large right ahead of the Nov. 5, 2024, election, when he lambasted NBC’s decision to host former Vice President Kamala Harris on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the final episode ahead of Election Day, but did not offer equal time to Trump or other candidates in the presidential cycle.
The FCC’s equal-time rule was established in 1934, and requires radio and television broadcast stations to provide the same amount of time for competing political candidates. There are exceptions to the rule, such as newscasts, documentaries and political debates.
‘NBC has structured this in a way that’s plainly designed to evade the FCC’s rules. We’re talking 50 hours before Election Day starts, without any notice to other candidates, as far as I can tell,’ Carr told Fox News Digital at the time. ‘And after previously coming out and saying they weren’t going to do this precisely because they did not believe that they could do this consistent with election laws and the FCC’s equal time rule.’
NBC ultimately filed an equal time notice amid outrage over Harris’ appearance.
Trump appointed Carr to lead the FCC shortly after his November 2024 election win, with Carr taking the helm of the commission in January. Carr was first nominated to the commission by Trump during his first administration, and served as the senior Republican member of the FCC until his appointment as chair.
‘Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that has stifled Americans’ Freedoms, and held back our Economy,’ Trump said in a statement about the appointment. ‘He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.’
The top Republican on the Senate’s chief health committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., indicated Thursday during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s second confirmation hearing of the week that his vote for Trump’s nominee to head Health and Human Services was not a lock, noting that he was ‘struggling’ to confirm Kennedy over his inability to admit vaccines are safe and don’t cause autism.
Kennedy faced two separate hearings in front of Senate lawmakers this week in his bid to be the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy was probed frequently over his views on vaccines, which have been a sticking point for many senators as they figure out whether to vote in favor of Kennedy’s nomination or not.
During the hearings, Kennedy refused to reject claims he has posited publicly in the past that vaccines cause autism and argued he is not anti-vaccine but rather ‘pro-safety.’ Kennedy added during the hearings that his plan as HHS secretary would be to ‘follow the science,’ noting that if the science says he is wrong on vaccines, he will publicly apologize.
But senators, like Cassidy, have suggested during Kennedy’s confirmation hearings that the science says vaccines are safe — and they don’t cause autism.
‘My responsibility is to learn, try and determine, if you can be trusted to support the best public health,’ Cassidy, a former physician, said during his closing remarks at Kennedy’s Thursday confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). ‘A worthy movement called ‘MAHA,’’ Cassidy continued, ‘to improve the health of Americans, or to undermine it, always asking for more evidence, and never accepting the evidence that is there … That is why I’ve been struggling with your nomination.’
Cassidy repeatedly asked Kennedy during the Thursday hearing to publicly declare that vaccines don’t cause autism, but he refused. ‘That would have an incredible impact,’ Cassidy said.
‘There are issues we are, man, ultra-processed food, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned,’ Cassidy continued during his closing remarks. ‘And as someone who has discussed immunizations with thousands of people, I understand that mothers want reassurance that the vaccine their child is receiving is necessary, safe and effective. We agree on that point, the two of us, but we’ve approached it differently. And I think I can say that I’ve approached it using the preponderance of evidence to reassure, and you’ve approached it using selective evidence to cast doubt.’
Meanwhile, Cassidy pointed out the massive ‘megaphone’ Kennedy has as a descendant of former President John F. Kennedy, and questioned whether he will use his credibility ‘to support’ or ‘to undermine’ the nation’s public health and its confidence in vaccines.
‘I got to figure that out, for my vote,’ Cassidy said.
The Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department, former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
He secured confirmation with significant bipartisan support and a 79-18 vote.
On Wednesday, senators voted by a 78–20 margin to close debate and move the nomination to a final vote.
Burgum appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in mid-January, where he told lawmakers that national security issues and the economy were his top two priorities for leading the agency.
‘When energy production is restricted in America, it doesn’t reduce demand,’ Burgum said in his opening statement on Jan. 16. ‘It just shifts production to countries like Russia and Iran, whose autocratic leaders not only don’t care at all about the environment, but they use their revenues from energy sales to fund wars against us and our allies.’
Lawmakers, including Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, questioned Burgum on whether he would permit oil drilling in national parks if Trump asked him to.
‘As part of my sworn duty, I’ll follow the law and follow the Constitution. And so you can count on that,’ Burgum said. ‘And I have not heard of anything about President Trump wanting to do anything other than advancing energy production for the benefit of the American people.’
Burgum served as governor of North Dakota from 2016 to 2024. He also launched a presidential bid for the 2024 election in June 2023, and energy and natural resources were key issues during his campaign.
Burgum appeared during the first two Republican presidential debates, but didn’t qualify for the third and ended his campaign in December 2023. He endorsed Trump for the GOP nomination a month later ahead of the Iowa caucuses.
Aubrie Spady, Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.