Author: Press Room

Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday curtailed the chamber’s preelection calendar, putting a number of priorities at risk of being delayed until the lame-duck period or axed altogether.Johnson cited premidterm political pressures and a lack of action in the Senate — which is due to return Sept. 14 — as reasons for canceling the House’s final two weeks of session before November.But that means House lawmakers have just one more work week in Washington before the elections, and a short list of priorities some members wanted to see action on are now in serious doubt:— DATA CENTERS: One key item that…

The demographic reversal is putting growing pressure on pension and healthcare systems, particularly in Europe The world’s elderly population has overtaken the number of young children for the first time in human history, according to a new US Census Bureau report. Europe, already the world’s oldest region, is at the forefront of the trend. People aged 65 and over accounted for 10.5% of the global population in 2025, surpassing children aged five and younger for the first time, the bureau said in its An Aging World: 2025 report. The reversal has been driven by longer life expectancy and falling birth…

Trump-appointed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte just dropped the hammer on FICO’s longtime stranglehold over American homebuyers. On Thursday, Pulte announced that he is ordering mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to approve every lender seeking to use VantageScore as an alternative to FICO, effective immediately. According to Pulte, the price charged for an individual FICO credit score has skyrocketed by an astounding 1,800% since 2020. Enough is enough. “Since 2020, FICO has increased the price per a person’s credit score by 1,800%,” Pulte wrote on X. “FICO has enjoyed a monopoly. No more.” Pulte continued: Fannie…

The U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent. Economists had expected the economy would add 55,000 jobs and the unemployment rate would tick up to 4.2 percent from 4.1 percent in July. The previous month’s reported job loss was revised away. The July estimate was revised up by 44,000, from a loss of 23,000 to a gain of 21,000. The June gain was revised up by 11,000 to 31,000. After these revisions, employment in June and July combined is 55,000 higher than previouslyreported. The U.S. labor market has experienced a significant shift…

Work will begin in the next two weeks on President Donald Trump’s planned European-style, 250-foot arch to be built in Washington, DC, his administration confirmed Thursday. Models of the towering creation show it mirrors the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. The White House confirmed in February it would be part of the president’s legacy to mark the 250th anniversary of America’s founding and 1776 declaration of independence from Britain. AP notes the proposed gold-accented monument is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing that will leave his lasting imprint on the national capital. These include – but are not…

House Democrats’ top election leader has a message for states ahead of the midterms: count faster.“We are, I think, nicely trying to encourage people to do their balloting as quickly as possible, and that means hiring additional staff so that it doesn’t call into question results,” Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said in a Thursday interview with POLITICO.The advice is just one part of Morelle’s efforts to secure the midterm elections. He said Democrats have wargamed over 150 scenarios of how the Trump administration could attempt to interfere or complicate the…

How human vivisections became routine work for members of a secret Japanese unit and why the US saved them from justice “For the surgeons, it was a regular workday.” This is how, many years later, one of the doctors from Unit 731 recalled the autopsies performed on living humans in a Japanese military laboratory near Harbin during the Second World War.This is neither a mistake nor an exaggeration: human vivisections, exposure to plague and cholera, and chemical weapons testing on prisoners were simply “routine work” for those who worked in the unit – along with protocols, reports, video recordings, and…

The Maine Supreme Court this week upheld a lower court ruling preventing a mother from taking her 13-year-old daughter to a church it referred to as a “cult.” The decision could set a bad precedent for other jurisdictions to grab onto nationwide. But the religious liberty law firm representing the mother, Emily Westbrook, in the case has promised an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. A look at Calvary Chapel of Greater Portland’s doctrines and description in the court opinion makes it sound like it believes in pretty standard Bible-based teaching: the Old and New Testaments are the Word of…

Wednesday on FBN’s “The Evening Edit,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) offered a positive assessment of resuming normal operations in the Strait of Hormuz amid hostilities between the United States and Iran. The Florida Republican said, if successful, it would eliminate the threat to the strait and would take a bargaining chip away from Iran. “The U.S. says it controls the Hormuz Strait,” host Elizabeth MacDonald said. “You know we’re tracking the data. More than 17 million barrels of oil transited the Strait on Monday. It’s growing to averaging about half or two-thirds of the oil shipments before the war. What…

(AFP) — Britain insisted Friday that the Falkland Islands “are British” after Argentine President Javier Milei said the “winds of change” favored his country’s claim to the archipelago, citing Washington’s readiness to review its neutrality in the dispute. Britain and Argentina fought a 10-week war in 1982 over the South Atlantic islands, a British overseas territory which Argentines call Las Malvinas. The fate of the islands hit headlines again in recent days after US President Donald Trump threatened to wade into the dispute, and an British-Israeli oil project near the islands caused anger in Argentina. In an address on national…