Author: Press Room

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced sweeping new sanctions Thursday on senior Iranian officials and regime-linked financial networks, saying Tehran’s ruling elite are “rats fleeing the ship” as they frantically wire tens of millions of dollars out of the country amid mounting unrest. At the direction of President Donald Trump, Bessent said the Treasury Department is sanctioning key Iranian leaders involved in the brutal crackdown on protesters, while moving to choke off the regime’s sanctions-evasion pipelines used to launder proceeds from Iranian petroleum and petrochemical sales. In a video released Thursday on X alongside the sanctions announcement, Bessent said his message…

Thursday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” disgraced former acting FBI director and senior law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe claimed we couldn’t trust what the Trump administration was saying about the civil unrest in Minneapolis. Host Pamela Brown said, “Just really quickly to follow up, I mean, you had the situation with the shooting overnight, and DHS says that a Venezuelan national tried to flee and attacked the ICE officer trying to arrest him. I mean, in that situation, do you think the shooting was justified? In that case, he was shot in the leg, that Venezuelan national.” McCabe said, “Well, it’s very…

The US president is “pumping himself with poison all day long” by eating fast food and drinking soda, the health secretary has said US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed bafflement that President Donald Trump is still alive given his well-documented diet of fast food and soda, as the president insists he is in “perfect health.”Kennedy made the remarks during an appearance on the Katie Miller Podcast. When asked who in the administration had the most “unhinged eating habits,” Kennedy answered, “the president.”“The interesting thing about the president is that he eats really bad food, which is McDonald’s…

Responding to crippling input costs, Alex Harrell slashes his cropland in half and predicts significant U.S. acres may be bare come spring.How deep is the farm crisis? Adios to acreage.In November 2025, Alex Harrell, among the most highly reputed producers in the U.S., dropped an old-school grading scale, A to F, across his 6,000-acre operation and slashed almost half his ground, notifying 12 landlords in a three-week window. “I can’t speak to the rest of the country, but around here, generational growers are either cutting back, quitting, falling into Chapter 12, or grasping at straws.”Spurred by crippling inputs, Harrell’s acreage…

Tariff Doom Didn’t Show Up in the Factory Data Cato Institute economist Scott Lincicome’s recent Bloomberg column argues that U.S. manufacturing “ended 2025 with a thud,” citing employment losses and weak survey data as evidence of policy failure. But this analysis makes a fundamental error: treating employment as the scoreboard in a labor-constrained economy. A better scoreboard would look to output and productivity. In the third quarter of 2025, manufacturing productivity rose 3.3 percent because output climbed 2.6 percent even as hours worked fell 0.7 percent. Over the past four quarters, productivity is up 2.3 percent—the biggest gain since 2021.…

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt detailed the “four commonsense pillars” of President Donald Trump’s newly unveiled framework for the “Great Healthcare Plan,” which the White House is calling on Congress to pass. Leavitt outlined the president’s vision to reporters during Thursday’s White House press briefing. She stated that the first pillar is “permanently lowering prescription drug prices” by codifying Trump’s most-favored-nations deals with pharmaceutical companies. “Congress can get this done by codifying President Trump’s historic most-favored-nation [MFN] initiatives into law to guarantee Americans the same low prices for prescription drugs that people in other countries around the world pay,”…

President Donald Trump met with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday — a rare one-on-one meeting between the two native New Yorkers. The two have shadow-boxed repeatedly over the past year, including on a failed nominations deal and a historic government shutdown, but have had virtually no personal interaction. Trump, according to a statement from Schumer’s office, called the meeting to talk about the Gateway tunnel project, which the administration said late last year would not be funded because of the shutdown. But the Senate leader also used the sit-down to raise two unrelated issues — health care and…

The French president is moving troops there, but would he dare use them against the US? French land, sea, and air forces are heading for Greenland to rebuff threats of annexation by the US. Emmanuel Macron has vowed to ‘stand alongside’ the Danish dependency, but that promise could end in humiliation for the French president. What did Macron say?In an address to the country’s armed forces on Thursday, Macron said that “a first team of French military personnel is already on site” in Greenland, “and will be reinforced in the coming days by land, air and maritime assets.” These reinforcements will…

New powers making it easier to mobilise tens of thousands of former UK armed forces personnel to prepare for war are expected to be announced soon by the Starmer government, reports indicate. The latest move from the Ministry of Defence means ex-service personnel in the strategic reserve can be called into action until they’re 65, rather than 55 as is currently the case. They will also face a lower threshold for being mobilised. Metro reports while the strategic reserve would only be used in moments of “national danger, great emergency or attack in the UK” under current guidelines, this will…

Minnesota residents of Somali descent and Hispanic heritage are suing President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to effectively shut down federal immigration enforcement across the state. On Thursday, the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing Somali immigrant Mubashir Khalif Hussen, Mahamed Eydarus, who is American and of Somali descent, and Javier Doe, a Hispanic American, filed suit against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Director Todd Lyons, among other agency officials. The lawsuit is asking a federal court to issue a statewide injunction to stop what it calls “unlawful policies and practices” being…