Presidential pardons

CNN: 

Bush: 189 

Obama: 212 

Trump First term
144 

Biden: 80 

Trump Second term
1500+

Trump Asserting Executive Privilege in January 6 Case

Newsweek -   President Donald Trump has reportedly asserted executive privilege to prevent his courtroom opponents from getting access to evidence in the lawsuit in which he is accused of stoking violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

What occurred on January 6, 2021—when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's win in the 2000 election—has become one of the most contentious political issues of recent years.

The attack caused millions of dollars of damage at the Capitol and about 140 police officers were injured, some of whom brought legal action....

It is unclear exactly which records Trump is aiming to keep out of the hands of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

However, Politico has reported that a White House spokesperson confirmed that the president has decided to fight disclosure of some material subpoenaed last year from the National Archives and Records Administration.

"The President asserted executive privilege over the discovery requests in this case because the overly broad requests demanded documents that were either presidential communications or communications among the president’s staff that are clearly constitutionally protected from discovery," the spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, said in a statement.

The police officers who filed the lawsuit say Trump’s remarks to a crowd of supporters fueled the riot that nearly derailed the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden.

Immigration

Washington Post - More than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in D.C. during the surge in federal law enforcement this year had no prior criminal record, newly released federal data shows, even though that crackdown was portrayed as targeting violent crime.

President Donald Trump cast the “crime emergency” he declared on Aug. 11 as an effort to root out the worst criminal offenders in a city under siege.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump announced as he deployed the National Guard, ordered hundreds of federal law enforcement officers to patrol city streets and prompted his administration to take over the city’s police department. 

The Hill - A federal judge has restricted warrantless immigration arrests in Washington, D.C., only permitting them when probable cause exists that someone in the country illegally is likely to escape. 

NBC News - The Trump administration have launched immigration enforcement operations in New Orleans and Minneapolis a day after President Donald Trump said he would be sending National Guard troops to Louisiana.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the New Orleans operation is "targeting criminal aliens roaming free thanks to sanctuary policies."

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, has said he welcomes the administration's intervention in the Democrat-run city, which has logged significant drops in crime and is on track to have its lowest number of homicides in nearly 50 years, according to crime data from the police department.

The Trump administration also began an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News. The operation comes after Trump launched into a hate-filled rant against Somalia and Somali immigrants living in the U.S. for the second day in a row, saying they've "destroyed Minnesota" and "our country" in his latest comments.

A senior law enforcement administration official told NBC News that ICE officers are not specifically targeting Somali immigrants and their families but may be arresting some who they allege have violated immigration laws.  Read the full story.

Polls

Newsweek  -  It's tempting to see rage everywhere—from the Oval Office, to online communities, even to families divided over political beliefs. But anger isn’t actually how most Americans feel about politics. Exhaustion is. In a substantial Pew survey in 2023, 65 percent said they "always or often feel exhausted" when thinking about politics, compared with 55 percent who said "angry." In December 2024, an AP-NORC poll found nearly two-thirds have cut down on political and government news because of "information overload" and fatigue. And the research organization More in Common has described an "Exhausted Majority" comprising roughly two-thirds of the country, whom it described as "fed up with the polarization, often forgotten in public discourse, flexible in their views."

So this is more than about just Trump. The country is tired of being tired.

Politico - New polling shows many Americans have begun to blame President Donald Trump for the high costs they’re feeling across virtually every part of their lives — and it’s shifting politics.

Almost half — 46 percent — say the cost of living in the U.S. is the worst they can ever remember it being, a view held by 37 percent of 2024 Trump voters. Americans also say that the affordability crisis is Trump’s responsibility, with 46 percent saying it is his economy now and his administration is responsible for the costs they struggle with.

The Hill -  The Yahoo/YouGov poll found that 38 percent of Americans blame Trump for inflation, compared to 31 percent who blame Biden. 

A Fox News poll, also released last month, made for even grimmer reading for Trump. It found that voters say Trump is more responsible than Biden for the state of the economy by an almost 2-to-1 ratio, 62 percent to 32 percent.  

A separate question found that just 15 percent of voters believe they have been helped by Trump’s economic policies, while 46 percent say they have been hurt and 39 percent say those policies have made no difference.

Federal Judge Rips Stephen Miller

New Republic - A federal judge on Wednesday shredded the Trump administration’s shallow defense for bragging about its rampant, warrantless immigration arrests.

In an 88-page ruling, U.S. Judge Beryl Howell wrote that the Trump administration had illegally lowered the standard for making immigration arrests when it instituted a policy of “arrest now, ask questions later” as part of the federal takeover of Washington, D.C.

Howell documented how the Department of Homeland Security and Trump officials began to insist on using a standard of “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests, and included a laundry list of official comments claiming that the government did not need to demonstrate probable cause. Howell took issue with the government’s attorneys, who claimed the statements had been made by “non-attorneys” who “don’t necessarily understand” legal terms.

“This is a remarkable assertion. On its face, the government’s defense appears to be that the individuals behind these statements are ignorant or incompetent, or both,” Howell wrote.

For example, chief Border Patrol agent Gregory Bovino told the press, “We need reasonable suspicion to make an immigration arrest,” adding, “You notice I did not say probable cause, nor did I say I need a warrant. We need reasonable suspicion of illegal alienage, that’s well grounded within the United States immigration law.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was also cited in the ruling as saying, “Just go out there” and arrest people at Home Depots or 7-Elevens.

NY Times sues Pentagon for suppressing journalists

NY Times - The New York Times accused the Pentagon in a lawsuit on Thursday of infringing on the constitutional rights of journalists by imposing a set of new restrictions on reporting about the military.

In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, The Times argued that the Defense Department’s new policy violated the First Amendment and “seeks to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

The rules, which went into effect in October, are a stark departure from the previous ones, in both length and scope. They require reporters to sign a 21-page form that sets restrictions on journalistic activities, including requests for story tips and inquiries to Pentagon sources. Reporters who don’t comply could lose their press passes, and the Pentagon has accorded itself “unbridled discretion” to enforce the policy as it sees fit, according to the lawsuit.

Donald Trump

The clearest symptom yet of Trump’s mental decline

Layoffs Hit Record High

New Republic - The U.S. economy has seen 1.1 million layoffs this year—the most since the Covid-19 pandemic—even as President Donald Trump constantly proclaims us to be the “hottest country anywhere in the world.” 

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday that there were 71,321 layoffs in November. This brings the year’s total up to 1.17 million, which is a whopping 54 percent higher than last year and the highest layoffs have been since the pandemic hit the economy in 2020. Employers have also seen a 35 percent decrease in hires from last year. 

Immigration Isn’t an ‘Invasion’—It’s the Answer to an Invitation

Time - For more than two decades after WWII, the United States beckoned Mexicans to move north to work in American agriculture. To facilitate this migration, the United States formally enlisted the cooperation of the Mexican government, which was to recruit Mexican men and transport them north, proceeding from the understanding that migrants were to be guaranteed certain baseline wages, housing, and food provisions. The treaties outlining this cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico came to be known as the Bracero Program. All told, it brought over four million Mexicans to the United States between 1942 and 1964.

Farmers argued such a program was necessary—at first because World War II shrank the domestic labor pool, as 16 million American men were deployed to fight Nazi Germany and Japan. But once the war ended, farmers emphasized a different rationale to keep the program going: farm labor jobs were so demanding—the hours, the climate, the constant stooping—that white Americans would never fill them. Their economic destiny, amid the U.S. post-war boom, was to join the expanding middle class, ensconced in proliferating suburban developments. Mexicans, on the other hand, were framed as being especially suited to arduous toil.

In reality, growers were attracted to the cost structure of institutionalized Mexican migration. Mexico took care of conveying migrants to the border, sparing growers expenditures on labor recruitment and transportation. Growers were also seduced by the disciplining power they gained. Migrants who engaged in labor organizing could be summarily deported back to Mexico, meaning growers could exploit migrants with less fear it might lead to labor unionism. Millions of migrants subjected themselves to this system to experience life in the United States and earn their livelihood in dollars.

Gen Z fears

Main Street bust

Axios - Economic pain is mounting quickly for America's small businesses, raising the chances of a Main Street recession despite an AI-powered growth boom.

The fortunes of mom-and-pop businesses are diverging from their larger counterparts.

• The dynamic isn't new, but the divide is getting bigger, faster. It exposes a vulnerability for President Trump's economic agenda, which top officials have said is focused on reigniting Main Street businesses.

Larger businesses have been able to adapt to a tough economic backdrop — historic tariffs, high interest rates and a more cautious consumer — in ways far more challenging for small companies with fewer resources.

• "They can set prices, they can change suppliers, they can hire contractors instead of permanent employees in a more sophisticated way," says ADP chief economist Nela Richardson. "They have more tools in the toolbox."

The private sector shed 32,000 jobs in November, according to payroll processor ADP. Small firms — those with fewer than 50 employees — accounted for all the losses.

• Those businesses reported a net loss of 120,000 jobs, the largest number small businesses have cut since the onset of the pandemic. Larger businesses grew, but not enough to offset the cuts elsewhere.

The Trump administration shrugged off the ADP data that indicated a hiring bust. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that the cuts were due to factors unrelated to tariffs, like immigration crackdowns.  Share this story.

Kids and smartphones

ABC News - Children who have smartphones by age 12 are at higher risk of lack of sleep, obesity and depression, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

What's more, researchers found that the earlier a child received a smartphone, the greater their risk of developing these conditions.

Dr. Ran Barzilay, lead author of the study and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told ABC News that many experts suggest parents should postpone the age at which children receive their first smartphone.

Teens spend over 1 hour on phones during school hours, new study finds

Barzilay said he and his colleagues wanted to examine whether not delaying smartphone use by children would lead to negative health outcomes. He also had a personal motivation behind the study.

"I have a nine-year-old who wants a phone, and I think [whether to get them a smartphone] is a question that is relevant for every parent of a kid going into adolescence, even before adolescence," said Barzilay, who's also an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The study team – comprised of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Berkeley; and Columbia University – looked at data from more than 10,500 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, which is an ongoing study assessing brain development in children throughout adolescence.

Brain changes over time

Nice News - If you feel like you’re still waiting for your brain’s “adult mode” to kick in, recent research from the University of Cambridge may explain why. Scientists analyzed brain scans of 3,802 people ages zero to 90 to see how neural networks change over a lifetime.

They identified four turning points at which there are significant shifts in how we process information. Those points separate five distinct “epochs,” or phases. “Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been characterized by different phases. It turns out that brains also go through these eras,” senior author Duncan Astle said in a news release.

During the first era, childhood (birth to age 9), the brain’s synapses are refined while the brain grows and matures. Next comes the adolescent phase, from 9 to 32, marked by a steady increase in cognitive performance and efficiency. At age 32, the “strongest topological turning point of the lifespan” occurs, ushering in that “adult mode.” This is the longest phase, characterized by a stable plateau in intelligence and personality. The last two eras are early aging, when white matter begins to gradually degenerate around 66, and late aging, taking shape around 83.

The information provides greater clarity on how patterns of change affect neurological development, cognitive disorders, and mental health, Astle noted: “Understanding that the brain’s structural journey is not a question of steady progression, but rather one of a few major turning points, will help us identify when and how its wiring is vulnerable to disruption.”

Trump regime lowers required automakers' gas mileage

Axios - The White House and Transportation Department yesterday unveiled a plan to greatly soften Biden-era mileage rules — and said it would save people money.

• The new proposal would require automakers to hit an average of 34.5 miles per gallon across their fleets by 2031.
• That's way lower than the Biden-era target of over 50 mpg, which would mean lots of EV sales.

More

FBI makes arrest involving placed pipe bombs evening before Jan 6, 2021

The Hill - The FBI has made an arrest in its nearly five-year-old investigation into who placed pipe bombs outside the offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees the evening before Jan. 6, 2021.

The arrest marks the first action in the case in years, as police had been unable to identify the suspect, whose face was largely shielded in video footage that showed them laying the bombs near each party’s headquarters.

The FBI did not share any additional information about the suspect.

The bombs were swiftly disabled shortly after they were discovered, but they sent police scrambling the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before a riot descended on the Capitol.

Leader of right to die movement passes away

Newsworthy News - Ludwig Minelli, founder of the Swiss right-to-die organization Dignitas, chose to end his life through assisted dying on November 29, 2025, just before his 93rd birthday. This decision reflects his lifelong commitment to self-determination in end-of-life matters. Minelli’s death through the very means he advocated for underscores his unwavering belief in individual autonomy and the right to choose one’s final moments. His passing has sparked discussions on ethical and philosophical grounds, particularly in a world where the legal landscape surrounding assisted dying is rapidly evolving...

Minelli’s death comes amidst a global shift in attitudes toward assisted dying. Since Dignitas’s inception, countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and Austria have legalized the practice. In the U.S., assisted dying is now permitted in 10 states, reflecting a broader acceptance of end-of-life autonomy. 

Pete Hegseth

MS NOW - In just 10 months in office, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pinballed from one embarrassing scandal after another. In March, it was his use of the Signal messaging app, which a Pentagon inspector general’s report, scheduled to be released Thursday, concluded that Hegseth put military operations and service members at risk. 

 

Now, it’s more recent allegations that under his leadership, the U.S. military may have committed war crimes in its undeclared war against drug traffickers.

 

However, the only thing surprising about this latest black eye for Hegseth’s tenure is that it took this long for  such atrocities to happen.

 

If there is a single defining element to Hegseth’s view of the military, it is that “might makes right” and that the laws of armed conflict, which have long guided how U.S. soldiers comport themselves on the battlefield, are for losers.

 

Hegseth’s 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” is filled with evidence of his disdain for what he terms “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long.” And now he has brought his shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach to the Pentagon. More

New England warming faster than most places on Earth, study finds

Guardian - New England is widely known for its colonial history, maple syrup and frigid, snow-bound winters. Many of these norms are in the process of being upended, however, by a rapidly altering climate, with new research finding the area is heating up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

The breakneck speed of New England’s transformation makes it the fastest-heating area of the US, bar the Alaskan Arctic, and the pace of its temperature rise has apparently increased in the past five years, according to the study.

“The temperature is not only increasing, it’s accelerating,” said Stephen Young, a climate researcher at Salem State University, who conducted the study, published in the Climate journal, with his son Joshua Young.

“It’s really sped up in recent years, which surprised me. Our climate is moving in a new direction, after being relatively stable in the past 10,000 years.

“Along with the Arctic and parts of Europe and China, the north-east US is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. New England is now heading towards being like the south-eastern US.”

For the study, the Youngs analyzed three datasets on day and night temperatures, as well as snow cover on the ground, that have helped shape New England – the north-eastern region that encompasses Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut – since 1900.

They found that New England has heated up by 2.5C (4.5F) on average from 1900 to 2024. This is far in excess of the global average, with the world warming by around 1.3C in this time due to the release of heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels. “That is very fast, which is worrying,” said Young.

The rise in temperatures is eroding the severe cold that New England winters are known for. Minimum temperatures and nighttime temperatures are rising faster than maximum and daytime temperatures, while the winters are heating up at twice the rate of other seasons.

The entire US ‘drug boat’ war is legally shaky

Guardian - Graphic depictions of two survivors being killed by a second US military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug ferrying boat have provoked outrage where previously there was none – or at least relatively little.

A firestorm of controversy has greeted a recent Washington Post report which suggested that a deadly attack on a vessel carrying 11 people in the Caribbean was followed with a second assault after the initial strike failed to kill everybody onboard.

Since September, the Trump administration has relentlessly targeted vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific suspected of being used by “narco-terrorists” to export illicit narcotics to the US – killing at least 81 people in more than 20 strikes.

The administration has insisted the strikes are legal under the rules of war, arguing that the US is engaged in armed conflict with traffickers, whom it accuses of being in league with Venezuela’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, to flood the US with illicit narcotics.

The rationale has been widely rejected by most legal experts, who have pointed out that the US is not in conflict with an armed group involved in attacking its territory or its assets abroad.

Detainees at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ facing ‘harrowing human right violations

The Guardian  - Detainees at the notorious Florida immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” were shackled inside a 2ft high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time, a shocking report published on Thursday by Amnesty International alleges.

The human rights group said migrants held at the state-run Everglades facility, and at Miami’s Krome immigration processing center operated by a private company on behalf of the Trump administration, continue to be exposed to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” rising in some cases to torture.

The cage, known to detainees as “the box”, is used by guards for the arbitrary punishment of trivial or non-existent offenses, according to the report compiled from interviews with detainees and advocacy groups, and a site visit to Krome made by Amnesty workers in September.

“It’s a box outside, exposed to the south Florida sun and humidity, and exposed to mosquitos,” one detainee told the group.

“One time, two people in my cell were calling out to the guards telling them that I needed my medication. Ten guards rushed into the cell and threw them to the ground. They were taken to the ‘box’ and punished just for trying to help me. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

Health

NPR - Vaccine advisers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are scheduled to meet today and tomorrow to discuss the safety of established vaccines and to potentially introduce a controversial change to the U.S. vaccine schedule. A key vote expected to happen today concerns whether to withdraw the current recommendation that the hepatitis B vaccine be administered to babies at birth.

The recommendation for the Hep B vaccine has been in place for over 30 years, and independent researchers have found that delaying it by even a couple of months could lead to hundreds of preventable deaths a year, NPR’s Pien Huang says. When it comes to the vaccine schedule, the advisers plan to investigate whether vaccines are causing asthma, eczema, and other autoimmune diseases in children, new committee chair Dr. Kirk Milhoan told The Washington Post. However, every vaccine on the schedule has been vetted and is based on the age a child’s immune system can provide the best protection after receiving it, Dr. Sean O’Leary with the American Academy of Pediatrics says. 

Trump's attacks on the Somali community

NPR - For two consecutive days, President Trump has launched into racist tirades targeting Minnesota's Somali community. Yesterday, his remarks included comments about Somalis as a group and mentioned deporting Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. His remarks began after a reporter asked the president about a fraud investigation in Minnesota, where some Somalis, among others, were convicted of defrauding social service programs.  

Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the U.S. Here’s a brief history of how they came to settle there.  

The mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul have defended the Somali community and responded to reports of the Trump administration increasing immigration enforcement targeting the community. Listen to Minnesota Public Radio’s Matt Sepic with the latest details. 

 

Heat deaths

 Nina Lakhani, The Guardian  - In Mohave county, a vast sprawling desert area that borders California and Nevada, about 70% of confirmed heat-related deaths occur indoors, with low-income residents living in RVs and mobile homes most at risk. I went to meet the family of Richard Chamblee, who died just two days after his central air conditioning broke.

Richard was clinically obese and bed-bound in the living room as the temperature hit 46C but his family could not afford to immediately replace or repair the AC system. They tried their best to keep him cool: they bought a window AC unit and installed it next to Richard’s bed, and positioned fans, ice packs and cold drinks at his bedside. But their mobile home is old, open-plan and poorly insulated; Richard overheated, struggling to breathe. His core temperature measured 42C [115 F] when he was rushed to the emergency room, but doctors were unable to cool him down. His wife, Sherry, who works three jobs, told me: “We had no idea the heat could be so dangerous so quickly inside. It just happened so fast.”

Richard was just 52. He was a devout Baptist and loved playing video games.

Another person who made my heart ache was Hannah Moody, a super-fit, inspiring social media influencer who regularly posted about her passion for the outdoors. Hannah went out on a desert hike and didn’t come home. Rescuers found Hannah, 31, the following day, just 90 metres from the car park, where her body temperature measured 61C [142 F] . Hannah was among 555 suspected heat deaths this year alone in Maricopa county, home to Phoenix, America’s fifth-largest and hottest city. This year’s death toll comes on top of another 3,100 confirmed heat-related fatalities over the past decade.

One of the most troubling things I have learned over these past few years is that the US does not have a reliable way of counting heat deaths. The nation’s 2,000-plus coroner and medical examiner offices follow no single protocol, and in many cases, whether heat is listed as a factor depends entirely on the experience and qualifications of who certifies the death. Maricopa county is considered the gold standard for investigations, yet my reporting suggests that even they could be undercounting heat-related deaths, specifically for people who are homeless.

Every single heat death is preventable, but the US chooses not to know just how many people are dying and why. “No one dies from a heatwave,” Bharat Venkat, the director of the University of California, Los Angeles’s heat lab, told me. “The way in which our society is structured makes some people vulnerable and others safer.” In other words, it is not just the heat. It is inequality – who has access to shelter, healthcare, money and social support – that often determines who lives and who dies.

What we do know is that the US is the biggest historical greenhouse gas emitter, and that today it is second only to China, so this country’s own culpability in the climate catastrophe now killing Americans did not begin with Trump.

But his rolling out of the red carpet for fossil fuel billionaires while rolling back hard-won regulations and investments in the green transition has been both barefaced and unprecedented.

Just wondering

Jobs via presidents

Polls

Newsweek - While 56 percent of all Americans surveyed said having a sexual relationship with someone you do not know well is morally wrong, young adults were significantly more likely to be more lax on the subject.

About half (51 percent) of young women surveyed believe that sex between people who do not know each other well is morally wrong, but 57 percent of young men said the same.

Young women were also the least likely to condemn open relationships, with only 46 percent of young women saying that being in an open sexual relationship is morally wrong most or all of the time. In contrast, 57 percent of young men said this was morally wrong at least most of the time.

Health

Newsweek - Around 1.6 million Americans were removed from the federal health program Medicaid during the first six months of President Donald Trump's second term, according to data collected by the health news organization KFF.

These Americans were removed from the program as part of an unwinding process happening in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the former President Joe Biden expanded access to the health insurance program

NBC News - Congress has less than a month before health insurance premiums are set to spike for millions of Americans, and hopes of a deal to mitigate the pain are fizzling.

Nautilus - Muscle cells may outcompete cancer cells for sugar, which could be why exercise has been shown to slow cancer. (Read on New Scientist) 

NBC News -  A group of advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to vote on whether the agency should dismiss its long-standing recommendation that every baby get a hepatitis B vaccination within 24 hours of birth. The shot is credited with driving down cases of acute hepatitis B infections in kids by 99%. It has been universally recommended for newborns in the U.S since the early 1990s. 

The virus, which can be passed from mother to baby during childbirth, can lead to liver disease and early death. There is no cure. Despite its success, the hepatitis B vaccine has become the latest target of skeptics who question whether the benefits of the shot outweigh potential risks.

A review of more than 400 studies found no evidence that the birth dose of the vaccines causes any short- or long-term health problems. On the contrary, the review of research, published by the Vaccine Integrity Project, an independent group of experts led by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, found that giving newborns a vaccine has prevented more than 6 million infections and nearly 1 million hospitalizations. The paper was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. Read the full story. 

Word

Bernie Sanders: Since Trump was elected:

• Mark Zuckerberg got $25 billion richer
• Jeff Bezos got $36 billion richer
• Larry Ellison got $78 billion richer
• Elon Musk got $187 billion richer

Meanwhile, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, food & housing costs soar and AI is killing jobs.