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Taken together, prices across 67 categories of everyday goods would have edged down over the 12 months to February 2026 if not for President Donald Trump's tariffs. That is the conclusion of a new study posted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Researchers at the New York Fed and Columbia University studied 67 categories of consumer goods. They found that tariffs imposed in 2025 and early 2026 pushed the yearly rate of price increases on those items up by 2.9 percentage points as of February 2026. Without the tariffs, prices for the same goods would have fallen by almost 1 percent instead of rising.

The researchers, Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise and David Weinstein, also found that the cost does not land all at once. For every one-point increase in the average tariff, consumer goods prices were roughly a quarter of a percent higher a year later. About two-thirds of the effect came from higher prices on imported goods that are directly hit by the tariffs. The rest came from knock-on effects, such as American companies paying more for the imported parts and materials that go into their own products.

In other words, even goods made in this country can cost more because of tariffs.

The tariffs' contribution to yearly price growth on the tracked items peaked in February 2026. But the researchers' forecast, which assumes tariffs stay at current levels, shows the overall level of consumer goods prices remaining higher into 2027.

The White House disputes the idea that Americans carry the burden. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement: "The Trump administration has consistently maintained that the cost of tariffs will ultimately be borne by foreign exporters who rely on access to the American economy."

The finding comes from researchers at the New York Fed and Columbia University, and it points the other way. Their model shows the effect on the overall price level easing from nearly 3 percent to about 2 percent by August 2026 after a Supreme Court ruling led to lower tariffs, before edging up again as newer tariffs on Canadian goods pass through.

A single mother in New Jersey says a lawyer for President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump warned, in a message relayed to her by another attorney, that she would lose her home, be bankrupted and end up on the street with her kids.

Joanne Carducci, known online as JoJo From Jerz and followed by more than a million people, told the Medias Touch podcast of an ordeal that has lasted months.

She says it began with a letter, several pages long, from the Trumps' personal attorney in Florida, "the same attorney that was handling the IRS case and the ABC case," she told host Ken Harbaugh. It demanded that she retract things she had said online, including a claim that Trump incited a de*dly insurrection against the U.S. Capitol. It also called for a full apology, an admission that she had knowingly lied, and a payment that had not yet been named. It set a deadline of a few days and warned of punitive damages.

Carducci says a prominent attorney first offered to help her for free, then changed course after speaking with the Florida lawyer. His advice, she says, was to meet every demand because the Trumps have "inexhaustible resources." She says she is paraphrasing her attorney's account of his call with the Florida lawyer, but that his exact words to her were: "They're going to take your house. It's the only asset you have. They're going to bankrupt you and you're going to end up on the street with your kids."

She says one million dollars was demanded at one point. Carducci says she once earned $16 an hour as a paraprofessional and rebuilt her life with no credit after a brutal divorce. She says she never considered giving in, and that her children still do not know.

Former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin offered to help with part of her case for free, she says. She decided to go public after hearing Melania Trump on the news congratulating herself for empowering women.

"I'm still terrified, but I'm done being quiet about it."

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson hinted on Thursday hinted that he could quit Congress if Democrats win the upcoming midterms. With Democrats being favored to take control of the House, Johnson told Fox News, “Heaven forbid, if we lose this majority or whatever, I don’t know what my next chapter of life is."

Johnson has struggled to control his own conference all year, canceled votes to avoid difficult decisions on Hegseth’s impeachment and the Epstein files, and sent members home for two months before the midterms.

Talk about timing. Back in 2019, New Jersey man Mike Weirsky found himself unemployed and freshly divorced after 15 years of marriage. For years, his wife had been the breadwinner while he stayed at home, and the couple finalized their split in the fall of 2018. Just five months later, everything changed.

Mike bought a handful of Mega Millions tickets at a local convenience store, then walked out and left them sitting on the counter. Luckily, an honest stranger spotted the tickets and handed them to the clerk. Mike came back the next day, picked them up, and later checked the numbers at home. He had matched every single one, winning a staggering $273 million jackpot.

At his press conference, Mike joked that he could hardly believe he’d finally won more than a couple of dollars after years of playing. His first plans were refreshingly down to earth: a new pickup truck for himself, a new car for his mom, and a remodel of her home. He also said he wanted to quietly thank the good Samaritan who returned his tickets.

His ex-wife said she wasn’t interested in getting back together, but she hoped he’d do the right thing considering how long she supported him.

Beavers are heading north. As the Arctic warms, they’re moving into territory that was previously too cold for them, damming creeks and flooding tundra as they go and there are now reports of beavers swimming in the Arctic Ocean itself.

The problem was that nobody knew when they’d arrived.

Remote Arctic sites are expensive to survey and hard to monitor, so there was no baseline. Without one, you can’t tell how fast they’re spreading or which changes to the landscape they’re responsible for. So researchers worked it out from the chewing.

They collected 94 willow and alder stems bearing beaver bite marks near dams and lodges, plus 99 untouched stems for comparison. By matching the growth-ring patterns between the two, they could date each bite then checked those dates against four decades of satellite imagery showing how surface water had changed.

The answer: beavers have continuously occupied that part of Arctic Canada since at least 2008.

The project came from the Imaryuk Monitors, a community patrol group who noticed in 2020 that beaver activity was reshaping their creeks and lakes, and went looking for researchers who could tell them what was happening.

Their dams change how water flows which can block travel routes and create conditions where waterborne illness spreads.

“Little engineers,” as one monitor put it. “They’re incredible, but at the same time, they create so much damage.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Theo Vonn on a recent podcast that when his administration took office and reviewed New York City's finances, they discovered the actual budget deficit was roughly double what the previous administration had publicly claimed.

"The prior administration had said we had a balanced budget. We had, I don't know, maybe a $6 billion deficit or so in the year to come," Mamdani said. "And then we came in, we looked through all the books and we found that at a best case scenario, we were at a $12 billion deficit."

Mamdani said deficits of that size are typically tied to a major crisis. "The last time we had deficits like that, there was a major global event," he said, pointing to the pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis as past examples. "There was no event around this that could explain this much of a deficit."

Asked what caused the gap, Mamdani didn't point to fraud, though he noted some cases from the prior administration had been investigated for it. Instead, he described a more systemic failure. "I think it's incompetence and a lack of interest in resolving it," he said. "A sense that you could just keep pushing it until it was somebody else's problem."

Mamdani said the experience revealed how shortsighted city budgeting had become, citing an unrelated example: snow removal funding calculated as an average of recent years' costs, leaving the city unprepared after a stretch of mild winters. "You look under the hood and it is way worse than what you would have imagined," he said.

Donald Trump's envoy Jared Kushner is helping steer Middle East diplomacy while his investment firm holds a major stake in an Israeli company tied to that country's arms industry, a new CNN report highlights.

Kushner's firm, Affinity Partners, is the largest shareholder in Phoenix Financial, one of Israel's biggest financial groups. He invested $128.5 million in 2024, then doubled his stake in January 2025, just five days before Trump took the oath of office.

CNN found that Phoenix has put at least $456 million into nine companies linked to Israel's defense sector. At least $265.1 million of that went to Elbit Systems, Israel's largest arms maker, which won contracts in the past year worth about $200 million for advanced airborne munitions and $48 million for thousands of 155mm artillery shells. Phoenix also backs makers of military drone cameras, warplane engines and artillery fuses.

Kushner has called Phoenix Affinity's "best investment". In July, his firm sold about a quarter of its holding for more than $340 million. It still owns a 7.4 percent stake worth more than $1 billion.

His attorney told CNN he never participated in or directed Phoenix's investment decisions. Kushner told Forbes in September 2025 that he had "a very active dialogue" with the company and met its leadership regularly. His attorney says those contacts have since decreased significantly, and CNN found no indication his diplomacy directly affected the investments it reviewed.

Kushner was the main architect of the Gaza recovery plan, and he sits on Trump's "Board of Peace", which is responsible for mediating the ceasefire and rebuilding Gaza.

Affinity reported more than $6.1 billion in assets in a regulatory filing this spring, with about 99 percent belonging to investors outside the United States. The only publicly known investors in Affinity are reportedly Arab Gulf states, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Because Kushner holds no official government position, he is not required to disclose his finances.

After taxpayer dollars paid for television ads that promote President Donald Trump personally, a former White House ethics attorney revealed the spending could be illegal, and even impeachable.

Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush during his second term, said the ads could be "an impeachable offense." Writing on the social platform X, Painter said: "@POTUS has no right to use taxpayer money for campaign ads." He added, "Congress has expressly prohibited government sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy."

One of the White House ads concludes with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White calling Trump the "toughest, most resilient person that I've ever met." Another clip shows Trump saying during his 2024 campaign that he and his supporters "will demolish the deep state" and "expel the warmongers from our government."

In the same ad, Trump says: "We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all." The campaign has since grown to at least three ads, with total taxpayer spending nearing $1.5 million, including close to $920,000 spent airing one spot alone. Each carries a disclaimer reading "Paid for by the U.S. Government."

Federal law bars executive branch agencies from spending taxpayer-appropriated funds on what statute calls "publicity or propaganda" purposes, a restriction separate from campaign finance rules. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have criticized the ad campaign.

Todd Blanche served as Trump's personal criminal defense attorney before being confirmed as Attorney General in a 4am Senate vote. He has since been accused of running the DOJ as a political operation, including managing the Epstein files release that exposed victims' personal information and spending nine hours meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell while initially declining to meet survivors.