MINNESOTA FREEZEOUT: The Trump administration announced that it is cutting off $185 million in childcare payments to Minnesota in the midst of a burgeoning corruption scandal rooted in the Somali immigrant community of that state. This comes just days after a conservative-activist sleuth posted video of a childcare location that he presented as a fraudulent shell, even though its operators say it is active.

  Adding to right wing glee, the sign on the building had been misspelled as “Learing Center” rather than “Learning.” Vice President JD Vance posted on X that, “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes.” 

  Investigators have in fact found massive fraud in Minnesota childcare, possibly billions of dollars funneled out of the system. As many as 59 people have been convicted, many of them of Somali origin, causing President Trump to say he wants Somali immigrants out of the country. 

  Jim O’Neill, the deputy health secretary, said in a statement that the department paused the funding in response to “credible allegations” of “extensive fraud” in Minnesota’s child care programs. 

BECAUSE IT WAS THERE: Three hikers have been found dead on dangerous Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles where actor Julian Sands died in 2023.

  The Devil’s Backbone trail the hikers took is 14 miles long, round trip, and gaining 4,274 feet in elevation. Winter hikers are advised to have crampons and ice axes and know how to use them. There have been 14 deaths and 100 rescues on Mt. Baldy since 2020.

  The bodies were spotted on Monday and a friend who was with the hikers told emergency responders that one of them was a 19-year-old man who had fallen 500 feet. Unable to reach the hikers by land and air, a medic was lowered to the area and confirmed that the three were dead.

THE EPSTEIN FILES: The Justice Department is now examining 5.2 million documents related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and looking to hire 400 lawyers to vet them for release, the NY Times reports. Congress had passed a law requiring all the documents to be released by December 19, a deadline the Justice Department failed to meet.

  “We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible,” the department said on social media.

THE REGIME: 

— A federal judge in Washington ruled that the Trump administration must continue to seek funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency the administration has been trying to dismantle through staff and funding cuts. The administration has argued that because the agency gets its money from the Federal Reserve, which is operating at a loss, there’s no money for the CFPB.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected that, writing that this “would be tantamount to closing what is left of the Bureau.” 

  The CFPB was created after the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans against fraud, predatory lending practices, and abuse by businesses. Conservatives complaining that the agency is too aggressive. President Trump installed Budget Director Russell Vought as acting director of the CFPB and he ordered all work at the agency to stop within the first few weeks of Trump’s second inauguration.

— In his campaign against wind-generated power, President Trump posted that, “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”

— Trump said this week that his new White House ballroom will have a “drone-free roof, so drones won’t touch it.” 

NICE TUNE BUT YOU CAN’T DANCE TO IT: Singer Beyoncé is the fifth musician to reach billionaire status, according to Forbes magazine. She joins her husband, Jay-Z, as well as Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and Rihanna. 

THE OBIT PAGE: Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, died yesterday only weeks after announcing in an affecting essay in The New Yorker that she had terminal leukemia. She was 35, leaving a husband and two young children.

  In an essay titled “A Battle With My Blood,” published online on Nov. 22, the  anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination, Schlossberg wrote of how she learned of her cancer after the birth of her daughter in May 2024. 

  It was leukemia with a rare mutation. “I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew.” She wrote, “This could not possibly be my life.” 

  She fought the cancer with rounds of chemotherapy, stem cell transplants … all failed. She was left too weak to pick up her children. Schlossberg seemed to feel guilty for adding to the family tragedies; the assassinations of a grandfather, and great uncle, the death of her Uncle John Jr. in a plane crash.“For my whole life, I have tried to be good,” she wrote, “to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

THE SPIN RACK: The chairlifts are still and the slopes are empty at Telluride ski resort in Colorado where the ski patrol voted to strike for higher pay and the company shut down the operation. Patrollers start at $24 an hour and the price of a day ticket is $245. 

BELOW THE FOLD: It’s already 2026 in Australia. Happy New Year and we’ll be back on Friday.

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