Econ 101: The Dow Jones rose 421 points yesterday, the market’s biggest one-day spike in three years. Investors were excited about earnings reports. At the same time the price of oil continued to slide under $56 a barrel. While that’s bad for oil companies and related businesses, it frees billions of dollars for Americans to spend on other things.

Cuba Libre: The US is moving quickly to change trade relations with Cuba after President Obama announced the re-establishment of diplomatic relations. The government is making plans to ease agricultural and banking restrictions while making way for exports of construction and telecommunication equipment to Cuba. It ain’t all about cigars.

A big move would be to remove Cuba from the list of countries with state-sponsored terrorism.

President Obama acted on Cuba because Congress would not. Some Congressional Republicans have vowed they will fight to restore the Cuban embargo.

Permawar: Under the umbrella of US air attacks, Kurdish forces yesterday retook a large piece of territory from the Islamic State. The head of the Kurdistan Regional Security Council described the operation as “the single biggest military offensive against ISIS and the most successful.” The Pentagon also claims that in the last several weeks air strikes have killed several senior ISIS leaders.

The Big Hack: The US government is preparing to publicly blame North Korea for the damaging hack attack against Sony pictures and terror threats against theaters that were scheduled to show the movie The Interview. The White House says a “sophisticated actor” was behind the attack that cost Sony Pictures millions of dollars and led to the cancellation of the movie. The White House sees the attack as a national security issue that requires some proportional response, but the question is, “What?” Not many economic sanctions are left to bring against the Hermit Kingdom.

Show Me: The Missouri attorney general is suing 13 St. Louis suburbs accusing the towns of bleeding motorists with traffic fines. The city of Normandy, for instance, gets 38 percent of its operating revenue from traffic fines. By state law cities are supposed to give the state anything over 30 percent to discourage them from depending on traffic fines. The suit is a result in part of complaints that young black men are stopped disproportionately to their numbers and pay a large share of the fines.

World: Eight children ages 18 months to 15 years were found stabbed to death in a house in northern Queensland, Australia. The woman who was the mother of at least seven of the children is in the hospital with stab wounds. She is said to be assisting the investigation.

>The Pakistani military claims to have killed at least 59 Taliban militants in the days since the Taliban killed 141 people in an attack on a school.

The Obit Page: Mandy Rice-Davies, the former model who was a figure in the 1960s British sex scandal known as the Profumo Affair, has died at age 70. Rice-Davies’ roommate Christine Keeler had an affair with War Minister John Profumo leading to his resignation in 1963. For a time, those names were in the news every day.

L.L. Cool: Leon Leonwood Bean would never have dreamed of this when he invented his Maine Hunting Shoe for deer hunters in the boggy backwoods of his state. Always a staple of hunters and preppies, the Bean leather and rubber boot has become internationally popular and the company is stitching its way through 100,000 back orders that will take months to clear. A lot of people will be disappointed Christmas morning.

Truthiness: Stephen Colbert finished his nine-year run on Comedy Central last night. He said in his opening, “Folks if this is your first time tuning in to the Colbert Report, I have some terrible news.”

-30-