Mike Steger takes less than 20-minutes to walk through a year of President Trump’s multifaceted U.S. manufacturing policy initiatives that have positioned the U.S. economy for a massive surge in growth. Steger recaps several consequential moves by President Trump and his cabinet to fundamentally change economics in the Western Hemisphere. Each point is well delivered […]
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For the crowd that doesn't seem to be able to define what a woman is, Democrat Reps.
The post Girl Power? Dem Reps. Say Employers Who Won’t Pay Women to Stay Home from Work During Menstruation Are Committing ‘Economic Violence’ (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The following is the full transcript of the interview with Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 31, 2026. The interview was taped on May 29, 2026.
The following is the full transcript of the interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 31, 2026. The interview was taped on May 29, 2026.
President Donald Trump’s “pursuit of retribution” has led to the ousting of several GOP lawmakers he’d perceived as inefficiently loyal, but in doing so, may very well have doomed his future nominees for the remainder of his term, health care reporter Joseph Choi argued Sunday in an analysis published in The Hill.Earlier this month, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was defeated in his GOP primary race by his Trump-backed challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA). Cassidy was among the few Republican lawmakers to vote to convict the president for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and would go on to call for Trump to drop out of the 2024 race.And, while Trump may have succeeded in helping oust Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican still maintains his position as chair of the influential Senate Health Committee, a position with the power to derail any of Trump's health agency nominees.“The next few months could determine whether [Cassidy’s] legacy is restraining the Trump administration’s more extreme elements or ultimately ushering them in,” Choi wrote.“In the coming months, Cassidy will play a major role in elevating the next round of federal health leaders, presiding over the nominations of former Deputy Surgeon General Erica Schwartz to be the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Nicole Saphier to be next U.S. surgeon general and whomever the administration picks to replace former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary.”Cassidy ended up being the deciding vote in confirming Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he was initially skeptical of but convinced to confirm after receiving assurances that the HHS would adhere to vaccine safety guidelines.Now, with “nothing to lose,” noted Joseph Antos, senior health policy fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, speaking with The Hill, Cassidy could prove a problem for Trump’s health nominees going forward.
The AI boom is pushing companies across the economy — from tech giants to automakers — deep into the energy business.Why it matters: The scramble for electricity has become the gold rush beneath the AI boom, creating enormous financial value and enormous risk if demand falls short.Driving the news: Electricity — long treated as a cheap, abundant commodity — is suddenly emerging as one of the most valuable strategic assets in business."Everyone to some extent is either dependent on energy as a core input or they see energy as a huge opportunity," said Brian Janous, who was Microsoft's first energy hire 15 years ago and is now co-founder of data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure.The latest: Ford unveiled earlier this month its expansion into energy storage for data centers and other large power users.It launched a new subsidiary called Ford Energy in response to what it calls "the massive demand for domestic energy storage."Follow the money: Investors are increasingly rewarding companies pivoting to — or doubling down on — the power behind the AI boom. A few recent highlights:Ford's stock price rose to its highest level in three years after its rollout of the $2 billion energy business.Bloom Energy, long seen as a niche energy player whose tech can deliver on-site power fast, saw its stock price skyrocket more than 1,200% over the past year.Fervo Energy, a geothermal startup once viewed as speculative climate tech, surged after going public earlier this month as Wall Street hunts for new electricity sources to feed data centers.GE Vernova booked $2.4 billion in electric equipment orders for data centers in the first quarter alone, more than it made all of last year in equivalent sales. Its stock has gone up about 60% this year."The energy behind the [artificial] intelligence is invisible to most people, but it's enormous," said Andy Power, president and CEO of Digital Realty, one of the world's largest and most established data center companies."But this isn't new for those of us who've been building digital infrastructure for more than 20 years," Power said in a statement to Axios. "What's new is the pace. Utilities are inundated with applications for power and doing triage on who's real."Reality check: Beneath the surging stock prices, trouble is mounting. Opposition to data centers is intensifying rapidly, and some of the biggest projects may never come to fruition."A lot of people are going to lose a lot of money in this space," Janous said — not because of a lack of demand, but because so many mega projects are chasing that demand.He pointed to a troubled project in Texas that bills itself as the largest data center proposal in the world and another proposal in Utah by celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary.Friction point: The number of data centers canceled after pushback reached a record high in the first quarter of this year, according to data by Heatmap Pro.The canceled projects accounted for more than $40 billion in investment, the analysis found."It's getting a lot worse," Janous said about the opposition, sounding far more negative than he did in an Axios interview from February. He cited community concerns about water use, air pollution and noise as top worries.Between the lines: Every gold rush creates problems — and new businesses. The AI power boom is now spawning a generation of startups building products for data centers, some of which could help address community concerns.How it works: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are teaming up with nonprofit investor Elemental Impact to accelerate new technologies using data centers as test cases.Those technologies include advanced cooling, energy storage and low-carbon building materials.What we're watching: If these startups scale, some could help address concerns surrounding data centers, particularly around water use and air pollution.The bottom line: For decades, energy was an input. In the AI era, it's becoming the product.
Data: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates; Chart: Russell Contreras/AxiosAs exurban cities near booming metro areas explode in growth, hundreds of U.S. communities are losing residents at a pace that signals deep structural decline.Why it matters: The shrinking cities are a crisis in plain sight.They concentrate poverty and tend to have aging infrastructure and limited job growth.They struggle to attract doctors and teachers and have few of the amenities drawing younger Americans to boomtowns like Celina, Texas or Apex, N.C.Zoom in: An Axios analysis of census estimates found more than 600 incorporated places of 20,000 or more lost population between April 2020 and July 2025.Many of the fastest-declining cities are majority-Black communities in the Deep South, working-class Mexican American and Native American cities in the Southwest or legacy industrial towns in the Midwest. By the numbers: Big Spring, Texas, lost 15.3% of its population since 2020 — the steepest percentage drop of any U.S. city of 20,000 or more, per the Axios review of Census estimates.Greenville, Miss., was second, falling 10.6%, dropping from 29,690 to 26,530.Gallup, N.M. — the largest city on the Navajo Nation's edge and a hub for Indigenous commerce along Route 66 — lost 8.8% of its residents. The city's daily newspaper, The Gallup Independent, closed in January after what publisher Bob Zollinger described as the area's economic "collapse."Zoom in: Big Spring's decline came after two privately operated federal detention centers closed in 2021, costing the area several hundred jobs.Big Spring's fortunes in the Permian Basin also have long been tied to the volatility of the West Texas oil economy.Mississippi alone has three cities in the top 10 fastest-declining list: Greenville, Vicksburg, and Jackson. All three are majority-Black cities facing compounding crises: chronic underinvestment, high poverty rates, deteriorating infrastructure and outmigration of younger residents to metro areas.Zoom out: The U.S. has added millions of housing units since 2020, but that construction is almost entirely happening in the booming metros in the South and Mountain West, not in the communities shrinking fastest.Yes, but: Population loss isn't always a death spiral. St. Louis, for example, has been shrinking for 70 years and retains a functioning civic economy, major universities, and a regional healthcare system.And some of the fastest-declining cities by percentage are starting from small enough bases that raw numbers remain manageable.Between the lines: The racial geography of decline is impossible to ignore. The majority of the top 10 fastest-shrinking cities — in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana — are majority-Black communities in the South. These are cities that never fully recovered from decades of disinvestment, and the current growth era is not reaching them. Meanwhile, federal housing and infrastructure dollars are increasingly flowing toward the fast-growing exurbs that need new roads, schools, and utilities.That leaves shrinking cities competing for fewer resources with diminishing political representation as their congressional clout shrinks with their populations.Caveat: It's also worth noting that Twentynine Palms, Calif. — with a steep decliner of -7.6% — is home to a U.S. Marine Corps base, so its losses may reflect military deployment cycles as much as economic flight.The bottom line: The Census data presents two Americas in sharp relief. One is building, expanding, and filling in the outer rings of Sun Belt metros at a pace unseen in decades. The other is contracting — losing people, tax base, and political power in a slow bleed that rarely makes national headlines.
