President Joe Biden is set to visit Italy next month in what is likely the final international trip of his presidency. Biden will tour Italy from Jan. 9 to 12, where he will visit with Pope Francis, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden’s audience with the Pope will focus on peace efforts around the world. She said Biden will also use the visit to “highlight the strength of the U.S.–Italy relationship, thank Prime Minister Meloni for her strong leadership of the G7 over the past year, and discuss important challenges facing the world.”

Overseas visits so late in a U.S. presidency aren’t typical. The last president to travel overseas in the final month of his presidency was fellow one-termer George H.W. Bush, who traveled in early January 1993 to Moscow to sign a nuclear treaty and to Paris for talks with French President François Mitterrand about the Bosnian war, according to State Department historical records. (More)

During the past four years, many businesses have been like Dana Dunmyer’s—in a holding pattern. Now Dunmyer, who froze hiring at his Ohio-based tech business since 2021, anticipates adding employees in 2025 after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

He is among more than 81 percent of small business owners who said they would consider hiring new staff if Trump won the election, according to the Freedom Economy Index. That survey, conducted every two months, is a joint project of two conservative business-boosting groups, PublicSquare and RedBalloon.work.

A post-election survey conducted by Teneo, a global CEO advisory firm headquartered in New York City, produced similar results. Teneo said it “took the pulse” of more than 300 global CEOs and 380 investors and found that almost 80 percent of CEOs predicted the economy would improve in the next six months—45 percentage points higher than in the previous year. (More)

President Joe Biden’s administration has retracted its $10 million counter-terror bounty against Ahmad al-Sharaa, an insurgent leader who played a key role in driving Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad from power in recent weeks.

Sharaa, who is also known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist faction currently designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. HTS is a rebrand of Jabhat al-Nusra, which formed as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. The decision to drop the bounty against Sharaa coincided with a U.S. diplomatic visit to Syria on Dec. 20. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara A. Leaf announced the bounty decision in a call with reporters after meeting with Sharaa.

“If I’m sitting with the HTS leader and having a lengthy detailed discussion about a whole series of—interests of the U.S., interests of Syria, maybe interests of the region, suffice to say it’s a little incoherent then to have a bounty on the guy’s head,” Leaf said. (More)

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