The White House is more confident that the U.S. economy will grow in 2026 after spending around Thanksgiving and Black Friday rose.
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| “I attribute my success to this—I never gave or took any excuse.” |
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The White House is more confident that the U.S. economy will grow in 2026 after spending around Thanksgiving and Black Friday rose, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said on Sunday.
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President Donald Trump said that the freeze on asylum decisions, which was imposed following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, will likely be in place indefinitely.
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The growing evidence of a link between autism and transgenderism is leading some nations to turn to screening before intervention. In the United States, the prevailing “affirmation” approach is making detection more difficult.
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The Republican and Democratic heads of the House and Senate armed services committees say they are probing reports of follow-up strikes on alleged drug boats operating in the Caribbean Sea.
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🍵 Health: How a generation of women was misled about hormone therapy.
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| Ivan Pentchoukov
National Editor (Email) |
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Good morning! It’s Monday. Thank you for reading the Morning Brief, an exclusive newsletter for Epoch Times subscribers. |
Director of the White House National Economic Council Kevin Hassett during a television interview at the White House, Monday, Aug. 4, 2025, in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo) |
The White House is more confident that the U.S. economy will grow in 2026 after spending around Thanksgiving and Black Friday rose, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said on Sunday.
Online sales on Black Friday increased by about 10 percent compared with the annual shopping day last year, Hassett told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “I think the folks who were saying, ‘Wow, maybe people are going to be anxious about going back and getting presents for the kids’ and so on, they have been disproven this weekend,” Hassett said. Stronger spending around Thanksgiving suggests that the U.S. economy is more resilient than previously thought following a weekslong government shutdown that ended in mid-November, Hassett said.
“I think the reason is that ... incomes are up this year. We had a great jobs report, and with strong income and the government shutdown over, so that people have pent-up demand as well, I think that we’re looking at a great recovery from a weak few weeks because of the shutdown,” he said.
Adobe Analytics, which tracks e-commerce, said U.S. consumers spent a record $11.8 billion online on Friday, marking a 9.1 percent jump from last year. Traffic rose particularly between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. local time nationwide, when $12.5 million passed through online shopping carts every minute. (More)
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Politicians across the country are keeping a close eye on the special election for Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District on Tuesday. Democrats are hoping to flip the long-time Republican-held seat and narrow the GOP’s already slim majority in the U.S. House. The race will provide a temperature check on voters in the South ahead of the 2026 midterms. Here are six things to watch ahead of election day.
- President Donald Trump granted clemency to private equity executive David Gentile just days into his sentence, a White House official confirmed to the Epoch Times on Nov. 30.
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Chloe Cole grew up a tomboy, was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by age 7, and referred for autism screening by age 17. Cole began identifying as a boy during adolescence and sought physical changes to match.
Doctors readily consented to medical intervention. They prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone at age 13. At 15, surgeons performed a double mastectomy, she told The Epoch Times.
But doctors didn’t address her neurological issues first. The same gender specialist who referred her for breast surgery later referred her for autism screening. Cole has described herself as being on the autism spectrum, but said she was never formally diagnosed. Cole is now a leading campaigner against interventions to transition children with gender dysphoria. She said many of those she knew personally when she was involved in the transgender community, as well as many of the detransitioners she knows, “are either somewhere on the autism spectrum, or they have been diagnosed with similar conditions, like ADHD.”
Her observations are increasingly supported by research. For at least a decade, studies have reported links among transgender identity, autism, and other neurological conditions. These connections have recently gained greater public attention.
Growing evidence of an autism–transgender link is already prompting some nations to recommend neurological screening before intervention. In America, the treatment model remains unchanged, and the predominant “affirmation” model makes the link difficult to investigate. (More)
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Hurricane season officially came to an end on Nov. 30, and for the first time in 10 years, no hurricane made landfall in the United States.
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The man accused of shooting two National Guardsmen in Washington last week may have been radicalized after entering the United States, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
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The Department of Justice is increasingly cracking down on an online predator network known as “764.” The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said the group is “producing some of the most sadistic online enticement reports” it has ever seen. Here’s what we know about the 764 network and the government’s crackdown.
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The Republican and Democratic heads of the House and Senate armed services committees say they are probing reports of follow-up strikes on alleged drug boats operating in the Caribbean Sea.
“We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the [U.S. Southern Command] region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said in a statement shared on X on Nov. 29.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) issued a joint statement late on Nov. 29 stating that their committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
Citing anonymous sources, The Washington Post first reported on Nov. 28 that a special operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 strike on a suspect vessel off the coast of Trinidad ordered a second attack after two survivors were allegedly observed clinging to the floating wreckage of the vessel. The Epoch Times could not independently confirm the reported follow-on strike during the Sept. 2 operation. Responding to the reporting about the strike, War Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a statement denouncing what he described as “more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit ... incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.”
Hegseth further said that every individual killed in the ongoing series of sea strikes was a member of a designated terrorist organization. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s current term, the U.S. State Department has designated several Latin American criminal enterprises as foreign terrorist organizations. (More) More World News: |
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President Donald Trump confirmed that he has spoken with Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro amid rising tensions between the two nations. “I don’t want to comment on it. The answer is yes,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
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After U.S. and Ukrainian delegations wrapped up roughly four hours of discussion in Florida on Sunday, intended to broker a deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that progress had been made in reaching an endgame to the war but that work remains.
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The death toll in the blaze that consumed an apartment complex in Hong Kong rose to 146, cementing the disaster as one of the city’s worst in history as mourners gather and leave flowers at a makeshift memorial.
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Workers prepare the Stuart the Minion balloon during Macy's Balloon Inflation 2025 in New York City on Nov. 26, 2025. This year was the 99th annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Adam Gray/Getty Images) |
📸 America in Photos: Thanksgiving Festivities, Texas Storm, and National Guardsmen Shot (Look)
🎙️ Podcast: The Strategy That Could Help US Decouple from China Rare Earths—The Report (Listen) ✍️ Opinion |
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Delusion or Hate? Gaps Persist in Madness and Violence Cases—by Theodore Dalrymple (Read)
- Why America’s 1963 Poverty Math Is Broken—Peter C. Earle (Read)
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(Getty Images/MoMo Productions) |
“Was I misled?”
That’s the question many patients have asked lately—asked with anger, exhaustion, and the quiet devastation of women who wonder if they lost years of their lives to menopause symptoms they were told were untreatable.
The answer came earlier this month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would remove “black box” warnings from hormone therapy products after 23 years. For many women, the reversal is an admission that arrives decades too late.
In July 2002, preliminary data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) were published in JAMA, showing that combined hormone therapy (estrogen and progestin) increased the risk of breast cancer, stroke, and pulmonary embolism. Major media outlets interpreted early signals from the study as definitive danger, and the announcement led to an instant and dramatic decline in the use of hormone therapy. Women who had been sleeping well for the first time in years suddenly poured their medications into the trash. Pharmacies fielded calls from panicked patients demanding immediate discontinuation. Primary care doctors, most of whom had never been trained deeply in menopause management, told their patients to “stop now and ask questions later.”
Women did stop, and many suffered in silence for the next 20 years. On Nov. 10, the FDA announced that it is initiating the removal of broad “black box” warnings referencing risks of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and probable dementia from hormone replacement therapy products for menopause.
When FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary spoke publicly about the shift, he didn’t mince words. He said the media had frightened women away from a potentially life-changing therapy, and he noted the difference between estrogen-only therapy and synthetic combination regimens. He acknowledged, openly, that the “fear machine” had begun long before the scientific data had been fully understood. (More)
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Thanks for reading 🙏 Have a wonderful day! |
—Ivan Pentchoukov, Madalina Hubert, and Kenzi Li. |
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