News - Friday, December 5, 2025

Autumn Witt Boyd still remembers the soft crackle of the speakers in Judge Curtis Collier’s chambers – the way they let his clerks follow everything happening in the courtroom down the hall. When the proceedings wrapped and the sounds from the bench faded, she and the other clerks would gather in the library, knowing he was on his way back.

Carrie Stefaniak keeps a scrap of paper taped to the side of her printer, where her eyes land when she looks up from a brief. It holds a line she wrote down during one of the first sentencings she watched after leaving private practice to become U.S. District Judge Curtis Collier’s career law clerk.

When Notre Dame High School senior McKinna Wiles first stepped into the federal courthouse in Chattanooga, she expected to spend her internship doing what she’d seen interns do in movies – fetching coffee, shuffling papers and observing the real work from a distance.

Federal judges are drawn from the ranks of experienced lawyers with diverse personal and professional backgrounds. They bring to the bench their professional training and experience, personal history and lived experiences.

As a result of these experiences, they form certain beliefs and sympathies and develop certain preferences and biases. But, as judges, they must put aside these beliefs, sympathies, preferences and biases if they conflict with their obligation to apply the law fairly and impartially.

For many, this time of year is already packed with travel, school events and holiday prep. But if life has you listing your home this winter, whether for a job move, a growing household or a fresh start, there are smart ways to make the season work in your favor.

Thanks to market swings, evolving tax laws and new technology, it might be a good year to consider tax-loss harvesting – a strategy that can help reduce taxes and improve long-term returns.

What is tax-loss harvesting?

When you sell an investment for less than you paid, you might be able to use that loss to offset gains from other investments, potentially reducing your overall tax bill.

Ole Miss and Tennessee football programs now have one more thing in common, in addition to best-ever quarterbacks with the last name Manning: They’ve both been jilted by Lane Kiffin.

I will argue that Ole Miss is the more seriously aggrieved.

Getting run out of their own stadium by their in-state rival on Senior Day isn’t the way the Tennessee Volunteers wanted to end the regular season.

An inconsistent stretch of SEC play ended with a thud as Tennessee suffered a 45-24 loss to Vanderbilt at Neyland Stadium. Vanderbilt outscored Tennessee 24-3 in the second half to secure the first 10-win season in program history and beat the Vols for the first time since 2018.

If you build it, will they stay home?

It’s a possibility, especially if the product continues to be as bad and boring as it was Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Nissan Stadium was half empty Sunday, as a good number of holders of the 54,000 tickets distributed decided they had better things to do than sit through a blustery, 40-degree day and watch the Titans lose for their 11th consecutive time at home. 

Turnovers plagued the 2024 Tennessee Titans. Will Levis’ struggle with interceptions (12 in 12 games) is well-documented, and backup Mason Rudolph’s efforts (9 in 8 games) were no better as the Titans struggled to find three wins a year ago.

There are many luxury electric SUVs to choose from, but they are often out of reach financially for most buyers. This is especially true now that the $7,500 federal tax credit has been eliminated. 

But there are some options if you’re working with a modest luxury budget. Two of the most compelling are the Audi Q4 E-tron and Cadillac Optiq.

So much has been given to you. You have a place to sleep, food to eat and clean water to drink. You have friends and family, people who look out for you and folks who know your face. 

You have received much in life, and as you’ll see in the new book, “A Talent for Giving” by John Studzinski, you have much to give.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration's bid to halt an order requiring it to release millions of dollars in grants meant to address the shortage of mental health workers in schools.

The mental health program, which was funded by Congress after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, included grants meant to help schools hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers, with a focus on rural and underserved areas of the country. But President Donald Trump's administration opposed aspects of the grant programs that touched on race, saying they were harmful to students and told recipients they wouldn't receive funding past December 2025.

MADRID (AP) — Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it had restored services following an outage that took place in the morning and brought down several global websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks.

NEW YORK (AP) — Netflix struck a deal Friday to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the Hollywood giant behind "Harry Potter" and "Friends," in a $72 billion deal that would bring together two of the biggest players in television and film and potentially reshape the entertainment industry.

LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators on Friday fined X, Elon Musk's social media platform, 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc's digital regulations, in a move that risks rekindling tensions with Washington over free speech.

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump's White House is taking on the role of media critic and asking for help from "everyday Americans."

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the White House launched a web portal it says will spotlight bias on the part of news outlets, targeting the Boston Globe, CBS News and The Independent as its inaugural "media offender of the week."

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man accused of planting a pair of pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national parties in Washington on the eve of the U.S. Capitol attack confessed to the act in interviews with investigators, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation changed little in September, likely easing the way to a widely expected interest rate cut by the central bank next week.

Prices rose 0.3% in September from August, the Commerce Department said Friday in a report that was delayed five weeks by the government shutdown. It was the same increase as the previous month. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 0.2% in September from August, the same as the previous month and a pace that if it continued for a year would bring inflation closer to the Fed's 2% target.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. consumers' mood improved slightly this month, with worries about inflation easing a bit, but remains gloomy.

The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index, released Friday in a preliminary version, rose to 53.3 early this month from a final reading of 51 in November. The index beat the 52 mark that economists had forecast but is down considerably from 71.7 in January.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — U.S. Steel said it will resume making steel slabs at its Granite City Works plant in Illinois as demand rebounds.

The company shut down the last blast furnace there in 2023, and it even moved to wind down its steel processing mill there in September.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration will be expanding its ban on travel for citizens of certain countries to more than 30, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, in the latest restriction to come since a man from Afghanistan was accused of shooting two National Guard members.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration has set forth a new national security strategy that paints European allies as weak and aims to reassert America's dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

The document released Friday by the White House is sure to roil long-standing U.S. allies in Europe for its scathing critiques of their migration and free speech policies, suggesting they face the "prospect of civilizational erasure" and raising doubts about their long-term reliability as American partners.