The News

 The Los Angeles wildfires continue to cause devastation across California.

Former child actor Rory Callum Sykes is among the growing list of victims who have lost their lives in the fires. The Australian actor—who starred on the British TV show Kiddy Kapers—was 32.

As embers rained down on their home, his mom tried to call 911 but was unable to connect to get help. “He died needlessly,” she told Australian outlet 10 News First. “He said ‘Mom, leave me,’ and no mom can leave their kid.”

X/Shelley Skyes

Throughout his life, Rory was known as a fighter. “He overcame so much with surgeries & therapies to regain his sight & to be able to learn to walk,” Shelley wrote. “Despite the pain, he still enthused about traveling the world with me from Africa to Antarctica.”

“@rorysykes was a sought after inspirational speaker for @TonyRobbins when he was only 8 years old. @CallumsCure book first published by @simonschuster in Australia was about his courage.”

(Photo by TheStewartofNY/GC Images)

(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images) / Bryan Greenberg, Instagram

 Texas was on the edge of the end zone with a chance to tie the game with only minutes remaining in the Cotton Bowl against Ohio State. The Longhorns had the ball with first-and-goal at the 2-yard line. After a pass interference call on the Buckeyes, it was first-and-goal at the 1-yard line. 

At that point, almost nothing bad can happen. As a play caller, you have four plays to reach the end zone. As long as your calls go forward, you're unlikely to lose much ground. Even if you get stuffed, the opposing offense starts in the shadow of their own end zone. Ironically, Texas learned this the hard way in the Peach Bowl when Arizona State forced a safety after a red zone stop. 

For quarterback Quinn Ewers, it was set to be a validating moment. The Longhorns were major underdogs and Ewers made a handful of miraculous plays in the second half to swing the game, including a long pass to tight end Gunner Helm and magical toss to a running back while being tackled for a third-and-10 conversion. 

There's only two rules when facing a goal line stand: Don't give up ground, and don't turn the ball over. With their season on the line, in the 16th game of the season, in the final game for numerous mainstays of the program, Texas failed on both counts in a decision that iced a 28-14 loss against Ohio State. 

Texas ran a dive with their heavy set and running back Jerrick Gibson. It went nowhere. On second down, Texas coach Steve Sarkisian dialed up a bizarre, inexplicable, unacceptable call -- a toss sweep to running back Quintrevion Wisner to the short side of the field. Ohio State's uber talented secondary jumped all over it. Thanks to the play, 2nd-and-1 turned into 3rd-and-8. A likely tie game turned into a dire situation. 

"That's one of those plays, if you block it all right, you get into the end zone," Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. "We didn't, and we lost quite a bit of yardage." 

Technically, Sarkisian is correct. If any play is executed perfectly and not defended, it will result in a touchdown. But in a game where Ohio State owned the perimeter, the idea of calmly locking down the Buckeyes' secondary is ambitious to say the least. Technically, Sarkisian is correct. If any play is executed perfectly and not defended, it will result in a touchdown. But in a game where Ohio State owned the perimeter, the idea of calmly locking down the Buckeyes' secondary is ambitious to say the least. 

We asked our college football analyst Blake Brockermeyer, who was a first-team All-American offensive lineman at Texas, to take a look at the All-22 and break down the play.

 The What Women Want actor revealed that the Malibu home that he'd lived in for nearly 15 years burned to the ground amid the Los Angeles fires.

"You live there for a long time, and you had all your stuff," Gibson reflected during a Jan. 9 phone interview on NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports. "You remember George Carlin talking about your stuff? I had my stuff there, and it’s all like, I’ve been relieved from the burden of my stuff, because it’s all in cinders."

At the time the fires broke out, the 69-year-old had just flown to Austin, Texas, to record an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. 

"I was doing the Rogan podcast," Gibson said, noting his girlfriend Rosalind Ross and son Lars, 7, evacuated soon after the fire started. "And [I was] kind of ill at ease while we were talking, because I knew my neighborhood was on fire, so I thought, 'I wonder if my place is still there.'"

Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

 President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his hush money case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, an outcome that cements his conviction but frees him to return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.

Trump’s sentence of an unconditional discharge caps a norm-smashing case that saw the former and future president charged with 34 felonies, put on trial for almost two months and convicted by a jury on every count. Yet, the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations — didn’t hurt him with voters, who elected him to a second term.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan could have sentenced the 78-year-old Republican to up to four years in prison. Instead, he chose a sentence that sidestepped thorny constitutional issues by effectively ending the case but assured that Trump will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.

Merchan said that like when facing any other defendant, he must consider any aggravating factors before imposing a sentence, but the legal protection that Trump will have as president “is a factor that overrides all others.”

“Despite the extraordinary breadth of those legal protections, one power they do not provide is that they do not erase a jury verdict," Merchan said.

rump, briefly addressing the court as he appeared virtually from his Florida home, said his criminal trial and conviction has “been a very terrible experience” and insisted he committed no crime.

The Republican former president, appearing on a video feed 10 days before he is inaugurated, again pilloried the case, the only one of his four criminal indictments that has gone to trial and possibly the only one that ever will.

“It’s been a political witch hunt. It was done to damage my reputation so that I would lose the election, and obviously, that didn’t work," Trump said.

Trump called the case “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”

With Trump 10 days from inauguration, Merchan had indicated he planned a no-penalty sentence called an unconditional discharge, and prosecutors didn't oppose it.

Prosecutors said Friday that they supported a no-penalty sentence, but they chided Trump's attacks on the legal system throughout and after the case.

“The once and future President of the United States has engaged in a coordinated campaign to undermine its legitimacy,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.

Rather than show remorse, Trump has “bred disdain” for the jury verdict and the criminal justice system, Steinglass said, and his calls for retaliation against those involved in the case, including calling for the judge to be disbarred, "has caused enduring damage to public perception of the criminal justice system and has put officers of the court in harm’s way.”

As he appeared from his Florida home, the former president was seated with his lawyer Todd Blanche, whom he’s tapped to serve as the second-highest ranking Justice Department official in his incoming administration.

“Legally, this case should not have been brought,” Blanche said, reiterating Trump’s intention to appeal the verdict. That technically can’t happen until he’s sentenced.

Trump, a Republican, becomed the first person convicted of a felony to assume the presidency.

The judge had indicated that he planned the unconditional discharge — a rarity in felony convictions — partly to avoid complicated constitutional issues that would have arisen if he imposed a penalty that overlapped with Trump’s presidency.

Before the hearing, a handful of Trump supporters and critics gathered outside. One group held a banner that read, “Trump is guilty.” The other held one that said, “Stop partisan conspiracy” and “Stop political witch hunt.”

The hush money case accused Trump of fudging his business' records to veil a $130,000 payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She was paid, late in Trump’s 2016 campaign, not to tell the public about a sexual encounter she maintains the two had a decade earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them, and he contends that his political adversaries spun up a bogus prosecution to try to damage him.

“I never falsified business records. It is a fake, made up charge,” the Republican president-elect wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office brought the charges, is a Democrat.

Bragg's office said in a court filing Monday that Trump committed “serious offenses that caused extensive harm to the sanctity of the electoral process and to the integrity of New York’s financial marketplace.”

While the specific charges were about checks and ledgers, the underlying accusations were seamy and deeply entangled with Trump’s political rise. Prosecutors said Daniels was paid off — through Trump's personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen — as part of a wider effort to keep voters from hearing about Trump's alleged extramarital escapades.

Trump denies the alleged encounters occurred. His lawyers said he wanted to squelch the stories to protect his family, not his campaign. And while prosecutors said Cohen's reimbursements for paying Daniels were deceptively logged as legal expenses, Trump says that's simply what they were.

“There was nothing else it could have been called,” he wrote on Truth Social last week, adding, “I was hiding nothing.”

Trump's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to forestall a trial. Since his May conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, they have pulled virtually every legal lever within reach to try to get the conviction overturned, the case dismissed or at least the sentencing postponed.

The Trump attorneys have leaned heavily into assertions of presidential immunity from prosecution, and they got a boost in July from a Supreme Court decision that affords former commanders-in-chief considerable immunity.

Trump was a private citizen and presidential candidate when Daniels was paid in 2016. He was president when the reimbursements to Cohen were made and recorded the following year.

On one hand, Trump's defense argued that immunity should have kept jurors from hearing some evidence, such as testimony about some of his conversations with then-White House communications director Hope Hicks.

And after Trump won this past November's election, his lawyers argued that the case had to be scrapped to avoid impinging on his upcoming presidency and his transition to the Oval Office.

Merchan, a Democrat, repeatedly postponed the sentencing, initially set for July. But last week, he set Friday's date, citing a need for “finality.” He wrote that he strove to balance Trump's need to govern, the Supreme Court's immunity ruling, the respect due a jury verdict and the public’s expectation that "no one is above the law.”

Trump's lawyers then launched a flurry of last-minute efforts to block the sentencing. Their last hope vanished Thursday night with a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that declined to delay the sentencing.

Meanwhile, the other criminal cases that once loomed over Trump have ended or stalled ahead of trial.

After Trump's election, special counsel Jack Smith closed out the federal prosecutions over Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. A state-level Georgia election interference case is locked in uncertainty after prosecutor Fani Willis was removed from it.

 In one of the most important cases of the social media age, free speech and national security collide at the Supreme Court on Friday in arguments over the fate of TikTok, a wildly popular digital platform that roughly half the people in the United States use for entertainment and information.

TikTok could shut down the social media site in the U.S. by Jan. 19 unless the Supreme Court strikes down or otherwise delays the effective date of a law aimed at forcing TikTok's sale by its Chinese parent company.

"Absent such relief, the Act will take effect on January 19, 2025," TikTok said in a Dec. 9 legal filing. "That would shut down TikTok—one of the Nation's most popular speech platforms — for its more than 170 million domestic monthly users on the eve of a presidential inauguration."

• The TikTok ban heads to the Supreme Court tomorrow. Here's what to know about the case.

Working on a tight deadline, the justices also have before them a plea from President-elect Donald Trump, who has dropped his earlier support for a ban, to give him and his new administration time to reach a "political resolution" and avoid deciding the case. It's unclear if the court will take the Republican president-elect's views — a highly unusual attempt to influence a case — into account.

TikTok and China-based ByteDance, as well as content creators and users, argue the law is a dramatic violation of the Constitution's free speech guarantee.

"Rarely if ever has the court confronted a free-speech case that matters to so many people," lawyers for the users and content creators wrote. Content creators are anxiously awaiting a decision that could upend their livelihoods and are eyeing other platforms.

The case represents another example of the court being asked to rule about a medium with which the justices have acknowledged they have little familiarity or expertise, though they often weigh in on meaty issues involving restrictions on speech.

How TikTok could avoid a ban 

TikTok has several pathways to avoid a ban outside of Supreme Court intervention, experts told CBS News. 

Trump could take action once he's in office and ask the Justice Department not to enforce the law or prosecute tech companies, like Apple and Google, who host TikTok in their app stores. Trump also has the authority to issue a 90-day delay of the law after Jan. 19, though he would have to certify to Congress that "evidence of significant progress" toward a divestiture has taken place. 

TikTok won't disappear from Americans' phones on Jan. 19 if the law takes effect. However, users would not be able to update the app and those who don't already have it would not be able to download it.  

The Biden administration, defending the law that President Joe Biden signed in April after it was approved by wide bipartisan majorities in Congress, contends that "no one can seriously dispute that (China's) control of TikTok through ByteDance represents a grave threat to national security."

Officials say Chinese authorities can compel ByteDance to hand over information on TikTok's U.S. patrons or use the platform to spread or suppress information.

But the government "concedes that it has no evidence China has ever attempted to do so," TikTok told the justices, adding that limits on speech should not be sustained when they stem from fears that are predicated on future risks.

In December, a panel of three appellate judges, two appointed by Republicans and one by a Democrat, unanimously upheld the law and rejected the First Amendment speech claims.

Trump urges court to pause

Adding to the tension, the court is hearing arguments just nine days before the law is supposed to take effect and 10 days before a new administration takes office.

In language typically seen in a campaign ad rather than a legal brief, lawyers for Trump have called on the court to temporarily prevent the TikTok ban from going into effect but refrain from a definitive resolution.

"President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government — concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged," D. John Sauer, Trump's choice to be his administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, wrote in a legal brief filed with the court.

Trump took no position on the underlying merits of the case, Sauer wrote. Trump's campaign team used TikTok to connect with younger voters, especially male voters, and Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, in December. He has 14.7 million followers on TikTok.

The justices have set aside two hours for arguments, and the session likely will extend well beyond that. Three highly experienced Supreme Court lawyers will be making arguments. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar will present the Biden administration's defense of the law, while Trump's solicitor general in his first administration, Noel Francisco, will argue on behalf of TikTok and ByteDance. Stanford Law professor Jeffrey Fisher, representing content creators and users, will be making his 50th high court argument.

If the law takes effect, Trump's Justice Department will be charged with enforcing it. Lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the new administration could seek to mitigate the law's most severe consequences.

But they also said that a shutdown of just a month would cause TikTok to lose about one-third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.

As it weighs the case, the court will have to decide what level of review it applies to the law. Under the most searching review, strict scrutiny, laws almost always fail. But two judges on the appellate court that upheld the law said it would be the rare exception that could withstand strict scrutiny.

TikTok, the app's users and many briefs supporting them urge the court to apply strict scrutiny to strike down the law.

But the Democratic administration and some of its supporters cite restrictions on foreign ownership of radio stations and other sectors of the economy to justify the effort to counter Chinese influence in the TikTok ban.

A decision could come within days.

 About last week, Biblical scholar and self-styled ‘Christian apologist’ Wesley Huff dropped the massive update that he would be appearing on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. This made the fans really thrilled, especially after the fact that Huff has been sued for winning a debate. But why is he getting sued for such a trivial thing, and what’s the whole story? Joe Rogan has managed to bring out the entire scoop on JRE #2252.

The Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada recently won over the internet after completely destroying Billy Carson in a debate about the truth of Christianity – specifically, the question of “whether Christianity is true.” Wes Huff convincingly won the argument. His academic background in theology and apologetics allowed him to constantly contradict and fact-check Billy Carson’s arguments, making the atheist’s lack of preparation and the grasp of the subject apparent.

So, what did Billy Carson do to retaliate? He sued Wesley Huff. As per the atheist, he is suing Wes Huff because the latter used his name and likeness without permission when sharing clips of their debate. This led him to issue a cease-and-desist letter to stop displaying the embarrassing moments from the exchange, also claiming that he was unprepared for it. However, Huff has now debunked this claim as well on social media.

He said, “He’d been given all of the prerequisites. Like, he knew we were going to go over some of his stuff that he had said about Christianity, that I was going to come in, who I was, what my name was, some of my background. And that part of the conversation was going to be me kind of asking him some clarifying questions and rebutting some of the things that he said.” 

Two people have died and over 5,000 acres have burned across the greater Southern California area as four different fires rage with 0% containment Wednesday, officials said. The conditions are causing power outages across the region.

Track current power outages in the greater Los Angeles area here.

LIVE UPDATES | Southern California wildfires rage

 Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have been officially revealed and they are beastly. The RTX 5090 will cost $2,000 and require a recommended power supply of 1kW, or roughly the equivalent of running a belt sander non-stop. The latest line of GPUs comes as Nvidia rushes to fill demand in the current AI rat-race.

The new GPUs promising to take PC gaming rigs to the next level were revealed onstage at CES 2025 on Monday night by CEO Jensen Huang. You’re probably familiar with DLSS, Nvidia’s upscaling technology that squeezes even better resolutions at higher framerates out of existing computing resources, but the company is now also touting RTX Neural Shaders which will use machine learning to compress textures and free up even more processing power for other stuff.

The 5080 and 5090 are both available later this month, while the 5070 and 5070 Ti will ship in February. Here are the prices:

The big thing to note here is that Nvidia is promising big results even from the low-end budget card. All cards are supposed to be twice as fast on average as their corresponding predecessors, and Huang even claimed that this year’s $550 RTX 5070 would be as effective in practice as the previous $1,600 RTX 4090, seemingly due to machine learning and other optimizations.

At the high end, Nvidia showed a graph promising double the performance of the RTX 4090 from the newer (and only $400 more expensive) RTX 5090 across games like Alan Wake 2 and Black Myth: Wukong. The company even showed Cyberpunk 2077 running at over double the framerate with full raytracing enabled, because one can never have too many frames when navigating Night City’s treacherous underworld.

But while the 5090 is a power hog, it’s not quite the hulking big boy that it’s predecessor was. The 4090 founder’s edition was a three-slot card that weighed over five pounds. The 5090 will only be two slots, allowing it to fit into more compact PC builds at launch.

After a combined two divorces, a rumored affair, and months of tabloid gossip, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster have finally made their glossy paparazzi debut. Per People, the former Music Man co-stars were photographed holding hands on Monday night, as they waltzed down the streets of Santa Monica laughing and staring into each other’s eyes. Actually, they look so carefree and in love I’m almost inclined to believe they’re blissfully unaware of all the drama surrounding their relationship. Almost.

Let’s recap the couple’s timeline, shall we? In December 2021, Jackman and Foster hit Broadway to premiere their revival of the 1957 classic, The Music Man. They spent nearly two years onstage together playing Professor Harold Hill and Marian Paroo, and sources later told “Page Six” that the actors spent “all of their free time together” and “[snuck] around.” (Neither has commented on rumors of an affair.) In 2023, Jackman and his now ex-wife Deborra-lee Furness announced that they had decided to mutually end their 27-year marriage. The following year, Foster filed for divorce from her husband of ten years, Ted Griffin. And now, Foster and Jackman have hard launched their love with totally candid, definitely not pre-arranged photos in People. Who said romance was dead?

On Saturday, Jackman was also reportedly spotted in the audience of one of the final performances of Foster’s Once Upon a Mattress at Los Angeles’s Ahmanson Theatre. He sat next to Carol Burnett, who originated Foster’s role in the 1959 production of the show. Cute! Messy origins aside, I will begrudgingly root for Wolverine and his new paramour. I need something to believe in anyways, and soulmates finding each other later in life seems like a small miracle I can get behind.