Mass Immigration Under Biden Fueled Housing Crisis

Biden migrant crisis fueled housing shortage

OpenAI launched GPT-5.2

Canada’s attack on religious freedom

From 2021 to 2023, 8.46 million U.S. households experienced “worst-case housing needs,” meaning they pay over half their income on housing without government assistance.

The foreign-born population grew by over 6 million between 2021 and 2024, the fastest increase in U.S. history, now totaling more than 53 million.

Analysis shows that in states like California and New York, immigrants accounted for all rental growth and over half of owner-occupied housing growth.

The agency found that without the migrant surge, housing inventory pressures would have been far lower and prices would not have climbed as sharply, noting roughly 784,000 fewer households would have formed over that period.

Fewer than 60 affordable units exist per 100 very low-income renters, and fewer than 40 per 100 extremely low-income renters.

⭐ Editor’s Pick: U.S. trade deficit contracted 10.9% to a four-year low of $52.8 billion in September, the narrowest since June 2020. (BEN)

China's economy faces a historic pivot as fixed-asset investment in manufacturing, infrastructure, and property is poised to contract for the first time since the 1980s. (NYT)

Bessent proposed overhauling the Financial Stability Oversight Council by slashing burdensome regulations and capital rules. (CNBC)

Federal Reserve's board unanimously reappointed all 12 regional bank presidents to five-year terms starting March 2026. (WSJ)

⭐ Editor’s Pick: Hive Digital trades at a mere $3 per share, offering investors dual exposure to surging crypto mining and AI, with hash rate exploding from 5.7 EH/s in January to 23.5 EH/s in November for over fourfold revenue gains. (MF)

F/m Investments' Don Nesbitt spotlighted AbbVie and Medtronic as large-cap health care dividend growers, with undervalued multiples and robust pipelines fueling 20% annual earnings gains. (BBG)

MarketBeat spotlighted Aehr Test Systems, Photronics, and SkyWater Technology as small-cap frontrunners in AI and quantum computing for 2026 (MB)

Monster Beverage earned Zacks' Bull of the Day nod, fueled by 11% expected earnings growth to $1.66 per share in 2025 and robust international sales expansion in the energy-drink market. (ZCK)

⭐ Editor’s Pick: Eli Lilly's experimental retatrutide delivered striking 28.7% average weight loss and up to 75.8% knee pain relief in a Phase 3 trial for patients. (FBN)

Amazon will pilot a "rush" pickup service, letting customers collect unified online and in-store orders from its physical locations within one hour. (INV)

Palantir sued the CEO of rival AI startup Percepta, alleging a systematic scheme to poach employees and steal trade secrets. (WSJ)

Lululemon Athletica announced CEO Calvin McDonald's abrupt departure in January amid founder pressure to reclaim the brand's "cool" factor. (CBC)

⭐ Editor’s Pick: U.S. could seize up to 30 sanctioned tankers hauling Venezuelan crude to choke off black-market sales funding narcoterrorism. (OP)

Trump officially reopened Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and vast federal lands to oil drilling. (BBG)

U.S. launched the "Pax Silica" coalition with allies including Japan, Israel, Australia, Singapore, and South Korea to secure silicon supply chains for critical minerals. (POL)

EU scrapped its planned ban on new combustion-engine cars, pivoting to flexible CO2-reduction rules amid industry pushback. (INV)

⭐ Editor’s Pick: A New York federal court sentenced Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon to 15 years in prison for orchestrating the $40 billion Terra-Luna collapse. (CD)

Coinbase will launch prediction markets and in-house tokenized equities on December 17. (BBG)

JPMorgan Chase launched a Solana-based USCP token to enable Galaxy Digital's pioneering U.S. commercial paper debt offering in "one of the first debt issuances ever executed on a public blockchain." (CT)

The CFTC withdrew its "actual delivery" guidance for crypto commodities, deeming it outdated and overly complex, easing burdens on exchanges. (CB)

OpenAI said the model sets new benchmark highs across coding, math, science, vision, and long-context reasoning, edging out Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 in most tests.

OpenAI said GPT-5.2 reduces hallucinations and performs better on internal and public benchmarks, including coding leaderboards.

The company highlighted new guardrails for users showing signs of mental health distress after lawsuits alleging earlier models mishandled sensitive conversations.

OpenAI is positioning GPT-5.2 as a foundation for developers and enterprise deployments, doubling down on agentic workflows and multi-step logic that support production-grade applications.

⭐ Editor’s Pick: Trump signed a "One Rule" executive order to impose a single national AI regulation framework, supplanting a patchwork of over 1,000 state-level bills. (FBN)

Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI under a licensing deal, unlocking over 200 Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters for Sora-generated clips and ChatGPT images. (THR)

xAI and El Salvador announced the world's first nationwide AI education program, deploying Grok as a personalized tutor across over 5,000 public schools to serve more than one million students. (XAI)

Cursor unveiled Visual Editor, a vibe-coding tool for designers that fuses professional-grade controls with natural-language AI editing to streamline web app development directly in codebases. (WIR)

Stanford researchers' AI hacking bot Artemis outpaced nine of 10 professional penetration testers in uncovering vulnerabilities across the university's engineering network. (WSJ)

⭐ Editor’s Pick: University of Pennsylvania engineers unveiled a microrobot tinier than a grain of salt, equipped with sensors and a motor to autonomously sense, think, and act. (WAPO)

1X inked a landmark deal with EQT to deploy up to 10,000 of its Neo humanoid robots to over 300 portfolio companies in factories and warehouses. (TC)

Stanford researchers harnessed AI to autonomously pilot NASA's Astrobee free-flying robot through the International Space Station for the first time. (SP)

Aescape's AI-powered robot massage debuted at D.C. Equinox gyms for $39 per 30-minute session. (AX)

⭐ Editor’s Pick: Medra, a biotech startup programming AI-driven robots for autonomous biological experiments, raised $52 million in funding led by Human Capital. (BBG)

Nu Quantum secured a $60 million oversubscribed Series A round led by National Grid Partners to scale quantum-networking infrastructure. (SR)

AI startup Shapes secured $24 million in seed and Series A funding, led by Entrée Capital, to automate HR workflows like onboarding. (PM)

Crypto infrastructure startup LI.FI raised $29 million in a round led by Multicoin Capital and CoinFund. (FOR)

The Criminal Code’s explicit protection for good-faith religious argument was removed at Bloc insistence during committee review of the Combating Hate Act.

Bloc leaders said religion can be a “cover” for hate and refused to support the bill without this change.

Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre blasted the move as an assault on religious freedom, warning it could “criminalize” teachings from the Bible, Qur’an and Torah.

Justice Minister Sean Fraser insisted the change “will not criminalize faith,” calling the exemption redundant, though critics say removing the shield opens the door to selective enforcement.

Free speech advocates like Sheila Gunn Reid cited Canada’s pandemic-era arrests of pastors as evidence that authorities have already crossed the line once and could do so again.

⭐ Editor’s Pick: Trump administration mandated that AI vendors measure and mitigate political bias in large language models to qualify for federal sales. (RTS)

Bessent scrapped Biden-era quarter DEI designs for America's 250th anniversary, opting instead for patriotic motifs featuring Revolutionary War soldiers. (FOX)

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya detailed how he eradicated DEI mandates at the agency, axing mandatory statements, audits, and race-based funding to prioritize merit-driven biomedical research. (SPEC)

HUD launched a civil rights probe into Boston's DEI housing policies for alleged racial discrimination in federal grant allocations. (AOL)