The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) received approval Tuesday from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to construct the nation’s first commercial small modular reactor (SMR) at its Clinch River site near Oak Ridge.
The NRC issued a construction permit for Clinch River Unit 1, a 300-megawatt GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy BWRX-300 boiling-water reactor. The permit clears TVA to move forward with construction.
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Ultium Cells LLC announced Tuesday it will invest $1 billion to upgrade and diversify its battery cell manufacturing operations at its Spring Hill facility, with the expansion expected to create 500 new jobs.
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A knife-carrying pilot flying a commercial flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday tried to stab a fellow pilot, resulting in the jet plummeting roughly 16,000 feet before making an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, according to multiple news reports.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there was no official law enforcement report on the incident, including a motive or possible motive.
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CBS News Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech on Wednesday that the Pentagon is eliminating roughly 1 in 5 generals and admirals during the second Trump administration through firing or position cuts, following through on Hegseth’s pledge to fundamentally change how the Pentagon operates. Hegseth said he’s aimed for the department to be “unrelenting, unapologetic, and uncompromising” in its mission to win. Generals who “clung to the woke department or seem to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion, well, they no longer work here,” Hegseth said. “The number crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right,” Hegseth said. “And I know because I directed it that we’ve also reduced the overall number of general officer slots by an additional 10%. So yes, 20% reduction across the board. Now the media calls that a purge. I call it accountability, and long overdue.” READ THE FULL STORY
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Breitbart The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has added another 5,000 criminal illegal aliens to its public database, known as WOW.DHS.gov, which stands for the “Worst of the Worst,” Breitbart News has learned. “The Trump Administration is committed to transparency, and that’s why this website allows the American people to see for themselves what kind of dangerous illegal aliens ICE is removing from their communities,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Breitbart News. The public database, a user-friendly site that Americans can readily search, now has more than 40,000 criminal illegal aliens listed. READ THE FULL STORY
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The Hill South Korea’s government will invest up to $200 billion in U.S. energy infrastructure, including a natural gas pipeline in Alaska, President Trump announced Wednesday. The investment also includes a natural gas plant in Texas and eight new nuclear power plants across the country, Trump said during remarks in the Oval Office. Trump said the deal came as part of a trade agreement between South Korea and the U.S. in which the U.S. would lower the Asian country’s tariff rate to 15 percent in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. READ THE FULL STORY
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Justice Samuel Alito’s last-minute recusal has shaken up a blockbuster Supreme Court battle that stands to alter the future of climate litigation across the country.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Oct. 5 in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a dispute over whether Colorado localities can use state tort law to seek damages from energy companies for alleged harms tied to global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the court’s docket. Alito recused himself Sept. 28, leaving eight justices to consider the dispute.
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Attorney General Todd Blanche on Wednesday announced charges against 10 foreign nationals in Minnesota related to alleged illegal voting and registration.
“We are announcing that a federal grand jury returned indictments against 10 foreign nationals alleged to have committed unlawful voting and registration offenses in the state of Minnesota,” he said. The indictments include nine counts of illegal voting by an alien and nine counts of making false claims of citizenship to register to vote.
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While Ohio drivers are seeing increasingly high gas prices, state lawmakers just moved a step closer to providing some relief.
On Wednesday, both chambers of the Ohio General Assembly approved House Bill 519, temporarily suspending the state’s gas tax for 90 days, which could get drivers lower prices at the pump through the holiday season.
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Senate Democrats on Wednesday voted down a ban on lawmakers trading stocks that had included a voter ID provision in the legislation.
The 53-47 vote came on party lines and saw the bill fall short of the 60 votes it needed to advance in the upper chamber. The House previously approved the bill.
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Conservative activist Riley Gaines announced Tuesday that she would appeal a recent court decision dismissing her lawsuit against the NCAA.
Gaines and other current and former collegiate female athletes alleged the NCAA violated their Title IX rights by allowing biological males to compete in female sports.
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While the White House marked the first year since the authorization of the Memphis Safe Task Force (MSTF) earlier this month, the U.S. Marshals Service on Tuesday released a retrospective exactly one year after combined federal, state, and local forces deployed to the Bluff City on September 29, 2025.
The Marshals said task force members have made 12,796 arrests since the deployment. Of these arrests, the federal law enforcement agency said in its press release that 131 were homicide arrests, while 1,367 were for controlled substances, 125 for sex offenses, and 1,279 for firearms violations.
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U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Lee (R-TN) on Wednesday escalated their actions against former special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed under the Biden administration to investigate President Donald Trump for his purported role the civil unrest on January 6, and was revealed to have obtained phone records from about 20 Republicans in Congress as part of his investigation.
Blackburn’s lawsuit, filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, seeks a federal court ruling to determine Smith’s appointment by former Attorney General Merrick Garland was unlawful, then to hold him accountable, in his personal capacity, for the alleged abuses of power committed during his investigation.
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U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw will hear arguments on Friday on whether to dissolve the order he filed on July 1 to block enforcement of Senate Bill (SB) 714 and dismiss the lawsuit filed by Shelby County. Governor Bill Lee signed the law earlier this year, and it would empower the state to take control of school districts that meet certain conditions.
The only school district that meets the threshold for state action is Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS), but the Obama-appointed district judge blocked its enforcement with his emergency status quo order issued in July. Crenshaw issued the order in response to the request for an injunction by the plaintiffs, who are still seeking an injunction that would formally block the law while the lawsuit continues.
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Tennessee has seen more than 18,500 illegal aliens removed since President Donald Trump began his second term, with The Tennessee Star’s lead reporter Tom Pappert reporting that the number of departures from the state could climb as high as 80,000 when voluntary departures are included.
Pappert discussed the figures during Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show following a release from the Tennessee House Republican Caucus that ICE has removed more than 18,500 illegal aliens from the Volunteer State since January 2025.
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Tennessee ranked seventh nationally for education freedom in the Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Education Freedom Report Card, with the state receiving particularly high marks for academic transparency and the return on investment of education spending.
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The full government cost of an active-duty service member is about $86,000 a year higher than what’s reflected in the Department of War’s budget.
That’s a cost that will ultimately be paid by taxpayers through VA’s budget decades from now, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate of future veterans’ benefits that aren’t captured in the military’s personnel-cost accounting.
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In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidential election partly on the basis of his campaign’s false accusation that George H. W. Bush had overseen “the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.” Or so claimed Clinton’s running mate Al Gore.
James Carville, chief campaign adviser to Clinton/Gore, amplified that message with the constant refrain: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
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The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday handed Tennessee a victory in the lawsuit brought by Kalshi, the prediction market company that sued the Volunteer State earlier this year, claiming the Tennessee Sports Wagering Council (TSWC) does not have the authority to regulate its predictions.
“This is a great win for Tennessee,” stated Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “Kalshi attempted an end run around Tennessee law to avoid any of the rules or taxes associated with sports gambling. They failed.”
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to continue deporting illegal aliens to third countries while the case proceeds.
The court issued a one-page order without a vote count, permitting the administration to resume the practice, the New York Times reported. Oral arguments are set for December.
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Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Tex., sent a letter on Tuesday to President Donald Trump urging action on a centralized registry of guns and gun owners that, according to Gun Owners of America (GOA), violates multiple federal statutes.
“No one in their right mind can look at ATF’s digital, searchable 1.4 billion record database of firearm transactions and tell me that isn’t a gun registry. Several federal laws prohibit gun registration, so it’s truly shocking to see how ATF has disregarded the will of Congress here,” Aidan Johnston, GOA Federal Affairs Director told Just The News.
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The Trump administration on Tuesday highlighted data showing a 96% drop in legal immigration from Muslim-majority nations since 2024.
The administration’s Rapid Response 47 account shared a chart from the CATO Institute, a pro-immigration, libertarian-leaning think tank that used State Department data.
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Breitbart The U.S. State Department on Monday announced U.S. visa restrictions against 27 Latin American nationals due to their efforts in undermining democratically elected governments in the Western Hemisphere. The list of targeted individuals includes current and former government officials, lawmakers, members of the judiciary, police officers, judges, businessmen, and other nationals from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru — all members of the U.S.-led Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C), also known as the Shield of the Americas. The targeted Latin American government officials and their respective immediate relatives have either had their existing U.S. visas revoked, or are now barred from obtaining one. READ THE FULL STORY
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The Hill Consumer confidence dipped in September to its lowest level in a dozen years, the Conference Board reported Tuesday. The board’s consumer confidence index fell to 81.9 last month, down 6.7 points from August. That marked the lowest point for the metric since 2014, when consumer sentiment was rebounding from a low point of less than 30 during the financial crisis. The expectations index, a six-month outlook of future economic conditions, also declined by 3.2 points in September to nearly 60. That metric dipped to less than 60 last year, the first time it had done so since 2013. READ THE FULL STORY
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CBS News Lindsay Clancy was back in Plymouth Superior Court Tuesday for the first time since her high-profile Massachusetts murder trial ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury on Sept. 4. Prosecutors did not specifically say if they will retry Clancy, and if so, on what charges, however during Tuesday’s hearing both sides discussed setting a retrial date with Judge William Sullivan. Clancy’s attorney told the judge there’s “no evidence” his client admitted to strangling her children, though during trial he argued only that she wasn’t criminally responsible for her actions due to postpartum psychosis. READ THE FULL STORY
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Online pharmacies — including one from an e-commerce giant — are on the rise as health insurance premiums and prices skyrocket.
Amazon Corporation appears to be tapping into a shifting market as individuals increasingly abandon traditional health insurance for more cost-effective alternatives. RxPass — a benefit of Amazon Pharmacy — and other online platforms offering prescription subscription services are increasing in popularity, Reuters reported.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith’s sweeping investigation into President Donald Trump included the financial data of everyday supporters across 50 states who gave as little as $1 to the president and allied groups, new documents reveal.
Smith’s team obtained at least 4,782 checks from everyday Americans making mainly small-dollar donations. Smith’s sweep — though ostensibly focused on the events of Jan. 6, 2020 — hoovered up checks from September 2019 to August 2023.
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has removed more than 18,500 illegal aliens from Tennessee since President Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025, according to the Tennessee House Republican Caucus, whose leaders praised the federal agency on Tuesday.
The Republicans called the performance a result of cooperation between the Trump administration and the Tennessee General Assembly, which earlier this year passed immigration bills aimed at making Tennessee a national model, and in 2025 created the Centralized Immigration Enforcement Division (CIED) of the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
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Top artificial intelligence and private equity firms are teaming up with building trades unions to stop states from freezing data center construction.
OpenAI, Blackstone, QTS and SoftBank joined seven union partners to form the American Infrastructure Alliance (AIA), a multimillion-dollar coalition that plans to work with officials in seven states on data center standards in 2027 to head off moratoriums, Axios first reported Monday.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday launched America.gov, a government chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. It will allow the public to research government services.
“This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence,” Trump said, the Washington Post reported.
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Tennessee State Senator Charlane Oliver (D-Nashville), who was disciplined after standing on her desk and protesting during the Tennessee General Assembly’s May redistricting vote, announced Monday that she filed a federal lawsuit challenging the punishment imposed against her by Senate leadership.
During the May 7 redistricting vote, Oliver stood on her desk in the Senate chamber while shouting objections to the congressional map and displaying a banner criticizing the proposal as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Video also showed Oliver attempting to retrieve the banner from a Senate sergeant at arms after it was confiscated.
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U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) helped pass the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), which seeks to regulate college athletics.
Along with the Tennessee senators, 75 other senators voted for the PCSA on Monday night. Twenty-two senators voted against the bill.
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The second Trump administration increasingly resembles the Biden administration on two issues that played a major role in President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, raising the question of how many foot soldiers Republicans can turn out in November midterms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blew past its sibling Food and Drug Administration’s targeted approvals of updated COVID-19 vaccines for elderly and high-risk Americans, quietly issuing recommendations last week that all healthy adults and children starting at 6 months old take the non-sterilizing mRNA products off-label.
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Legal analyst and retired attorney Mark Pulliam, who endorsed former federal prosecutor TJ Harker’s forthcoming book American Scapegoat: How a Corrupt Justice System Sacrificed Derek Chauvin to the Mob after reading its galley proofs, previewed the book and its central arguments during Monday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Harker’s book, scheduled for publication December 1 by Passage Press, argues that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was wrongfully convicted in the 2020 death of George Floyd and that political pressure, public outrage, and failures within the criminal justice system influenced the case.
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The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly tracking a 600-person migrant caravan that is traveling from Honduras to the United States and is expected to arrive at the U.S. border ahead of the November midterms.
The caravan, which began with just 200–400 people, departed San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on Sept. 20 and traveled north toward Guatemala. As of Monday, the caravan known as “Fe y Esperanza,” or “Faith and Hope,” is in southern Mexico, in the city of Tapachula, and heading north toward the U.S., according to Newsweek.
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One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Alberto Ramirez-Diaz, a criminal illegal alien from Guatemala who records show was sentenced to eight years in a Tennessee prison. According to ICE, Ramirez-Diaz was convicted of second-degree child rape following his 2019 arrest.
Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) records show Ramirez-Diaz began an eight-year sentence on November 12, 2019, aligning with the date ICE said the Guatemalan national was arrested in Florida.
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Real America’s Voice (RAV) launched RAVPool.org on Monday, a free platform that gives the public and news organizations access to the presidential pool camera feed, real-time pool notes, the President’s daily schedule, and White House guidance.
Parker Sigg, vice president of RAV, announced the launch, describing it as the latest expansion of the network’s White House coverage.
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Nearly 1 million California students designated as English learners will no longer have to pass a set of tests and benchmarks to exit the program, under a new law signed Sunday by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In a story posted Sunday by The Los Angeles Times, the newspaper states that when a child enrolls in a California public school, families are asked what language is spoken at home and that as early as kindergarten, children who mainly speak a foreign language at home could be designated as an English learner and placed in language classes.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
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Americans are increasingly turning to adjustable-rate mortgages to escape borrowing costs above 7%, reviving a type of home loan that played a prominent role in the housing collapse preceding the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
Adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs, accounted for 9.8% of mortgage applications during the week ending Sept. 18 as the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate surged to 7.12%, its highest level since May 2024, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The shift was notable because borrowers were accepting the risk of future rate increases for relatively modest savings compared with a traditional fixed-rate mortgage.
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In 2024, Hawkins County voters gave President Donald Trump a very clear mandate.
Voters there chose the president by giving him 84 percent of the vote, making it one the Volunteer State’s top 20 Trump supporting counties.
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Ten thousand U.S. households that earned over $1 million collected unemployment benefits in 2024, receiving nearly $100 million in taxpayer money, according to data shared with The Washington Times.
The data was given to the newspaper by Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst, who received it from the IRS and who has tracked this issue for years.
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Relying too heavily on internet-connected commercial AI could introduce dangerous new vulnerabilities into warfare, a top executive told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an exclusive interview.
Artificial intelligence will inevitably become deeply embedded in military decision-making, but allowing general-purpose systems to replace human judgment rather than support warfighters could create serious risks, according to Tyler Saltsman, co-founder and CEO of EdgeRunner AI. Those risks have already surfaced as the Pentagon races to become an “AI-first” force, with an AI-assisted intelligence report this spring falsely flagging a Chinese vessel as carrying nuclear-weapons-related components and nearly triggering a U.S. operation to board the ship, according to the Department of War.
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A federal panel of district judges on Friday dismissed a lawsuit by independent congressional candidate Pamela Moses, challenging Tennessee’s congressional map, which was redrawn earlier this year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that race cannot be used as a predominant factor when during redistricting.
In granting the defendants’ motions to dismiss the lawsuit, the judges notably cited the Supreme Court’s decision when dismissing Moses’ claim that Tennessee’s new congressional map disenfranchised minority voters, ruling she failed to establish racial bias under the new ruling.
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The Department of Education on Monday finalized its repeal of a Biden-era Title IX rule reforming sexual misconduct investigations on campus.
The move restores Trump’s first-term rule and expands the protections a student accused of misconduct has in disciplinary proceedings, notably guaranteeing the right to call witnesses, have representation, and appear in a hearing, Politico reported.
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FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey announced Monday that he is stepping down from his role after one year on the job.
Bailey, who served as Missouri’s Republican attorney general from Jan. 2023 to Sept. 2025 — before joining the Bureau — said in an X post that he is resigning to spend more time with his family.
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Brian Gaffney, author of School of Hard Knucks: My Three Sons and Baseball’s Wildest Pitch, joined The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy for an exclusive interview to discuss his family’s years-long journey to master one of baseball’s rarest pitches.
Gaffney said the idea for the book began in 2012 after he returned home during R.A. Dickey’s “spectacular” season with the New York Mets and discovered his young sons throwing knuckleballs in the backyard.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) could eventually serve as a decision-maker in legal disputes under a contract-based arbitration system being developed by Arbitrus, a company founded by recent Harvard Law School graduates
Jack Kieffaber, Harvard Law School Class of 2023, who serves as general counsel for the company, discussed the technology during a Friday appearance on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, where he described a product from Arbitrus Corporation designed to use AI to interpret contracts and potentially resolve disputes.
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The federal government loses as much as $304 billion a year to tax fraud, and the IRS has no agency-wide strategy for stopping it, congressional auditors said in a report Friday.
The Government Accountability Office estimated annual losses at $116 billion to $304 billion, the first comprehensive federal estimate of tax fraud losses. Auditors used a Monte Carlo simulation drawing on IRS data from 2018 through 2024, potential fraud inside the tax gap and tax evasion in the shadow economy.
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