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December 31, 2025 
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Good morning, and happy New Year’s Eve. Sam is away.
The Justice Department is now reviewing more than five million pages of Epstein files, according to people familiar with the matter. And Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy who received worldwide praise for a moving essay about having terminal cancer, has died at 35.
We’ll get to more news below. But first, the year in video.
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| The New York Times |
Watch this
I was working on The Morning when news of the massacre at Bondi Beach broke. When I saw the video on social media of Ahmed el Ahmed, an Australian man, tackling one of the shooters, my first thought was: Is this real?
Because artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated at producing video, and more people are turning to it to create social media content, I hesitated. But I knew my colleagues on our video team would have an answer soon. They quickly confirmed it was real, and we got it into the newsletter as soon as they did.
Every day, The Times’s video journalists work to verify crucial information in an age of rampant disinformation. They did a lot of that in 2025. They also told stories, held power to account and conducted some of our most sprawling investigations.
The Times is increasingly coming to you in videos — in The Morning, on our home page and on social media. So we wanted to share with you a highlight reel of some of the original Times videos you watched the most:
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| The New York Times |
- Tate brothers: Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, were prohibited from leaving Romania for years after they were accused of trafficking dozens of women for a porn business. They courted powerful figures on the American right in order to gain their freedom.
- Miley Cyrus: Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviewed the pop star about fame, family and the therapy she said saved her life.
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| The New York Times |
War in Ukraine
- As President Trump pushed publicly for an end to the war in Ukraine, factions in the Pentagon and the White House were severing an alliance between Washington and Kyiv that had helped the country survive the Russian invasion. A Times investigation reveals the details.
- The investigation, by Adam Entous, drew on hundreds of interviews with military officials, intelligence officers and diplomats around the world. Here are takeaways.
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In the Courts
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| Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times |
- Newly released emails show that Justice Department leaders pushed for charges against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, raising questions about whether officials had misled a judge in the case.
- A federal judge ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cannot lose its funding. The Trump administration has been trying to defund it.
- A federal judge blocked the deportation of more than 200 migrants from South Sudan.
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Politics
International
- Protests in Iran over worsening economic conditions spread to universities in several cities. Students clashed with security forces near some campuses.
- The government of the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad interfered with evidence to conceal atrocities it committed during the Syrian civil war, a Times investigation found.
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Other Big Stories
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| Tatiana Schlossberg Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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| Todd Heisler/The New York Times |
The reporter Luis Ferré-Sadurní and the photographer Todd Heisler spent 2025 traveling across the U.S., from Texas and New Mexico to Illinois and New York, to document the Trump administration’s effort to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history.
Luis writes:
Over the year, the deportations forced Americans, even those who welcomed the stepped-up enforcement, to reckon with the human consequences of rounding up and expelling people from their streets. Homes were emptied. Families were splintered. Neighborhoods were subdued.
Read more, and see Todd’s photos, here.
Which politician was the most surprising dropout? Michelle Cottle awards superlatives to the best and worst of U.S. politics.
Here is a column by Thomas Edsall on how Trump gets away with it.
The Times Sale starts now: Our best rate for readers of The Morning.
Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year.
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| A cannabis farm in Wynnewood, Okla. Shuran Huang for The New York Times |