This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper . Trace Gallagher: This year's resolution is for the'naughty nightly news' Chicago mayor endorses'Abolish ICE' snowplow name NYT writer downplays MN fraud scandal investigation from'politicized' DOJ CBS News correspondent claims Supreme Court corruption narrative is'patently false' Sanders rails against AI, says'science-fiction fear' of it running the world not an outrageous idea Pelosi says she didn't intend to tear up Trump's 2020 State of the Union speech MS NOW guest praises Trump's'unconventional' approach to foreign policy (1) LA Mayor Karen Bass says it's'sad' to see Latinos joining the Border Patrol Santa is'PACKING HEAT' during a traffic stop Joe Rogan roasts'crazy' White House plaques installed by Trump Jimmy Kimmel criticized for'ridiculous' Christmas message Jimmy Kimmel jabs at Trump on Christmas: 'Tyranny is booming' CBS News defends pulling '60 Minutes' story'Jesus Crown of Thorns' season 2 is available to watch now on Fox Nation Kimmel says'tyranny is booming' under Trump in UK Christmas message Sunday Morning Futures anchor Maria Bartiromo looks back at her 2025 interviews with President Donald Trump as he laid out his agenda on the border, the economy, energy and foreign policy heading into 2026. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Larry Ellison Is a'Shadow President' in Donald Trump's America The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil. Save this storyIn Trumpworld, Larry Ellison gets more credit than anyone else for operating in the shadows. Over a drink earlier in Donald Trump's second term, one of the president's advisers described the Oracle cofounder, chairman, and chief technology officer to me as a literal "shadow president of the United States," if not necessarily the shadow president. In the months since, Ellison, who's been trading the title of "richest man alive" with Elon Musk lately, has begun to live up to the moniker. Musk is almost starting over from scratch, working his way back into Trump's good graces by seeming to pretend that whole ugly breakup and half-baked ploy to form a third party never happened. Rupert Murdoch is 94 years old and ceding more control of his media empire to his son Lachlan.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This week has demonstrated that the tech "broligarch" who's most influenced President Donald Trump's second administration isn't Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or Marc Andreessen--it's Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the 80-year-old software tycoon who recently became the second-richest man in the world. Just look at everything that's gone his way. On Thursday evening, the Federal Communications Commission finally voted to approve Paramount's 8.4 billion merger with fellow entertainment firm Skydance Media. The controversial, long-awaited deal only came about thanks to Paramount's appeals to this administration: settling a baseless lawsuit that Trump brought against 60 Minutes for "deceptively" editing its Kamala Harris interview, pressuring subsidiary CBS News to shift its "balance" in a right-wing direction, and canceling presidential foe and beloved comedian Stephen Colbert's highly rated late-night talk show.

Thousands of protesters have clashed with authorities as they took to the streets of Los Angeles for a third night in response to United States President Donald Trump's extraordinary deployment of the National Guard. Sunday's protests in Los Angeles, a sprawling city of 4 million people, were centred in several blocks of the city centre. It was the third and most intense day of demonstrations against Trump's immigration crackdown in the region, as the arrival of about 300 National Guard troops spurred anger and fear among many residents. The troops were deployed specifically to protect federal buildings, including the Metropolitan Detention Center where protesters concentrated. The crowds blocked a major highway and set fire to self-driving cars.

The Agency

Paramount just announced that it's going ahead with a new video game based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, which will be developed by Saber Interactive. For the uninitiated, Saber is behind titles like Snowrunner and Teardown. It also has plenty of experience making licensed content, as it published Evil Dead: The Game and World War Z: Aftermath, among others. After all, there have been plenty already. Paramount is already crowing about the title, though, calling it a "AAA RPG" and claiming it'll be the "biggest video game in franchise history."

A sci-fi series has taken the number one spot on IMDB following the release of its second season - despite the show's'disappointing' debut in 2022. The first season of the video game adaptation was deemed a'one-hit' wonder' by viewers who felt the story was written by a'high schooler' and the graphics were'low budget CGI.' But Halo season two, released this month, now sits at number one in IDMB's list of top sci-fi TV series. The Paramount series has 7.2 stars and more than 81,000 votes - overtaking popular shows like Netflix's Stranger Things and Black Mirror. Halo also has an 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes - a jump from season one's 61 percent rating.

Sylvester Stallone wants his daughters, Sistine, Scarlet and Sophia, to be ready for anything. In new clips from the second season of their Paramount reality series, "The Family Stallone," Stallone spoke about his two eldest daughters, Sophia and Sistine, moving to New York, calling it "traumatic" as he recalled his own experiences with robbery, car accidents, and more. "Since you guys have moved to New York, it's made me very uneasy. You know I'm paranoid anyway because I have a responsibility as a father to do everything I can," he told them early in the episode. The girls then joked about him being "the most paranoid person on the planet," with the youngest daughter Scarlet saying "he is crazy!"

Whether we're living in the age of Peak TV or Trough TV, one thing is clear: There's too much TV. Thankfully, not every show has to be watched in its entirety. One of the best things about television is its serialized nature, the continuous thread that strings viewers along from one episode to the next. It's a cliché that prestige television is the new novel precisely because of the way that many dramas develop their characters and plots over many hours of storytelling. But an older virtue of TV is its brevity--the way a scenario can be introduced and resolved within the space of an hour, or half that--and some of the best episodes are less like chapters in a long-running novel than like short stories or short films. There's been no shortage of debate about this question, but for our purposes, we're defining it simply as an episode that stands up on its own, whether or not you've seen the rest of the show. Some are "bottle episodes," which typically confine a small cast to one location to save money. Some are "departure episodes," in which a show abandons its usual format or style to suddenly become, say, silent, animated, a musical, or about a minor character it was never about before. But not all bottle episodes and departure episodes are stand-alones, and vice versa. It's for this reason that you won't find Breaking Bad's celebrated "Fly" on this list: It may be a bottle episode, but it doesn't stand alone, because the best thing about it--how the housefly is a metaphor for everything else going on in the series--is comprehensible only to those who have watched the show. These are English-language selections, and, out of fairness, we have limited ourselves to one episode per series, although some shows are full of stellar contenders. Use these picks--arranged in chronological order, with an admitted bias toward our most recent, and best, era of television--to populate your streaming queue with a feast of bite-sized morsels, each of which could double as either a snackable introduction to a new show or a satisfying meal in itself. If movies made Alfred Hitchcock a name, TV made him a brand. The master of suspense embraced the burgeoning medium in 1955 with Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour), an anthology series whose entries began and ended the same way: the titular celebrity providing context to a unique half-hour thriller, typically an adaption of a short story by an esteemed author (John Cheever, Ray Bradbury, many others).

And so, after 17 years of false starts, numerous failed attempts at feature films (including a Peter Jackson venture), more than 265 drafts, a reported budget of $200m and a production schedule in Hungary decimated by the pandemic, we are finally set to see a TV series of the video game Halo. Will it have been worth such perseverance? Since the release of the first video game in Microsoft's crown jewel franchise – 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved – the series has sold more than 81m games, generating in excess of $6bn. If a network sticks the landing, a Halo TV show could be a significant weapon in its arsenal. For the uninitiated: Halo takes place at a time of intergalactic war between humans and a collective of quasi-religious alien species known as the Covenant.