The Kennedy Center is the second building to Washington to be renamed for President Donald J. Trump this month, following the renaming two weeks ago of the United States Institute of Peace as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.

Sources have now confirmed that NASCAR Driver Greg Biffle, his wife Cristina, and son Ryder, were killed in today’s crash of a private jet, a Cessna Citation II, earlier this morning at Statesville Regional Airport in North Carolina.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump has signed an Executive Order reclassifying marijuana from a Schedule I Controlled-Substance, in the same category at heroin and bath salts, to a Schedule lll Controlled-Substance, on the level as many prescription drugs such as ketamine, potentially paving the way for future federal decriminalization and/or legalization by Congress and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

President Donald J. Trump has decided to endorse Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, who supports gun control and previously was the sole Texas Republican to oppose the Border Safety and Security Act of 2023, for Texas's 23rd Congressional District, instead of Second Amendment activist and media personality Brandon Herrera.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump has officially signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The “person of interest” in this past weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which killed two students, has been found dead via a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside of a storage unit at a facility in Salem, New Hampshire.

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) has announced, that at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, military forces under Joint Task Force-Southern Spear (JTF-SS) carried out a series of strikes today, December 18, against two alleged narco-trafficking vessels operating in the Eastern Pacific. According to SOUTHCOM, intelligence indicated that the vessels were transiting along a known narco-trafficking route and carrying illicit narcotics, with a total of five suspected narco-terrorists killed in the strikes, three in the first vessel and two in the second, all believed to have been members of a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO).

Authorities have identified the suspect in this past weekend’s shooting at Brown University and the murder of a professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Monday, as 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves‑Valente of Miami, Florida, a previous student of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who was found dead via a self-inflicted gunshot wound earlier inside a storage unit in New Hampshire.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order earlier today declaring both December 24th, Christmas Eve, and December 26th, known in some countries as Boxing Day and to others as the day after Christmas, to be federal holidays, extending the vacation for millions of federal employees from one to three days for Christmas.

U.S. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle announced today, less than a month after the cancelation of the Constellation-class frigate program, being built by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, that the Navy has selected the U.S. Coast Guard’s Legend-class cutter to be the basis for a new class of frigates, which will be constructed by Huntington Ingalls Industries in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) ceased production of the Legend-Class National Security Cutter (NSC) for the U.S. Coast Guard earlier this year, after producing ten ships of the class, with the first ship of the new class of frigates based on the NSC likely to not be completed until 2030 or even later, due to massive ongoing delays and a backlog of ships at HII.

The Special Operations Forces of Ukraine have published a teaser for a recent operation which appears to have targeted a Project 22460 Okhotnik/Rubin-class patrol boat of the Russian Coast Guard in the Black Sea, possibly during one of the several drone attacks this week against Russian-occupied Crimea.