Trump congratulates Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt on their engagement: Live updates

Elon Musk began 2024 as the controversial owner of a social media platform, but is ending it as one of the most powerful people in the world and a key advisor to the new US president.

The debate surrounding the billionaire has evolved dramatically over the past 12 months, from whether the way he ran X, formerly Twitter, would be viable or sustainable in the long term, to whether Mr. Musk His own influence on world politics through his wealth and the megaphone of social media made him a threat to democracy.

The biggest story of 2024 surrounding Mr Musk was the dramatic turnaround behind US President-elect Donald Trump ahead of November’s election and how Mr Musk effectively refashioned X into a vehicle to support the Republican candidate alongside his personal fortune.

Russia, the United States and China are undertaking major modernizations of their nuclear weapons just as the Cold War-era Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) between the Soviet Union and the United States begins to unravel.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” revealed in a holiday-themed social media post on Christmas night that he was taking the weight-loss drug Mounjaro while treating himself to “Ozempic.” “Santa” called.

The revelation also came just a few weeks after he clashed with Trump’s designated Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the widespread use and long-term benefits of GLP-1 inhibitors in the fight against obesity.

Musk shared a picture of himself dressed as Santa Claus next to a Christmas tree on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) with the caption “Ozempic Santa.” The post quickly went viral, garnering over 200,000 likes and 26 million views.

“Like Cocaine Bear, but Santa and Ozempic!” Musk added in a separate tweet.

The Trump administration plans to lock immigrant families together in detention centers before deporting them from the country.

“We need to build family facilities,” Tom Homan said The Washington Post in a recent interview. “How many beds we need depends on the data.”

Trump and Homan have repeatedly said that even children of non-citizen parents who are U.S. citizens are likely to be deported along with their families.

“Here’s the problem,” Homan said The post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and you decided to have a child. So put your family in that position.”

Trump has named Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera as U.S. ambassador to Panama, “a country that is ripping us off at the Panama Canal far beyond its wildest dreams,” President-elect Trump announced on Christmas Eve.

“Few understand Latin American politics as well as Kevin,” Trump said.

Cabrera also served as Florida state director for Trump’s 2020 campaign and is vice chair of the International Trade Consortium of Miami-Dade.

His nomination follows a seemingly random attack that suggested the U.S. would take control of the Panama Canal. This is part of a series of statements aimed at other countries signaling that his administration is threatening U.S. territorial expansion to force sovereign nations to meet his economic demands.

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino responded and emphasized that the canal remained under Panama’s control.

“The sovereignty and independence of our country are non-negotiable,” he said.

Some of Donald Trump’s most prominent critics are bracing for repercussions.

“By going after me, they’re just giving me a platform,” George Conway said The Independent.

More from The IndependentWhite House correspondent Andrew Feinberg on critics preparing for a fight:

President Joe Biden spent Christmas Eve signing 50 bills into law, including a bill backed by Paris Hilton and another declaring the bald eagle the national bird of the United States.

Gustaf Kilander breaks it down:

A video of aspiring Republican politician Valentina Gomez shows her firing a gun into the back of the head of a doll tied to a chair with a black bag over it.

“They are simple, public executions for any illegal alien who rapes or kills an American. They don’t deserve deportation, they deserve to be killed,” she says.

According to the League of United Latin American Citizens, the country’s largest Latino civil rights group, the widely derided video was condemned because it “glorifies the kind of vigilantism that has led to deadly consequences in our country and reinforces the anti-immigrant lie.”

“LULAC condemns violent crimes in our country and expresses its deepest condolences to its victims and their families,” the group’s chairman, Roman Palomares, said in a statement.

“However, we believe in the Christian principles of justice, not retribution. Using public executions to promote a politically motivated message fuels blind hatred. This type of language is intended to appeal to an extreme group of people who believe the lie that all immigrants are here to harm others.”

More on the backlash to Gomez’s latest stunt:

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the heads of the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in U.S. dynamism in science and technology resulted in tech companies hiring more skilled, foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts.

His comments follow broader tensions within the Trump coalition, which includes both far-right, anti-immigrant views and increasing acceptance of the tech industry, whose workforce is highly diverse and includes many immigrants and first-generation Americans.

The IndependentJosh Marcus reports:

Trump’s inauguration fund is expected to raise more than $150 million. This breaks the previous fundraising record of $107 million, set at the president-elect’s first inauguration.