‘He lights stuff on fire’: GOP ex-lawmaker blasts Trump for Fed investigation

Speaking to a ballroom full of bankers in Durham on Monday, former U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, offered his blunt assessment of the Trump administration’s move to investigate Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

“What Trump is doing now, I think is deeply offensive to our system of checks and balances,” McHenry said during an interview at the 2026 Economic Forecast Forum, hosted by the North Carolina Bankers Association and the North Carolina Chamber. “It is deeply offensive to Fed independence, and is a wrong thing to do. It is not right for the economy.”

McHenry represented North Carolina’s 10th Congressional District from 2005 to 2025. He served as chair of the House Financial Services Committee before deciding not to run for reelection in 2024. He has since been hired as a senior adviser at the investment firm Lazard.

His scheduled appearance at the forecast forum came a day after Powell confirmed the Department of Justice had issued a subpoena and threatened a criminal charge over Powell’s past testimony concerning Federal Reserve building renovations. This multiyear construction project has exceeded initial cost estimates, a fact President Donald Trump has seized on while also criticizing the central bank for not making more substantial interest rate cuts.

—The News & Observer (Raleigh)

Illinois and Chicago sue DHS over ‘militarized’ immigration-enforcement tactics

Saying immigration agents have acted more like an occupying military force than law enforcement, lawyers for the state of Illinois and Chicago sued the Trump administration in federal court Monday seeking to bar agents from using tear gas without sufficient warning, making warrantless arrests, and randomly stopping people to question them about their citizenship.

The 103-page lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court also seeks to ban agents from immigration enforcement operations from “sensitive” areas such as schools, courthouses and hospitals, and limit the use of “biometric” scanning of fingerprints and other personal information.

“Border Patrol agents and ICE officers have acted as occupiers rather than officers of the law,” Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in a news release announcing the lawsuit.

“They randomly, and often violently, question residents. Without warrants or probable cause, they brutally detain citizens and non-citizens alike. They use tear gas and other chemical weapons against bystanders, injuring dozens, including children, the elderly and local police officers.”

—Chicago Tribune

Unprecedented livestock attacks by one California wolf pack cost $2.6 million

SACRAMENTO, Calif.— The unprecedented reliance of a single Sierra Valley wolf pack on livestock for food cost local ranchers and the state of California at least $2.6 million over a roughly six-month period last year, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis.

The Beyem Seyo pack hunted at least 92 calves and cows from late March through early October, costing ranchers $235,000 in livestock losses and the state more than $2 million in intervention costs, economist Tina Saitone and researcher Tracy Schohr said in the university’s quarterly agricultural economics update on Friday. If another two dozen cattle are confirmed to have been killed by wolves also, the livestock losses would rise to about $300,000, they said.

The pack’s unusual hunting behavior caused panic among residents and ranchers in the state’s high rangeland north of Truckee, eventually leading state wildlife regulators to euthanize its three adult wolves and accidentally kill one of four juveniles in October. It was the first time California had sanctioned the killing of wolves, a protected species under both the federal and state endangered species acts, in a century.

“Despite extensive nonlethal deterrence efforts, the pack became irreversibly dependent on cattle as a food source, and habituated to human presence and deterrence measures,” the scientists wrote.

—The Sacramento Bee

Russia ramped up civilian killings in Ukraine amid peace push

Russia accelerated its attacks on civilians after President Donald Trump began his efforts to end the war in Ukraine, the first comprehensive assessment of 2025 casualties undertaken by European governments has found.

Some 2,400 Ukrainian civilians were killed in Russian attacks in 2025 with almost another 12,000 injured, according to an analysis seen by Bloomberg, which has not been made public but is in line with United Nations data published Monday. That amounts to an increase of nearly 30% on 2024.

The European governments’ report put total Ukrainian civilian deaths since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 at around 15,000, with more than 40,000 injured. It said there had been 758 Ukrainian children had been killed and a further 2,445 injured.

While the assessment offers no insight into the Kremlin’s motivations, the timings show that the scale of the attacks increased whenever the Trump administration attempted to advance peace negotiations.

—Bloomberg News