Top 5 US news stories
August 29 2025
Federal Crackdown in DC: Officials Tout 45% Drop in Violent Crime
China and Russia Deepen Military Ties With First-Ever Joint Submarine Patrol
CVS Halts Covid Vaccines in 16 States, Citing 'Regulatory Environment'
Trump Administration Ends $800 Tariff Exemption on All Imported Packages
Alibaba Develops Advanced AI Chip, Fueling China's Push for Tech Independence Amid US Sanctions
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1. Federal Crackdown in DC: Officials Tout 45% Drop in Violent Crime
Juan Carlos Dela Torre had already experienced one run-in with one of the roving crews of federal law enforcement agents who descended on Washington, D.C., this month. Then on Friday night came another. He was standing on the sidewalk smoking a joint, which the officers grabbed as evidence of “consuming marijuana in a public space,” a misdemeanor in the district. The officers took him to a local police station, searched him and, they said, found a small amount of the stimulant MDMA. He was sent to jail. “I’ve never seen this much police presence in my whole life,” said Mr. Dela Torre, 37, a massage therapist who has lived in Washington since 1994. “You guys are worried about some guy smoking a joint on the corner on a Friday night?” Records show that officers from some of the nation’s most elite federal law enforcement agencies are often conducting traffic stops, performing low-dollar buy-and-bust drug operations or checking to see whether someone is drinking liquor from an open container. In some ways, the focus on low-level offenses or so-called quality of life crimes resembles strategies employed in cities such as New York in the 1990s that sought to drive down crime by controlling visible disorder. In the current operation, however, federal agents appeared to be stopping people for minor infractions as a way to look for more serious drug and gun offenses. Arrests were up slightly overall, with 995 new criminal defendants booked into the city jail and taken to court between Aug. 8, the day after the surge began, and Aug. 22, compared with 870 in the previous 15-day period. Officials from the Trump administration boast that violent crime has plummeted by more than 45 percent and property crimes by 12 percent since the federal push began. Local officials point out that while crime was already declining beforehand, the drops in some categories, including robbery and carjacking, have steepened since the push started. In addition to the people whose arrests are in the court records, more than 400 people suspected of being in the country illegally have been picked up by federal immigration agents in Washington over the past three weeks.
NYT
2. China and Russia Deepen Military Ties With First-Ever Joint Submarine Patrol
Russian and Chinese submarines have conducted their first joint patrol in the Pacific, the latest in a series of efforts to expand military cooperation between the two countries. The Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet said on Wednesday that the patrol began in early August after five days of joint naval exercises in the Sea of Japan – also known as the East Sea – from August 1. “The diesel-electric submarine Volkhov of the Pacific Fleet and a submarine of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy took to patrolling along an approved route in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea,” the statement said. The patrols and the “Maritime Interaction-2025” drill come in the countdown to a massive military parade in Beijing next week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. The Chinese foreign ministry confirmed on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be among dozens of foreign leaders to attend the event. The United States has the world’s biggest fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, but Russia and China have been working together to coordinate their strengths in the area.
SCMP
3. CVS Halts Covid Vaccines in 16 States, Citing 'Regulatory Environment'
CVS, the country’s largest pharmacy chain, is currently not offering Covid vaccines in 16 states, including Florida, New York and Pennsylvania, even to people who meet newly restricted criteria from the Food and Drug Administration. Amy Thibault, a spokeswoman for CVS, cited “the current regulatory environment” as the reason the vaccine was not available in those states, or in the District of Columbia, emphasizing that the list could change. Legal experts said that federal decisions were creating an extremely difficult situation for pharmacies to navigate. In some states, pharmacists are forbidden to administer vaccines that are not recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel. Last year, the panel voted to recommend updated Covid vaccines in June. In 2023, it endorsed new Covid vaccines in September, just one day after the F.D.A. gave its approval.
NYT
4. Trump Administration Ends $800 Tariff Exemption on All Imported Packages
The US has begun implementing new tariffs on small packages from around the world, ending a loophole that has allowed billions of dollars of goods to enter the country duty-free. President Donald Trump announced earlier this summer that he would eliminate a tariff waiver that allowed goods worth less than $800 to enter the US duty-free. All packages entering the country will now be subject to tariffs regardless of their value. The levies on low-value goods, introduced on Friday, represent the latest escalation of Trump’s trade war, which has pushed US tariffs to the highest level in decades and rattled trading partners and allies.
FT
5. Alibaba Develops Advanced AI Chip, Fueling China's Push for Tech Independence Amid US Sanctions
SINGAPORE—Chinese chip companies and artificial-intelligence developers are building up their arsenal of homegrown technology, backed by a government determined to win the AI race with the U.S. The latest example: China’s biggest cloud-computing company, Alibaba, has developed a new chip that is more versatile than its older chips. Alibaba was long one of the biggest customers of American AI-chip leader Nvidia. Now it and other chip designers are filling the void left after Nvidia ran into regulatory barriers to selling its products in China.
WSJ
August 29 2005: Hurricane Katrina slams into Gulf Coast
Two decades ago, before Hurricane Katrina inflicted unprecedented devastation along the Gulf Coast, before it killed at least 1,392 people and displaced hundreds of thousands, before levees failed and floodwaters swallowed New Orleans, before the glaring lapses in the government response led to years of questions about how to better prepare for such disasters … before all that, there was the anticipation of a Category 5 hurricane carving a path toward the Louisiana coast. “This could be the storm that everyone feared,” a front-page story in The Washington Post proclaimed on Aug. 29, 2005. And it was.
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Sources
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/us/federal-crackdown-washington-dc-arrest-data.html
- https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3323527/russian-and-chinese-submarines-join-forces-pacific-patrol-first?share=7q6OfLwLZX%2BkpEi%2B4b43XiYSfQhLmTFzxNLO%2B7XWHxDWVlwcBAI2C%2B1W2w6pYsctSwY5kIkjHNtPQBaImCMVCq3QPfJ%2BALGuXq52NVUae2M%3D&utm_campaign=social_share
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/well/cvs-pharmacy-covid-vaccine-16-states.html
- https://www.ft.com/content/43ae5c68-2f6b-4a6c-ba8e-3575a9fe685b
- https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/alibaba-ai-chip-nvidia-f5dc96e3?mod=hp_lead_pos1
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