Top 5 US news stories
October 27 2025
Healthcare.gov Premiums to Spike 30% Next Year
US Deploys Aircraft Carrier to Latin America in 'Dramatic Escalation'
Food Banks Brace for Surge as Shutdown Poised to Cut Off SNAP Funding
Two US Navy Aircraft Crash in South China Sea as Trump Begins Asia Tour
War, Exodus, and Uncertainty 'Crumble' Putin's 25-Year Push to Boost Russian Birth Rate
…US GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN ENTERS 27th DAY…
BREAKING…Hurricane Melissa Nears Jamaica as ‘Catastrophic’ Storm...
...Officials across the Caribbean opened shelters and evacuated residents from low-lying areas. As much as 30 inches of rain was expected in Jamaica over the next few days…
Healthcare.gov Premiums to Spike 30% Next Year
Premiums for the most popular types of plans sold on the federal health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov will spike on average by 30 percent next year, according to final rates approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and shown in documents reviewed by The Washington Post. The higher prices — affecting up to 17 million Americans who buy coverage on the federal marketplace — reflect the largest annual premium increases by far in recent years. The higher premiums, along with the likely expiration of pandemic-era subsidies, mean millions of people will see their health insurance payments double or even triple in 2026. The premium spikes, mirroring the rising cost of private-employer-sponsored plans, arrive during a protracted and bitter congressional battle over health insurance costs that prompted a government shutdown Oct. 1. Democrats have urged an extension of enhanced subsidies for plans sold through the Affordable Care Act to soften the blow of rising insurance costs, while Republicans have said the additional assistance was never meant to be permanent. The spike in premiums will become visible to more Americans on Monday, when the Trump administration is expected to open Healthcare.gov for window shopping to browse the price of plans ahead of the Nov. 1 start to open enrollment.
Washington Post
US Deploys Aircraft Carrier to Latin America in 'Dramatic Escalation'
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the deployment of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford as well as its accompanying warships and attack planes to waters off Latin America, the Pentagon said on Friday, in a dramatic escalation of military might in the region. The enhanced American presence “will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said on social media. Mr. Parnell did not say when the Ford, the Navy’s most modern and technologically advanced carrier, would be moving to the region or where it would be positioned. Navy officials said on Friday that the Ford is currently steaming off the coast of Croatia on a monthslong European deployment and would take seven to 10 days, depending on speed and weather conditions, to reach its new assigned mission with U.S. Southern Command. Since late August, the U.S. military has deployed about 10,000 troops to the Caribbean, about half of them on eight warships and half in Puerto Rico, for what the administration says is a counterterrorism and counternarcotics mission. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters. For decades, Republican and Democratic presidents have dispatched one or more aircraft carriers to the Middle East as a sign of U.S. military power and of American geopolitical resolve. President Trump’s second administration has focused more intently on securing the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere. The deployment of the Ford to the region, which officials said had been under consideration for weeks, underscores that shift in national security priorities. The new Pentagon orders came hours after Mr. Hegseth announced that the U.S. military had killed six people on a boat suspected of smuggling drugs from South America, as the Trump administration’s lethal and legally disputed campaign continued to escalate. The latest attack raised the death toll from the Trump administration’s campaign on suspected drug boats to 43 in 10 known strikes — eight in the Caribbean and two more this week in the eastern Pacific.
NYT
Food Banks Brace for Surge as Shutdown Poised to Cut Off SNAP Funding
Food banks across the United States were stretched thin even before the federal government shut down. Rising food prices had driven a growing number of people to their doors. Cuts to federal programs had left them with less to give. Now, that system — a last resort for tens of millions of hungry Americans — is anticipating an even greater surge in demand. With no end in sight to the nearly monthlong federal government shutdown, funding for the nation’s largest food assistance program, known as SNAP, will disappear at the start of November, according to the Department of Agriculture. On Friday, the Trump administration said in a memo that it would not tap into contingency funds to keep payments flowing to states. That means that the roughly 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — may soon have to find other ways to feed themselves and their families.
NYT
Two US Navy Aircraft Crash in South China Sea as Trump Begins Asia Tour
A. President Trump is embarking on a nearly weeklong tour of Asia, his first trip to the region during his second term, with stops in Malaysia, Japan and South Korea, capped by a meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. He may tout a new trade deal, push for credit for negotiating peace between Thailand and Cambodia, and show that Washington still has sway in Southeast Asia, a region where Beijing has growing clout. Across Asia, governments are looking to stabilize ties with the United States after months of tariff disputes, yet mindful of how Mr. Trump’s diplomacy can shift overnight. Many nations will be trying to find a way to balance their relationship with Washington against an increasingly assertive China.
NYT
B. KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia—A U.S. military helicopter and a jet fighter from the same aircraft carrier crashed into the South China Sea within 30 minutes of each other on Sunday. All five crew members were rescued and are in stable condition, the U.S. Pacific Fleet said on X. Both aircraft had taken off from the USS Nimitz, America’s oldest aircraft carrier that is returning to its home base on the U.S. West Coast for decommissioning scheduled for next year. The cause of both crashes is under investigation, the fleet said. The USS Nimitz had been deployed in the Middle East as part of the Pentagon’s response to attacks by Yemen-based Houthi rebels on commercial ships in the Red Sea. The crashes coincide with a visit by President Trump to Asia and follow a series of mishaps over the past year on another aircraft carrier, the USS Harry S. Truman, during its deployment to the Middle East.
WSJ
War, Exodus, and Uncertainty 'Crumble' Putin's 25-Year Push to Boost Russian Birth Rate
For a quarter century, President Vladimir Putin has faced the specter of Russia’s shrinking and aging population. In 1999, a year before he came to power, the number of babies born in Russia plunged to its lowest recorded level. In 2005, Putin said the demographic woes needed to be resolved by maintaining “social and economic stability.” In 2019, he said the problem still “haunted” the country. As recently as Thursday, he told a Kremlin demographic conference that increasing births was “crucial” for Russia. Putin has launched initiatives to encourage people to have more children – from free school meals for large families to awarding Soviet-style “hero-mother” medals to women with 10 or more children. At first, births in Russia grew with its economic prosperity, from 1.21 million babies born in 1999 to 1.94 million in 2015. But those hard-won gains are crumbling against a backdrop of financial uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, an exodus of young men and opposition to immigration. Russia’s population has fallen from 147.6 million in 1990 — the year before the USSR collapsed — to 146.1 million this year, according to Russia’s Federal Statistics Service.
Since the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, it has included the peninsula’s population of about 2 million, as well as births and deaths there, in its data. The population also is significantly older. In 1990, 21.1% was 55 or older, government data said. In 2024, that figure was 30%. Since the 2015 peak, the number of births has fallen annually, and deaths are now outpacing births. There were only 1.22 million live births last year — marginally above the 1999 low. Demographer Alexei Raksha reported the number of babies born in Russia in February 2025 was the lowest monthly figure in over two centuries. About 27 million Soviet citizens died in World War II, diminishing the male population dramatically. As the country was beginning to recover, the Soviet Union collapsed, and births tumbled again. The number of Russian women in their 20s and early 30s is small, said Jenny Mathers of the University of Aberystwyth in Wales, leaving authorities “desperate to get as many babies as possible out of this much smaller number of women.” Although Russia has not said how many troops have been killed in Ukraine, Western estimates have put the dead in the hundreds of thousands. When the war began, many young Russians moved abroad — some for ideological reasons like escaping a crackdown on dissent or to avoid military service. Last year, Russia’s fertility rate — the average number of children born per woman — was 1.4, state media reported. That’s well below the 2.1 replacement rate for the population, and slightly lower than the U.S. figure of 1.6 released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
AP News
October 24 1861: Chick-fil-A founder takes last Ford Taurus
On October 27, 2006, the last Ford Taurus rolls off the assembly line in Hapeville, Georgia. The keys to the silver car went to 85-year-old Truett Cathy, the founder of the Chick-fil-A fast-food franchise, who took it straight to his company’s headquarters in Atlanta and added it to an elaborate display that included 19 other cars, including one of the earliest Fords.
The 2006 closure of Ford’s Hapeville, Georgia, assembly plant epitomized the long arc of American deindustrialization that began in the 1970s. At its peak in 1979, U.S. manufacturing employment reached nearly 19.6 million, accounting for about 22% of all nonfarm jobs. By 2010, that figure had fallen below 11.5 million, or less than 9% of the workforce, as globalization, automation, and corporate offshoring hollowed out industrial centers across the Midwest and South. Automaking was emblematic of this shift: Detroit’s Big Three lost market share to Japanese and later Korean imports, while thousands of unionized plants in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt shuttered or downsized. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the U.S. shed roughly 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, the steepest decline on record. The demise of the Taurus line reflected this structural transition—American firms retreating from mid-priced, mass-market production toward capital-light models of design, finance, and marketing—marking both an economic and cultural inflection point in the nation’s industrial identity.
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Sources
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/10/24/obamacare-premiums-rise-30-percent/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/us/politics/caribbean-sea-boat-strike-us-venezuela.html?searchResultPosition=2
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/us/food-banks-snap-shutdown-hunger-trump.html?searchResultPosition=2
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/world/asia/trump-japan-korea-china.html
- https://www.wsj.com/us-news/two-u-s-navy-aircraft-from-same-carrier-crash-into-south-china-sea-efc10fad?mod=hp_lead_pos4
- https://apnews.com/article/russia-birth-rate-population-demographics-putin-63ab4675ff6d4e415630b7c830799077?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=2025-10-26-Birth+rates
