Top 5 US news stories
August 20 2025
WSJ Propose Five-Point Plan to Tackle Soaring Costs, Staff Shortages in Child Care
Billionaire Bill Ackman Champions AI-Powered School
Musk Quietly Pauses Plans for Third Political Party to Avoid Alienating GOP, Vance
Facing Sticker Shock Complaints, McDonald's Moves to Cut Combo Meal Costs
Cocaine Superhighway Through Amazon Fuels Unprecedented Crime Wave Across Latin America
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1. WSJ Propose Five-Point Plan to Tackle Soaring Costs, Staff Shortages in Child Care
America's child care system is facing a crisis where families spend an average of 22% of their income on care while child-care workers earn poverty wages, creating a cycle where parents can't find quality care and providers can't retain good teachers. The economic ripple effects extend beyond individual families to impact workforce participation, birth rates, and overall economic growth.
Here are 5 key ideas from a WSJ article, published today, for solving America's child care crisis:
- Require Child Development Associate credentials - Ensure each classroom has at least one teacher with CDA training, which can be completed in months at community colleges and significantly reduces turnover while improving quality
- Provide business training and tax breaks for daycares - Connect daycare operators with business mentors and offer government support like eliminating property taxes on in-home daycares, capping liability insurance increases, and helping with startup costs
- Implement employer-state cost-sharing programs - Use models like Michigan's where employers pay one-third of child-care costs, the state contributes another third, and employees pay the remainder for families earning 200-400% of the federal poverty level
- Encourage corporate child care benefits - Have companies offer on-site subsidized daycare centers, backup care, or direct child-care assistance to reduce employee turnover, especially in high-turnover industries like restaurants and manufacturing
- Treat child care as a public good - Shift from viewing daycares as babysitting services to recognizing them as essential public infrastructure like K-12 schools, with expanded government funding and support similar to existing programs like Head Start
WSJ
2. Billionaire Bill Ackman Champions AI-Powered School
Billionaire Bill Ackman has a new fascination: a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and uses artificial intelligence to speed-teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York City location in September, and the investor and social-media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution, according to people familiar with the matter. On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha’s co-founder, its principal and others on a panel discussion at his Hamptons home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of the Milken Institute’s Hamptons Dialogues. Alpha School, which calls its teachers “guides,” says it uses artificial intelligence-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite the condensed days. The schedule allows students to do hands-on activities in the afternoon, which the school says help them build life skills. These include 5-mile bike rides “without stopping” for kindergartners, and exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans. The school also strives to keep the hot-button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely, co-founder MacKenzie Price said in an interview.
WSJ
3. Musk Quietly Pauses Plans for Third Political Party to Avoid Alienating GOP, Vance
The billionaire Elon Musk is quietly pumping the brakes on his plans to start a political party, according to people with knowledge of his plans. Musk has told allies that he wants to focus his attention on his companies and is reluctant to alienate powerful Republicans by starting a third party that could siphon off GOP voters. Musk’s posture marks a shift from early last month, when he said he would form what he called the America Party to represent U.S. voters who are unhappy with the two major political parties. As he has considered launching a party, the Tesla chief executive officer has been focused in part on maintaining ties with Vice President JD Vance, who is widely seen as a potential heir to the MAGA political movement. Musk has stayed in touch with Vance in recent weeks, and he has acknowledged to associates that if he goes ahead with forming a political party, he would damage his relationship with the vice president, the people said.
WSJ
4. Facing Sticker Shock Complaints, McDonald's Moves to Cut Combo Meal Costs
McDonald’s is lowering the cost of its combo meals, after consumers were left sticker-shocked by Big Mac meals that climbed to $18 in some places. The burger giant’s move follows weeks of discussions between McDonald’s and restaurant operators, including the company offering financial support if franchisees agreed to drop prices, according to people involved in the discussions. After pitching operators on the plan, McDonald’s and its U.S. franchisees agreed to keep the cost of eight popular combo meals 15% below the sum of the individual items’ prices, according to company materials viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The chain also will run $5 breakfast and $8 Big Mac and McNugget combo meal specials later this year, marketing them as Extra Value Meals. The move is part of the chain’s push to restore its reputation for affordability, which has taken a hit with cash-strapped consumers. McDonald’s has said that its new McValue deal menu is helping, but many consumers still feel the chain’s menu prices overall are too high.
WSJ
5. Cocaine Superhighway Through Amazon Fuels Unprecedented Crime Wave Across Latin America
Over the past century, the Ticuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracts of the vast rainforest. But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before. “Drones were flying around this area last year,” says Major Jonatas Soares, the regional military police commander speaking in the village of Ourique, about 1,100km west of the city of Manaus. Drug traffickers, he adds, “were stopping off there, storing their cocaine and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey”. Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drug stored there, but police were unable to locate the stash. One of the world’s largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforest, the upper Amazon has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest-growing global market. Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say, tonnes of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighbouring Peru and Colombia through the Amazon to Manaus and the port city of Belém for export to Europe and Africa.
Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos downriver, or they hide larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats. At the other end of the scale, semi-submersible craft, dubbed “narco-subs”, capable of carrying several tonnes of drugs have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia and Peru. “Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for $300 a kilo and then selling a refined kilo for €60,000 [in Europe],” says Soares. “That changes the life of the guy who’s trying his luck bringing it.” The global cocaine business is booming as never before. Europe’s drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that it has overtaken the US as the biggest cocaine market, while the narcos are now hooking new users in the Middle East and Asia. Flush with money, Latin America’s cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities. “We think 2024 was the most lucrative year ever for organised crime in Latin America,” says Jeremy McDermott, co-founder of Insight Crime, which tracks illicit activity in the region. “This was driven principally by three criminal economies. The first is cocaine. Lagging not far behind that is gold . . . number three is human smuggling and human trafficking.” Drug-related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics-producing nations of Peru, Colombia and Mexico, with nations such as Argentina or Chile largely untouched. Today, such violence has become a feature of life in virtually every country in the region, reaching even former havens Costa Rica and Uruguay, a nation of 3mn people sometimes hailed as the “Switzerland” of Latin America because of its relative peace and prosperity. Organised crime “has become the main threat to the institutional stability of our nations”, says Laura Chinchilla, former president of Costa Rica and an expert on regional security. “No Latin American country today can escape this.”
FT
August 19 1920: Early football leagues consolidate into precursor of the NFL
On August 20, 1920, seven men, including legendary all-around athlete and football star Jim Thorpe, meet to organize a professional football league at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom in Canton, Ohio. The meeting led to the creation of the American Professional Football Conference (APFC), the forerunner to the hugely successful National Football League.
The NFL’s Journey: From Steel Mills to Global Brand
The rise of America’s favorite sport parallels the rise of a superpower
Greg Loving
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Sources
- https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/daycare-prices-solutions-eaff4b24?mod=hp_lead_pos9
- https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/bill-ackman-school-ai-curriculum-cef53f44?mod=hp_lead_pos6
- https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/elon-musk-third-political-party-69bf9bd8?mod=hp_lead_pos3
- https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/mcdonalds-combo-meal-prices-929b4891?mod=hp_lead_pos5
- https://www.ft.com/content/dc6b17fc-ba19-47b7-8a54-a7216356bf47
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