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Top 6 US news stories

December 15 2025

Greg Loving

15 Dec 2025 • 7 min read

The aftermath of the Bondi Beach shootings. (Credit: Getty)

Authorities Identify Father and Son as Terrorists Who Killed 15 at Australian Hanukkah Celebration

Police Renew Search for Brown University Gunman After Clearing Primary Person of Interest

ISIS Ambush in Syria Kills Three Americans in First US Casualties Since Assad’s Fall

Economic Data Reveals Tariffs Failed to Spark Manufacturing Revival but Avoided Predicted Recession

Disney Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI to License Characters While Simultaneously Suing Google for Copyright Infringement

New Demonstration Zone Accelerates China’s Oil Independence with Record Shale Production Ahead of Schedule

1. Authorities Identify Father and Son as Terrorists Who Killed 15 at Australian Hanukkah Celebration

A. Last night was the first night of Hanukkah, a celebration of a small people — the Jews — refusing to surrender their faith and belief in God to state-imposed paganism.

Upward News, Ariel David

B. Officials said a father and son killed at least 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration [in Australia] More than three dozen others were hospitalized, including a surviving suspect. The authorities said they have concluded that the attack on Sunday at Bondi Beach, which they said was carried out by a father and son, was an act of terrorism. But they declined to provide additional details, including the suspects’ ideology or exact motive. At least 38 people remained hospitalized following the mass shooting. Hundreds of people had gathered at the beach, a famed half-mile crescent of sand, for a Hanukkah event. Children played as music and bubbles filled the air until the attackers emerged from a silver hatchback near a pedestrian bridge and opened fire. Gunshots ripped through the celebration. Investigators did not release the names of the suspects, but described them as a 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son. The older man died after being shot by officers. The younger man sustained critical injuries, the police said on Monday afternoon. Officials said on Monday that the father was an immigrant who came to Australia in 1998 on a student visa and stayed in the country for decades on different kinds of visas. It was unclear what country he was from. The son is an Australian-born citizen who first came to the attention of the police in 2019 “on the basis of being associated with others,”

C. Police had earlier said that the gunmen behind the attack were father and son. They have been named by local media as Sajid Akram and his son Naveed Akram.

Image of the two gunmen who carried out the terror attack at Bondi Beach targeting a Jewish event @@MrAndyNgo

NYT / BBC

2. Police Renew Search for Brown University Gunman After Clearing Primary Person of Interest

Law enforcement officials on Monday urgently renewed their search for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University in Rhode Island over the weekend, after investigators released a person of interest because they could not find enough evidence connecting him to the shooting. Mayor Brett Smiley of Providence, R.I., said Sunday night that officials had no way of knowing if the attacker, who killed at least two students and injured nine others in the attack on Saturday, was still in the city. The turn in the investigation came hours after the authorities said they had detained a person of interest. Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, said that federal investigators had found the person in a town near Providence after receiving a lead from the city police. But investigators could not charge that person in connection with the shooting, Col. Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief, said at a news conference on Sunday night. The Brown University campus was placed on lockdown after a person entered a lecture hall and started shooting with a rifle on Saturday afternoon.

NYT

3. ISIS Ambush in Syria Kills Three Americans in First US Casualties Since Assad’s Fall

President Trump vowed on Saturday to retaliate against the Islamic State after an attack in central Syria killed two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian U.S. interpreter, the first American casualties in the country since the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad last year. The soldiers were supporting counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State group in Palmyra, a city in central Syria, when they came under fire from a lone gunman, according to American officials. Syrian security forces subsequently killed the gunman, American and Syrian officials said.

NYT

4. Economic Data Reveals Tariffs Failed to Spark Manufacturing Revival but Avoided Predicted Recession

When President Trump declared the highest U.S. duties in nearly a century in April, he promised the tariffs would revitalize American manufacturing, bring back middle-class jobs and buoy the economy. Economic experts weren’t sold. They forecasted peril for the nation’s GDP, and expectations of a recession shot up. Both missed the mark. An economic collapse hasn’t materialized. Neither has an economic revival. A lot of federal data is delayed, but the numbers so far show the U.S. economy has held up. The odds of a recession in the coming year have fallen below 25%. While Trump’s promise on tariff revenues happened to a degree, most of his others have fallen flat. The U.S. has seen little evidence of large-scale reshoring. Cheaper labor abroad continues to give foreign manufacturers an edge, while uncertainty at home over the tariffs has kept many companies from making major investments or bringing manufacturing home.

WSJ

5. Disney Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI to License Characters While Simultaneously Suing Google for Copyright Infringement

[Disney]…on Thursday announced a blockbuster deal with OpenAI to invest $1 billion for an equity stake in the ChatGPT maker. As part of the deal, OpenAI will license more than 200 characters from Disney so that users can create AI-generated videos in Sora. Through the three-year licensing arrangement, fans will be able to generate videos of themselves surfing with Stitch off the shores of Hawaii or wielding a lightsaber in front of R2-D2. The previous day, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, one of OpenAI’s main rivals in the AI space. Disney’s letter accused Google of “infringing Disney’s copyrights on a massive scale.” Disney executives had grown frustrated that Google’s image generators had been going viral—but, from Disney’s point of view, without the output guardrails that OpenAI was offering copyright holders.

WSJ

6. New Demonstration Zone Accelerates China’s Oil Independence with Record Shale Production Ahead of Schedule

On Tuesday, the Jimsar shale oil demonstration zone in Xinjiang – China’s first such national-level zone – reached its annual crude oil output goal of 1.7 million tonnes 22 days ahead of schedule. Established in 2020, the shale oil demonstration zone in the Junggar Basin covers an area of 1,278 sq km (493 square miles) and could potentially yield more than 1 billion tonnes of crude oil, according to a report on Tuesday by ministry newspaper Science and Technology Daily. China has its own vast shale potential – the largest recoverable shale gas and third largest recoverable shale oil reserves in the world, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As the world’s largest crude oil importer, China’s commercial exploitation of its shale reserves could threaten Opec and its allies. However, accessing these formations, buried deeper than those found in the US, has presented a significant challenge.

SCMP

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