KRAKOW, Poland (AP) — Five people were killed and more than a dozen injured after a gunman opened fire Saturday afternoon in a busy market square in Krakow, Poland, police said. The gunman aimed at random people as he drove into the Main Square, a major tourist destination in the center of the city, Krakow police said. Police officers are among the wounded. The perpetrator was shot and wounded during a gunfight with officers a short distance away from the initial violence, police said. Katarzyna Cisło, a spokesperson for the Krakow police, told TVN24 that the perpetrator was wearing military-style fatigues and he used a military-type long gun in the attack. Police found many pieces of other weapons, as well as ammunition, in his car. Cisło added that the gunman acted alone and that the public is safe. Mass shootings are uncommon in Poland. Images from the scene showed police officers and ambulances covering the area, which is in the center of Krakow. A Polish Medical Air Rescue helicopter also landed in the square. A tram driver reported around 3 p.m. that his vehicle was shot at from a man in a moving car while passing nearby the main square, the Krakow municipal transport company said. The window to the tram driver’s cabin was shattered. Around 15 million tourists visit Krakow annually, the majority passing through the Main Square. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in a post on X, said police are investigating the attack. And Polish President Karol Nawrocki said his thoughts were with the victims, the wounded and their families. “We are just learning details of the horrific mass shooting in Krakow, a savage and murderous attack that’s shattered the peace of Poland,” Tom Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, wrote on X. “America stands with Poland at this dark hour as Poland stands with her beloved citizens of Krakow.” Krakow is the second-largest city in Poland and roughly 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the capital, Warsaw.This article originally appeared on Associated Press at https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/EU–Poland-Shooting-160651039.html

Washington — Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who is set to take over the White House chief of staff role on Monday, has driven President Trump’s most controversial immigration policies during both of his administrations. Mr. Trump announced the staffing shake-up on Friday, calling Miller one of his “most trusted” advisers. Miller replaces Susie Wiles, who has been his chief of staff throughout his second term. The move comes after Republicans suffered crippling losses in the midterm elections and as Democrats plan sweeping investigations into the administration’s actions, including its immigration enforcement policies. Miller was the architect behind many of those policies and also championed the administration’s immigration enforcement expansion, which has been supported by approximately $170 billion that congressional Republicans allocated for immigration enforcement and border security in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which became law in July 2025. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Miller helped develop and publicly defend the administration’s executive order that restricted entry by nationals of several Muslim-majority countries. The travel ban led to protests around the U.S. and legal challenges. A third iteration of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018. He was a leading supporter of the administration’s 2018 zero-tolerance immigration policy, which resulted in thousands of family separations, and he pressed for dramatic reductions in refugee admissions. The administration repeatedly lowered the annual refugee admissions ceiling, ultimately setting it at 15,000 for fiscal year 2021, a record low at the time. Under former President Barack Obama, the ceiling was 110,000 for fiscal year 2017. Miller also advocated penalizing legal immigrants who received public benefits and making it harder for them to obtain citizenship.  In Mr. Trump’s second term, Miller pushed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make at least 3,000 immigration arrests per day. In May 2025, Miller publicly demanded a dramatic increase in daily arrests, placing pressure on ICE leadership and expanding enforcement beyond immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes. He also proposed that the National Guard be deployed to support mass deportations. Miller’s arrest targets were part of a sweeping expansion of enforcement in communities, workplaces and immigration courts. Detentions of immigrants without criminal histories rose sharply, and increased ICE activity sparked protests across the country.  The longtime Trump adviser also championed the use of a wartime law — the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — to bypass due process and quickly deport alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, where they were held in a notorious maximum-security prison, known as CECOT. The deportations set off a legal battle, and the Supreme Court blocked the government from immediately deporting the Venezuelans without giving them an opportunity to challenge their removal. As part of the administration’s deportation efforts, Miller has supported an aggressive expansion of third-country deportations. The administration has deported immigrants to countries where they have no citizenship or family ties, including several African nations. In May 2025, Miller said the administration was actively considering suspending the constitutional mechanism that allows detainees to challenge their confinement in court. At a March 2026 conference in Miami, Miller argued that military force, rather than traditional criminal law enforcement alone, was needed to defeat cartels. Miller appeared alongside Mr. Trump in the Oval Office this summer as he signed executive orders to refuse citizenship to some children born in the United States, after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship. This article originally appeared on CBS News at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-miller-chief-of-staff-trump-immigration-policies/

The skyline of Cleveland, Ohio, on 30 September 2023.Photograph: Photo by Mike Kline (notkalvin)/Getty Images While Elon Musk has often touted putting datacenters in space, reports suggest that another geographic area may soon become a widespread target: our lakes and oceans. Two underwater datacenters are already in operation off the coast of China, and recent reports suggest that the Trump administration is considering plans for four proposed underwater, sealed-pod datacenters to be built off the shores of Maine and Alaska. At a campaign rally in Ohio last month, Donald Trump said of datacenters: “There’s so much money to be made for Ohio … they’ll go to China … we want them.” Underwater iterations are particularly attractive to tech companies as they largely eliminate community opposition and controversy around datacenters in residential areas on land. In theory, underwater datacenters could also significantly cut down on utility costs, another issue that’s currently riling communities across the country. A Microsoft project set up off the coast of northern Scotland in 2018 found that after two years, server failures were reduced by 87% compared with on-land datacenter equivalents. Microsoft executives saw the project, which ended after two years, as an unmitigated success. That makes the cool, salt-free waters of the Great Lakes, home to 30 million people in major cities such as Chicago, Toronto and Detroit, potentially attractive to datacenter companies. A spokesperson for the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said: “The EPA supports development of data center infrastructure that is essential to remaining the world leader in Super Intelligence while using its statutory authorities to protect water quality.” But the environmental consequences of any similar project in the freshwater Great Lakes, which those tens of millions of people depend on for drinking water every day, could be significant. Local environmental activists are already worried and sounding the alarm – even though no underwater datacenter projects are currently proposed for the region. For them, they think it is better to be prepared than surprised, given the high stakes of the ecologically sensitive ecosystem. “We are concerned because if you think about what a datacenter does, it throws off a lot of heat. Lake Erie already has an issue with harmful algal blooms, and they develop because of heat, not only because of fertilizers and agricultural runoff,” said John Lipaj of the Lake Erie Foundation, a non-profit based in Ohio. The floor of Lake Erie on the US side falls under the jurisdiction of the state of Ohio. In the past, its state government, where Republicans hold a supermajority, proposed a law making it easier for datacenter companies to discharge wastewater into public waterways. That measure was denied by the state’s EPA last July following a public outcry. Of the eight US Great Lakes states, only New York currently has a temporary state-wide moratorium on datacenter construction. That ends in mid-2027. “We’re also concerned about the possibility of contamination and leaks. These have not been around a long time,” said Lipaj. “We are concerned about the types of fluid contained in a datacenter, the batteries and electrical equipment. These are all things that could lead to a catastrophic failure that we don’t want happening in the Great Lakes.” Lake Erie is home or close to major cities such as Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo and is already by far the warmest of the five Great Lakes during summer months. It also ranks as one of the most polluted large lakes in the country in large part due to agricultural runoff in its western basin. A number of fish species are under threat due to the lake’s warming trend. “Warm water can impact aquatic life and ecosystems in a number of ways. One immediate effect is what is known as a thermal shock,” said Helena Volzer of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, an environmental group based in Chicago. “Aquatic organisms are highly sensitive to temperature changes, and even a small, rapid increase of just 2-5F can be dramatic for the aquatic ecosystem. When a facility releases warm water, it can alter metabolism and increase oxygen demand, reduce dissolved oxygen availability, disrupt food webs [and] force fish to move away from preferred habitats.” On 3 November, residents of Conneaut, a Lake Erie community of about 12,000 people an hour’s drive north-east of Cleveland, voted in favor of a charter amendment to prohibit the construction of large datacenters in its area. But the idea of offshore underwater datacenters is not a popular one here. “Being one of the largest freshwater sources in the world, I would be very much for protecting that resource,” said Mariana Branch, a Conneaut council member who lives a short distance from the Lake Erie shoreline. Branch said she hadn’t previously been aware of the idea of datacenters operating underwater. “Technology is moving so quickly, it’s difficult for cities to keep up with,” she said. Still, some suggest that following Microsoft’s lead in Scotland may have some merit considering the public opposition to on-land equivalents; and, unlike the open ocean, there are no large fauna in the Great Lakes ecosystems. “They require a lot of energy for cooling … one of the biggest advantages of these underwater datacenters is the low cooling cost [associated]. They don’t have to spend a lot to cool the servers,” said Nir Kshetri, a professor of emerging technologies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. “Datacenters have been a big issue for communities and in the recent elections. Also, datacenters don’t have to worry about any latency problems because they can be located close to large population centers where they are needed. A lake is a great place to do a datacenter. Cold water is even better.” However, the Great Lakes are not without significant challenges to any such project. Last winter saw one of the most extensive Great Lakes freeze-ups in decades, with almost all of Lake Erie and up to half of the four other lakes freezing over up to several feet deep. Experts say it isn’t clear to what extent ice cover could affect underwater projects. What’s more, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “We have no plans to deploy an underwater datacenter in any location at this time,” and: “Our focus today is on building and operating datacenters responsibly on land.” A spokesperson for Ohio’s EPA said it had not yet received any applications to permit an underwater datacenter in its part of Lake Erie. For its part, Lipaj says the Lake Erie Foundation has contacted state representatives and state senators in New York, Ohio and Michigan to discuss the issue. “Whether or not they happen, [we’re saying] let’s propose to state legislatures in Great Lakes states that they consider that this may be coming down the line and let’s get some regulations in place before the datacenter developers make their proposals and then state legislators are scrambling. That’s what we’re trying to avoid. We’re exercising an abundance of caution,” he said. “The Great Lakes states should take some leadership in this, get the regulations written so that nothing is forced on them.”This article originally appeared on The Guardian at https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trump-administration-wants-underwater-datacenters-140014506.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democratic leaders are placing an early emphasis on healthcare as they discuss their immediate priorities upon the swearing-in of the new Congress on Jan. 3. Early votes in the House next year are expected to focus on boosting Medicaid and restoring an enhanced tax subsidy that is designed to lower the cost of Affordable Care Act health plans for millions of enrollees. Democrats are also promising swift action on legislation to stop the war with Iran and to reverse some of President Donald Trump’strade tariffs. “We’re going to get out of the gate fast,” said New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader who is in line to become the next House speaker. The legislative flurry carries enormous stakes for Democrats as they seek to translate their sweeping victories in the midterms — their numbers will exceed 250 in the 435-member House — into achievements that deliver on their promises to lower the cost of living. Obstacles abound for the Democratic agenda Passing those bills should not be a problem with such a large Democratic House majority. Getting them signed into law most certainly could be. A 60-vote threshold in the Senate looms for the legislation, as does a potential presidential veto. Trump on election night posted a photo on his social media site of a red hat with a simple message on it: “VETO”. Following those early votes, Jeffries said five working groups are developing plans to put forward bills that would lower costs in areas such as housing, energy, groceries and caregiving. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said Democrats will at some point take up legislation dealing with artificial intelligence and data centers. He is part of a group of lawmakers working on a document that will lay out some of the priorities for Jeffries to consider. “House Republicans last year made a conscious decision to let the AI industry run wild, and that was a bad decision politically and a bad decision on policy,” Lieu said. “Two things will change next term. We will hold public hearings on AI. We will pass legislation, reasonable guardrails on AI, and specifically data centers.” New Congress will return to past political fights Democrats are trying to reverse Medicaid changes that are expected to cut more than $900 billion from the program over a decade. The Republican-approved cuts helped offset some of the costs of Trump’s big tax and spending cut bill that was signed into law last year. The Medicaid changes in the bill imposed new administrative requirements and added conditions for eligibility, including work requirements. Some of the most substantial changes have yet to take effect. Still, enrollment in Medicaid has dropped by about 5 million, or about 7% since July 2025, when the bill was signed into law, according to KFF, a health policy research and news organization. Reversing those cuts would likely require Trump and the Republicans to abandon the hard-fought changes they made to cut entitlement spending in their signature tax bill. It’s an unlikely proposition. The effort to extend enhanced tax subsidies for certain enrollees in ACA plans has also been debated and voted on in the current Congress. The measure passed the House with some Republican support but stalled in the Senate. There also have been numerous war powers votes regarding Iran — 14 in the Senate and six in the House. Gridlock may be on the horizon Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said going into the election that a Democratic majority in the next Congress would amount to “two years of paralysis.” “I don’t think that’s good for anybody,” Thune said. But Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York is insisting that Democrats will push their agenda with or without the Republican president’s help. “If he vetoes it, it will show the divisions. As much as we didn’t want to shut down, when we shut down the government for a month over healthcare, people knew we were on their side,” Schumer said in an interview with The New York Times’ podcast “The Daily.” Schumer said he believes Democrats can gain some Republican votes on restoring the enhanced subsidies for ACA plans. When asked if he was hearing from Republicans expressing a willingness to work with him on legislation, he replied: “They’re never so definitive but, yes, I am getting initial signs that way on certain issues, not on every issue.” While the prospects for getting any of the early priority bills over the finish line are uncertain, the votes in Congress will help frame the choices voters will face during a presidential election in 2028. Tensions exist within the new Democratic majority Progressive groups call the agenda outlined by Jeffries a good early start, but they have much greater expectations for Democrats this Congress. “It’s perfectly fine if the Senate and the House are unified and Donald Trump is standing in the way because that sets up another tidal wave election in 2028,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic-aligned group that backs progressive candidates and policies. At the same time, he said Schumer cannot be content to let bills die in the Senate because of the 60-vote threshold. “It will require the Democrats to get rid of the filibuster,” Green said. “There’s no doubt about it.” He said there’s a disparity because Republicans’ top priorities — tax cuts and Supreme Court justices — can get through with simple majorities. But the Democratic Party’s top priorities require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. “The only question is will the American public trust Democrats enough to keep giving us more power or will this week’s gains whittle away because we do nothing? That’s why the filibuster is a threshold question,” Green said. Schumer in an interview with The Associated Press this week would not say whether he would try and eliminate the filibuster. “The focus has got to be on getting things done,” Schumer said. “That’s all I am saying.” In a memo to fellow members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, said Democrats also need to target what he called “powerful forces outside of government.” Examples he cited were corporations using Americans’ private data to adjust their pricing based on a consumer’s personal data and AI companies that he says are putting jobs and lives at risk. “By focusing not just on the Trump administration but also on big corporations and billionaires, we will show the American people we are not just anti-Trump but also pro-worker and pro-consumer,” Casar said. ___ Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.This article originally appeared on Associated Press at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/house-democrats-start-majority-focused-130956806.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans aren’t holding back. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described this week’s elections as an “extinction-level event” for the GOP. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz likened it to a “Watergate-level repudiation.” Former Vice President Mike Pence called it a “reckoning.” For all the apocalyptic talk emerging from a midterm that relegated Republicans to their thinnest ranks on Capitol Hill in decades, there’s little agreement on how the party should move forward. A return to the bedrock fiscal and national security conservatism that defined Republicans under President Ronald Reagan risks alienating the more hard-line conservatives welcomed into the party under President Donald Trump under the “Make America Great Again” banner. But leaning even further into Trump’s coarse brand of politics could lead to more voter rejection. “We have soul-searching to do,” Alex Latcham, the executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, which spent $810 million to support Republicans, said in an interview. “We need to first understand and honestly admit why we just endured a wipeout of this magnitude. And then we have to regroup and agree to a path forward.” GOP faces questions about Trump’s future role As has been the case for the past decade, the central question is the role Trump will play in shaping the party’s future. His insistence on loyalty reached a zenith this year as he intervened in GOP primaries and pressed voters to make the elections a referendum on his second term. He held dozens of rallies in the final weeks of the campaign for candidates, most of whom lost their races. Since Tuesday’s election, he’s refused to acknowledge any responsibility, placing blame on the candidates. His public events have focused on his pet projects in Washington, which have proven unpopular with voters. On Friday, he elevated Stephen Miller, the architect of some of his most contentious policies, to White House chief of staff. In an interview, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, said the election results were “shocking” but that Trump could still steer the conversation around issues such as immigration. The governor described the GOP’s current dynamic as a natural process for a party whose leader is deep in his second term. “It just tells you that the American people, after 10 years, they’re pretty much tired of whoever’s in office,” Stitt said. “I think people want a little more stability. They want people to be nice to people, to say, ‘Hey, we’re all Americans.’” Others were more blunt. Longtime conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said the midterms marked “the end of the Trump era.” John Sununu, a Republican who lost his bid for a Senate seat in New Hampshire, blamed Trump. “It seems like he or his family is in on every transaction and deal that goes on in Washington,” Sununu told John Kasich, a former Republican congressman from Ohio, on SiriusXM. “Those two things, I think, caused people to say, ‘You know, I just can’t vote for a Republican while he’s still in office.’” Republican infighting is likely to intensify The GOP infighting is poised to intensify quickly. When Republicans return to Capitol Hill next week, they’ll have to choose between Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio to lead the party in the House. They may weigh whether to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. There could also be tough votes on defense spending and keeping the federal government open after Dec. 11. Already a leadership fight is brewing at the Republican National Committee, where there are early conversations about limiting Trump’s influence in picking the next chair. KC Crosbie, currently the co-chair, circulated a letter this week calling the midterms a “serious setback” and announcing plans to run for chair at the committee’s January meeting in Arizona. Trump announced his support Friday for the party’s current chair, Joe Gruters. That’s to say nothing of the emerging contest for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. Vice President JD Vance, seen as a leading contender, will likely face a broad range of opponents if he enters the race. Stitt is among the Republicans calling for a “big open primary.” “I don’t think we should crown anybody,” he said. There will be pressure to revive the coalition of voters, particularly Latinos, who have lifted the party to success in previous elections but swung to Democrats this week. Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., said he thought Secretary of State Marco Rubio is best positioned to win Latinos. “The two main constituencies that Republicans have to quickly regain are white suburban voters and Hispanic voters,” Curbelo said in an interview. “Vance was out on the campaign trail this year and it doesn’t appear that he was able to move the needle in terms of Hispanic voters.” A representative for Vance didn’t comment on that characterization. Broad election fallout for the GOP Still, the fallout for the GOP is broad, according to The AP Voter Poll, an expansive survey of about 80,000 voters in all 50 states. Younger Republican voters who supported the Republican candidate in their House race were less likely to approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, and more likely to say he worsened the economy with his policies. About two-thirds of Republican voters under 30 said they approved of how Trump was handling the presidency, compared with about 9 in 10 Republican voters age 65 and older. About one-third of younger GOP voters said Trump had worsened the country’s economic conditions, compared with about 2 in 10 older Republican voters. The war with Iran also appeared to divide Republican voters, with about 6 in 10 Republican voters under 45 saying the U.S. made the right decision in taking military action against Iran. That rose to about 8 in 10 among Republican voters who were 45 and older. Young Republican voters were more likely to say the U.S. support for Israel was “too strong.” Roughly half of Republican voters under 30 said the country’s backing of Israel was “too strong,” compared with about 1 in 10 voters 65 and older. Despite rosy outlooks from top Republicans including Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in the final weeks of the campaign, Republican strategists had long seen the country’s confidence in the party unraveling. In late August, the Senate Leadership Fund convened a donor retreat in Laguna Beach, California, where Latcham told the group that Republicans had lost the confidence of voters on handling the cost of living and the economy, according to two Republican Senate campaign sources who attended the event. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. In defeat, Republicans are trying to take a broader view, knowing that it may take several election cycles before they one day return to power. Rep. Christopher Smith was reelected to his 24th term this week and is New Jersey’s last Republican in Congress. He took a long view on the party’s current struggles. “The pendulum swings back and forth,” he told reporters. “These are cycles.” ___ Associated Press writers Steve Peoples, Kevin Freking and Linley Sanders contributed to this report.This article originally appeared on Associated Press at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-grip-party-republicans-reel-124922943.html