Asking Eric: Estate theft divides siblings, but one brother wants to reconcile

USC struggled to put UCLA away early Saturday, but the Trojans celebrated roaring back to life in the fourth quarter of a rivalry win.

US President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images Two. Trillion. Dollars. That’s how much Elon Musk, co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, has said he can cut out of the annual federal budget. Musk and his partner Vivek Ramaswamy have suggested that they can achieve this through “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” by cracking down on spending “unauthorized” by Congress, and “large-scale audits” of federal contracts. Their target wouldn’t be entitlement programs “like Medicare and Medicaid,” they say, but “waste, fraud, and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.” If you could actually cut this much, it would wipe out the US’s $1.9 trillion deficit and put the country into surplus for the first time since the 2001 fiscal year. But let’s be clear: There is no way in hell Musk and Ramaswamy are going to be able to identify $2 trillion in annual spending to cut, and they certainly will not get anywhere near that number without congressional action. To see why, consult this simple chart of projected federal spending in fiscal year 2025, which began on October 1: !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

Sports betting writer Dylan Svoboda joins The Post’s NFL Bettor’s Guide for his first season. 

Dan Campbell’s 2023 Lions have Restored the Roar, beginning with its first playoff win in 32 years last season, and the Roar has never been louder in 2024. 

Frank Rubio’s experience – leave Earth in one vehicle, return much later in another – gives him an intimate understanding of the ordeal of two other NASA astronauts.

An inside look at Sunday’s Giants-Buccaneers matchup at MetLife Stadium:

Nayelly Flores finishes second at City Section Division II final while supported by her boyfriend, who asked her to run on the team this fall.

The Washington Commanders are set to meet the Dallas Cowboys at home Sunday. Here’s everything you need to know for game day.

The biggest surprise through two-thirds of St. John’s trip to The Bahamas has been the Johnnies’ 3-point shooting.

The former host of game shows "Love Connection" and "Wheel of Fortune" has died at the age of 83.

A Latin American restaurant in Brooklyn with a laundry list of revolting health-code violations is at the center of an illegal vending scheme where dozens of migrant women brazenly hawk hot meals on street corners across the Big Apple, The Post has learned.

After Trump’s victory, tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates.

With President-elect Donald Trump vowing to impose tariffs on imports when he takes office, now might be the time to buy new appliances.

The postnatal retreat in Northern Virginia, which offers services inspired by practices in South Korea, is one of only a few to have opened in the United States.

It is possible to enjoy the holidays while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, says Dr. Nicole Saphier. The Fox News medical contributor shares her tips for navigating the season in a nutritious way.

A reader said she used to walk to a Metro bus stop on Sunset Boulevard. Now, after falling on poor sidewalks, she uses ride share or just stays home.

The president-elect should redouble his earlier efforts to emphasize skills over college degrees.

The annual game between Army and Notre Dame used to be a clash of worlds: military and religious. The Fighting Irish now just represent capitalism.

A reader predicts Phillips 66 executives will be just fine if their company is convicted, because 'corporations are definitely not people.'

Eagles coordinator Vic Fangio shut down Sean McVay and the Rams offense in 2018 as the Bears won and gave the Patriots a blueprint to win Super Bowl LIII.

Holiday concert guide

A transgender reader says she has been out for many years and hopes California stands up for her rights. Another cautions that Trump has seized on this issue.

This is the season for California lawmakers to travel across the globe, some to lush beachside resorts with schmoozing lobbyists, at no cost of their own.

Saturday night’s showpiece final between the Orlando Pride and the Washington Spirit capped a record year for attendance, viewership and growth.

Temperatures turn noticeably cooler starting Wednesday.

California is now producing so much solar energy that the state must increasingly ask solar farms to stop producing to prevent overloading the electric grid. In the last 12 months, power that would have fueled 518,000 California homes for a year has been curtailed or thrown away.

Madeleine Lambert, who had her daughter at 14, wanted to prove to people that she was "more than just a statistic."

"A Palestinian state is a must and an absolute prerequisite for normalization with Israel," a Saudi political analyst told Newsweek.

The farmer raising the turkeys for a presidential pardon talked to TIME about why they like bugle music and how he gets them used to cameras.

Dear Abby advises a couple on what to do with their valuables before their time on Earth ends.

A Montgomery County police officer argues that revealing records of investigations into his conduct would be unconstitutional and violate his privacy.

The Post's Dave Blezow returns for Season 31 of the Bettor's Guide to give his Week 12 NFL picks.

The problem that the United Nations’ annual climate conference was meant to solve this year was, in one way, straightforward. To have any hope of meeting their commitments to holding global warming at bay, developing countries need at least $1 trillion a year in outside funding, according to economists’ assessments. Failure to meet those commitments will result in more chaotic climate outcomes globally. Everyone agrees on this.And yet, after two weeks of grueling, demoralizing negotiations, the assembled 198 parties agreed to a deal that was, in the most generous terms, weak. The agreement committed to $300 billion per year, by 2035, in funding for climate action in developing countries—triple the current target, but less than a third of that trillion-plus goal.These negotiations have operated on the presumption that a significant chunk of this money would come from wealthy countries, because where else would it come from? A limited number of places—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and Europe—have been the source of 92 percent of excess carbon emissions since industrialization. The countries that are bearing the brunt of climate change largely didn’t emit the carbon causing it. And the wealthiest countries failed to make a financial commitment even close to what was needed. “They’re really finding ways to avoid their responsibility,” Nafkote Dabi, the climate-change-policy lead at Oxfam International, told me.Even the climate financing that was agreed to is not just a cash handout. Previous agreements had promised $100 billion annually, a goal that the world claims to have finally managed to hit in 2022. But about 70 percent of that financing came in the form of loans. Much of the money in this agreement will likely be structured as debt, too—and will add to a global debt crisis that the International Monetary Fund estimates has 35 countries in dire financial straits this year. Dabi described debt—both a country’s existing national debt and climate finance taking the form of new debt—as the elephant in the room at COP. Even as developing countries worried about their debt burden growing from funds promised at the conference, they worried that discussing debt forgiveness would derail the already fragile negotiations.But both national debt and new climate debt stand in the way of COP’s stated goals. Towering national debts are stifling countries’ ability to invest in climate resilience: Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on servicing the interest payments on their debt than on education or health, let alone climate adaptation. And as climate change fuels hurricanes, droughts, and other disasters, the country must take on more debt to respond. African nations in particular are struggling. Last year, the chief economic adviser for Kenya’s president tweeted, “Salaries or default? Take your pick.” The country’s economy is collapsing under the weight of debt repayments. Kenya is also ricocheting between drought and flooding, and although climate funding might help build irrigation systems for drought-stricken farmers or finance renewable-energy infrastructure, it could also exacerbate the economic crisis if it arrives in the form of debt, adding to a burden that itself makes people that much less resilient to climate change’s challenges.Pakistan is perhaps the clearest example of how debt and climate risk can send a country into a downward spiral. It is one of the countries most loaded with external debt, owing some $100 billion to mostly the Asian Development Bank, IMF and World Bank, and a handful of wealthy countries including China, Japan, and the United States. And disasters worsened by climate change only add to its hardship: In 2022, for instance, flood damage amounted to $30 billion in losses. Pakistan can never repay its debts, and natural disasters will push it to rack up more.Dramatically lessening Pakistan’s debt would offer some recognition that the country is suffering under climate conditions it was not responsible for creating, and to which it will struggle to respond otherwise. Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, has called for countries on the front lines of climate change to have their national debts forgiven, and the president of Nigeria recently wrote that offering climate financing to African countries without restructuring their debts would be like “pedaling harder on a bicycle as its tires go flat.”There is precedent for mass debt forgiveness: In the 1990s and early 2000s, the IMF led the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative to restructure debts. It managed to cut out up to 64 percent of the countries’ debts on average. Kevin Gallagher, the director of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and an expert on climate finance, told me he’d like to see a new program like it, but one meant to wrangle the many private bondholders that have since entered the debt market. These companies, he says, tend to be reluctant to grant a country debt relief, despite charging extremely high interest rates meant to cover losses in the likely case the country defaults. “They’ve already priced it in,” he told me. Right now, China and other major debt holders are then also wary of offering debt relief, knowing the debtor country will likely use any financial breathing room to pay the private bond market.China, which is the single biggest creditor of any country in the world, is actually a far more progressive lender than private bondholders, experts say. China can be reluctant to restructure countries’ debts when they’re at risk of default, but it also lends at much lower interest rates than private bondholders. And few other creditor countries have been willing to entertain cutting debts as part of a climate-resilience strategy either, according to Jason Braganza, a Kenyan economist and the executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development. If a major debt-restructuring initiative managed to get China, other creditor countries such as the U.S., private bond markets, and global-development banks to the table, that could alter the fate of the world: Although every one of the poorest indebted countries could default on its loans without having a huge impact on the global financial system, the financial strain of them defaulting—and tumbling into austerity—would drag down the global economy, Gallagher said. “If these countries can’t even afford to pay back their international debts, they certainly can’t invest in climate resilience, mitigation, and development.”Debt forgiveness poses a similar challenge to the climate-finance question that COP failed so miserably to address: Solving either crisis would take collective will, and at COP too few responsible entities were willing. And although COP could agree not to issue new climate finance in the form of debt, a multilateral agreement on debt forgiveness wouldn’t happen at COP, which doesn’t include nonstate actors.Still, last week in Brazil, President Joe Biden called on G20 countries to swiftly provide debt relief to nations that need it, urging a faster debt-restructuring process. Many analysts say wealthy countries have an obvious interest in preventing default in the developing world: The impact of debt distress is not confined to the distressed country’s borders. Indebtedness breeds austerity, and if countries are unable to shield themselves from the effects of climate change and to transition away from fossil fuels, then that crisis deepens into an issue of global security. Emissions go up, as does displacement. If the world could think differently about debt, perhaps the next round of climate talks, scheduled for November 2025 in Brazil, could go differently, too.

"Russia's own troops are not enough" to push Ukraine out of the Russian border region, Kyiv's top commander has said.

It’s not quite Babe Ruth calling his shot, but Brock Nelson will come away from Hockey Fights Cancer Night with quite the story to tell.

Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for Nov. 24, 2024.

An Idaho woman, 18, was arrested over accusations that she dropped a deceased baby in a Safe Haven Baby Box at a hospital with the placenta still attached.

Empires in decline. Demagogues on the rise. Welcome to this weekend’s two escapist blockbusters!

Ukraine's air force said that at least 73 Russian attack drones entered the country's airspace on Saturday night into Sunday.

Many on social media took inspiration from her post, with one commenting how they'll be copying her message.

The TikTok CEO Shou Chew is trying to find out how Trump will approach the social media platform in his second term.

At the start of the season, Nets coach Jordi Fernandez said he hoped Ben Simmons would be aggressive and put up double-digit shots on a nightly basis.

Most United Nations efforts to deliver aid to the area in November were obstructed, except for a single World Food Program mission, according to OCHA.

Reporting on the 40th anniversary of the popular pizza literacy program sent one writer on a mozzarella-scented memory trail.

Archaeologists working in Central America have discovered a series of fishing-catching canals made by pre-Columbian Mayan predecessors thousands of years ago.

One seismologist has told Newsweek how his team reacted to one of the worst natural disasters in history.

One marketing expert told Newsweek that the retail giant has struggled in recent years to find a niche within the American retail market.