House Republicans will select new leaders for several powerful committees this week, with the chairmen inheriting both a gavel and the task of advancing President-elect Donald Trump 's agenda through a united GOP Congress . With the new members' swearing-in on Jan. 3, 2025, and Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, the newly selected House committee leaders will have the power to deliver on the president-elect's top priorities, including a tax bill, government spending , and border security, among other policies. The new chairmen will be selected by the House GOP Steering Committee, a panel of over 30 Republican leaders and regional representatives that recommend the committee chairs for approval from the full Republican conference. The Steering Committee is meeting Monday to make their selections, with some of the most influential committees attracting multiple challengers. Unless they receive a waiver, Republican committee leaders can not serve more than three consecutive terms as the head of the committee. Many current GOP committee leaders, such as Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), did not seek a waiver to remain chairman, while others, such as Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO), were approved to stay as the top GOP lawmaker on the committee. Several committees also have leaders who decided ahead of the 2024 election that they would retire or seek another office off Capitol Hill, leaving many vacancies . The Washington Examiner will update this story as the Steering Committee announces its selections. MEET THE NEW CONGRESS: THE HOUSE AND SENATE FRESHMEN ELECTED TO SERVE NEXT YEAR Foreign Affairs Committee - Brian Mast Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) defeated Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Ann Wagner (R-MO), and Joe Wilson (R-SC) in a four-way contest to replace McCaul on Monday. With Mast's selection, House Republicans are on track to have zero chairwomen on any committee. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, which led the high-profile investigation of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, had a vacant chairmanship because McCaul is terming out and did not seek a waiver to remain chairman. Mast, a Purple Heart recipient and U.S. Army veteran, became a staple in the GOP conference after he wore his Israeli military uniform to the Capitol to show solidarity for the Jewish state following the 2023 Hamas attacks. Sources told Punchbowl News he gave a great presentation to the Steering Committee to make his case that he should lead the committee next Congress. Wagner, the vice chairwoman of the committee, touted her foreign policy experience as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg during former President George W. Bush’s administration and co-chairwoman of the Abraham Accords Caucus as a reason for seeking the gavel. As chairwoman, she had vowed to crack down on Russia, Iran, and China and touted a key GOP talking point about securing the border. Issa, however, also campaigned on his foreign affairs experience, having visited over 100 countries, and his prior experience as chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Similar to Issa, Wilson pitched himself as the senior lawmaker equipped to lead the committee after leading 70 congressional delegation trips to over 80 countries. The Hill reported that Wilson was giving members of the Steering Committee pieces from the Berlin Wall that he brought back from Germany in 1990. DEMOCRATS SEARCH FOR ANSWERS AS BARACK OBAMA’S INFLUENCE WANES Energy and Commerce Committee - Brett Guthrie The Steering Committee selected Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY) as the next House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), a powerhouse who led the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, did not seek reelection in 2024, setting off a competitive race between Guthrie and Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH). The Energy and Commerce Committee will be a key panel moving into the Trump administration, holding jurisdiction over healthcare, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Energy Department — all areas that have been targeted by Trump and Republicans over the last two years due to Biden administration-era rules and regulations on everything from electric vehicles and appliances to the aftermath of COVID-19. Despite Guthrie's selection, Latta will still be the most senior GOP lawmaker on the Energy and Commerce Committee, holding experience on all six subcommittees and having 33 bills signed into law. Guthrie has sat on five of the six subcommittees and is currently chairman of the health subcommittee. The newly-selected chairman said his top priorities are permitting reform and the United States beating China to developing 6G, the latest wireless communication network expected to arrive in the 2030s. Financial Services Committee - French Hill Rep. French Hill (R-AR) will be the new Financial Services Committee chairman once approved by the full GOP conference. Hill will replace current Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who had a brief stint as speaker pro tempore after Kevin McCarthy's ouster and is retiring after this term. The chair-elect beat out Reps. Andy Barr (R-KY), Frank Lucas (R-OK), and Bill Huizenga (R-MI) for the gavel to succeed McHenry as the top GOP lawmaker on the Financial Services Committee, a panel that holds hearings regarding the Federal Reserve, cryptocurrency, and Wall Street. All three areas, particularly the Fed and crypto, will likely be top priorities of the Trump administration. Hill is vice chairman of the Financial Services Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion. His selection as the new chairman will be a significant asset for the cryptocurrency field. Barr was originally considered to be the favorite in the race. He is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy, writing in a letter to colleagues he can "build a bridge between those traditional Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street Republicans, and the America First populists who elected Donald Trump.” Lucas is the longest-serving GOP lawmaker on the committee and had touted his three decades in the House, while Huizenga had campaigned on his relationship with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who is expected to become chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs next year. BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, CONGRESS, AND UNIONS TRY TO ‘TRUMP-PROOF SCIENCE’ Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Graves, the current chairman, will seek his fourth term as the top Republican on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee after the Steering Committee approved his waiver to surpass the third-term rule. Graves is facing a challenge from Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR), who put out a blueprint focusing on investments in the most-used methods of transportation, including highways, railways, ports, and airways. Rumored to be in the running for transportation secretary for the incoming administration, Graves is campaigning on his experience in the role — particularly the five-year Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that passed earlier this year. Education and the Workforce Committee Outgoing Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) received a waiver to seek a fourth term but declined to run for reelection, opening up the race for Reps. Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Burgess Owens (R-UT). Whoever serves as the next chairman will play a significant role in the House GOP's reconciliation process to push bills to Trump's desk for approval, including on the subject of student loans. Walberg, as one of the senior Republicans on the committee, outlined his top priority as supporting parents' rights, as well as fighting back against antisemitism on campus, which has continued to rise during the Hamas-Israel war. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER Owens is also running on combatting antisemitism on campuses and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements in schools, hiring practices, and school choice. The Steering Committee will hear presentations from challengers on Monday and Thursday, with selections expected by the end of Thursday. The full conference vote to approve the committee chairmen-elect will likely be held next week.Israeli airstrikes hit a Yemen airport as a jet with hundreds onboard was landing, UN official saysMysterious New Jersey are manned aircraft being flown lawfully, White House says"The Chinese people are so miserable," read a social media post in the wake of yet another mass killing in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: "There will only be more and more copycat attacks." "This tragedy reflects the darkness within society," wrote another. Such bleak assessments, following a spate of deadly incidents in China during 2024, have led to questions about what is driving people to murder strangers en masse to "take revenge on society" . Attacks like this are still rare given China's huge population, and are not new, says David Schak, associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often as copycat attempts at garnering attention. This year has been especially distressing. From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year, where perpetrators attacked pedestrians or strangers. In 2024, that number jumped to 19. In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 people killed and 166 injured. November was especially bloody. On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man ploughed a car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35. Police said that the driver had been unhappy with his divorce settlement. He was sentenced to death this week. Days later, in Changde city, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school, injuring 30 of them. The authorities said he was angry over financial losses and family problems. That same week, a 21-year-old who couldn't graduate after failing his exams, went on a stabbing rampage on his campus in Wuxi city, killing eight and injuring 17. In September, a 37-year-old man raced through a Shanghai shopping centre, stabbing people as he went . In June, four American instructors were attacked at a park by a 55-year-old man wielding a knife. And there were two separate attacks on Japanese citizens, including one in which a 10-year-old boy was stabbed to death outside his school. The perpetrators have largely targeted "random people" to show their "displeasure with society", Prof Schak says. In a country with vast surveillance capabilities, where women rarely hesitate to walk alone at night, these killings have sparked understandable unease. So what has prompted so many mass attacks in China this year? A major source of pressure in China right now is the sluggish economy. It is no secret that the country has been struggling with high youth unemployment, massive debt and a real estate crisis which has consumed the life savings of many families, sometimes with nothing to show for it. On the outskirts of most major cities there are entire housing estates where construction has stopped because indebted developers cannot afford to complete them. In 2022, the BBC interviewed people camping in the concrete shells of their own unfinished apartments , without running water, electricity and windows because they had nowhere else to stay. "Optimism certainly does seem to have faded," says George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University's China Centre. "Let's use the word trapped, just for the moment. I think China has become trapped in a sort of cycle of repression. Social repression and economic repression, on the one hand, and a kind of faltering economic development model on the other." Studies appear to point to a significant change in attitudes, with a measurable increase in pessimism among Chinese people about their personal prospects. A significant US-China joint analysis, which for years had recorded them saying that inequality in society could often be attributed to a lack of effort or ability, found in its most recent survey that people were now blaming an "unfair economic system" . "The question is who do people really blame?" Mr Magnus asks. "And the next step from that is that the system is unfair to me, and I can't break through. I can't change my circumstances." In countries with a healthy media, if you felt you had been fired from your job unfairly or that your home had been demolished by corrupt builders backed by local officials, you might turn to journalists for your story to be heard. But that is rarely an option in China, where the press is controlled by the Communist Party and unlikely to run stories which reflect badly on any level of the government. Then there are the courts – also run by and for the party – which are slow and inefficient. Much was made on social media here of the Zhuhai attacker's alleged motive: that he did not achieve what he believed was a fair divorce settlement in court. Experts say other outlets for venting frustrations have also narrowed or been shut down altogether. Chinese people often air their grievances online, says Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, who has carried out significant research on how the Chinese state responds to push back from its people. "[They] will go on to the internet and scold the government... just to vent their anger. Or they may organise a small protest which the police would often allow if it's small-scale," she explains. "But this sort of dissent, small dissent, has been closed off in the last couple of years." There are plenty of examples of this: Increased internet censorship, which blocks words or expressions that are deemed controversial or critical; crackdowns on cheeky Halloween costumes that make fun of officialdom; or when plain-clothed men, who appeared to have been mobilised by local officials, beat up protesters in Henan province outside banks which had frozen their accounts. As for dealing with people's mental and emotional responses to these stresses, this too has been found wanting. Specialists say that China's counselling services are vastly inadequate, leaving no outlet for those who feel isolated, alone and depressed in modern Chinese society. "Counselling can help build up emotional resilience," says Professor Silvia Kwok from Hong Kong's City University, adding that China needs to increase its mental health services, especially for at-risk groups who have experienced trauma or those with mental illness. "People need to find different strategies or constructive ways to deal with their emotions... making them less likely to react violently in moments of intense emotional stress." Taken together, these factors suggest the lid is tightening on Chinese society, creating a pressure cooker-like situation. "There are not a lot of people going around mass killing. But still the tensions do seem to be building, and it doesn't look like there is any way it is going to ease up in the near future," Mr Magnus says. What should worry the Communist Party is the commentary from the general public blaming those in power for this. Take this remark for example: "If the government truly acts fairly and justly, there would not be so much anger and grievance in Chinese society... the government's efforts have focused on creating a superficial sense of harmony. While it may appear that they care about disadvantaged people, their actions have instead caused the greatest injustices." While violent attacks have been rising in many countries, according to Professor Ong, the difference in China is that officials have had little experience dealing with them. "I think the authorities are very alarmed because they've not seen it before, and their instinct is to crack down." When China's leader Xi Jinping spoke about the Zhuhai attack, he seemed to acknowledge pressure was building in society. He urged officials across the country to "learn hard lessons from the incident, address risks at their roots, resolve conflicts and disputes early and take proactive measures to prevent extreme crime". But, so far, the lessons learnt seem to have led to a push for quicker police response times using greater surveillance, rather than considering any changes to the way China is run. "China is moving into a new phase, a new phase that we have not seen since the late 70s," Prof Ong says, referring to the time when the country began opening to the world again, unleashing enormous change. "We need to brace for unexpected events, such as a lot of random attacks and pockets of protest and social instability emerging."
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CLEVELAND (AP) — Alyssa Nakken, the first woman to coach in a Major League Baseball game, is leaving the San Francisco Giants to join the Cleveland Guardians. Nakken made history in 2022 when she took over as first-base coach following an ejection. A former college softball star at Sacramento State, Nakken joined the Giants in 2014 and was promoted to a spot on manager Gabe Kapler's staff in 2020, becoming the majors' first full-time female coach.
No. 2 Georgia is resting its national championship hopes on backup quarterback Gunner Stockton following Carson Beck’s season-ending elbow surgery on Monday. Coach Kirby Smart said Monday that Georgia is preparing Stockton to start in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1 in the College Football Playoff quarterfinal against No. 3 Notre Dame. Stockton took over when Beck suffered a right elbow injury in the the first half in the Bulldogs’ 22-19 overtime win over Texas in the Southeastern Conference championship game on Dec. 7 in Atlanta. Georgia announced later Monday that Beck had season-ending surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament in the right elbow. The procedure was performed by Dr. Neal ElAttrache in Los Angeles on Monday. Beck is expected to begin throwing next spring. Georgia’s first-round bye in the playoffs has given Stockton, a sophomore, more time to prepare for his new starting role. Smart said the experience with the first-team is the primary benefit in “several practices” since the SEC championship game. “He got lots of reps prior to these practices, but he’s getting much more now,” Smart said. “I do think ... when you get ready for an opponent like Notre Dame, you need time and we have time.” The Fighting Irish advanced by beating Indiana 27-17 in the first round on Friday night. Smart said Stockton and Georgia can focus on Notre Dame. “But I think the biggest thing is just competition at practice,” Smart said. “You know, the situations we put him in. All those things allow him to get better as a quarterback.” Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman said Stockton will require adjustments by his defense. “You evaluate, obviously, what they’ve done all season and you have a separate tape of what Stockton has done,” Freeman said Monday. “I think we have 80-something plays of him. He can run their offense. He does things a little bit differently. He can extend plays with his legs, he’s a good athlete. The thing I probably noticed most about him, he’s an ultra-competitive individual.” Georgia announced on Dec. 9 that Beck and his family were considering treatment options for his elbow. Beck suffered the injury to his throwing arm in the first half of the SEC championship game and made a dramatic return to the field for the handoff on the game-winning play in overtime. Stockton had to leave the field for one play after having his helmet knocked off. Even though he was able to take the snap and hand off to Trevor Etienne for the running back’s decisive 4-yard touchdown run, Beck was unable to raise his right arm. Stockton’s job may get a little easier with Notre Dame defensive tackle Rylie Mills out. Freeman announced Monday that Mills will miss the rest of the season with a right knee injury he suffered against Indiana. Mills had 37 tackles and 7 1/2 sacks this season and anchored the interior line while All-American Howard Cross II missed the final three regular season games with a high ankle sprain. Cross returned against Indiana. It’s yet another blow to a defense that had already lost preseason All-America cornerback Benjamin Morrison and its top two rush ends with season-ending injuries. “You can’t replace Rylie Mills,” Freeman said. “Yes, the production, but the leadership, a captain, very similar to the things I said about Benjamin when he was out. You feel awful for him as a person, a guy that came back to improve his draft stock. You’ve got to replace what he did for our defense in different ways.” Stockton completed 12 of 16 passes for 71 yards with one interception against Texas. Smart downplayed the suggestion Stockton could give the Bulldogs more options as a running quarterback. “I think we are who we are in regards to that,” Smart said. “I mean, we played an entire season, offensively. You know, Gunner’s a good athlete. I think Carson is a good athlete. So it’s one of those deals that I don’t know how much that changes things.” Beck, a fifth-year senior, is 24-3 as a starter. He started all 26 games for the Bulldogs in 2023 and 2024. He passed for 3,941 yards with 24 touchdowns and only six interceptions in 2023 but had more difficulties with turnovers this season. Beck passed for 28 touchdowns with 12 interceptions this season and completed 7 of 13 passes for 56 yards before his injury in the SEC championship game.