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  • Michael Reagan, political commentator and son of Ronald Reagan, dies at 80

    Michael Reagan, political commentator and son of Ronald Reagan, dies at 80

    Michael Reagan, a longtime political commentator for radio, TV and print media, and the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, died Jan. 4 from cancer, a conservative group affiliated with the former president said Tuesday. He was 80.

    A longtime Republican like his father, Mr. Reagan espoused conservative opinions, advocating antiabortion views, stressing adherence to Christianity and expressing skepticism about green policies. Like many in his party, he was initially a critic of President Donald Trump, describing him as an “egomaniacal billionaire” and a “political train wreck” who had little chance of winning in 2016. When Trump defied the odds and won, Mr. Reagan embraced him, decrying the “liberal media” that he said hated Trump.

    But Mr. Reagan’s political outspokenness and his famous father appeared to overshadow his lifelong struggle with scars suffered during a tumultuous childhood. He first heard at the age of 4 that he had been adopted, and he was sexually molested at the age of 7 by a camp counselor – experiences that molded his political views and prompted him to turn to religion for solace.

    Mr. Reagan kept the molestation a secret for decades, partly out of fear that revealing it could ruin his dad’s political career. Mr. Reagan finally told his father in 1987, as the president was nearing the end of his second term and when Mr. Reagan was writing a memoir. The book was going to contain the story, so Mr. Reagan felt compelled to tell his father beforehand.

    “Now here I am at the ranch. Dad’s standing in front of me with his belt buckle on, and it looks like a brand new pair of cowboy boots. Nancy’s on my left side. Nancy and Dad say, ‘So what’s in the book we don’t know about?’ I had to tell Dad, and I couldn’t look at him,” he recalled in a later interview.

    “The hardest thing was telling him the act. It was not enough to tell him, ‘Geez, Dad, I was molested,’ but the act … that was the toughest thing. I got all done. My dad looked at me and said, ‘Where’s this guy? I’ll kick his butt.’ My dad didn’t walk away, didn’t say he hated me. I thought to myself, Why didn’t I do this years ago? But I couldn’t have years ago. God brought me to the right moment in 1987.”

    Michael Edward Reagan was born on March 18, 1945, in Los Angeles. Born to unmarried parents John Bourgholtzer, an Army soldier, and Essie Irene Flaugher, his birth name was John Charles Flaugher. The Reagans changed his name after adopting him. Mr. Reagan often joked that he was born German but became Irish at 3 days old, referring to the Reagans’ Irish roots.

    Mr. Reagan first learned he was adopted from his 8-year-old sister Maureen. When Mr. Reagan asked their mother, actress Jane Wyman, what the word “adopted” meant, she first gave a stern look to Maureen before telling her son that he had been chosen so he was special. “Let’s not ever talk about it again,” Wyman told her children.

    But when Mr. Reagan went to boarding school a few years later and told a classmate that he was special, he was bullied.

    “He comes back to me, ‘You were not chosen; you’re illegitimate,’” Mr. Reagan said in a 2008 interview. “So the kids started teasing me in school that I wasn’t a real Reagan. I was the ‘Bastard Reagan,’ the illegitimate Reagan.”

    Mr. Reagan didn’t understand what “illegitimate” meant. So he consulted the Bible, and found a verse that said “all the illegitimate children and their children until the 10th generation will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.”

    “I closed the Bible. This is like 1951. [I] didn’t reopen the Bible until 1978.”

    The pain pushed him toward self-hate and anger. His parents’ subsequent divorce and the crime he suffered at the hands of a child molester exacerbated the negative emotions. As a high school student, he told himself he was condemned and blamed himself for his molestation.

    “I thought I was living a lie because no one knew what I had done. I questioned my sexuality, I stole money from my parents to buy prostitutes trying to convince myself I was straight,” he said in 2012. “I just didn’t know … I thought my birth parents gave me away because they knew I would be evil and I thought the Reagans would give me back if they found out.”

    He briefly attended Arizona State University and Los Angeles Valley College, and attempted to follow his parents into acting, but ultimately became better known for the radio shows he hosted, starting in the late 1980s in Los Angeles, where he briefly rubbed elbows with conservative talk show star Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Reagan attributed Trump’s rise to his ability to cater to the millions who tuned into conservative radio talk shows.

    Mr. Reagan became a frequent presence on television, radio and print as a political commentator, working as an analyst for the right-wing news outlet Newsmax during his final days.

    Although Mr. Reagan repeatedly expressed dismay over Trump’s haphazard style of politics earlier in Trump’s political career, Mr. Reagan’s opinions appeared to veer increasingly closer to those of Trump.

    Mr. Reagan initially denounced the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “wrong” and saying that they had “soiled [Trump’s] legacy forever.” But a year later, he was describing those arrested for allegedly participating in the events that day as “political prisoners.”

    In 2024, he wrote a column titled “Democrats: The Enemy of Democracy.”

    “While our streets and campuses are crawling with [left-wing protesters] and pro-Palestine vandals, Democrats are still yammering about the ‘insurrection’ of Jan. 6 and worrying about the existential threat Donald Trump supposedly poses to our democracy,” he said.

    That year, Mr. Reagan welcomed Trump’s reelection, praising the president for building a broad coalition that included “blue-collar workers, blacks and Latinos” – those who have not traditionally voted Republican.

    “With his historic political comeback and his MAGA movement, Trump has created the Republican Party of the future,” Mr. Reagan wrote in November 2024.

    In his private life, Mr. Reagan cherished his relationship with his wife, Colleen, whom he married in 1975 after a short marriage to Pamela Putnam that ended in 1972. Mr. Reagan has publicly thanked his wife for persuading him to turn to religion. Survivors include his wife and two children.

  • She battled bladder accidents for decades before doctors found the problem | Medical Mystery

    She battled bladder accidents for decades before doctors found the problem | Medical Mystery

    From as early as she can remember, Cindy O’Connor couldn’t control her bladder. She would suddenly feel the urge to pee and couldn’t make it to the bathroom before urine leaked out.

    In kindergarten, the Wisconsin resident wet her snow pants, which froze to a ledge as she sat outside of school. In seventh grade, a teacher who thought she was faking the need to go stopped her in the hallway, where, surrounded by classmates, she soaked her jeans. When playing outdoors with friends, she would run to a neighbor’s weeping willow and relieve herself under its wispy branches.

    Kids called her “pee-britches,” and her parents scolded her. To reduce the need to urinate, she stopped drinking water, only to develop cramps from constipation.

    As an adult, especially after the birth of her son, the problem got worse. She had to abruptly leave work meetings, stop the car frequently on road trips, and plan walks around available restrooms. Her regular doctors didn’t suggest any treatment for what they said was an overactive bladder, so she wore absorbent pads and figured she had to live with incontinence.

    Other doctors eventually prescribed medications and implanted two devices to try to resolve the issue, but the approaches didn’t help and had side effects. It wasn’t until O’Connor saw another specialist, who ordered a test other doctors hadn’t, that she was diagnosed with a rare condition that is typically caught at a much younger age.

    “I wish they would have figured it out years ago,” said O’Connor, now 65. “I wonder what things would have been like to have that normalcy.”

    Lifelong struggle

    O’Connor’s childhood memories are marked by urinary accidents.

    Her parents told her Santa wouldn’t leave gifts if he caught her up at night. Afraid to go to the bathroom, she often wet the bed on Christmas Eve. At the annual carnival in Belleville, the small town south of Madison where she grew up and still lives, she got stuck on a Ferris wheel and couldn’t hold her pee. After accidents at school, she would walk home during recess to change clothes.

    “I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘Why are you waiting until the last minute?’” O’Connor said.

    “‘I don’t,’” she would reply.

    When the trouble didn’t go away after her teens, she told doctors about it at visits for other complaints, but they didn’t focus on her incontinence. After her son was born when she was 21, she developed endometriosis, which is when tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside of the uterus. She underwent a hysterectomy a few years later. Her abnormal bladder seemed like a secondary concern.

    As she raised her son, helped her husband, Mike, start an insurance business, and cared for her father before he died of lung cancer, O’Connor adapted to her uncontrolled peeing. On morning walks, she and Mike would go by the fire station, their church, a park, a laundromat, and a bar — all of which had bathrooms open early — so she could dash in when necessary.

    But the condition was more than a nuisance. After Mike struggled to pull the car over in time, they stopped taking lengthy road trips. Sometimes the urge to pee was so overwhelming that O’Connor’s whole body would tremble. Unless she calmed herself, an accident was inevitable.

    “It was like my bladder was spasming, my heart was racing, my ears were ringing, and my head was pounding,” she said. “Everything just goes haywire. If I stood up right away, I was done.”

    Unhelpful treatments

    In her late 40s, a change in health insurance led O’Connor to see a new gynecologist. The doctor treated her for incontinence with a medication called Detrol. It didn’t help and made O’Connor’s constipation worse.

    The gynecologist surgically placed a mesh sling under her urethra, which can ease some kinds of urinary incontinence. But O’Connor’s bladder was nicked during the procedure, requiring her to use a catheter for 12 days. The sling made it hard for her to urinate, so after three months the doctor cut the device to release its tension.

    O’Connor tried oxybutynin, another drug for overactive bladder, but it didn’t help and caused dry eyes and blurry vision. She went to another doctor — a gynecologist with training in urology — who prescribed a drug called Vesicare, which had a similar effect. Physical therapy, with Kegel exercises, wasn’t beneficial.

    The urogynecologist implanted a device that acts like a urinary “pacemaker,” using electrical pulses to stimulate nerves that communicate between the bladder and the brain.

    The device didn’t lessen O’Connor’s bladder symptoms. Instead, it activated another part of her body. “It made my toes curl,” she said.

    A new test

    In 2013, nearly four years after her first treatment, she saw another urogynecologist, Sarah McAchran, at UW Health in Madison. McAchran, a urologist with training in gynecology, found two things about O’Connor to be unusual. Her incontinence had persisted since childhood, and she hadn’t responded to numerous treatments. McAchran tried two additional drugs, which were also unsuccessful: Mirabegron, which gave O’Connor headaches, and Gelnique, a topical form of oxybutynin, from which she broke out in a rash.

    McAchran conducted urodynamic tests, in which catheters, electrodes, and fluids measure bladder capacity, pressure, and flow. O’Connor’s results were unusual. “She had a very early first sensation to void,” McAchran said. “Her contractions got progressively stronger and were all associated with leakage.”

    Using a flexible tube mounted with a camera, McAchran inspected O’Connor’s bladder and saw some trabeculations, or thickening of the wall, which suggests the bladder was contracting too much. “It can be a sign that the bladder has had to work harder than it should to try to get urine out,” McAchran said.

    Suspecting an underlying nervous system condition, McAchran ordered a spinal MRI. The scan revealed that the tip of O’Connor’s spinal cord was low and that a band of tissue between the tip and her tailbone appeared abnormal, indicating a condition called a tethered spinal cord. In the disorder, the spinal cord attaches to the spinal canal instead of flowing freely. Body movement causes the spinal cord to stretch too much, which can interfere with signals between the brain and the bladder.

    The condition can be caused by scar tissue from surgery but is often present at birth, when it is associated with spina bifida occulta, a mild version of a birth defect that can cause serious disabilities. O’Connor almost certainly was born with her tethered cord; many children who have it are diagnosed at a young age. But in a middle-aged woman, “you have to think about it to diagnose it,” McAchran said. “There’s so many other, more common … reasons for a woman to have incontinence that you would focus on those first.”

    When she heard the diagnosis, O’Connor was ecstatic. She finally had a response to the ridicule she had endured.

    “‘See, I told you that it’s not my fault; I don’t wait too long,’” O’Connor said she told those close to her. “Nobody would listen to me all those years. That was so frustrating.”

    Finding comfort

    Despite getting the diagnosis, a remedy did not come easily. When O’Connor was 53, a neurosurgeon cut the band of abnormal tissue connected to her spinal cord to release the cord, confirming during the procedure that the cord had been tethered. The operation, when performed at a young age, can prevent bladder and neurological problems.

    The surgery relieved O’Connor’s lower back pain, another symptom of her tethered cord, but it didn’t significantly improve her incontinence. That is because the procedure can’t reverse damage already done, said the neurosurgeon, Bermans Iskandar, of UW Health, who normally operates on children.

    “If you wait 50 years, there’s no way you’re going to bring back a bladder that has been damaged over the years,” Iskandar said. “The main reason for the surgery is to prevent additional problems in the future.”

    McAchran turned to Botox, injecting purified botulinum toxin through O’Connor’s urethra into her bladder to relax the muscle and reduce contractions. At first, the treatment decreased accidents, even though it made it harder for O’Connor to urinate and sometimes required her to use disposable catheters. But the benefit of the injections, given nine times over more than two years, diminished. “The spasms came back just as hard,” O’Connor said.

    The last option was surgery to increase the size of her bladder. It would require her to use a disposable catheter every time she went to the bathroom, regularly flush her urethra and bladder with saline solution, and urinate on schedule, every five or six hours, for the rest of her life. She worried about how she would do those things as she got older.

    But on a trip with Mike to Door County, Wisconsin’s version of Cape Cod, she had an accident at a restaurant. As their retirement years approached, she wanted to travel without worrying so much about her bladder.

    She decided to have the operation. In October 2018, during the five-hour procedure, McAchran and another surgeon used a piece of O’Connor’s bowel to more than double the size of her bladder, increasing its capacity to store urine more than threefold.

    Since then, O’Connor has had only one accident, when she exceeded her scheduled urination time while watching a parade in New Orleans. She has acclimated to using catheters in her daily routine. “It’s natural, it’s normal,” she said.

    For much of her life, she struggled with low self-esteem, sensing that people were laughing at her because of her condition. “It wasn’t a death sentence, but it sure wasn’t fun,” she said.

    Now, after retiring in September as office manager for Mike, she is embracing a more unencumbered life. She went with Mike to Europe two years ago, took a trip to Nashville last summer with her son and is regularly playing with her granddaughter, who is nearly 2. She and Mike plan to fly to California and drive back along Route 66.

    “Mike has always wanted to do that,” she said. “It is something that has never crossed my mind as possible until now.”

    David Wahlberg has been a medical reporter for 30 years, including at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.

  • Emails outline potential cuts affecting thousands of FEMA disaster responders

    Emails outline potential cuts affecting thousands of FEMA disaster responders

    The Department of Homeland Security has drafted plans to drastically cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency workforce in 2026, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post that detail potential reductions to thousands of disaster response and recovery roles.

    The terminations are likely to come in waves, according to three people familiar with the plans who, like some others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. They said the cuts began on New Year’s Eve with the elimination of about 65 positions that were part of FEMA’s largest workforce, known as the Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) — staffers who are among the first on the ground after a disaster and often stick around for years to help communities recover.

    Independent journalist Marisa Kabas and CNN earlier reported a portion of the New Year’s Eve cuts.

    Emails sent to senior agency leadership in late December include detailed tables identifying roles that can be cut from the agency’s divisions. These tables include a 41% reduction in CORE disaster roles, amounting to more than 4,300 positions. They also list reductions in surge staffing, standby workers who are often the first on the ground when a disaster strikes, by 85%, or nearly 6,500 roles.

    In a statement, FEMA spokesperson Daniel Llargués said the agency has “not issued and is not implementing a percentage-based workforce reduction.”

    “The materials referenced from the leaked documentation stem from a routine, pre-decisional workforce planning exercise conducted in line with OMB and OPM guidance,” Llargués added. “The email outlining that exercise did not direct staffing cuts or establish reduction targets.”

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has long wanted to cut back on CORE staffing, according to two former senior officials.

    Losing a large number of disaster-specific workers over a short period “would mean greater delays in processing and survivors not being dealt with as quickly as they had been before,” said Cameron Hamilton, who led FEMA as acting administrator in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term.

    Internal agency emails and documents, as well as people familiar with the plans, suggest Noem is spearheading the drastic reductions, which may impede FEMA’s ability to fulfill its legal obligation to help the nation respond to disasters, according to three FEMA officials.

    Noem, who has exercised a tight grip over FEMA since taking over its parent department, has repeatedly expressed a desire to shrink or eliminate the agency. The Post reported that she previously made recommendations to cut agency staffing by about half.

    Although the documents call the staffing reduction an “exercise” and say “no staffing actions or personnel decisions are being directed or implemented as part of this request,” two officials familiar with the situation said the tables reflect Noem’s targets for the agency.

    An email describes the tables, which list total reduction counts and percentages for most of the agency’s divisions, as a “planning document.”

    Llargués said in FEMA’s statement that the “accompanying spreadsheet was an internal working tool used to collect planning inputs.”

    The emails show that there have been “deliberate” discussions regarding workforce reductions, said a person familiar with them, who added that the documents request “senior leadership to review and ensure that whatever staff is retained is absolutely necessary.”

    DHS has said publicly that it terminated 50 people in early January and that the cuts were “a routine staff adjustment of 50 staff out of 8000.”

    Two officials with knowledge of the process said that number is closer to 65. The officials had been told to expect that hundreds more people would lose their jobs by the end of January. CORE staffers whose jobs were supposed to be renewed this week still have not heard anything about their status, officials said.

    Llargués said the New Year’s Eve cuts were unrelated to the “planning exercise described in the leaked email.”

    The potential for additional cuts come less than a year after a wave of FEMA terminations, including of hundreds of probationary employees. FEMA officials are also awaiting a final draft of a report by a Trump-appointed review council on the agency’s future, which was supposed to be released last month. The Post previously reported that a version of that report recommended making FEMA leaner but also more independent — findings that countered recommendations from Noem, the council’s co-chair.

    Three FEMA officials raised concerns about the rapid and drastic dismantling of the agency workforce.

    Under the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, the homeland security secretary is prohibited from taking actions that “substantially or significantly reduce the authorities, responsibilities, or functions” of FEMA.

    “It’s not just unprecedented — it directly contradicts the law,” said a veteran FEMA official who has also worked within DHS.

    Having the head of DHS determine the fate of disaster response roles “strips FEMA leadership of its statutory authority and puts control of the nation’s disaster workforce in the hands of a department that Congress explicitly told to step back after Katrina,” that person added.

    Emergency management historian Scott Robinson said cutting FEMA’s staffing at these levels “would [undo] an act of Congress without an act of Congress.”

    “The president is using a lot of administrative tools to try and do things we would have traditionally expected legislation to do,” Robinson said.

    There are about 17,500 CORE employees spread across the country — the majority of FEMA’s workforce of 22,316, an agency official said. Under the Stafford Act, FEMA hires these staffers for multiyear terms using the disaster relief fund.

    CORE teams partner directly with state and local officials to support ongoing response and recovery after a hurricane strikes or a fire tears through a town. They may move resources from warehouses to hard-hit communities; they process grants and conduct trainings. Some staffers were working on long-term projects related to Hurricanes Sandy, Maria, and Fiona. CORE teams also include lawyers, IT experts, and others who may help oversee nuclear plant operations or help in hazard reduction for earthquakes.

    For example, in a region that includes Texas, Louisiana and more than 60 tribal nations, about 80% of the FEMA staffers deployed in support roles are CORE employees, a former senior official said.

    Ongoing discussions to downsize FEMA also underscore how much autonomy the nation’s emergency management agency has lost since the start of Trump’s second term. FEMA has been without a congressionally appointed leader for nearly a year, cycling through temporary officials who have lacked disaster management experience, which is required by law to lead the agency. After David Richardson resigned in November, DHS tapped its chief of staff at the time, Karen Evans, to act as the agency’s interim administrator.

    An agency official familiar with the discussions said Evans has been part of conversations about the future of this disaster-specific workforce for the past few weeks, including about whether to extend positions for a month or two until the agency has had enough time to review the need for the roles. But the official said it seemed that Noem was making the final decision.

    As documents detailing workforce cuts made rounds within the agency over the past week, FEMA officials were stunned and pointed out that getting rid of nearly half of the nation’s disaster workforce would greatly harm communities in various stages of disaster recovery. States would need much more time to prepare and bolster their own disaster capabilities before the federal government significantly pulled back resources such as CORE employees.

    “The entire framework of a reduction should be built on stronger state partnerships, not knee-jerk reactions from the federal government,” Hamilton said.

    CORE appointments are typically renewed every two to four years. When the end of an employee’s contracted term approaches, their supervisors submit paperwork to renew those roles and send it up the chain. Most of the positions are usually reinstated, according to four current and former FEMA officials, in part because recovery work is long and complex.

    In mid-December, DHS took away FEMA’s authority to independently renew these positions, and it instituted a hiring process that requires Noem to review all CORE positions and help decide whether they should continue to exist, according to emails and a person familiar with a meeting where these new requirements were discussed.

    An email from Dec. 17 described how Noem — often referred to as “S1” in internal DHS and FEMA conversations and documents — created parameters for keeping the CORE employees.

    “To improve DHS review outcomes, each CORE term renewal justification must be written to fit what the S1 verification form is designed to capture,” it said.

    Noem overseeing hiring for disaster-specific employees “is completely outside the norm,” said the veteran FEMA official who also served within DHS. “CORE renewals have always been handled inside FEMA, as Congress intended under the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act.”

    The new system created year-end confusion as supervisors scrambled to send in detailed letters justifying a variety of positions.

    For example, in one region with 40 CORE employees whose jobs were to be renewed in January, supervisors sent lengthy justification notes for about 35 of those workers. That same day, they were told to trim the letters and send them again.

    They heard nothing in response, until they learned on Dec. 31 that they would lose nine employees “regardless of the recommendations of emergency management experts,” one official familiar with the situation said. The fate of the rest is unknown, a supervisor said. He said he was also told “there was no plan” to extend any other CORE employees whose jobs were supposed to be renewed this month.

    It is unclear whether FEMA or DHS took the justification memos into account.

    In the last weeks of December, the office was inundated with hundreds of these justification memos, including statistics and data meant to explain why specific roles were crucial to FEMA’s mission to help communities recover from disasters.

    Then, on New Year’s Eve, human resources staffers were told to inform people they had lost their jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation and memos obtained by the Post. Some CORE staffers learned they were fired on New Year’s Day while on vacation, and they were asked to send in their equipment by Jan. 2.

    Several agency officials who supervise CORE team members were shocked when they learned that numerous employees had suddenly lost their jobs, emails show.

    “This must be a mistake,” one supervisor wrote to FEMA’s HR services and other officials, explaining that they had approved their employee’s renewal and sent the paperwork through the proper channels.

    Another supervisor overseeing recovery work for Hurricane Helene expressed concern and confusion over losing a staffer, stating in a New Year’s Eve note to human resources that “based on the attached emails and form,” the worker’s “appointment should be renewed.”

    “I would like to resolve this ASAP, as this is a disappointing and confusing email to get right before a holiday,” the supervisor said.

    In response, a top human resources official said the situation was essentially out of their hands.

  • The best (and weirdest) tech we found at CES 2026

    The best (and weirdest) tech we found at CES 2026

    LAS VEGAS — This week, 2.5 million square feet of prime Las Vegas real estate is packed with visions of the future. Some of them are sensible and going on sale soon, others are way out there and still in development.

    That’s business as usual at CES, the massive tech confab once known as the Consumer Electronics Show that opens today. It’s a place where robots roam free, TVs tower over footsore onlookers, and artificial intelligence lurks around every corner.

    Here’s what has stood out from the crowd so far.

    Uber’s new robotaxi

    The ride-booking giant’s road to robotaxis has been a complicated one: An early Uber self-driving test vehicle killed a pedestrian in 2018. The company sold off its autonomous driving project in 2020 and has since partnered with its would-be rival Waymo in some parts of the country.

    Now, Uber is getting ready to roll its own self-driving cars onto city streets once again.

    The ride-hailing company didn’t build this thing from scratch. Autonomous driving company Nuro provided the cameras, sensors, and self-driving smarts, all of which are integrated into a Gravity model three-row electric SUV from Lucid Motors.

    Uber invested $300 million in Lucid last year and fleshed out the in-car experience for riders. You’ll be able to pick out playlists, adjust the cabin temperature, and make other customizations that are also already offered by Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxis.

    On Monday, Uber said that its Lucid vehicles are already being tested on public roads. It plans to make robotaxis available to Uber riders in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.

    There’s no word yet on when these new self-driving Ubers will make it out of California, but at least it doesn’t seem like you’ll have to pay extra for one. When you hail a ride where these vehicles are active, the company says, you won’t have the option of selecting a robotaxi until you’ve already locked in a fare.

    A CES attendee sits on VOVO’s $4,990 Smart Toilet Neo.

    A toilet that can call for help

    VOVO’s $4,990 Smart Toilet Neo comes with now-standard niceties like a built-in bidet and automatic flushing. And VOVO claims its built-in urine analysis sensor can provide deeper insights into a user’s overall health, splashed across a screen meant to be installed nearby.

    Scanning one’s pee is par for the course at CES though: stand-alone liquid waste sensors have been floating around the show for years. The Smart Toilet Neo’s standout feature? When installed in a senior’s home, it can send messages to family members if no one has used it for more than eight hours, prompting loved ones to check in and make sure everyone is OK.

    Samsung’s 130-inch Micro RGB TV.

    A TV for the ‘size matters’ crowd

    Samsung’s 130-inch Micro RGB TV broke cover this week, and is so big that the svelte metal frame surrounding it looks barely up to the job.

    Long story short, Micro RGB TVs use gobs of incredibly small LEDs in red, green, or blue to light up the screen. That makes them better at delivering bright, accurate colors compared to a more standard LED TV.

    It’s unclear when Samsung plans to offer this monstrosity up to consumers, but when it does be sure to steel yourself before checking out the price tag. The company began selling a similar 115-inch model last year for an eye-watering $30,000.

    The Pinwheel Home phone.

    A retro landline phone for kids

    If you’re old enough to remember the pre-cellphone days, cast your mind back to all the time you spent tying up your parents’ phone line when you were young. A company called Pinwheel wants kids of the smartphone era to know what that feels like — without getting distracted by a screen.

    The $99 Pinwheel Home, slated for sale in the coming months, is a dead ringer for the corded phones you’d find affixed to kitchen walls in the 1980s. The company says it’s designed to help young ones hone their verbal and social skills by chatting with a handful of preset contacts.

    Calling other households with a Pinwheel Home costs parents nothing, but placing calls to regular phone numbers will set you back $9.99 a month. To sweeten the deal and help this throwback gadget further appeal to youngsters, the device will ship with a sheet of stickers.

    A portable, battery-powered food allergen detector

    For people allergic to gluten or dairy, even a simple meal out can feel like a minefield. Allergen Alert, spun out of a family-owned French biotech firm, wanted to help — by building a $200 portable allergen-sensing gadget they allege delivers lab-grade results.

    Here’s how it works: You unpack one of the company’s test pouches (available in packs of five to seven as part of a monthly subscription), and cram a bit of a suspect meal into a slender spoon. Pack all of that into the sensing device, which is about the size of a thick paperback, and you’ll get a result back in a few minutes.

    The catch? For now, the company only offers gluten test kits. It says that dairy-specific models will launch soon and that by 2028 the lineup will include tests for most major food allergens, including nuts and dairy.

    LEGO chief product and marketing officer and executive vice president Julia Goldin talks as a Wookiee stands behind her during a LEGO news conference ahead of the CES tech show Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Las Vegas.

    Star Wars and Lego announce a new partnership

    When Lucasfilm chief creative officer David Filoni brought out an array of X-Wing pilots, Chewbacca, R2D2, and C-3PO, he won the Star Wars fandom for Lego.

    Lego announced its Lego Smart Play platform on Monday, which introduces new smart bricks, tags, and special minifigs for your collection. The new bricks contain sensors that enable them to sense light and distance, and to provide an array of responses, essentially lights and sounds, when they are used in unison.

    Combine this with a newly announced partnership with the Star Wars franchise, and now you can create your own interactive space battles and light-saber duels.

    An LG Electronics home robot interacts with the audience during an LG news conference ahead of the CES tech show Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Las Vegas.

    LG reveals a new robot to help around the home

    File this one under intrigued, for now.

    The Korean tech giant LG gave the media a glimpse Monday of its humanoid robot that is designed to handle household chores such as folding laundry and fetching food. Although many companies have robots on display at CES, LG is one of the biggest tech companies to promise to put a service robot in homes.

    The Associated Press contributed to this article.

  • Fear grips Caracas as a new wave of repression is unleashed in Venezuela

    Fear grips Caracas as a new wave of repression is unleashed in Venezuela

    For a brief moment, some Venezuelans allowed themselves to celebrate.

    When they learned Saturday that strongman Nicolás Maduro had been seized by U.S. Special Forces, many group chats filled with messages of joy and relief. Some people cried. One family in Caracas opened a bottle of champagne they had bought months earlier and saved for a special occasion. After more than a decade of living under Maduro, there were cautious hopes for a different future.

    By Monday, however, those feelings had been replaced by more familiar ones: fear, dread, and uncertainty.

    Venezuela’s government has moved quickly to suppress any public expression of support for Maduro’s ouster, launching a nationwide crackdown that has included the detention of journalists, the arrest of civilians, and the deployment of armed gangs across the capital.

    “It feels like it did after the presidential elections in 2024,” said María, 55, who like others in this story spoke on the condition that they be identified by their first name, or on the condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisals. “We won, but we also lost,” she said, referring to the country’s last elections, in which Maduro claimed victory despite tallies showing the opposition had prevailed.

    The crackdown unfolded as Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s vice president, was sworn in as interim president Monday at the National Assembly. Senior military officials publicly pledged their loyalty to her — a signal that while the country had a new leader, the old power structure remained in place.

    At least 14 journalists and media workers were detained Monday — including 11 working for international outlets, according to the National Press Workers Union. Most, the union said, were held for several hours and later released, but several reported that military counterintelligence officers searched their phones. Many of the detentions took place near the National Assembly as Rodríguez took the oath of office in a ceremony overseen by her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who heads the legislature.

    Authorities also moved against ordinary citizens — empowered by a “state of external commotion” decree that ordered Venezuela’s national, state, and municipal police forces to immediately search for and arrest anyone “involved in promoting or supporting the armed attack by the United States of America.” The decree, which entered into force Saturday but was published in full Monday, also suspended the right to protest and authorized broad restrictions on movement and assembly.

    In the western state of Mérida, two people in their 60s were arrested for shouting anti-government slogans and “celebrating the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores,” according to state police.

    Across Caracas, pro-government paramilitary groups known as “colectivos” — a hallmark of the informal security state built by former president Hugo Chávez and inherited by Maduro after his death — set up checkpoints, including along the Cota Mil highway that runs north of the city. Residents described being pulled over, questioned and forced to hand over their phones. Some said the armed men scrolled through their messages and social media, looking for anything that could be construed as support for the U.S. raid.

    “We’re texting each other routes to avoid,” said a Caracas resident. “You hear ‘don’t go there — they’re stopping cars with machine guns.’”

    In the wake of Maduro’s capture, President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that the United States is “running” Venezuela, though it is unclear what influence Washington is exerting on authorities in Caracas.

    Overseeing U.S. involvement in the country, Trump said, would fall to a small group of senior officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, — and himself. Venezuela, the president told NBC on Monday, was not in a position to hold elections.

    “We have to fix the country first,” he said. “We have to nurse the country back to health.”

    In a news conference Tuesday, Trump suggested that the Venezuelan government planned to shut down El Helicoide, a sprawling, spiral-shaped detention center in Caracas that has long been used to hold and torture dissidents, according to rights groups.

    Foro Penal, a local human rights group, has said more than 860 political prisoners remain in state custody.

    “Of course I have hope things could get better without Maduro,” a 30-year-old man in the capital told the Washington Post. “But from where I am, all I see is the same people who destroyed my country still in power. They’re still persecuting us. And we’re still afraid.”

    In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, opposition leader María Corina Machado — who left Venezuela in December to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway — called the crackdown “really alarming” and urged the U.S. and the international community to monitor the situation. She described Rodríguez as “one of the main architects of torture, persecution [and] corruption.”

    Late Monday, as weary families bedded down, gunshots rang out near the Miraflores presidential palace. On social media, residents shared videos from their window of armed men in the streets; some speculated that a coup was underway.

    Hours later, the Communication and Information Ministry put out a statement saying police had fired warning shots after “drones flew over the area without authorization.”

    “The entire country is completely calm,” the statement said.

  • U.S. mandates more foreign travelers to pay $15,000 visa bond deposits

    U.S. mandates more foreign travelers to pay $15,000 visa bond deposits

    Foreign travelers from seven additional countries are now required to pay up to $15,000 for a reimbursable bond when applying for a U.S. visitor visa, as the Trump administration continues to tighten entry requirements to the country.

    As of Jan. 1, Bhutan, Botswana, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, and Turkmenistan are required to pay the assurances as part of a State Department pilot program launched in August. Thirteen countries are now affected by the program, most of them in Africa.

    The bond deposits — which the department has said are aimed at deterring visitors from staying in the United States longer than they are allowed for business or tourism — range between $5,000 and $15,000, and do not guarantee that a visa will be issued. The payment will be refunded if visitors depart the U.S. within the time specified on their visas, according to the policy.

    Applicants whose visas are approved can only enter the U.S. from three designated airports: Boston Logan International Airport, New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, and Washington Dulles International Airport, the State Department notice said. The program is not applicable to those on student visas.

    Travelers from 42 countries that are part of the visa waiver program — who don’t need a visa to enter the U.S. — including much of Europe, Australia, Qatar, and Israel, are also exempt.

    The administration has said the program is aimed at countries with high visa overstay rates, citing a Department of Homeland Security report to Congress. However, some of the countries newly added to the list have low overstay numbers. The department suspects that two of the 137 visitors from the Central African Republic (or about 2%) overstayed their nonimmigrant business and tourist visas in fiscal year 2024, while about 4% from Namibia are suspected of overstaying.

    The pilot was launched in August with Malawi and Zambia. An estimated 234 visitors from Malawi (or 14%) overstayed their nonimmigrant visas in fiscal year 2023, as did 365 (11%) from Zambia. Four countries were added to the list in October.

    For couples or families, the potential up-front cost of $10,000 or $15,000 per person could be prohibitive. At the time of its launch, the State Department predicted the year-long pilot program would cost travelers around $20 million, based on 2,000 potential travelers paying an average bond of $10,000.

    The State Department had planned a six-month visa bond pilot in 2020, but did not implement it as global travel dwindled during the coronavirus pandemic.

  • Iran hospital raid fuels protest anger as crackdown kills 29

    Iran hospital raid fuels protest anger as crackdown kills 29

    Iran’s government ordered an investigation into clashes between protesters and riot police at a hospital in the country’s west as a video emerged online showing another hospital being hit with tear gas by security forces.

    Video posted to social media on Tuesday purportedly showed the courtyard of Sina Hospital submerged in tear gas smoke. The footage cannot be verified by Bloomberg but the hospital is near the capital’s Grand Bazaar, where a fresh bout of protests and clashes with police erupted on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

    Security forces fired tear gas at demonstrators in the sprawling market — where unrest began on Dec. 28 — who had shuttered their businesses and were staging a sit-in at the trading hub, the AP said, citing witnesses. Unverified social media footage also appeared to show police rushing crowds in the bazaar’s surrounding streets and in one of its main arteries.

    The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said Monday that at least 29 people have been killed in provinces including Lorestan, Fars, and Kurdistan and more than 1,200 people arrested since a sharp currency decline triggered demonstrations in Tehran that later spread to other cities.

    On Sunday, videos emerged on social media appearing to show security forces storming the Imam Khomeini Hospital in the western city of Ilam and firing tear gas inside. The footage fueled even more public anger at the authorities, prompting President Masoud Pezeshkian to order the investigation. Officials haven’t yet responded to the incident at the hospital in Tehran.

    The protests have divided Iran’s leadership over how to respond. While Pezeshkian, a political moderate and a former heart surgeon, has described protesters’ demands as legitimate, judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei has warned that “no leniency or tolerance” would be shown toward protesters and vowed swift trials, according to the official Mizan news agency.

    “Rioters can no longer claim to have been misled,” Ejei said, accusing the U.S. and Israel of openly backing the unrest. “There is now no room for any concessions toward rioters and instigators of unrest.”

    Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on most state matters, said Saturday that “rioters must be put in their place.”

    The protests are the biggest to rock Iran since nationwide unrest in 2022 over the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody. But they don’t yet represent a threat to the Islamic Republic’s security, Eurasia Group analysts wrote in a report last week.

    The unrest comes amid deteriorating living conditions in Iran, where high inflation, rising costs and a weak currency have fueled growing public dissatisfaction.

    The government has announced measures to ease the frustration including a monthly cash subsidy of 10 million rials (roughly $7) for each member of every household. It also appointed a new central bank governor to stabilize the declining rial.

    The subsidy is part of a broader “livelihood plan” that’s aimed at offsetting the rising cost of basic goods like cooking oil, milk, sugar, and meat, government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said on Monday.

    Iran’s currency has dropped by around 45% on the black market in the past year. It trades at roughly 1.5 million against the dollar, according to bombast, a website that tracks the currency.

  • Congress has four weeks to dodge another shutdown

    Congress has four weeks to dodge another shutdown

    Lawmakers are back in Washington this week for a four-week sprint to finish funding the government before the current spending law runs out on Jan. 30.

    If they fail, they will need to pass another short-term extension or spark another government shutdown just two and a half months after the last one, the longest funding lapse in U.S. history.

    Funding the government usually requires passing 12 individual bills. Lawmakers approved three as part of a deal to end last fall’s shutdown, and they also extended current funding levels for the rest of the government into January. Those levels were last set in March 2024.

    But it will be challenging to finalize the remaining bills, which have not yet been formally negotiated between the House and the Senate or approved by congressional leaders.

    The two Appropriations Committee chairs, Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), announced in late December that they had finally reached an agreement on the total spending level they’ll shoot for in the remaining bills. They did not reveal the overall cost, but Cole said it is lower than the amount if Congress were to pass another funding extension, known as a continuing resolution.

    “This pathway forward aligns with President [Donald] Trump’s clear direction to rein in runaway, beltway-driven spending,” Cole said in a statement. “We will now begin expeditiously drafting the remaining nine full-year bills to ensure we are ready to complete our work in January.”

    From there, appropriators must navigate political pressures from their right and left: Fiscal hawks, including many in the conservative House Freedom Caucus, insist that funding levels for most agencies should not be higher than the last fiscal year.

    “I believe that we should begin to control our federal deficit and runaway federal debt by keeping this year’s discretionary spending level at or below last year’s level,” said House Freedom Caucus chairman and senior Appropriations Committee member Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.) in a statement.

    But Democrats must approve any funding agreement, which has to receive at least 60 votes in the Senate to bypass the filibuster. Republicans control the upper chamber 53-47.

    Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, slammed the chamber’s newly released Homeland Security spending bill in December, calling it “partisan” and pledging to fight for accountability in Trump’s “out-of-control” DHS.

    The Senate has spent weeks attempting to pass a five-bill appropriations package that had only been negotiated in that chamber. The bill needed consent from all 100 senators to advance, and several conservative senators held up action for weeks over billions of dollars in earmarks tucked into the bills. (The House proposals also include billions in earmarks.)

    Those senators eventually relented, and the chamber was poised to vote on the package right before leaving town for the winter break, but two Democratic senators blocked it — demanding funding be reinstated for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a Colorado-based research organization that Trump has moved to eliminate.

    The Senate package would tie together two major government funding bills — covering defense, labor, education, and health and human services agencies — with three other bills to fund the departments of Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Justice, and science-related agencies.

    It would appropriate $1.3 trillion, making up the vast majority of discretionary federal government spending.

    Cole has said that the Senate’s five-bill package would be too big to pass the lower chamber. He suggested passing the remaining nine appropriations bills in three separate three-bill packages in January when lawmakers return, beginning with bills covering the Commerce and Justice Departments, the Interior Department and agencies covering energy and water.

    The political minefield ahead may mean lawmakers once again turn to a funding extension rather than face another shutdown.

    “I don’t want another CR, I don’t think Mr. Cole wants another CR,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. “Let’s go. Let’s get the bills done.”

    Congress is supposed to pass all 12 appropriations bills before government funding runs out at the end of each fiscal year on Sept. 30.

    But lawmakers’ inability to adhere to that process is not new: Congress has only passed all its spending bills before the deadline four times in recent decades. Instead, most spending bills in modern history have been approved in one big package known as an “omnibus” right before the holiday break.

    House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) pledged to stop that practice. The political complications of passing all 12 bills separately, however, has made that difficult to achieve. Instead, lawmakers have extended funding levels first approved under President Joe Biden multiple times, and Republicans have passed supplemental spending for their immigration and defense priorities through a party-line tax and spending bill.

  • Trump team puts a target on Cuba, with threats and oil blockade

    Trump team puts a target on Cuba, with threats and oil blockade

    No place was hit harder than Cuba by the shock waves that Saturday morning’s U.S. military seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro sent throughout Latin America and the world.

    Within hours of the operation — long before the government in Havana acknowledged it — phone calls and texts across the island spread the news that dozens of elite Cuban security forces had been killed guarding Maduro.

    But by the time it finally released a statement late Sunday saying that 32 of its military and security personnel were dead in Caracas, the Cuban government had bigger problems on its hands.

    Both President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear over the weekend that the collapse of Cuba’s communist government was not only a likely side benefit of Maduro’s ouster but a goal.

    “I don’t think we need [to take] any action,” Trump said as he flew back to Washington from his extended Florida holiday break. Without Maduro and the oil supplies Venezuela provided, he said, “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall.”

    Rubio went further, indicating that the United States might be willing to give it a push. “I’m not going to talk to you about what our future steps are going to be,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. But, he added, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.”

    Their words resonated with many in the Miami-centered exile community, where the struggle to free Cuba from communist rule has dominated politics for decades. On Saturday, South Florida Cuban exiles — some wearing red Trump hats and Cuban flags as capes — joined hundreds of revelers at spirited, impromptu celebrations from Little Havana to Doral, a city nicknamed “Doralezuela” because of its large population of Venezuelans. Cuban American leaders, most of them Republican, issued statements as Venezuela coverage dominated local TV stations.

    Cuba is the “root” of problems with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other leftist regimes in the region, said Dariel Fernandez, Miami-Dade County’s elected tax collector. “Now the time has come … for the Castro communist and socialist assassin regime to be held accountable as well, and for the Cuban people to finally be free.”

    Absent direct U.S. intervention, however, Cuba experts here and on the island were less certain.

    “If you’re asking if the Cuban government will just collapse on its own because the economic pain is bound to increase” without shipments of Venezuelan oil, “I’m very skeptical,” said Michael J. Bustamante, associate professor of history and director of the Cuban studies program at the University of Miami.

    To keep the lights on and cars running, Cuba has long been dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies, for which it has exchanged security and medical personnel in a sympathetic contract with leftist allies in Caracas.

    “I could very well be proven wrong, but Cuba has been here before” and survived, Bustamente said, referencing what is known in Cuba as the “special period” that began in 1991 with the abrupt cutoff of outside assistance after the demise of the Soviet Union.

    Juan Gonzalez, who served as Western Hemisphere director on the Biden administration’s national security staff, said that “cutting off the oil deliveries is going to put a huge squeeze on the humanitarian situation” in Cuba, which is already suffering regular electricity blackouts and food scarcities. “But I don’t think the regime is going to cry uncle.”

    Aside from an economic uptick during the Obama administration, when the resumption of diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana led to increased tourism and slender openings for private ownership and outside investment, the Cuban economy has never really recovered from the Soviet fall.

    The nation has been on a steady slide into economic chaos for years, owing to U.S. sanctions and what even many of its supporters see as mismanagement by a sclerotic Cuban Communist Party.

    Some chose to see opportunity in the darkness following Maduro’s ouster. Carlos Alzugaray, a retired career Cuban diplomat reached by phone at his Havana home, said, “There is of course an increase of the threat, a very bad thing.”

    But it was possible, he said, that Cuba’s allies in Russia and elsewhere would help, “and just maybe the government will … open up the economy and do what the economists have been telling them for a long time and they have refused to do.”

    Venezuelan support under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, in the early 2000s helped Cuba emerge from the special period and the weight of decades-long U.S. sanctions. Since then, Havana has weathered the death of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, COVID, Trump’s dismantling during his first administration of the limited Obama opening and furious street protests in 2021.

    But the emboldened second Trump administration presents an entirely new threat to Cuba’s leaders.

    At various points over the years, Cuba’s own government economists have advised overhauling the economy and have been urged to do so by allies in China, Vietnam, and Russia.

    Raúl Castro, who took over from his ailing brother, Fidel, in 2006, warned of needed reforms in a lengthy 2010 speech to the Cuban parliament. “We are playing with the life of the revolution,” he said. “We can either rectify the situation, or we will run out of time walking on the edge of the abyss, and we will sink.”

    But his plans to expand the role of the private sector and reduce state ownership were seen as contradictory and insufficiently implemented, ultimately resolving few of Cuba’s systemic problems. Other pushes for change have run into similar roadblocks over the ruling party’s refusal to allow private businesses and farms to sell their goods directly for market prices, its rejection of currency reforms, heavy government investments in a failing tourism industry and the growing power of GAESA, the military-controlled conglomerate that runs vast swaths of the economy.

    At their peak of about 100,000 barrels a day, Venezuelan oil shipments allowed Cuba to serve its own energy needs and sell refined petroleum products overseas for desperately needed cash. But as Venezuela dealt with sharp drops in output, due to U.S. sanctions and mismanagement, shipments dropped to about 30,000 barrels last year.

    Those cuts, along with Cuba’s aging refineries, failing infrastructure and the occasional hurricane, led to at least five islandwide blackouts last year.

    “They have to realize they can’t depend on foreign help anymore,” Alzugaray said. Russia and Mexico have supplied some oil, although Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is likely to come under increasing U.S. pressure to cut off aid to Havana. China, which holds major Cuban debt, has shown little interest in helping.

    Reforms have been approved “on paper,” Alzugaray said. “The problem is they don’t do it. The essence is opening to market economics, allowing expansion of the private sector, and eliminating or selling socialist state enterprises that don’t produce. They have to do it, and they have to do it fast. They have lost too much time.”

    Few Cuba watchers have much confidence that reforms will happen, at least under the party government of President Manuel Díaz-Canel and the current power structure.

    “There are reformers inside the regime,” said Gonzalez, the Biden administration official, who had extensive dealings with the Cuban government. “They have a vision, but they don’t have the wherewithal and the influence to have it done.”

    Even if they did, he said, “it won’t be enough” for Rubio, whose parents fled the island before Fidel Castro’s 1959 takeover, and Cuban American lawmakers and power brokers, he said. “They’re going to want big change.”

    Opposition on the island is diffuse and leaderless since arrests following the 2021 street protests.

    “People who aspire to be opposition leaders are either in Miami or in Madrid or in jail,” said William LeoGrande, a specialist in Latin American affairs at American University. A Venezuela-like removal of even a handful of individuals is unlikely to rattle the multilayered, entrenched party and military power centers to the point of collapse, he said.

    As for Cubans themselves, Alzugaray said, “I wouldn’t think that people are so desperate that they will welcome an American intervention or a group of Miami Cubans taking over. What people want is the Cuban government to change,” he said, “but in Cuban terms, not imposed by the outside.”

  • More than 2 million Epstein documents still unreleased, officials say

    More than 2 million Epstein documents still unreleased, officials say

    More than 2 million documents regarding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein remain to be released, Justice Department officials told a federal judge Monday, offering the most precise estimate so far of the size of the file still under review.

    In a letter to U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in New York, officials said the department had released 12,285 documents, comprising about 125,575 pages, but that the vast majority of the Epstein files had not yet been released. Last month, Engelmayer issued an order allowing the department to release grand jury documents related to the 2021 trial and conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice, on sex-trafficking charges.

    Justice Department officials had previously given even larger estimates of the number of documents still under review. The letter notes that the department has identified a large number of documents that are “copies of (or largely duplicative of) documents that had already been collected.”

    The letter was signed by Attorney General Pamela Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

    A new law passed in November mandated that the entire trove of Epstein files be released by Dec. 19. Justice Department officials said late last month that they hope to release the rest of the documents by Jan. 20. Members of Congress who pushed the legislation say that the department has not released key documents they want to see.

    “DOJ’s refusal to follow the law I passed in Congress and release the full files is an obstruction of justice,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), one of the new law’s main sponsors, said in a statement. “They also need to release the FBI witness interviews which name other men, so the public can know who was involved,” he said.

    More than 400 lawyers and 100 specially trained document analysts “will dedicate all or a substantial portion of their workday” to getting documents ready for release, the officials told the judge.

    The letter — a progress report of sorts — gives a glimpse into the daunting labor that lies ahead for federal officials.

    Those reviewing the unreleased documents must determine whether each document falls under the law’s broad mandate, review the documents to redact information that could identify victims, and respond to requests from victims or their family members for additional redactions, according to the letter.

    Officials offered similar explanations for a delay in releasing all unclassified Epstein documents last month, after the Justice Department failed to meet its deadline.

    Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019 and died in federal custody later that year. His death was ruled a suicide. Judges and lawmakers say that over decades, he abused, trafficked, and molested scores of girls, many of whom have come forward in court and in other public forums.

    Epstein’s friendships with prominent political, business, and cultural figures, including President Donald Trump, also continue to be under intense scrutiny.

    Trump had a long-standing friendship with Epstein. He has said he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Fla., and that they had a falling out in the mid-2000s. Trump has attributed the end of their relationship to a quarrel over a real estate deal and to Epstein hiring employees away from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has said Epstein was ejected from the club “for being a creep” to female workers there.

    Trump has not been accused of participating in Epstein’s criminal conduct.

    Documents released last month confirmed that the FBI received a complaint about Epstein as far back as 1996. But Epstein did not appear to come under serious law enforcement scrutiny until about a decade later, when he was arrested in 2006.

    At the time, Epstein reached an agreement with officials in Florida that enabled him to plead guilty in 2008 to two state charges of soliciting prostitution, including one involving a minor, while avoiding federal charges and serving just over a year behind bars — with ample work-release privileges.