The Washington Post

Since the election, some disappointed in the results are tuning out the news media as a way to take care of themselves.

Americans paid private tax preparers nearly $850 million in fees for special-purpose bank accounts to receive their tax refunds in the most recent tax year, according to a new government report that faulted the Internal Revenue Service for failing to warn consumers about the expense.

“I thought it was going to be a great record. It turned out even better than I thought,” said Katie Ornelas, who found the record at an Austin thrift store.

Walt Disney Co. has agreed to pay $43 million to settle allegations that it systematically paid women in California less than their male counterparts for more than a decade.

Donald Trump entered the White House eight years ago with a Cabinet full of people with traditional conservative credentials, tapping some he barely knew to help him learn his way around Washington. Now the president-elect has rapidly assembled a different kind of team for his second term — enlisting people deeply critical of the agencies they will lead, bucking conservative orthodoxy with some of his picks and, above all, rewarding his most loyal allies.

It takes intense pressure and temperatures north of 2,000 degrees for a diamond to form deep within the Earth. But these days, there’s another way to create a diamond: in a lab, where a diamond can go from seed to jewelry in a matter of weeks.

The weirdly warm November weather will soon come to a crashing end, thanks to an air mass moving from the Laptev Sea north of Russia — over 4,000 miles away from the U.S. East Coast, where its journey will end this weekend.

Safety advocates are suing the federal workplace safety regulator in an attempt to reveal more details about three fatalities at Amazon warehouses during a summer 2022 heat wave in New Jersey. The complaint filed Tuesday against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said the agency has failed to respond to public records requests seeking documents about the incidents.

Donald Trump's team is mapping out early moves -- one of the first could be going after "sanctuary cities," pulling federal funding if they won’t comply with mass deportations. “I think Chicago is going to be made an example of,” one source tells me. In The Washington Post today:

Mexico’s president responded angrily to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to impose a 25 percent tariff on its products if the country didn’t curb the flow of irregular migrants and fentanyl, warning that the penalties would only wind up causing inflation and unemployment in the U.S. Trump said he would impose the 25 percent tariff on Mexico and Canada on his first day in office, to halt the “invasion” of drugs and migrants. He also vowed to introduce a 10 percent tariff on goods from China, the source of precursor chemicals to make fentanyl. The three countries exchange $1.8 trillion in goods and services per year, making them one of most important commercial blocs in the world. On Tuesday, the U.S. dollar rose against the Mexican peso and Canadian dollar, but the American stock exchange remained steady.