For months, headlines warned of an impending famine in Gaza — images of starving children, shattered infrastructure and humanitarian collapse filled the news. On Aug. 22, 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared that while full data was lacking, expert inference indicated famine was underway. Governments pledged aid; humanitarian agencies sounded alarms. Yet today, the word ‘famine’ has nearly vanished from headlines. What happened?

This is not to deny the human suffering in Gaza; it is to ask difficult, necessary questions. Was famine averted, exaggerated or politically reframed?

Famine has been described as a tree swaying in the wind — at some point it cannot recover and cannot be returned upright. But Gaza’s ‘famine tree’ never appeared to fully sway. If aid efforts or local resilience truly prevented catastrophe, where is the evidence? On August 22, 2025, famine was declared, and the global press carried that narrative. Then came a shift to the word ‘starvation.’ Now, even that language has faded.

The distinction matters. Famine is a technical classification grounded in data — household food security surveys, acute malnutrition rates and mortality. Starvation, by contrast, is a moral and legal term implying intent; under international law, using starvation as a weapon constitutes a war crime. In Gaza, this rhetorical shift occurred before comprehensive data was gathered — an escalation of accusation without empirical foundation.

Recovery from famine typically takes eight to 12 months, even under ideal conditions with full humanitarian access and functioning medical systems. Historical precedents — Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and Sudan in 2023 — show that malnutrition persists long after headlines fade. If Gaza truly met famine standards this summer, the signs would still be unmistakable: rising mortality, overwhelmed clinics and a generation of weakened children. Yet no such surge has been confirmed by independent medical reporting.

Another inconsistency is behavioral. True famine unleashes chaos — hunger overrides social norms and people fight to survive. In August, 84% of Gaza aid convoys were reportedly looted. Yet after the Oct. 10 ceasefire, U.N. 2720 data show interceptions fell to 6%, and by November, below 1%. Where did the desperation go? Where is the looting? Where are the crowds of thousands?

Following the ceasefire, Hamas rapidly reasserted control, executing accused defectors and projecting an image of order. Recent videos show bustling markets and calm streets — a façade of normalcy meant to reinforce legitimacy. Within six weeks, famine conditions seemingly vanished. Can that be real?

If famine had truly taken hold, it would not have dissipated so quickly. Either the crisis was overstated, the data manipulated or public perception deliberately managed.

We cannot shy away from uncomfortable questions. Asking what happened to the famine in Gaza is responsible, not callous. Truth demands transparency, even when it challenges narratives we’ve grown accustomed to believing.

Homeownership has long been part of the American dream, but that dream has been deferred.

Households in their 30s have an ownership rate of just 42% — more than 20 points lower than the national average.

The median age of all home buyers is a record-breaking 59, and the age of a first-time buyer is 40 — up from 29 in 1981.

As a solution, the Trump administration is floating a 50-year mortgage.

Though I disagree with that specific idea, I am heartened that they are brainstorming ways to tackle the problem.

We need a Marshall Plan for housing, a collection of broad initiatives to make homes more affordable and put the dream back on track.

The federal government can use its bully pulpit to get changes to red tape and regulations that are holding back building, and encourage policies that would increase housing and decrease costs.

To start, the White House and Fannie Mae should instead promote shorter, 20-year mortgages.

As Ed Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, a 20-year loan can be paid off ‘when the 30-year-term loan leaves most homeowners saddled with another decade or more of mortgage payments, the cash flow freed up from a paid-off shorter-term loan is available to fund a child’s post-secondary-education needs and later turbocharge one’s own retirement.’

The 20-year loan could be incentivized with a first-time buyer tax credit.

The decline in homeownership is a problem that must be addressed federally and locally.

This would be especially important today when the vast majority of taxpayers no longer itemize their tax returns — which means they cannot avail themselves of the deduction for mortgage interest.

That deduction always favored wealthy buyers of high-end homes anyway — so a targeted tax credit would help those who actually need it far more.

It’s time, as well, for the Trump White House to roll back one of the key initiatives of Elizabeth Warren’s pet project, the Consumer Protection Financial Agency.

The CPFC has pressured banks to limit mortgages to ‘plain vanilla’ mortgages, premised on its rules or what consumers can afford.

Adjustable rate loans and other ‘mortgage products’ can be right for some buyers — who should have a choice of how much risk they want to take in exchange for getting into the home market.

Even a low down payment might be hard to come up with, however, for those who can’t take advantage of generous in-laws.

Those without rich parents might turn to a ‘housing saving account’ — akin to the popular health savings accounts initiated by George W. Bush and which hold some $59 billion and are sheltered from taxation.

The new housing accounts should be tailored only for down payments, however — not long-term maintenance and other homeowner needs.

Buyers also are allowed today to take out $10,000 from their 401(k) penalty-free to go to a downpayment on a home.

Perhaps it’s time to raise that ceiling.

Of course, it goes almost without saying that even the most creative financing and incentives will fall short of addressing our housing needs without the most important problem: Supply.

There are many reasons why there aren’t enough starter homes.

Regulation in many cities makes construction difficult.

More retiring Boomers own second homes.

Banks have increasingly bought real estate as an investment and drive up prices.

Low turnover is another reason Gen X buyers have so much trouble breaking into the market.

During COVID, mortgage rates hit record lows and many refinanced.

These owners have a strong incentive not to trade a 3% mortgage for a new home and a much-higher rate.

Another key reason: more and more of us are living in small households or even alone.

The Census Bureau reports that, between 2019 and 2021, the number of households increased by more than 2 million a year.

That means we not only need more housing but more types of housing — many smaller units especially, rather than the two-acre, one house lots common in so many suburbs.

Here is where the limits of Washington’s hard power is reached.

Much of US housing policy is set at the hyper-local level, by planning boards and zoning boards.

That’s why outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams deserves so much credit for his ‘City of Yes’ rezoning in New York, which will permit safe basement apartments and ‘accessory dwelling units’ in parts of the city.

Accessory units — or ‘granny flats’ — can also be the means for older couples to sell the homes to younger households and downsize.

As part of a federal push, though, the Marshall Plan for Housing could encourage these same changes nationwide: Changing zoning to allow more housing; or taking undeveloped state land and providing tax incentives to build on them.

It’s the 18,000 municipalities across the country that are often standing in the way of what might be called naturally occurring affordable housing — small homes on small lots, like those of the original Levittown, where houses were just 750 square feet of living space.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner should urge localities to permit private, unsubsidized, small homes and apartment buildings, or what AEI’s Pinto terms ‘light-touch density.’

It’s far more likely to gain local approval than the subsidized, low-income housing Democrats have long favored, starting with the public housing the socialist Zohran Mamdani wants to revive.

Private building is also less costly; new housing units in California subsidized through the low income housing tax credit can cost upwards of $800,000 per units, a bonanza for developers but not many tenants.

Building costs for any housing, however, will inevitably go up as a result of another Trump policy: his 10% tariff on plentiful Canadian lumber and timber products and a 25% tariff on kitchen cabinets and furniture.

The de facto taxes are causing what the National Association of Home Builders calls ‘headwinds’ holding back new construction.

As a builder himself, he should rethink these tariffs.

Homeownership is a virtuous conspiracy making the nation better.

Owners are more likely to maintain neighborhoods than renters, more likely to improve schools and services by getting involved in local government — the essence of American federalism.

The decline in homeownership is a problem that must be addressed federally and locally.

But the Trump administration can take the lead, with tax breaks and the encouragement of construction.

The president can bring the dream alive again.

Several weeks into the government shutdown, the notion of reopening seemed impossible. 

Both Senate Republicans and Democrats were deeply entrenched in their positions for 41 days and 40 nights, and neither side wanted to appear to be caving to the other. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his caucus wanted a guaranteed deal on expiring Obamacare subsidies, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., argued that the government needed to reopen first. 

But an explosion of bipartisan talks, pushed by external pressures of federal workers going unpaid, federal food benefits in jeopardy, and air travel grinding to a standstill, invigorated a working group of senators to build an off-ramp out of the historic closure.

The result was a bipartisan deal that included a trio of spending bills meant to jump-start the government funding process, an extension of the original House-passed continuing resolution (CR) to Jan. 30, 2026, to provide time to fund the government the old-fashioned way, and a renewed guarantee that Senate Democrats would get their vote on expiring Obamacare subsidies. 

In the end, the shutdown dragged on for 43 days, with the climactic vote to end it and send the package to the White House unfolding in the House on Wednesday. 

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., who was part of crafting the final spending deal, said discussions on those three bills had begun ‘long before’ the shutdown. 

‘We certainly had some knotty issues, a hemp issue, disagreements on funding levels and all that. But for the most part, we worked those through. And I would tell you from our side and I would assume from the other, the three big players were the Cardinals themselves,’ Cole said, referring to the three House Republican subcommittee chairs who led discussions on the three individual bills.

‘Our Democratic colleagues that voted against the bills had plenty of input in the bills. The real question will be in the next package — can you guys bring any votes? If you’re not going to bring any votes, our negotiation will be a waste of time, and we’ll be required to construct a coalition that’s all Republican.’ 

Nevertheless, most of the eight Senate Democrats that crossed the aisle viewed the guarantee of a vote on Obamacare as the turning point, though it lacked the guaranteed outcome that Schumer and the majority of the caucus sought. 

‘There was no vote that we were going to get on the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits,’ Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said on Sunday, referring to Obamacare. ‘We have a guaranteed vote by a guaranteed date on a bill that we will write, not that the Republicans will write.’

For Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who proved the decisive Democratic vote that sealed the deal on the proposal in the Senate, it was provisions that would rehire and protect workers fired by the Trump administration. 

Kaine recalled that it was just hours before the Senate was set to take a key test vote on the CR that he changed his mind. Up to that point, the White House had not wanted to include language that would have reversed the reductions in force (RIFs) that had been ordered at the start of the shutdown. 

But it was through Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., who was a key negotiator in the Senate, that Kaine got the White House on board. 

‘I said, I’m a no if you don’t do that, I’m a no, and you know that it was 4:45 p.m. in the afternoon on Sunday when they told me they would do that,’ he said.

Kaine noted that with 320,000 federal workers in Virginia and 2 million nationally, he recognized it was a big ask. 

‘And I told her, and when I explained it to her, she said, that’s a reasonable ask, but that the White House didn’t want to do it,’ he said. ‘And she was a little bit of a go-between and helping me.’

In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer unleashed a threat against the Supreme Court’s conservative justices in the wake of their decision to overturn Roe vs Wade’s national protection for abortion. ‘You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,’ he bellowed. ‘You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.’

Although Schumer’s bellicose words may have contributed to an attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life back then, five years later it is not the men and women in robes suffering a whirlwind, but rather Schumer himself, and it is one of his own making.

This week, Schumer is facing calls to step down from his leadership position from multiple House Democrats including Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and neo-centrist Rep. Ro Khana, D-Calif., after his shambolic performance during the government shutdown.

It is likely only a matter of time before such calls for Schumer’s ouster echo in the upper chamber as well.

In the end, Christ had an easier 40 days in the desert than Schumer had during this shutdown, where he went from swearing not just that Democrats would never back down, but that they were winning the fight politically, to watching Democrats capitulate with nothing in return.

As former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy pointed out, this was the ‘Seinfeld shutdown,’ a shutdown about nothing, and Schumer was decidedly George.

Tellingly, Chuck himself did not sign on to the deal to open the government, start paying out SNAP benefits and unchoke our airports, which only makes him appear weaker, because he can’t control his caucus.

Schumer is now facing the first true crisis of his five decades in politics, and it doesn’t seem like he knows what hit him.

The scuttlebut in Washington, D.C., and the Empire State is that, by hook or by crook, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will take Schumer’s Senate seat in 2028, just like she took Rep. Joe Crowley’s House seat seven years ago.

AOC is not being particularly shy about it, saying this week, ‘We have several Senate primaries this cycle. I know I’m being asked about New York, [but] that is years from now. I have to remind my own constituents because they think that this election is this year.’

This is a long way from, ‘Chuck is doing a great job and I have no plans to run against him.’

In the recent mayor’s race in New York City, in which AOC was democrat socialist Zohran Mamdani’s most important surrogate, Schumer bravely declined, even on Election Day itself, to disclose whether he had cast a ballot for Zany Zohran.

It was actually quite amazing: Schumer is the highest-ranking elected Democrat in the United States of America and he decided not to weigh in on whether his party should embrace communism.

Schumer couldn’t reject Mamdani because he and his ilk are obviously the future of the party, but he couldn’t embrace him because his pro-capitalism and pro-Israel donors won’t have it.

Schumer wasn’t sitting on the fence in the mayor’s race, he was impaled on it.

Right now, whether fairly or not, Schumer is the avatar for the old establishment Democrat Party that shuffled off the stage with former President Joe Biden. He is the political version of the Washington Generals, being dunked on over and over by the more talented socialist Globetrotters.

In fact, this whirlwind that Schumer has reaped is entirely his own fault. At any point, he could have shown courage, acted like an adult and tried to work in good faith with Republicans and the Trump administration. Instead, he decided to curse on TikTok like the radical kids who want his job.

It was Schumer who helped to oust former Democrat senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for opposing the party’s push to nuke the filibuster in 2021. Where did he think his support was going to come from once he tossed out the moderates?

In the end, Schumer’s career will be a cautionary tale, lacking the courage to rein in the radical elements in his caucus and party. He instead opened the door for them and hastened his own exile from power.

Chuck Schumer has well and truly reaped the whirlwind, and in very short order he will most likely be paying the price.

President Donald Trump said on Friday that he directed the Deoartment of Justice to investigate disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to several high-profile Democrats and certain banks.

‘Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking AG Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JPMorgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,’ Trump said on Truth Social.

‘This is another Russia, Russia, Russia scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,’ he added. ‘Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘island.’ Stay tuned!!!’

Head of Policy & Advocacy Communications at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Trish Wexler told Fox News Digital that ‘The government had damning information about [Epstein’s] crimes and failed to share it with us and other banks.’

‘We regret any association we had with the man, but did not help him commit his heinous acts,’ she added. ‘We ended our relationship with him years before his arrest on sex trafficking charges.’

In an earlier post on Friday, Trump said that ‘Epstein was a Democrat,’ and therefore is the ‘Democrat’s [sic] problem,’ not the Republicans’ problem. He also accused the Democrats of ‘doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents.’

Trump then said lawmakers should not ‘waste’ time looking into him and instead should focus on the Democrats he later named in the post announcing the probe.

On Wednesday, Oversight Committee Democrats released never-before-seen emails related to the Epstein case. The first email is between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein writes, ‘I want you to realize that the only dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,’ adding that the now-president ‘spent hours at my house’ with a victim.

In the second email, the disgraced financier told Michael Wolff that Trump ‘knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.’

Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., called on the DOJ to release all the Epstein files ‘immediately.’

‘The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover,’ Garcia said in a statement. ‘These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president.’

The emails were released the same day that Trump signed a bill ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The timing led Trump to accuse Democrats of using Epstein to distract the public from the shutdown fiasco.

Following the Democrats’ email drop, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital that the lawmakers ‘selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.’

In response to the release of the emails, Oversight Committee Republicans said Democrats ‘whine about ‘releasing the files,’ but only cherry-pick when they have them to generate clickbait. You deserve the full truth.’ Included in the tweet was a link with what the Republicans said was an additional 20,000 pages of documents from the Epstein estate.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., a member of the Oversight Committee, slammed Democrats and accused them of ignoring the stories of Epstein’s victims in order to focus on Trump.

‘How pathetic that Democrats are using Epstein’s victims to bury headlines on their vote against reopening the government,’ Mace wrote on X.

Fox News Digital reached out to representatives for Clinton, Summers and Hoffman for comment.

Fox News Digital’s Leo Briceno contributed to this report.