North Korea showed off its apparent progress in the development of a nuclear-powered submarine. State media released photos of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his daughter, a potential heir, as they inspected what appears to be a largely completed hull.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s official state media, said Kim and his daughter visited the shipyard to examine the construction of what it describes as an 8,700-ton-class nuclear-propelled submarine, The Associated Press reported. Pyongyang has signaled that it plans to arm the submarine with nuclear weapons, the AP noted. Kim has said the development of the submarine is a crucial step toward the modernization and nuclear armament of his country’s navy.

The Christmas Day release of the photos marks the first time North Korean state media has shown an update on the nuclear-powered submarine since March. Earlier images mostly showed the lower sections of the vessel, the AP noted. The KCNA did not say when the photos released on Thursday were taken.

Moon Keun-sik, a submarine expert at Seoul’s Hanyang University, told the AP that the photos of a largely completed hull indicate that many of the core components are already in place, as submarines are typically built from the inside out. However, it was not immediately clear exactly how much progress Pyongyang had made.

‘Showing the entire vessel now seems to indicate that most of the equipment has already been installed and it is just about ready to be launched into the water,’ Moon, who also served as a submarine officer in the South Korean navy, told the AP. Moon added that North Korea’s submarine could be ready for testing at sea within months.

While at the shipyard, Kim condemned South Korea’s efforts to develop its own nuclear-powered submarine as an ‘offensive act,’ despite the fact that President Donald Trump has backed Seoul’s push toward the technology. Kim said South Korea’s efforts violate North Korea’s security and maritime sovereignty, according to the AP.

In October, during his tour of Asia aimed at securing investments, Trump said that the U.S. would share technology with South Korea that would allow it to build a nuclear-powered submarine. The president posted on Truth Social that the vessel would be built in Philadelphia.

‘South Korea will be building its nuclear-powered submarine in the Philadelphia shipyards, right here in the good ol’ U.S.A. Shipbuilding in our country will soon be making a BIG COMEBACK,’ the president wrote.

The White House underscored the point when it released a fact sheet in November which directly referenced Washington and Seoul’s efforts to ‘further our maritime and nuclear partnership.’

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center was canceled just days after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the iconic performing arts institution in Washington, D.C.

The show’s host, musician Chuck Redd, who has led the holiday ‘Jazz Jams’ at the Kennedy Center since 2006, said he called off his performance after Trump’s name was added to the facility.

‘When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,’ Redd told the Associated Press.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Kennedy Center for comment. The Kennedy Center’s website lists the show as canceled.

The Kennedy Center’s board voted unanimously on Dec. 18 to rename the institution the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center,’ prompting swift backlash from members of the Kennedy family who said the decision undermined the legacy of President John F. Kennedy.

Maria Shriver, Kennedy’s niece, criticized the decision, calling it ‘beyond comprehension.’

Last week, workers added Trump’s name to the outside of the center, and the website’s header was changed to ‘The Trump Kennedy Center.’

Another Kennedy niece, Kerry Kennedy, vowed to remove Trump’s name from the building after he leaves office.

President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill in 1964 that designated the center as a living memorial to Kennedy following his assassination in 1963. The law prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else or from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior, the AP reported.

Trump was elected chairman of the Kennedy Center board in February, after removing 18 trustees appointed by former President Joe Biden.

Since Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, several artists have canceled performances at the Kennedy Center, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, who called off a production of ‘Hamilton.’

Redd has toured worldwide and performed with numerous musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, according to his website bio.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Redd for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A group of 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over a declaration that aims to restrict gender transition treatment for minors.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and its inspector general comes after the declaration issued last week described treatments such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender surgeries as unsafe and ineffective for children experiencing gender dysphoria.

The declaration also warned doctors they could be excluded from federal health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, if they provide these treatments to minors.

The move seeks to build on President Donald Trump’s executive order in January calling on HHS to protect children from ‘chemical and surgical mutilation.’

‘We are taking six decisive actions guided by gold standard science and the week one executive order from President Trump to protect children from chemical and surgical mutilation,’ Kennedy said during a press conference last week.

HHS has also proposed new rules designed to further block gender transition treatment for minors, although the lawsuit does not address the rules, which have yet to be finalized.

The states’ lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Eugene, Oregon, argues that the declaration is inaccurate and unlawful and urges the court to prevent it from being enforced.

‘Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online, and no one should lose access to medically necessary health care because their federal government tried to interfere in decisions that belong in doctors’ offices,’ New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the lawsuit, said in a statement.

The lawsuit claims the declaration attempts to pressure providers into ending gender transition treatment for young people and circumvent legal requirements for policy changes. The complaint said federal law requires the public be given notice and an opportunity to comment before substantively amending health policy and that neither of these were done before the declaration was released.

The declaration based its conclusions on a peer-reviewed report that the department conducted earlier this year that called for more reliance on behavioral therapy rather than broad gender transition treatment for minors with gender dysphoria.

The report raised questions about standards for the treatment of transgender children issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and brought concerns that youths may be too young to give consent to life-changing treatments that could result in future infertility.

Major medical groups and physicians who treat transgender children have criticized the report as inaccurate.

HHS also announced last week two proposed federal rules — one to cut off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that offer gender transition treatment to children and another to block federal Medicaid money from being used for these procedures.

The proposals have not yet been made final and are not legally binding because they must go through a lengthy rulemaking process and public comment before they can be enforced.

Several major medical providers have already pulled back on gender transition treatment for youths since Trump returned to office, even those in Democrat-led states where the procedures are legal under state law.

Medicaid programs in just under half of states currently cover gender transition treatment. At least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the treatment, and the Supreme Court’s decision this year upholding Tennessee’s ban likely means other state laws will remain in place.

Democrat attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, Washington state and Washington, D.C., as well as Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor, joined James in the lawsuit.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Nasry Asfura has won the 2025 Honduras presidential election, delivering victory for the right-of-center National Party of Honduras (PNH) and shifting the political landscape of Central America. 

The 40.3% to 39.5% result in favor of Asfura over Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla arrived after the vote-counting process had been delayed for days by technical glitches and claims by other candidates of vote-rigging. Rixi Moncada, the candidate of the ruling LIBRE party, came in a distant third.

The results of the race were so tight and the ballot processing system was so chaotic, that about 15% of the tally sheets, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of ballots, had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.

Two electoral council members and one deputy approved the results despite disputes over the razor-thin difference in the vote. A third council member, Marlon Ocha, was not in a video declaring the winner.

‘Honduras: I am ready to govern. I will not let you down,’ Asfura said on X after the results were confirmed.

The head of the Honduran Congress, though, rejected the results and described them as an ‘electoral coup.’

‘This is completely outside the law,’ Congress President Luis Redondo of the LIBRE party said on X. ‘It has no value.’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Asfura on X, saying the U.S. ‘looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.’

Initially, preliminary results on Monday showed Asfura, 67, had won 41% of the ballot, inching him ahead of Nasralla, 72, who had around 39%.

On Tuesday, the website set up to share vote tallies with the public experienced technical problems and crashed, according to The Associated Press.

With the candidates only having 515 votes between them, a virtual tie and site crash saw President Trump share a post on Truth Social.

‘Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,’ he wrote. ‘If they do, there will be hell to pay!’

By Thursday, Asfura had 40.05%, about 8,000 votes ahead of Nasralla, who had 39.75%, according to Reuters, with the latter then calling for an investigation.

‘I publicly denounce that today, at 3:24 a.m., the screen went dark and an algorithm, similar to the one used in 2013, changed the data,’ Nasralla wrote on social media, adding 1,081,000 votes for his party were transferred to Asfura, while 1,073,000 votes for Asfura’s National Party were attributed to him.

Asfura, nicknamed ‘Tito,’ is a former mayor of Tegucigalpa and had entered the race with a reputation for leadership and focus on infrastructure, public order and efficiency.

His win ended a polarized campaign season, with one of the defining moments of the contest being Asfura’s endorsement by Trump.

‘If he [Asfura] doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,’ Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Nov. 28.

Before the start of voting Nov. 29, Trump also said he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once led the same party as Asfura. Hernandez is serving a 45-year sentence for helping drug traffickers.

In the end, the election saw the defeat of centrist former vice president of Honduras, Nasralla and left-wing Moncada, 60, who served under President Xiomara Castro. 

Moncada, a prominent lawyer, financier and former minister of national defense, focused on institutional reform and social equity.

Nasralla, a high-profile television personality turned politician, mobilized a base but fell short of converting his popularity into a winning coalition.  

He was focusing on cleaning up Honduran corruption. The Honduran presidential race was also impacted by accusations of fraud.

In addition to electing a new president, Hondurans voted for a new Congress and hundreds of local positions.

Reuters contributed to this report.

The Department of Justice said Wednesday it may have more than a million more documents related to the late Jeffrey Epstein that it needs to review and that the process could take weeks to complete.

The DOJ said two of its components, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, had just handed over the missing tranche of files, days after the Epstein Files Transparency Act deadline had passed.

‘We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible,’ the DOJ wrote in a statement on social media.

The ‘mass volume of material’ could ‘take a few more weeks’ to review, the DOJ said.

‘The Department will continue to fully comply with federal law and President Trump’s direction to release the files,’ the department wrote.

The DOJ has been sharing on a public website since Friday tens of thousands of pages of files related to Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking cases as part of its obligation under the transparency bill. 

President Donald Trump signed the bill into law Nov. 19, giving the DOJ 30 days to review and release all unclassified material related to the cases.

The file rollout has stirred controversy as critics have blasted the DOJ for what they say are excessive redactions and the law’s lapsed deadline Friday. Initially, the DOJ said it would miss the deadline by a couple of weeks, but Wednesday’s announcement signals that might extend further into the new year than the administration had anticipated.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on ‘Meet the Press’ Sunday there was ‘well-settled law’ that supported the DOJ missing the bill’s deadline because of a need to meet other legal requirements, like redacting victim-identifying information.

The transparency bill required the DOJ to withhold information about victims and material that could jeopardize open investigations or litigation. Officials could also leave out information ‘in the interest of national defense or foreign policy,’ the bill said. 

The bill also explicitly directed the DOJ to keep visible any details that could be damaging to high-profile and politically connected people.

It’s never a dull moment in Washington during the holiday season — with multiple holiday celebrations at the White House itself for lawmakers and Cabinet secretaries. 

The White House has hosted Christmas parties dating back to 1800 when President John Adams and first lady Abigail Adams hosted several government officials and their families to celebrate on behalf of their granddaughter, Susanna Boylston Adams, according to the White House Historical Association. 

Now, government officials make their rounds to celebrate the season — both in their official capacity serving the government and privately with their families.

For example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attended the White House Congressional Ball in December. First lady Melania Trump hosted the annual event at the White House for Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

President Donald Trump indicated that other Cabinet members also attended, claiming that ‘we’ve got them all sort of here’ after singling out Rubio and Bessent. However, he refrained from identifying others because ‘they’re not names that are going to get huge applause from this very substantially Democrat audience.’ 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also kicked off the first Christmas worship service at the Pentagon, featuring American evangelist Franklin Graham, and musicians Anne Wilson and Matthew West. 

Additionally, Hegseth’s wife, Jen, hosted a Christmas Tea Party for Gold Star families at the Pentagon. A Gold Star family has experienced the loss of a family member during active-duty military service.

Outside of official events in Washington, the secretaries and their families enjoy their own holiday traditions as well. The White House shared a video on Dec. 13 detailing how the secretaries and their families celebrate, with activities ranging from baking to holding a talent show. 

Jeanette Rubio, who is married to the secretary of state, said their family attends midnight Mass together on Christmas Day. The couple shares four children. 

‘We, as a family, we go to midnight Mass, that’s something that’s very important to us,’ Rubio said in the video. ‘We celebrate it together, because we want to keep what the purpose of Christmas is.’

Allison Lutnick, who is married to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, said their favorite way to celebrate the holidays is lighting Hanukkah candles with their four children. 

‘My favorite holiday tradition is lighting Hanukkah candles with my children,’ Lutnick said in the video. ‘They’re approaching 30 now, so we don’t do chocolate dreidels or eight nights of gifts anymore though.’ 

Kathryn Burgum, the wife of Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, said their family celebrates Christmas by making a Norwegian flatbread called lefse.

‘Our favorite holiday tradition is making lefse,’ Burgum said in the video. ‘And some people don’t have any idea what that is, but that’s actually a Norwegian flatbread that’s a tradition around the holidays.’ 

Cheryl Hines, who is married to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said their family is large, which makes the holiday season extra fun. 

‘We like to have a talent show,’ Hines said in the video. ‘Not everybody is as talented as they wish they were, but that doesn’t stop us from singing at the top of our lungs or doing some crazy dance. We always have a really good time together.’

Lisa Collins, who is married to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, said their family enjoys decorating their Christmas tree with ornaments they’ve collected for nearly 40 years. 

‘Our favorite holiday tradition is collecting Christmas ornaments, everywhere we’ve been in 37 years,’ Collins said in the video. ‘[We] have a special tree for those places, and they’re all dated as a remembrance of where we’ve been, and how far we’ve come.’ 

It’s never a dull moment in Washington during the holiday season — featuring multiple holiday celebrations at the White House itself for lawmakers and Cabinet secretaries. 

The White House has hosted Christmas parties dating back to 1800 when then-President John Adams and then-first lady Abigail Adams hosted several government officials and their families to celebrate on behalf of their granddaughter, Susanna Boylston Adams, according to the White House Historical Association. 

Now, government officials make their rounds to celebrate the season — both in their official capacity serving the government and privately with their families.

For example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent attended the White House Congressional Ball in December. First lady Melania Trump hosted the annual event at the White House for Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

President Donald Trump also indicated that other Cabinet members also attended, claiming that ‘we’ve got them all sort of here’ after singling out Rubio and Bessent. However, he refrained from identifying others because ‘they’re not names that are going to get huge applause from this very substantially Democrat audience.’ 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also kicked off the first-ever Christmas worship service at the Pentagon, featuring American evangelist Franklin Graham, and musicians Anne Wilson and Matthew West. 

Additionally, Hegseth’s wife, Jen, hosted a Christmas Tea Party for Gold Star families at the Pentagon. A Gold Star Family is the family of a service member who died during active-duty military service.

Outside of official holiday events in Washington, the secretaries and their families enjoy their own holiday traditions as well. The White House shared a video Dec. 13 detailing how the secretaries and their families celebrate the holidays, with activities ranging from baking to holding a talent show. 

Jeanette Rubio, who is married to Secretary of State Rubio, said that their family attends midnight Mass together during Christmas. The couple shares four children together. 

‘We, as a family, we go to midnight Mass, that’s something that’s very important to us,’ Rubio said in the video. ‘We celebrate it together, because we want to keep what the purpose of Christmas is.’

Allison Lutnick, who is married to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, said that their favorite way to celebrate the holidays is lighting Hanukkah candles with their four children. 

‘My favorite holiday tradition is lighting Hanukkah candles with my children,’ Lutnick said in the video. ‘They’re approaching 30 now, so we don’t do chocolate dreidels or eight nights of gifts anymore though.’ 

Kathryn Burgum, the wife of Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, said that their family celebrates Christmas by making a Norwegian flatbread called lefse.

‘Our favorite holiday tradition is making lefse,’ Burgum said in the video. ‘And some people don’t have any idea what that is, but that’s actually a Norwegian flatbread that’s a tradition around the holidays.’ 

Cheryl Hines, who is married to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that their family is large, which makes the holiday season extra fun. 

‘We like to have a talent show,’ Hines said in the video. ‘Not everybody is as talented as they wish they were, but that doesn’t stop us from singing at the top of our lungs or doing some crazy dance. We always have a really good time together.’

Lisa Collins, who is married to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, said their family enjoys decorating their Christmas tree with ornaments they’ve collected for nearly 40 years. 

‘Our favorite holiday tradition is collecting Christmas ornaments, everywhere we’ve been in 37 years,’ Collins said in the video. We ‘have a special tree for those places, and they’re all dated as a remembrance of where we’ve been, and how far we’ve come.’