Each week Hot off the Wire looks at a variety of stories in business, science, health and more. This week's headlines include:
- How to avoid financial stress during the holiday season.
- 2024 was big for bitcoin. States could see a crypto policy blitz in 2025 in spite of the risks.
- Americans end 2024 with grim economic outlook, but Republicans are optimistic for 2025: AP-NORC poll.
- Business owners should not forget anti-money laundering rule currently in legal limbo.
- 'Dirty Dancing,' 'Beverly Hills Cop,' 'Up in Smoke' among movies entering the National Film Registry.
- Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with novels from Faulkner and Hemingway.
- From Caitlin Clark and Simone Biles to a new hockey league, women's sports had a pivotal year.
- Schools are cutting bus service for children. Parents are turning to ride-hailing apps.
- There's been an uptick in the sales of nuclear bomb shelters.
- Musk and Trump are viewed roughly the same by Americans, an AP-NORC poll finds.
- US to require passenger vehicles to sound alarms if rear passengers don't fasten their seat belts.
- Mystery drone sightings keep happening in New Jersey. Here's what we know (and don't know).
- New York man finds Mastodon jaw in his backyard.
- An Alabama woman is doing well after the latest experimental pig kidney transplant.
- Invasive 'murder hornets' are wiped out in the US, officials say.
- Concert promoters, hotels and lodging sites soon will have to disclose extra fees up front.
- Activists release images of foxes at Finnish fur farms to push EU to ban the trade.
- Milan's Via MonteNapoleone usurps New York's Fifth Avenue as world's most upscale shopping street.
- Once taboo, more Japanese women are brewing sake.
- Leap of faith: A few young women in US buck the trends by joining the ranks of Catholic nuns.
- Oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments sells for over $5M.
- Survivors seek a reckoning as FBI investigates child sex abuse in little-known Christian sect.
- Pope in autobiography reveals an apparent bombing plot during his 2021 visit to Iraq.
—The Associated Press
About this program
Host Terry Lipshetz is managing editor of the national newsroom for Lee Enterprises. Besides producing the daily Hot off the Wire news podcast, Terry conducts periodic interviews for this Behind the Headlines program, co-hosts the Streamed & Screened movies and television program and is the former producer of Across the Sky, a podcast dedicated to weather and climate.
Theme music
The News Tonight, used under license from Soundstripe. YouTube clearance: ZR2MOTROGI4XAHRX
