The Land of 10,000 Lakes has found itself in the middle of a scandal, with Minnesota at the center of wide-ranging fraud allegations. While the state is hardly the first to become embroiled in a fraud scandal, prosecutors say the evidence against Minnesota goes back years and may involve the highest levels of state government.

What’s the crux of the scandal?
It largely goes back to alleged fraud that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosecutors have “charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed” during the pandemic, said The New York Times. Federal prosecutors claim that billions of dollars were stolen as part of the schemes, most of which involved Minnesota’s Department of Human Services (DHS). 

Though there were several major fraud networks, officials claim they all had “three common threads: The state was billed for services that were never provided, DHS has failed to provide sufficient oversight, and many of those implicated are from Minnesota’s Somali community,” said The Minnesota Star Tribune. The scandal has “widely been viewed as a by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said CBS News, with former Attorney General Merrick Garland previously calling it the “largest pandemic relief fraud scheme” in the country.

What happens next?
Additional people are being charged with fraud as the cases continue and more evidence comes out. One notable update from prosecutors alleges that “half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 Minnesota-run programs since 2018 may have been stolen,” said The Associated Press. This would go back to the year before the administration of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) took over.

The “magnitude cannot be overstated,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson during a press conference. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering industrial-scale fraud.” Minnesota, said Walz in a statement, “will not tolerate fraud, and we will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”

Officials in France have called for a Christmas truce as protests over government efforts to cull entire cow herds showing signs of a skin disease continue nationwide. For more than a week, farmers have blocked roadways and dumped manure outside government buildings. Meanwhile, authorities press on with their controversial plan to stem the outbreak of nodular dermatitis, also known as lumpy skin disease, an insect-borne infection that affects cattle but poses little risk to humans.

Authorities are claiming early success with containment. But French protesters have only sharpened their criticisms against the government as a broader movement of trade-based discontent sweeps the country.

‘Excessive and cruel’ culling policy
France’s outbreak is an “absolute emergency,” said Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu in an address to the National Assembly on Tuesday. To that end, the government has “put all its hopes in vaccination” in an “ambitious” plan requiring the full inoculation of 1,000 farms in the Ariège department by Dec. 31, said Le Monde. Such an expansive plan poses a “logistical and human challenge” amid tensions between veterinarians “tasked with both culling and vaccinating” herds and farmers who reject the “systematic culling of herds where the disease is detected.”

Protesters contend that the policy of culling entire herds over a single infection is “excessive and cruel,” said Reuters. But the “economic consequences” of unchecked lumpy skin disease are “severe,” as it can “devastate herd productivity” and “trigger international trade restrictions,” said Bovine Veterinarian. Complicating things further is a concern among French authorities that this fight could “snowball into a wider movement” among local farmers who have fallen “under growing threat from the imposition of EU norms” and foreign competition.

‘Volatile cocktail of rural discontent’
The civil unrest and disruptive protests that have blocked French motorways were “initially sparked” by frustration over the cullings and vaccinations, but they have since “expanded to cover wider discontent” over the EU’s Mercosur trade agreement with a group of South American nations, said The Connexion. Many farmers have accused the deal of leading to “massive imports of products not meeting French standards,” said Reuters. The combination of lumpy skin frustrations and broader trade anxieties has created a “volatile cocktail of rural discontent and growing protest,” said France 24.

Members of the Karen community, Myanmar’s third-largest ethnic group, perform a traditional dance to celebrate their New Year today. The date of each Karen New Year is decided according to the lunar calendar and the end of the rice harvest.
Sai Aung Main / AFP / Getty Images

It was a banner year for literature, with a plethora of intriguing and memorable releases. The publishing world delivered boundary-pushing fiction alongside heavily researched and introspective nonfiction in 2025. Here are the best books of the year — ones that stood out among a host of excellent tomes.

‘Fish Tales’
Toni Morrison acquired and initially published this African American novelist’s manuscript in 1984. This year, Jones’ debut was finally rereleased. "Fish Tales" is a “burst of authentic energy, a rush of life from start to finish,” said the Chicago Review of Books. ($27, Macmillan)

‘Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church’ 
This “masterpiece” tells the story of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which is sadly now best known as the site of a mass shooting by a white supremacist that killed nine congregants on June 17, 2015, said The New York Times. Former Times reporter Kevin Sack delivers a “dense, rich, captivating narrative,” featuring “vivid prose, prodigious research and a palpable emotional engagement that’s disciplined by a meticulous attention to the facts.” ($35, Penguin Random House)

‘What We Can Know’
In his latest novel, Ian McEwan takes readers to the year 2119, where the “humanities are still in crisis,” said The New Yorker. The literary detective story combines science fiction with elements of a thriller as the protagonist, scholar Thomas Metcalfe, investigates a mysterious poem from 2014. ($30, Penguin Random House)