While San Francisco is one of the most notoriously expensive places to live in the United States, the city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, has unveiled a plan to help drive down costs. It involves providing free and subsidized child care for families across the city. 

What is being offered?
The new child care program is part of an “action plan with steps to make housing, child care, education, food, health care and transportation more affordable for San Franciscans,” Lurie’s office said in a press release. The tentpole of this program will “expand free child care for low- and middle-income families at more than 500 high-quality providers across the city.”

For families of four earning up to $230,000 per year, child care will be free at these locations, while families of four earning up to $310,000 per year will get a 50% subsidy for child care. While it may seem counterintuitive to offer free child care to families making six figures, San Francisco “consistently ranks among the most expensive cities in the U.S.,” with many “costs exceeding national averages,” said Bloomberg. Full-time child care for an infant in San Francisco “can cost as much as $30,000 a year, an expense that can rival rent payments.”

Will this help the city’s affordability?
The expansion of child care “will be funded by a $570 million reserve of unspent money from a commercial rent tax voters approved in 2018,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. As a result of the new program, about “12,000 children under age 5 will become newly eligible for child care tuition support and more than 7,000 other children are expected to see their current financial support doubled.”

But there is also a question of whether the mayor’s office is doing this simply as part of a political message. Democrats like Lurie “seized on voters’ concerns” about high costs as they “won major races” across the nation, said the Chronicle. Lurie, who took office in 2025, isn’t up for reelection soon, but “wants to promote the national narrative that San Francisco is bouncing back on his watch.”

The United States is sending a powerhouse group to compete in figure skating when the 2026 Winter Olympics begin in Italy in February. While the U.S. has always been dominant in the sport (Americans brought home the gold in both the men’s and team events during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing), this year’s roster has even loftier expectations.

Expected to dominate
Heading into the 2026 U.S. figure skating championships, where the Olympic team is chosen, many felt the U.S. would be “selecting the greatest American skating team to ever compete at the Olympic Games,” said USA Today. The selection of the final team showed this “potential was affirmed,” as the U.S. lineup is “strong and deep, with medal favorites in four of the five events.” 

‘A mix of seasoned veterans and rising stars’
The U.S. team still must prove how strong it will be, and how many medals it can rack up, as it heads to Italy with a “mix of seasoned veterans and rising stars,” said NPR. There are 16 total skaters, including men’s single skaters Ilia Malinin, Maxim Naumov and Andrew Torgashev. Malinin is considered the U.S. superstar, seen as “Team USA’s best hope for men’s figure skating gold, as one of the sport’s most revolutionary athletes.” Naumov, another top skater, is dedicating his Olympic performance to his parents, who died in the Washington, D.C., plane crash in January 2025.

The women’s single skaters, Amber Glenn, Isabeau Levito and Alysa Liu, are equally impressive. Glenn “just won her third consecutive U.S. title” and at the age of 26, will be the “oldest U.S. ladies’ singles skater to compete at the Olympics since 1927,” said CNN. Liu retired at age 16 following her first Olympics, but “last season, she came out of retirement — and shockingly won the world championship.”

The U.S. looks to dominate ice dancing this year, too. The “three-time defending world champions in the ice dance,” married couple Madison Chock and Evan Bates, will “head to Milan as the gold medal favorites,” said The Athletic.

A decorated draft ox and its handler leap over haystacks set on fire as part of the Kicchu Haisodu ritual today in Siddalingapura, Karnataka, India. The ritual is practiced in rural areas of the southern state to celebrate Makar Sankranti, the mid-winter harvest festival.
Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images

Filmmakers and audiences remain fascinated with glamorous, globe-trotting double agents. Some of the best examples deploy some of Hollywood’s most luminous stars to make us contemplate the nature of spycraft and the sometimes morally compromised leaders and causes they serve.

‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962)
Perhaps the ultimate cinematic expression of Cold War paranoia, “The Manchurian Candidate” (pictured above) was released, incredibly, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. This “jazzy, hip screen translation of Richard Condon’s bestselling novel” works because “from uncertain premise to shattering conclusion, one does not question plausibility: the events being rooted in their own cinematic reality,” said Vincent Camby at Variety. (Prime)

‘Three Days of the Condor’ (1975)
Turner (Robert Redford) is a CIA operative who runs an agency front called the American Literary Historical Society. Its actual purpose, foreshadowing Large Language AI Models, is to feed novels, short stories and articles into a computer looking for evidence of leaked operations or new spycraft ideas from fiction writers. The “action rarely falters, and at its best the film offers an intriguing slice of neo-Hitchcock,” said Time Out. (MGM+)

‘The Lives of Others’ (2006)
Not all espionage crosses borders. In this Academy Award-winning drama, an East German secret police officer is assigned to listen in on the phone calls and private life of a prominent playwright and his girlfriend. The movie depicts a society where there are “so many spies that there is almost no one left to be spied on,” said Geoffrey Macnab at Sight and Sound. (Prime)