Ruling parties often have an advantage in elections. But in history’s biggest election year so far, incumbents of all political stripes found that presiding over a period of economic inflation carries a heavy price at the ballot box.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a strong push to project Turkey’s influence internationally in 2024. He scored foreign policy successes with the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Turkey’s growing ties to nations in Africa. Still, tensions remain between his country and the West over Israel and his strong relations with Russia. As Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul, Erdogan has positioned himself for a bigger role internationally in 2025 and for a good working relationship with the incoming U.S. administration.
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Washington — The United States hit North Korea and Russia on Monday with new sanctions targeting Pyongyang’s financial and military support to Moscow as well as its ballistic missile program.

The sanctions, which list North Korean banks, generals and other officials, as well as Russian oil shipping companies, are the latest U.S. measure aimed at disrupting North Korea’s support to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The North Korean banks targeted include Golden Triangle Bank, one of the biggest banks in the northeastern Rason Special Economic Zone, and Pyongyang-based Korea Mandal Credit Bank, which has representatives throughout China, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

South Korea’s foreign ministry separately said on Tuesday that it has blacklisted 11 individuals and 15 entities linked to illicit military cooperation between North Korea and Russia.

The responses came as 10 countries, including the U.S., South Korea, Australia, Britain, France and Japan, as well as the European Union, issued a joint statement on Tuesday condemning Pyongyang and Moscow’s military ties “in the strongest possible terms.”

The statement said North Korea’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine was a “dangerous expansion of the conflict” and a “flagrant violation” of United Nations’ sanctions. It urged the country to withdraw its troops from Russia.

Pyongyang and Moscow have ramped up diplomatic and economic ties in recent years, culminating in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea in June when the countries’ leaders agreed a mutual defense pact.

Military cooperation between the two countries has been met by international alarm, with Washington, Kyiv and Seoul condemning North Korea for sending military equipment and more than 10,000 troops to support Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

North Korea’s actions, including its most recent test of a long-range ballistic missile and its deepening military support to Russia, undermine the stability of the region and sustain Putin’s war in Ukraine, said Bradley Smith, acting Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.

“The United States remains committed to disrupting the illicit procurement and facilitation networks that enable these destabilizing activities,” he said.

The officials sanctioned by both Washington and Seoul include North Korean generals leading tens of thousands of North Korean troops in Russia, including Kim Yong Bok, who has appeared at seven events with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year, including special forces exercises.

South Korea separately blacklisted the North’s special forces unit known as the Storm Corps, also in Russia fighting against Ukraine, and its chief, Ri Pong Chun.

Ukraine said on Monday that at least 30 North Korean soldiers had been killed or injured in combat in Russia’s Kursk region over the weekend.

It said that Moscow began deploying them in the southern region in significant numbers last week to conduct assaults on Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine launched a cross-border incursion into Kursk in August.

Kyiv estimates there are 11,000 North Koreans in total, adding to a force of tens of thousands of Russians.

Russia has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of North Koreans on its side.

Oil and gas to the North 

The Treasury sanctions freeze the U.S. assets of the designated entities, ban their trade with Americans, and block them from transactions with the U.S. financial system.

The Treasury blacklisted Russia-based foreign trade companies that it said were shipping oil and gas to North Korea. The companies include Vostok Trading, DV Ink, and Novosibirskoblgaz. Treasury said they began shipping “thousands of tons of oil and gas” to North Korea beginning in 2022 and continuing through at least April 2024.

North Korea has likely received more than 1 million barrels of oil from Russia over an eight-month period this year in breach of U.N. sanctions, according to an analysis of satellite imagery published in November by the British-based Open Source Centre and the BBC.

North Korean oil tankers have made more than 40 visits to Russia’s Far Eastern port of Vostochny since March, the report on the research group Open Source Centre’s website said.

The sanctions also targeted Sibregiongaz, AO, the Russia-based parent company and 100% owner of Novosibirskoblgaz. They also hit Okryu Trading Company, or Okryu, a North Korea-based foreign trade company that Treasury said has received thousands of tons of oil shipments from Russia.

 
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In a joint appearance Monday morning, President-elect Donald Trump and Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of the Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank Group, announced that the company would invest $100 billion in U.S. companies over the coming four years, saying that the infusion of cash would create 100,000 jobs in fields such as artificial intelligence.

Son attributed the decision to make the investment directly to Trump’s win in last month’s presidential election.

“I would really like to celebrate the great victory of President Trump,” Son said. “My confidence level [in] the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory. So, because of that, I’m now excited to commit this 100 billion dollars and 100,000 jobs into the United States.”

In introducing Son, Trump pointed out that eight years ago, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, SoftBank had made a similar pledge, promising $50 billion in U.S. investments and 50,000 new jobs.

“And they did,” Trump said. “They kept that promise in every way, shape and form.”

The president-elect then went on to press Son to double his pledge, saying “I’m going to ask him right now. Would you make it $200 billion?”

Son reiterated his promise of $100 billion, but said he would “try” to get to $200 billion.

“All right. $200 billion,” Trump said.

Son burst into laughter, telling the crowd Trump is “a great negotiator.”

‘Trump effect’

After the announcement Monday, Trump’s rapid response director, Jake Schneider, sent media outlets an email attributing the announcement to what he called the “Trump Effect.”

“President Trump is already delivering on his commitment to re-make America into the world’s manufacturing superpower once again — and he hasn’t even taken office yet,” Schneider wrote. “It’s all centered around his Made in America agenda, which incentivizes companies that make their products in America with American workers.”

He added, “In January, President Trump will immediately begin implementing bold reforms to restore the nation to full prosperity and make sure AI, emerging technologies, and the other industries of tomorrow are created, built, and grown in the United States.”

Hits and misses

Since founding SoftBank in 1981 at age 24, Son has become one of the most storied — and controversial — technology investors in the world. The company has several investment funds and owns significant shares of hundreds of companies across multiple fields, including telecommunication, robotics, internet services, e-commerce, artificial intelligence and much more.

Throughout his decades-long career, Son has made headlines for spectacular victories as well as disastrous failures. For a time, at the beginning of 2000, he claimed to be the world’s richest man, with a fortune worth an estimated $78 billion amassed by buying up internet startups. However, the collapse of the dotcom bubble just months later wiped out more than 90% of his wealth.

Son started rebuilding his business that same year, and a $20 million investment that bought SoftBank a 34% ownership share in a little-known Chinese e-commerce startup known as Alibaba would prove key to his fortunes. In 2014, Alibaba went public at a price that valued SoftBank’s shares at $58 billion, some 2,900 times its initial investment.

Along the way, Son successfully managed to merge mobile telecommunications firms T-Mobile and Sprint, creating one of the largest U.S. service providers in 2020. Just two years later, though, SoftBank suffered disastrous losses with the collapse of the office-sharing startup WeWork, in which it had invested heavily, as well as other failed investments by in-house venture and hedge funds.

At the time, Son announced that he was retiring from public life. However, by 2023, he was back in the headlines when ARM Holdings, a British computer chip design firm that SoftBank bought at a valuation of $30.8 billion in 2016, went public in the U.S. at a valuation of $54.5 billion.

Choosing the West over China

Lionel Barber, the former editor-in-chief of the Financial Times, told VOA that he believes Son’s appearance at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort Monday signals more than just an international investor seeking to get on the good side of an incoming U.S. president.

Barber is the author of Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Masayoshi Son, the first biography of the investor by a Western author, which will be published in the U.S. next month. He said that when Son made his pledge of $50 billion in 2016, he and Trump had clearly aligned interests.

“Trump wanted a big signal about business confidence in the Trump agenda and Masayoshi Son and SoftBank wanted to get in with the new Republican administration with an eye to getting [a] blessing for his big project, which was Sprint merging with T-Mobile,” Barber told VOA by phone.

Now, though, he sees something larger at play.

“Obviously, the world looks very different. Eight years on, we’ve got wars around the world, and we’ve also got de-risking and decoupling between China and the West,” Barber said.

In his last interview with him, Barber told VOA, Son said that he had realized that it was necessary for SoftBank to make a choice between China and the West.

Paraphrasing Son, Barber said, “He basically said, ‘We understand the world’s changed. We’ve been a global investor. We’ve been the biggest investor in China and the biggest investor in America. But now we have to choose. We’ve chosen the West.’”

“So, I see his getting into Mar-a-Lago as [saying], ‘I’ve chosen the West. I’ve chosen America, and I’m going with Trump.’”

Investment details unclear

The announcement at Mar-a-Lago did not include any details about specific investments that SoftBank intends to make, and not all foreign investments touted by Trump over the years have come to pass.

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn in 2017 promised a $10 billion investment in a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin that was later dramatically scaled back.

Even SoftBank’s 2016 pledge is difficult to consider truly fulfilled unless the more than $20 billion the company poured into Sprint in 2013 — three years before making the pledge — is included in the total.

Barber, Son’s biographer, said he has some doubts about SoftBank’s ability to identify $100 billion in U.S. investments over the course of four years.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I haven’t figured out how he gets to 100 billion, yet,” Barber said.

However, he said, it’s also important not to underestimate Son’s ability to achieve unexpected successes.

“You can’t write him off,” Barber said. “That’s what he does. He’s a bloody genius in that respect.”
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The U.S. Census Bureau is changing how it counts immigrants in annual estimates by including more people who were admitted for humanitarian, and often temporary, reasons. 

The change is being made in an effort to better reflect population shifts this decade, officials said Monday. Population estimates, including immigration, are due to be released Thursday showing how the populations of the United States and the 50 states changed this year. However, the new approach to counting immigrants will only be reflected nationally. 

The percentage of U.S. residents who were foreign born rose to its highest level in more than a century in 2023. It could be even higher under the new methodology. Census Bureau officials wouldn’t say Monday how much larger they expected the immigration figures to be in Thursday’s release because of the change. 

Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally. 

“We feel confident that this was a good approach in order to make our estimates more current and reflect recent trends that we’ve seen,” said Eric Jensen, a senior research scientist at the Census Bureau. 

The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people. 

The group of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the U.S. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024. 

Trump appears certain to dismantle humanitarian parole, saying during his campaign that he would end the “outrageous abuse of parole.” The annual population estimates released by the Census Bureau each year are calculated from births, deaths, migration to the United States and migration between states. The population estimates provide the official population counts each year between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.
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LOS ANGELES — A former FBI informant pleaded guilty Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress. 

Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income. 

An attorney for Smirnov declined to comment after the hearing in Los Angeles federal court. 

Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a sentence of between four and six years in prison when he’s sentenced next month. 

Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015. 

Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said. 

But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents. 

No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president. 

While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true. 

During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials. 

But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment. 

Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden. 

The case against Smirnov was brought by special counsel David Weiss, who also prosecuted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges. Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month after being convicted at a trial in the gun case and pleading guilty to federal charges in the tax case. But he was pardoned this month by his father, who said he believed “raw politics has infected this process, and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
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Omaha, Nebraska — A tornado near a mall in central California swept up cars, uprooted trees and sent several people to the hospital. In San Francisco, authorities issued the first-ever tornado warning.

Elsewhere, inclement weather plagued areas of the U.S., with dangerous conditions including heavy snow in upstate New York, a major ice storm in Midwest states and severe weather warnings around Lake Tahoe. 

The ice storm beginning Friday evening created treacherous driving conditions across Iowa and eastern Nebraska Friday and into Saturday and prompted temporary closures of Interstate 80 after numerous cars and trucks slid off the road. In upstate New York, more than 33 inches (84 centimeters) was reported near Orchard Park, which is often a landing point for lake-effect snow.

On Saturday, a tornado touched down near a shopping mall in Scotts Valley, California, about 110 kilometers south of San Francisco, around 1:40 p.m. The tornado overturned cars and toppled trees and utility poles, the National Weather Service said. The Scotts Valley Police Department said several people were injured and taken to hospitals.

In San Francisco, some trees toppled onto cars and streets and damaged roofs. The  

damage was due to 129-kph straight-line winds, not a tornado, weather  

service meteorologist Dalton Behringer said Sunday.

Roger Gass, a meteorologist in the weather service’s office in Monterey, California, said the warning of a possible tornado in San Francisco was a first for the city, noting an advanced alert did not go out before the last tornado struck nearly 20 years ago.

“I would guess there wasn’t a clear signature on radar for a warning in 2005,” said Gass, who was not there at the time.

The fast-moving storm prompted warnings for residents to take shelter, but few people have basements in the area.

More than 30 centimeters of snow fell at some Lake Tahoe ski resorts, and 181-kph gust of wind was recorded at the Mammoth Mountain resort south of Yosemite National Park, according to the weather service’s office in Reno, Nevada. Up to 90 centimeters of snow was forecast for the Sierra Nevada mountaintops.

The weekend Tahoe Live music festival at Palisades Tahoe ski resort in California went ahead as planned in spite of a snowstorm Saturday. Lil Wayne and Diplo were scheduled to perform Sunday, the festival’s website said. An avalanche warning was in effect at least until Monday morning in the area.

Interstate 80 was closed along a 130-kilometer stretch from Applegate, California, to the Nevada line just west of Reno on Saturday. The California Highway Patrol reopened the road in the afternoon for passenger vehicles with chains or four-wheel drive and snow tires.

The severe weather in the Midwest resulted in at least one death. The Washington County Sheriff’s office in Nebraska said a 57-year-old woman died after she lost control of her pickup on Highway 30 near Arlington and hit an oncoming truck. The other driver sustained minor injuries.

Businesses announced plans to open late Saturday as temperatures rose high enough in the afternoon to melt the ice in most places.

“Luckily some warmer air is moving in behind this to make it temporary,” said Dave Cousins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in Davenport, Iowa.

Tens of thousands of people in western Washington state lost electricity Saturday as the system delivered rain and gusty winds, local news outlets reported.
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President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates communications in the United States. Carr, an FCC commissioner since 2017, has taken aim at big tech and China’s influence on U.S. communications. VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports.
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Hundreds of thousands of Rhode Island residents’ personal and bank information, including Social Security numbers, were likely hacked by an international cybercriminal group asking for a ransom, state officials said on Saturday. 

In what Rhode Island officials described as extortion, the hackers threatened to release the stolen information unless they were paid an undisclosed amount of money. 

The breached data affects people who use the state’s government assistance programs and includes the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and healthcare purchased through the state’s HealthSource RI, Governor Dan McKee announced on Friday. 

Hackers gained access to RIBridges, the state’s online portal for obtaining social services earlier this month, the governor’s office said in a statement, but the breach was not confirmed by its vendor, Deloitte, until Friday. 

“Deloitte confirmed that there is a high probability that a cybercriminal has obtained files with personally identifiable information from RIBridges,” the governor’s office said in a statement on Saturday. 

A representative from McKee’s office was not immediately available to Reuters for comment. 

Anyone who has applied for or received benefits through those programs since 2016 could be affected. 

The state directed Deloitte to shut down RIBridges to remediate the threat, and for the time being, anyone applying for new benefits will have to do so on paper applications until the system is back up. 

Households believed to have been affected will receive a letter from the state notifying them of the problem and explaining steps to be taken to help protect their data and bank accounts. 
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ABC News has agreed to give $15 million to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air involving the civil case brought against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll, a court document filed on Saturday showed. 

The lawsuit, filed on March 19 in U.S. District Court in Southern Florida, accused Stephanopoulos of making the statements with malice and a disregard for the truth. It said the statements were distributed widely to third parties and repeated. 

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement.   

The lawsuit cites a March 10 interview with U.S. Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager. During the interview, Stephanopoulos said Trump was found liable for rape and asked her how she could endorse the candidate. 

According to the settlement, ABC News must publish by Sunday a statement at the bottom of a March 10 online article that accompanied the interview. 

“ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Representative Nancy Mace on ABC’s “This Week on March 10, 2024,” the statement must say, according to the court document. 
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AQABA, JORDAN — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday that American officials have been in direct contact with the Syrian rebel group that spearheaded the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad’s government but is designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States and others.

Blinken is the first U.S. official to publicly confirm contacts between the Biden administration and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which led a coalition of armed opposition groups that ousted Assad from power last Sunday.

Speaking at a news conference in Aqaba, Jordan, Blinken would not discuss details of the contacts but said it was important for the United States to convey messages to the group about its conduct and how it intends to govern in a transition period.

“Yes, we have been in contact with HTS and with other parties,” Blinken said. He added that “our message to the Syrian people is this: We want them to succeed, and we’re prepared to help them do so.”

HTS, which was once an affiliate of al-Qaida, has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department since 2018. That designation carries with it severe sanctions, including a ban on the provision of any “material support” to the group or its members. The sanctions do not, however, legally bar U.S. officials from communicating with designated groups.

HTS has worked to establish security and start a political transition after seizing Damascus and has tried to reassure a public both stunned by Assad’s fall and concerned about extremist jihadis among the rebels. Insurgent leaders say the group has broken with its extremist past.

The group’s leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, appeared in a video message Friday congratulating “the great Syrian people for the victory of the blessed revolution.”

U.S. officials say Sharaa has been making welcome comments about protecting minority and women’s rights, but they remain skeptical that he will follow through on them in the long run.

On Friday, the rebels and Syria’s unarmed opposition worked to safely turn over to U.S. officials an American man who had been imprisoned by Assad.

U.S. officials are continuing their search for Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared 12 years ago near Damascus.

“We have impressed upon everyone we’ve been in contact with the importance of helping find Austin Tice and bringing him home,” Blinken said.
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Americans should eat more beans, peas and lentils and cut back on red and processed meats and starchy vegetables, all while continuing to limit added sugars, sodium and saturated fat.

That’s the advice released Tuesday by a panel of nutrition experts charged with counseling the U.S. government about the 2025 edition of the dietary guidelines that will form the cornerstone of federal food programs and policy.

But the 20-member panel didn’t weigh in on the growing role of ultraprocessed foods that have been linked to health problems, saying there’s not enough evidence to tell people to avoid them. And the group steered clear of updating controversial guidance on alcohol consumption, leaving that analysis to two outside reports expected to be released soon.

Overall, the recommendations for the 2025-30 Dietary Guidelines for Americans sound familiar, said Marion Nestle, a food policy expert.

“This looks like every other set of dietary guidelines since 1980: eat your veggies and reduce consumption of foods high in salt, sugar and saturated fat,” Nestle said in an email. “This particular statement says nothing about balancing calories, when overconsumption of calories, especially from ultra-processed foods, is the biggest challenge to the health of Americans.”

What the scientific panel said about healthy diets

The nutrition panel concluded that a healthy diet for people aged 2 years and older is higher in vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, whole grains, fish and vegetable oils that are higher in unsaturated fat.

It is lower in red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened foods and beverages, refined grains and saturated fat. It may also include fat-free or low-fat dairy and foods lower in sodium and may include plant-based foods.

The panel, which met for nearly two years, was the first to focus on the dietary needs of Americans through what they called a “health equity lens,” said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, a Massachusetts General Hospital obesity expert who was part of the group. That meant considering factors such as household income, race, ethnicity and culture when recommending healthy diets. It will help ensure that the guidance “reflects and includes various population groups,” she said in an email.

The panel didn’t come to conclusions on ultraprocessed foods or alcohol

Ultraprocessed foods include the snacks, sugary cereals and frozen meals that make up about 60% of the American diet.

The panel considered more than 40 studies, including several that showed links between ultraprocessed foods and becoming overweight or developing obesity. But the nutrition experts had concerns with the quality of the research, leaving them to conclude that the evidence was too limited to make recommendations.

That decision is likely to bump up against the views of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to lead the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, who has questioned potential conflicts of interest among members of the dietary guidelines panel and vowed to crack down on ultraprocessed foods that contribute to chronic disease.

The panel also didn’t revise recommendations that suggest limiting alcohol intake to two drinks or less a day for men and one drink or less a day for women.

In 2020, the last time the guidance was updated, the government rejected the advice of scientific advisers to recommend less alcohol consumption.

Two groups — the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and a committee of the government agency that oversees substance abuse — are expected to release reports in the coming months on the effects of moderate alcohol use to inform the guidelines.

Do Americans follow dietary guidelines?

The advisory panel acknowledged that the diets of most Americans don’t meet the current guidelines. More than half of all U.S. adults have one or more diet-related chronic health conditions and 18 million U.S. households have insecure sources of food, according to the report.

“Nutrition-related chronic health conditions and their precursors continue to threaten health through the lifespan,” the report concludes. “Which does not bode well for the future of health in the United States.”

What happens next?

The scientific report informs the dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years. Tuesday’s recommendations now go to HHS and the Agriculture Department, where officials will draft the final guidance set for release next year.

Starting Wednesday, the public will have 60 days to comment on the guidance. HHS and USDA officials will hold a public meeting January 16 to discuss the recommendations.

The new guidance, which will be finalized by the incoming Trump administration, is consistent with decades of federal efforts to reduce diet-related disease in the U.S., said Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest.

“Broadly, I think these are well-formulated recommendations that the incoming administration would do well to adopt,” Lurie said. 
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