Welcome to Scoop, where you get the Scoop on this week's news. My name is Jenna, and this is

Smarter News. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Scoop. It is Monday, January 12, 2026. Still can't believe we're here.

2026, but we better get used to it. We're almost at mid-January,

believe it or not. This has moved very quickly. And speaking and moving quickly, we have a lot

of quickly developing news stories in front of us. Sometimes, as you know, I will step back

from this collage of news that we get periodically and think, well, wait a minute, there's a theme here.

You know, all of these stories are really based in the law and the interpretation of the law.

You know, such and such stories, this is really about the federal government and the relationship

with the state. Or wait a minute, there's something that's connecting all these stories.

It has to do with the economy. You know, I look for ways that we connect stories so we can

organize them in our minds and hopefully understand not only the story itself, but maybe a broader

perspective to it. That makes us feel a little bit less disjointed. Today, I don't have that

sort of theme. There's a lot of different stories out there that aren't necessarily

connected. There's not one major overarching theme. So what I decided to do is something a little bit

different and take each story that is important to have on your radar this week, tell you a little

bit about what's going on and why it matters. We'll sit with a few stories a little longer than

others, like the story out of Minneapolis or like

what's going on. For example, in Iran, these are really big stories that have rippling effects

that continue to develop in front of us. We're going to talk about what's going on, why it matters,

but then I want to give you as well a fact that you may not know about this story.

And hopefully that will help us all feel at the end of this a little bit smarter on the news

this week and a little bit more organized.

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