Do members of congress get paid during government shutdowns? And do they get free health insurance? Let’s get to the bottom of some common myths.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday that "substantial" tariff relief for a number of everyday consumer items would be announced shortly. Bessent, speaking on Fox News Channel, said that while "it's tough to do a lot of specific things," the administration would be moving to cut duties on a number of "things that we don't grow here in the United States."

The House Rules Committee on Wednesday advanced a funding bill to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The bill passed the committee in an 8-4 vote, after passing the Senate on Monday, and is set to be voted on by the full House late afternoon on Wednesday, The Hill news outlet reported.

Russian security officials this week said they thwarted an attempt by British and Ukrainian intelligence services to steal a MiG-31 jet armed with the Kinzhal hypersonic missile and fly it to a NATO airbase in Romania. If it had succeeded, the mission would have given the West access to the “secret technologies” that make the Kinzhal invulnerable to any air defense system, the state-owned Izvestia newspaper said Tuesday.

President Trump says the East Wing that was demolished to make way for a new ballroom “looked like hell,” describing the area of the White House before it was torn down as a “poor, sad sight.” “The East Wing was a beautiful, little, tiny structure that was built many years ago that was renovated and expanded and disbanded and columns ripped out — and it had nothing to do with the original building,” Trump said during a Monday interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “It was a poor, sad sight, and I could have built the ballroom around it, but it would not have been — we’re building one of the greatest ballrooms in the world,” Trump said.

Federal police arrested a suspected Hamas member soon after his entry into Germany on the A17 autobahn near the Czech border, prosecutors said on Wednesday. The Lebanese-born man is accused of procuring weapons that were supposed to be used for attacks on Israeli or Jewish sites in Germany and Europe, the federal prosecutor's office based in Karlsruhe said. The suspect, who was detained on Tuesday, was to be transported to Karlsruhe, where he would appear before an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice, who would make a decision on investigative custody.

Emails released by Democrats show convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein telling associates in the 2010s that “of course” President Trump knew about his relationships with underage girls. The three emails, released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, show Epstein’s correspondence with his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as columnist and author Michael Wolff. The first is direct correspondence between Epstein and Maxwell, the second is direct correspondence between Epstein and Wolff and the final one is direct correspondence between Epstein and Wolff, according to the House Oversight Committee Democrats.

Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein referred to Donald Trump as the "dog that hasn't barked" and told his former companion Ghislaine Maxwell that an alleged victim had "spent hours at my house" with Trump, according to email correspondence released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is trump," Epstein wrote in a typo-riddled message to Maxwell in April 2011. "[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned."