Top Stories — Sunday, September 7, 2025
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube — nyt News
- Egypt-Israel Tensions Rise Over Attack on Gaza City — nyt News
- Trump nominees pile up as GOP weighs rule shift once floated by Democrats — Fox News
Nepal Bans 26 Social Media Platforms, Including Facebook and YouTube
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/7/2025, 5:36:06 PM
Nepal's government has banned dozens of social media platforms after they failed to comply with new registration requirements, disrupting essential communication and raising concerns over free speech.
The 26 blocked platforms include messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, as well as websites like YouTube and LinkedIn.
The ban, which went into effect on Thursday after a one-week ultimatum to the social media companies expired, has caused confusion across the country. It has ignited fears about how it could affect press freedom and the tourism industry, and particularly about how families can continue to communicate with relatives working abroad as migrant laborers. About 7.5 percent of Nepal's 29 million population was living abroad in 2021, according to census figures cited by the Nepal Economic Forum, a research institute.
Officials at Nepal's ministry of communication and information technology said the ban was enforced after the platforms refused to comply with a new law regulating social media, despite several formal requests.
The government now requires platforms to register for a license and to appoint a representative who can address grievances.
"We requested them to enlist with us five times. What to do when they don't listen to us?" said Gajendra Kumar Thakur, a spokesman for the ministry.
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Egypt-Israel Tensions Rise Over Attack on Gaza City
Source: nyt News • Published: 9/7/2025, 5:35:13 PM
Israel's plan to force Palestinians to flee to southern Gaza ahead of an offensive in the northern part of the enclave has raised tensions with neighboring Egypt, which is concerned that Israel will try to push Gazans into its territory.
Egyptian and Israeli officials have traded criticisms over the past few days about Israel's preparations for a major attack on Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says the city, in northern Gaza, is one of the last strongholds of Hamas, which led the 2023 attack on Israel that set off the war.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said that 100,000 Palestinians had already fled the city after Israeli orders to leave. Ahead of a large-scale assault, Israel has also been bombing high-rise buildings in Gaza City that it says were used by Hamas, accusations which the group denies.
Mr. Netanyahu has called on Egypt to accept more Palestinian refugees from Gaza, without saying whether Israel would allow them to return after the war. He argued that Israel would not forcibly expel them, but rather wanted to allow whoever wanted to leave Gaza to do so.
"The Egyptian foreign ministry prefers to imprison residents in Gaza who would prefer to leave the war zone against their will," Mr. Netanyahu said on Friday.
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Trump nominees pile up as GOP weighs rule shift once floated by Democrats
Source: Fox News • Published: 9/7/2025, 5:30:36 PM
Senate Republicans are getting closer to changing the upper chamber's rules to allow for a slew of President Donald Trump's lower-level nominees to be confirmed, and they're closing in on a revived proposal from Democrats to do it.
The hope among Republicans is that using a tool that Senate Democrats once considered would allow them to avoid turning to the "nuclear option," meaning a rule change with a simple majority vote.
"The Democrats should support it, because it was their original proposal that we're continuing on," Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News Digital. "And I wouldn't be surprised if they won't. This historic obstruction by the Democrats is all playing to their far-left liberal base, who hate President Trump."
Senate Republicans are eyeing a Democratic proposal from years ago to change the Senate's rules to ram President Donald Trump's nominees through Senate Democrats' blockade. (Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Republicans met throughout the week behind closed doors to discuss their options and have begun to coalesce around a proposal that would allow them to take one vote to confirm a group of nominees, also known as "en bloc," for sub-Cabinet level positions.
So far, the only nominee to make it through the Senate with ease was Secretary of State Marco Rubio in January. Since then, various positions throughout the bureaucracy have stacked up and have not received a voice vote or gone through unanimous consent — two commonly-used fast-track procedures for lower-level positions in the administration.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was in charge of the Democrats, "this was always done in a way where, if you had some of the lower-level nominees in the administration, those were all voted en bloc, they were packaged, they were grouped, they were stacked."
"This is the first president in history who, at this point in his presidency, hasn't had at least one nominee clear by unanimous consent or voice vote," he said. "It is unprecedented what they're doing. It's got to be stopped."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., heads to the Senate chamber on Jan. 22, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
And the number of nominees on the Senate's calendar continues to grow, reaching 149 picks awaiting confirmation this week. The goal would be to make that rule change before lawmakers leave town for a week starting Sept. 22.
The idea comes from legislation proposed in 2023 by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Angus King, I-Maine, and former Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. Republicans are eyeing their own spin on it, such as possibly not limiting the number of en bloc nominees in a group or excluding judicial nominees.
Republicans would prefer to avoid going nuclear — the last time the nuclear option was used was in 2019, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lowered debate time on nominees to two hours — but they are willing to do so, given that Democrats haven't budged on their blockade.
They may only be making a public display of resistance, however.
"Democrats privately support what Republicans are talking about," a senior GOP aide familiar with negotiations told Fox News Digital. "They're just too afraid to admit it."
Sen. James Lankford, who worked with Thune and Barrasso over the recess to build a consensus on a rule change proposal, told Fox News Digital that his Democratic colleagues acknowledged that they've "created a precedent that is not sustainable."
The idea comes from legislation proposed in 2023 by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., among others. (Bloomberg/Getty)
"But then they'll say, 'but my progressive base is screaming at me to fight however I want to. I know I'm damaging the Senate, but I got to show that I'm fighting,'" the Oklahoma Republican said.
"We feel stuck, I mean, literally," Lankford continued. "Some of my colleagues have said, 'We're not the ones going nuclear. They're the ones that are going nuclear.'"
Klobuchar told Fox News Digital that she appreciated the prior work she's done with Lankford on "ways to make the Senate better" but wasn't ready to get behind the GOP's version of her legislation.
"When I proposed that, it was meant to pass as legislation, which means you would have needed bipartisan votes, and the reason that's not happening right now is because the president keeps flaunting the law," she said.
Not every Senate Democrat is on board with the wholesale blockade, however.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., told Fox News Digital that lawmakers should all behave in a way in which administrations, either Republican or Democratic, get "those basic kinds of considerations" for nominees.
"That's not the resistance," he said. "I just think that's kind of unhelpful to just move forward. I mean, you can oppose people like the big ones, whether it's [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.] Kennedy or others."
Fox News Digital reached out to Schumer's office for comment but did not immediately hear back.
Alex Miller is a writer for Fox News Digital covering the U.S. Senate.
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