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From explosive scandals to global conflicts, these headlines shaped our world! Join us as we look back at the news stories that defined 2025. From the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce engagement that broke the internet to the shocking Louvre heist, the historic election of NYC's first Muslim mayor, and the record-breaking government shutdown. Which story impacted you most?
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00:00We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at news stories that define 2025.
00:11Some shocking, others tragic, many that just raised eyebrows,
00:15and occasionally one that left us optimistic.
00:17On Friday, it looked like a done deal, but today,
00:20Paramount Skydance entered with a hostile bid.
00:24Andy Byron and Kristen Kabat called on KissCam.
00:27I could have never guessed that it would be such high-profile individuals in the video.
00:34I do feel sorry for their partners and spouses that they had to find out this way.
00:39The KissCam is intended to bring couples closer, but in some cases, it's grounds for separation.
00:44At a Coldplay concert in July, astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company's HR head,
00:49Kristen Kabat, wound up on the big screen.
00:52As it turns out, both were married to other people.
00:54Yeah, oh, look at these two.
00:56All right, come on, you're okay?
00:58Although some sources claim the two were just friends, both resigned shortly after the viral incident.
01:03Kabat has also filed for divorce from her husband, Andrew, although they were supposedly already separated.
01:08According to People, Andrew was also at the concert on a date with someone else.
01:12Byron and his wife, Megan Kerrigan, have remained together despite this sitcom-esque fiasco.
01:17Andy Byron, CEO of a billion-dollar AI company, and Kristen Kabat, his head of human resources,
01:24were seen shrinking in panic at the concert.
01:27He's married with teenage children.
01:29Kristen Kabat has been divorced for three years.
01:32She was hired just eight months ago.
01:35The Ukraine-Russia conflict rages on.
01:37It is just unimaginable to use such powerful, high-precision weapons in the central part of a city.
01:47When the Russo-Ukrainian war commenced in 2022,
01:50some were hopeful that we wouldn't still be talking about it three years later.
01:53Unfortunately, the conflict has continued with seemingly no end in sight.
01:56As of writing, Russia still occupies roughly 20% of Ukraine,
02:00although Ukraine has remained resilient throughout.
02:03The number of civilian casualties rose more than 25% between January and October compared to last year.
02:09This is the command center, where Ukraine's Scala Assault Regiment is coordinating the fight.
02:17They say they have hundreds of soldiers still in the city.
02:20They want to show us.
02:25To refute what they say is another Kremlin lie.
02:282025 also marked the year when the number of Russian troops lost surpassed one million,
02:33according to the British Ministry of Defense.
02:35It's as if these two countries are frozen in time,
02:37with virtually every day bringing more stories of death and destruction.
02:41Attempts at peaceful negotiations have been mostly ineffective,
02:44with Russia's leadership unlikely to compromise anytime soon.
02:48The LA protests concerning deportation.
02:50I have declared a local emergency and issued a curfew for downtown Los Angeles.
02:57Mayor Bass calls for an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for about a one-square-mile downtown.
03:02The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE,
03:06was introduced in 2002 following the 9-11 tragedies.
03:09Although some believe the organization is a fundamental facet of homeland security,
03:13former senior ICE official Scott Schuchart has expressed fear that Trump is forming a private army.
03:18Schuchart made this comparison following the protests against mass deportation in Los Angeles,
03:23which occurred between June and July.
03:24This is probably the place where I feel the most American,
03:27with my other community members really just trying to share our voice.
03:31The march started at City Hall, and people walked through downtown for hours.
03:35Although the protests were mostly peaceful and didn't occupy much space,
03:39Trump called upon an estimated 4,000 members of the National Guard,
03:42which Judge Charles Breyer declared violated the Pos Comitatus Act.
03:46California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken legal action against Trump.
03:50Discussing whether or not he'd have Newsom arrested, Trump wasn't exactly opposed to the idea.
03:55They were all the way back by the 710 freeway here when they were struggling with the protesters
04:01to get control of this street back.
04:03Again, you can see the fire department coming into the scene right now,
04:06but it looks like a war zone down here.
04:08Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's engagement.
04:10The palms were definitely sweating.
04:12Really?
04:13I was definitely, I'm an emotional guy, so there were a few tears here and there,
04:17but it's been an exciting, exciting ride up to this date,
04:20and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with her.
04:22Since she first hit the scene, the public has been obsessed with Taylor Swift's love life.
04:26Her relationship with three-time Super Bowl champion Travis Kelce has been different, however.
04:31Since they started dating in 2023, fans have speculated whether or not this could be the one.
04:35We got an answer in August, when the couple posted,
04:38your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.
04:40That pretty much summed up everyone's sentiment, but imagine a school on a global scale.
04:45Within six hours, their announcement exceeded one million reposts on Instagram,
04:49setting a new record.
04:50The engagement was arguably even bigger than Swift's new album,
04:53The Life of a Showgirl, which was largely inspired by her relationship with Kelce.
04:57Oh my lord, can we look just at the other things?
05:02The Southern California wildfires.
05:05This is where your home used to be, right.
05:08You guys are going to rebuild on this property?
05:13Yeah.
05:14No U.S. state has attracted more wildfires than California.
05:17According to the National Interagency Fire Center,
05:20January saw not one, but two of the worst wildfires in Los Angeles' history.
05:25While the Palisades and Eaton were responsible for much of the devastation,
05:28a few others led to excavations in parts of Ventura and San Diego as well.
05:32The winds were ferocious.
05:34If you could open your eyes from all the dust flying around,
05:36you would see the mountains on fire,
05:39and the fire was climbing up the mountain and also going down the mountain.
05:43L.A. got hit the hardest, however.
05:45The colder weather didn't help.
05:46In fact, the Santa Ana winds only fanned the flames of chaos.
05:50Although the fires would be contained by the end of January,
05:53many lost their lives.
05:54Over 50,000 acres burned,
05:56and more than 18,000 structures were destroyed.
05:58In addition to celebrity-owned homes,
06:01the fires affected numerous low-income households,
06:03some of which were uninsured.
06:05Your life savings was in this property.
06:07Yeah, exactly.
06:09And you're not going to get any of that, nearly all of that back.
06:12No.
06:13Late Night Under Attack
06:14In July, Paramount reached a $16 million settlement with President Trump
06:18over a 60-minute segment.
06:20While they might have won in court,
06:22it was speculated that Paramount didn't want Trump jeopardizing a pending Skydance merger.
06:26Stephen Colbert went as far as to call this a big, fat bribe.
06:29I'm so grateful to the Tiffany Network for giving me this chair
06:33and this beautiful theater to call home.
06:35And of course, I'm grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us.
06:40Coincidentally, or perhaps not depending on who you ask,
06:43news broke that The Late Show would end in May 2026.
06:46CBS chalked this up to financial reasons,
06:49despite Colbert's number one ratings.
06:51Many theorized that one of Trump's loudest critics was being targeted,
06:54a sentiment echoed in September when Jimmy Kimmel Live was pulled
06:57after the host criticized MAGA's reaction to Charlie Kirk's death.
07:00I've seen a lot of extraordinarily vile responses to this
07:04from both sides of the political spectrum.
07:06Some people are cheering this, which is something I won't ever understand.
07:11Despite pushback from the FCC and some broadcasters,
07:14Kimmel returned to record ratings.
07:16Maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don't support my show
07:21and what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway.
07:25The Louvre heist.
07:26A crew, gear, and a plan.
07:30The greatest heist in modern times is set in motion.
07:34Pulling off a heist at the Louvre sounds like the premise for a Danny Ocean movie
07:37or a Dan Brown novel.
07:39The Paris Museum has seen multiple thefts over the decades.
07:42However, 2025 marked the first since 1998,
07:45when the still-missing, Le Chemin de Sevres, was taken.
07:48This year, the French crown jewels were swiped from the Galerie de Apollon.
07:53The embarrassing incident has raised serious questions about security procedures,
07:57protecting the museum's collection of over half a million items.
08:01At least eight people posing as construction workers committed the crime in under eight minutes,
08:06getting away with eight pieces of jewelry, estimated at 88 million euros.
08:10That's a lot of eights.
08:11The crime was committed during the day while the museum was open to the public.
08:14Although several arrests have been made, the exact location of the stolen jewels remains a mystery as of writing.
08:21The problem has been swept under the carpet for 40 years.
08:24That's where the responsibility lies.
08:26Visitor's safety has been paramount.
08:28Safeguarding the works has been of lesser concern.
08:30Zoran Mamdani elected New York's mayor.
08:32Freeze the rent! Freeze the rent! Freeze the rent!
08:37We are going to deliver a four-year rent freeze for more than two million New Yorkers across the country.
08:41After a monumental defeat in 2024, Democrats saw several significant victories this November.
08:46The one that arguably attracted the most headlines was the mayoral race in New York.
08:50With Eric Adams' re-election campaign fumbling amid ongoing controversy, the election came down to three candidates.
08:56Mr. Mamdani, how will you deal with Trump?
08:58If he tries to thwart you once you're elected?
09:01Donald Trump will try to thwart me as Donald Trump tries to thwart anyone who has ideas to actually deliver for the working class people that he's betrayed.
09:06While Curtis Sliwa was the Republican nominee, most agreed that the race was between Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, and Zoran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
09:17Mamdani stood to become New York's youngest mayor in over a century, in addition to the city's first Muslim and South Asian mayor ever.
09:24He achieved all of these milestones with over 50% of the vote.
09:27Despite endorsing Cuomo, Trump seemingly got chummy with Mamdani in the Oval Office.
09:31So hear me, President Trump, when I say this. To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.
09:41Prince Andrew stripped of titles.
09:43Mountbatten-Windsor's name appears in documents and flight logs which were subpoenaed from Epstein's estate and publicly released by the committee.
09:50The former prince has always denied any wrongdoing.
09:53There was much discussion in 2025 concerning who is in the Epstein files, as well as whether the full client list would be released to the public, unredacted.
10:02Few had fallen farther due to their ties with Epstein than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
10:07Up until this year, the public knew him better as Prince Andrew.
10:10He was stripped of that title, along with various other honors and residents at Loyola.
10:14He has been stripped of his prized prince title, and will now be simply known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
10:23As the Epstein scandal continued to unfold, Andrew lost many of these privileges following the self-termination of Virginia Giuffre,
10:30who had accused Epstein and the former prince of sex trafficking.
10:33Giuffre's memoir was published posthumously in October, the same month news broke that Andrew would no longer be Prince Andrew, yet is still eighth in line.
10:41Earlier this month, he relinquished his remaining titles, including the Duke of York, ahead of the posthumous publication of Giuffre's memoir,
10:50where she alleged that she felt the now 65-year-old believed having sex with her, while she was still underage, was, quote, his birthright.
10:59The 12-day war.
11:00Iran says it will not abandon what it calls its peaceful uranium enrichment program.
11:05Meanwhile, Israel has nuclear weapons and bars international inspectors from its sites.
11:11The Gaza war, which has been ongoing since 2023, wasn't the only military conflict connected to Israel in 2025.
11:18In June, Israel bombed Iran, reportedly due to the latter country's nuclear program.
11:23Although Iran possesses a potentially concerning amount of enriched uranium, there's no evidence that the nation has any nuclear weapons as of now.
11:30Nevertheless, Israel launched the surprise attack, which not only led to deaths and injuries among Iran's military, but civilians as well.
11:37Iran's missiles never reached their intended target, the largest U.S. airbase in the Middle East.
11:44Intercepted one by one in the sky above Doha, no casualties reported on the ground.
11:50The Iran-Israel war lasted nearly 12 days, finally reaching a ceasefire with intervention from the U.S. and Qatar.
11:56Even so, there remains skepticism over Iran's nuclear program and Israel's continued military operations across the Middle East, which are showing few signs of a peaceful resolution.
12:06But people have the suspicious because they have seen how sometimes Israel has behaved in Lebanon, in Gaza after the ceasefire.
12:14Sean Combs convicted.
12:15None of these cases is ever a straight line from start to finish.
12:19There's always ups and downs for both sides.
12:21You can never tell what a jury's going to do.
12:23This rapper's reputation has spiraled since his ex, Cassie Ventura, brought forth sexual assault allegations in 2023.
12:30This was followed by numerous accusations from other parties, leading to an arrest in 2024.
12:35Diddy was staying in Midtown Manhattan.
12:38He apparently knew this was coming.
12:41Combs' trial finally began in May 2025, reaching a verdict in July.
12:46While Combs was found not guilty on the more serious charges concerning racketeering and sex trafficking, he was found guilty on two counts of illegally transporting individuals for sex acts.
12:55By October, Combs was sentenced to four years incarceration, with another five years of supervised release.
13:01Taking the year Combs already served into account, he'll likely be released in May 2028.
13:06Combs' legal team has pursued a pardon from President Trump, although the White House has rejected the plea.
13:10For now.
13:11Video of the savage beating of Cassie Ventura in a hotel hallway called for a more substantial sentence than the 14 months requested by the defense.
13:21The prosecution asked for 11 years.
13:24Charlie Kirk's assassination.
13:25At Utah Valley University, he engaged with a large crime.
13:29Get comfortable.
13:31Bring the best libs that Utah has to offer.
13:34What he didn't know was that there was an assassin among them.
13:38Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure, to say the least.
13:42The right and left were equally shocked, though, when news broke that Kirk had been fatally shot during an event at Utah Valley University in September 2025.
13:51Tyler James Robinson, who has been accused of shooting Kirk, turned himself in shortly after.
13:55Critics of Kirk noted his support of gun rights, having stated,
13:58I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.
14:08Although not everyone was sympathetic, many who disagree with Kirk's political views expressed empathy toward him and his family.
14:14With political tensions rising over the years, Kirk's death could be seen as a boiling point.
14:19Yet, the water doesn't seem to be getting any cooler.
14:21I would oppose a lot of the underlying traditional conservatism that he advocated for.
14:30I think a lot of it was hateful, a lot of it was dehumanizing, a lot of it was bigoted towards marginalized and vulnerable communities and populations.
14:38Volodymyr Zelensky's meeting with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
14:42It's been a chaotic year at the White House, and not just because of remodeling.
14:45In February,
14:46I brought these along so people could see, but very great patriots, actually.
14:51And the spirit on the building of it is amazing.
14:54We are using little sections of footings and various other things, but that's sort of irrelevant.
14:59President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance met with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office.
15:05What ensued was louder than any bulldozer.
15:08Although many were eager to hear about the Mineral Resources Agreement, it wouldn't be signed until April.
15:12Instead, this meeting played more like something out of reality TV.
15:16Mr. Trump's position has not changed much in the last eight months.
15:20He still sounds frustrated with the Ukrainian leader, who he says needs to start accepting American proposals as Russia is winning the war.
15:27While it started professionally enough, things went south when Vance accused Zelensky of being disrespectful.
15:33It wasn't long until the presidents were talking over each other, as Trump pressured Zelensky to make a deal with Russia.
15:38The shouting match ended abruptly, with Trump saying it'd be great television.
15:42Few would call it great foreign policy, however.
15:45Obama gave you sheets.
15:47In fact, the statement is, Obama gave sheets and Trump gave javelins.
15:52You gotta be more thankful.
15:54Leo XIV becomes the first American-born pope.
15:57This is beyond our wildest dreams.
15:59This is exciting.
16:00We're from Chicago to have a Chicago pope.
16:03Speaking of J.D. Vance, he met with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday.
16:06The next day, Francis passed away, following a series of medical problems.
16:10On May 8th, 2025, the Papal Conclave selected Francis' successor, Leo XIV.
16:16Named Robert Francis Prevost at birth, Leo XIV made headlines as the first pope who was born in the U.S.
16:23Can any of us imagine what it is like to stand in that place right now and looking out on that crowd?
16:28Leo XIV was raised in Chicago, going on to serve as a missionary in Peru.
16:39This also made Leo XIV the first pope with Peruvian citizenship.
16:43Leo XIV additionally received Vatican City citizenship in 2023, the same year that Francis made him a cardinal.
16:49Originally being from Chicago, it should come as no surprise that Leo XIV reportedly prefers his hot dogs without ketchup.
16:55But a real emphasis on community, learning, hospitality, pastoral care, and social justice, I think would be hallmarks of the Augustinian that you'll see.
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17:17The government shutdown.
17:21With funding set to expire at midnight, Democratic leader Chuck Schumer putting the onus on President Trump.
17:27He is using Americans as political pawn.
17:30With the Republican-controlled House and Democrats in the Senate unable to reach an agreement on the U.S. federal budget for 2026, the government shut down on October 1st.
17:40This wasn't the first shutdown on President Trump's watch, but it was even longer than the one from 2018 to 2019.
17:45In fact, it was the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
17:49We are not going to let Republicans dodge this subject.
17:52I actually think that this emboldens them in some way to say, look what they're doing, right?
17:56They can't be treated as operating in good faith.
18:00Over these 43 days, almost 900,000 federal employees were furloughed, while nearly 2 million worked without compensation.
18:07The shutdown affected various programs, including SNAP, which over 40 million Americans rely on for food aid.
18:13An agreement was finally met on November 12th, although some argued that Democrats caved to a deal that leaves the future of the Affordable Care Act uncertain.
18:20It's kind of hard to figure out where we're going to be a month from now.
18:24I hope I'm not still sitting down here a month from now doing this.
18:29Which news story shocked you the most in 2025?
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