By Hanako Montgomery, Junko Ogura, Chris Lau, CNN

Tokyo (CNN) — Japanese fans rushed to farewell the country’s last two pandas on Sunday ahead of their return to China, in a departure that highlights strained relations between the two countries.

Twin cubs Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei will leave Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo Tuesday after meeting their fans for the last time on the weekend.

They were born in the Japanese capital, but China retains ownership over them, under the rules of Beijing’s “panda diplomacy.” The government there treats pandas as national symbols and goodwill ambassadors, loaning them to countries with which they wish to strengthen ties.

The duo’s departure leaves Japan without any pandas for the first time in more than five decades, at a time when relations between Asia’s two biggest economies are at their lowest point in years.

And politics wasn’t far from visitors’ minds when they paid last visits to the pandas over the past week.

“I’m really sad,” visitor Shoken Ikeda told CNN during a recent trip to the zoo with his wife. “We always said, ‘There’s a panda here, so we’ll get to see it sometime,’ and then this happened. I wish I’d come more often.”

Long lines began to form in the weeks leading up to the pandas’ last encounter with the public, prompting the zoo to switch to a lottery system for tickets.

Another panda fan Yukie Kuyama said she lined up for five hours to see the animals in early December. After winning the lottery, she came to see them again last week.

“That’s very disappointing. It feels sad that such cute, innocent animals are being used as a trump card – or even a tool – in diplomacy,” she said.

The siblings have different personalities, according to their keepers; Xiao Xiao is timid while his sister Lei Lei is fearless and adapts to changes quickly.

The two pandas were born in 2021 at the Ueno Zoo, to mother Shin Shin and father Ri Ri. The parents were returned to China in 2024, a year after the twins’ sister Xiang Xiang was also sent back.

Japan welcomed its first pandas in 1972 to mark the normalization of diplomatic ties with China. Since then, more pandas have arrived or were born locally, gaining a huge following.

But remarks from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – suggesting that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could trigger a military response from her country – has recently drawn ire from China.

Beijing has responded with a flurry of economic pressure, including cutting flights and warning citizens against traveling to Japan. The number of Chinese tourists in Japan dropped by almost a half last month year on year, to around 330,000, Tourism Minister Yasushi Kaneko said last week.

Chinese authorities have also suspended seafood imports and banned exports of rare earth elements with military uses, as they demand that Takaichi withdraw her comment. The Japanese leader said in November that her remarks were “hypothetical” and that she would avoid making similar comments again.

Meanwhile, Takaichi has called an election on February 8 in a bid to reinforce her mandate on a range of policies, potentially including her tougher stance on China, having secured the office by winning an internal contest among her Liberal Democratic Party in October.

Last year, China also took back four pandas from the zoo of a Japanes

CNN

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Four decades ago, 126 of Nan Goldin’s snapshots of love and loss became one of the most influential photo books ever made.

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” published by Aperture in 1986, follows Goldin and her friends through darkened nightclubs, daylit bedrooms, and late-night car rides around New York’s East Village, unfurling over time and space to Chicago, London, Berlin and Mexico City. The searingly intimate body of work seems to place the viewer inside the scenes, as she and her friends find belonging and desire and heartbreak. Though the group is predominately queer and was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, Goldin has said that her work is often incorrectly misunderstood as being about marginalized people.

“We were never marginalized because we were the world,” she told the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2013. “We didn’t care what straight people thought of us. We had no time for them, they didn’t show up on our radar, so we weren’t marginalized from anything.”

This month in London, Gagosian is exhibiting all 126 prints from the book, its first full showing in the United Kingdom. But the “Ballad” extends beyond the book and has been shown in many formats; it actually includes several hundred images and has expanded over time.

Before the book was published, to experience the “Ballad” was fleeting, rare and often, emotionally intense. Goldin originally conceived of it as a slideshow timed to songs by The Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick, played in nightclubs around New York, and eventually, in the Whitney Biennial in 1985. In this version of the work, the images flash: Friends on the sand at the beach, or splayed together in bed. Their gazes are bright, or disaffected, or longing. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Goldin’s best friend Cookie falls in love; she marries; she and her husband die.

“It is a work that I love because it occupies a space that is both photographic and time-based, but it also ends up functioning a bit like a piece of immersive cinema or installation art,” explained Katherine A. Bussard, the curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, which recently acquired a version of the slideshow. “The slideshow originally was really a live performance. So it was the artist standing there, dropping the slides in, DJing the soundtrack…for those who have seen it that way, they talk about the alive feeling of that experience.”

The book is its own form of intimacy, and has its own self-guided rhythm, Bussard pointed out. The Table of Contents takes the form of song titles to pair the music, if desired, and (unofficial) Spotify playlists have sprung up to assist.

Today, we expect art to be deeply personal to the artist, but Goldin was tapping into something novel as image-making shifted across the 1970s and ’80s, Bussard said. There was skepticism that “serious art could be made from one’s own lived experience” and that serious photography could be made in color. Styled like snapshots, the “Ballad” helped break both molds.

“There is a way in which the compositions, the subjects, even sometimes the blur of the camera conjures images that we’ve taken, or that our families took of us that that are the repository for our memories,” Bussard said. At the same time, she added, “people don’t make family albums about heartbreak. They didn’t pull out the Koda

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Four decades ago, 126 of Nan Goldin’s snapshots of love and loss became one of the most influential photo books ever made.

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” published by Aperture in 1986, follows Goldin and her friends through darkened nightclubs, daylit bedrooms, and late-night car rides around New York’s East Village, unfurling over time and space to Chicago, London, Berlin and Mexico City. The searingly intimate body of work seems to place the viewer inside the scenes, as she and her friends find belonging and desire and heartbreak. Though the group is predominately queer and was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, Goldin has said that her work is often incorrectly misunderstood as being about marginalized people.

“We were never marginalized because we were the world,” she told the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2013. “We didn’t care what straight people thought of us. We had no time for them, they didn’t show up on our radar, so we weren’t marginalized from anything.”

This month in London, Gagosian is exhibiting all 126 prints from the book, its first full showing in the United Kingdom. But the “Ballad” extends beyond the book and has been shown in many formats; it actually includes several hundred images and has expanded over time.

Before the book was published, to experience the “Ballad” was fleeting, rare and often, emotionally intense. Goldin originally conceived of it as a slideshow timed to songs by The Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick, played in nightclubs around New York, and eventually, in the Whitney Biennial in 1985. In this version of the work, the images flash: Friends on the sand at the beach, or splayed together in bed. Their gazes are bright, or disaffected, or longing. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Goldin’s best friend Cookie falls in love; she marries; she and her husband die.

“It is a work that I love because it occupies a space that is both photographic and time-based, but it also ends up functioning a bit like a piece of immersive cinema or installation art,” explained Katherine A. Bussard, the curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, which recently acquired a version of the slideshow. “The slideshow originally was really a live performance. So it was the artist standing there, dropping the slides in, DJing the soundtrack…for those who have seen it that way, they talk about the alive feeling of that experience.”

The book is its own form of intimacy, and has its own self-guided rhythm, Bussard pointed out. The Table of Contents takes the form of song titles to pair the music, if desired, and (unofficial) Spotify playlists have sprung up to assist.

Today, we expect art to be deeply personal to the artist, but Goldin was tapping into something novel as image-making shifted across the 1970s and ’80s, Bussard said. There was skepticism that “serious art could be made from one’s own lived experience” and that serious photography could be made in color. Styled like snapshots, the “Ballad” helped break both molds.

“There is a way in which the compositions, the subjects, even sometimes the blur of the camera conjures images that we’ve taken, or that our families took of us that that are the repository for our memories,” Bussard said. At the same time, she added, “people don’t make family albums about heartbreak. They didn’t pull out the Kodak camera to record moments of despair or longing or upset or death… so at the same time that the ‘Ballad’ is leaning into snapshots, it’s also changing them into something more expansive.”

Goldin herself has written on the potency of memory and the senses it invokes, calling memory “an invocation

By Andy Rose, CNN

(CNN) — The body of Renee Good had not yet been turned over to her family when the Trump administration announced her fatal shooting by an ICE agent was in response to “an act of domestic terrorism.” Later, sources told CNN the Justice Department stopped investigating the agent and federal authorities refused to share information with local investigators.

Good’s family, including her partner, Becca, decided to get answers on their own. They hired the legal team connected to another case of deadly force by law enforcement in Minneapolis – the 2020 death of George Floyd under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin.

“The community is not receiving transparency about this case elsewhere, so our team will provide that to the country,” said the law firm of Romanucci & Blandin, the same lawyers who represented Floyd’s family in a civil lawsuit.

The Floyd case resulted in a $27 million payout by the city of Minneapolis, which the firm said was the largest pretrial settlement of a wrongful death civil rights case.

This month the attorneys sent letters to federal agencies connected to Good’s shooting, saying they “anticipate bringing legal action” over allegations including excessive force and negligence and demanding evidence be preserved. One of those letters was sent to the home of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fired the fatal shots January 7 in Minneapolis.

“We need to know based on the totality of circumstances – not only looking at the video, but also looking at the intent that was there, looking at reasonable police practices,” family attorney Antonio Romanucci told CNN’s Erin Burnett last week.

Taking on the city of Minneapolis in the George Floyd case was challenging, but Romanucci acknowledges this case – suing the United States government for the conduct of an immigration officer – is harder.

“Legal action against the federal government is even more complex,” Romanucci said.

Good’s family can’t immediately file a lawsuit against the administration

For most of the country’s history, suing the United States for harm caused by a government employee was impossible. Until 1946, most citizens seeking compensation for a negligent or wrongful act by a civil servant could get it only through a literal act of Congress, case by case.

“And Congress hated it because people who had these claims would just constantly contact their congressman to say, ‘How’s my claim going?’” said Paul Figley, professor emeritus at the American University Washington

By John Towfighi, CNN

New York (CNN) — The stock market in President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House was the weakest of any president’s first year of a new term since 2005, when George W. Bush started his second term.

From Trump’s inauguration day to January 20, 2026, the S&P 500 rose 13.3% — healthy gains by any standard. But it was the worst start to a presidency in 20 years. In comparison, the S&P 500 gained 24.1% across the first year of Trump’s first term, according to CFRA Research.

Stocks climbed higher across the past year, extending a bull run driven by enthusiasm about artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, international stocks outperformed the United States in 2025 for the first time in years.

The stock market, of course, doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Trump’s second term came on the heels of the S&P 500’s first back-to-back annual gains of more than 20% since the 1990s. The bar for further gains was already set pretty high.

Still, this past year has been marked by policy whiplash from the Trump administration.

Stocks slid to the brink of a bear market in April amid tariff uncertainty before sharply rebounding as Trump backed off his most severe threats. The S&P clinched 39 record highs across the year. In comparison, the index clinched 62 record highs in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term.

Trump appears to be aware of the stock market’s performance and views the market as a barometer for his success. On Wednesday, he said the recent stock market dip because of uncertainty about Greenland and tariffs was “peanuts” and the market would soon be “doubled.” He backed off his tariffs later in the day, which sent stocks on a rebound.

US stocks gained in 2025 amid enthusiasm about AI, optimism about Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, corporate earnings that remain robust and an economy that proved resilient. Trump in the summer also signed his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law. The stimulative impact of that policy could provide a further boost to markets this year.

“The front-end loading of this stimulus is a big reason why the stock market did well the first year of this term,” Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co, said in an email.

“This is also why many investors are thinking that the president wants to ‘let the economy run hot’ through the midterm elections,” Maley said. “This does not mean that the second year will be as bullish for stocks as the first year, but there is little question that the administration wants to see a very strong stock market this year, especially in the 5-6 months leading into those midterm elections.”

Strong gains, historic volatility

The first year of Trump’s second term yielded solid gains and bouts of volatility. Wall Street’s fear gauge, the VIX, surged to historically high levels in the spring amid the turmoil surrounding Trump’s tariffs.

“The only truly exceptional thing was that the VIX went over 50 for the first time since the pandemic during the height of trade policy uncertainty,” Nick Colas, co-founder at DataTrek Research, said in an email.

Tim Thomas, chief investment officer at Badgley Phelps Wealth Managem