This year's epic, never-ending news cycles were driven by stunning levels of political violence and uncertainty — plus the Olympics, Axios' Noah Bressner writes from our annual analysis of Google Trends data.

• Why it matters: Even in a wild election year, America's short attention span for news led to dramatic ups and downs in search trends (charted above) as the media pivoted from one major story to the next.

The big picture: The Paris Games were the news event that saw the largest spike in interest compared to others analyzed by Axios.

• The election itself — peaking on Nov. 5 — and the Pennsylvania assassination attempt targeting Donald Trump were runners-up.
• On the lighter side, the next two biggest peaks were for the total solar eclipse in April and Mike Tyson's return to boxing against YouTuber Jake Paul.

🔎 Zoom in: Only a small handful of people and news events held public attention over long periods.

• Trump, of course, was one of them. He became the first former president convicted of felony crimes, survived two assassination attempts and was the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades.
• Attention on President Biden shot up after his catastrophic debate performance in June and peaked around July 21, when he dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Harris.
• Elon Musk attracted search interest all year. But it boomed in October and early November as he unleashed unprecedented sums of cash to get Trump elected and personally campaigned in Pennsylvania. (More on Musk in Item 3.)

🎸 Among celebrities and athletes, Taylor Swift once again commanded an outsize share of attention.

• The deaths of O.J. Simpson and former One Direction singer Liam Payne made them two of the most searched people of the year.

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Hackers connected to China's government breached several Treasury Department workstations and accessed unclassified documents, Axios cybersecurity reporter Sam Sabin writes from a Treasury letter to Congress.

• Why it matters: The U.S. government is already scrambling to respond to an ongoing China-backed hack of American telecom networks that targeted high-profile officials.

Aditi Hardikar, Treasury's assistant secretary for management, wrote to the Senate Banking Committee that the department was notified of a "major" cyber incident on Dec. 8.

• The hackers, which Treasury has linked to an unspecified Chinese state-sponsored hacking group, gained access to Treasury's networks via software service provider BeyondTrust, according to the letter.

💻 How it worked: Chinese hackers stole a key that BeyondTrust uses to "secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support" for several Treasury Department users.

• The hackers leveraged that access to override BeyondTrust's security controls and access unclassified documents.

A Treasury spokesperson said in a statement to Axios that the "compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline" and there is "no evidence indicating a threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems."

• The Chinese Embassy in Washington accused the U.S. of "smear attacks."

Read the 1-page letter ... Share this story.

Elon Musk overshadowed coverage of other CEOs this year by a staggering margin, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes.

• Why it matters: It's a self-sustaining cycle. Stories about Musk get clicks — so publishers write more about Musk, who provides plenty of raw material.

🧮 By the numbers: Taboola, which powers advertising for thousands of websites, tracks views on news articles in its publisher network.

• Taboola data, shared exclusively with Axios, shows Musk has outpaced his closest peers — Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — for years. But the gap widened dramatically in 2024.
• This year, traffic on Musk stories is almost three times the traffic about the next nine most-read-about CEOs combined.

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Big swaths of the U.S., including the South and Southeast, are likely to see frigid air that could break records and bring potentially blockbuster winter storms, Axios extreme weather expert Andrew Freedman writes.

• Why it matters: The most extreme scenarios may pose risks of power outages.

❄️ Overnight low temperatures below 0°F are possible.

• Keep reading.

U.S. immigration courts are on pace to decide record numbers of deportation cases — and order the most removals in five years — under President Biden's push to fast-track asylum decisions, Axios' Russell Contreras writes.

• Why it matters: The increases will help reduce a backlog of 3.7 million immigration cases that could take four years to resolve.

Biden's fast-track system — with immigration judges hearing and ruling on asylum requests in a matter of minutes — stands to be overrun by President-elect Trump's plan for mass deportations.

• Without significant increases in immigration court personnel and other resources for asylum claims, Trump's plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants could create decades-long backlogs in immigration courts.

🧮 By the numbers: Immigration courts are on pace to rule on 852,000 deportation cases from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025, according to case data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

• If that pace continues, immigration judges will rule on more deportation cases in 2025 than in any previous year.

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Major energy companies doubled down on oil and gas in 2024, slowing down — and at times reversing — climate commitments, in a shift they're likely to stick with in 2025.

• Why it matters: Big European energy companies that invested heavily in the clean energy transition found their stocks lagging U.S. rivals Exxon and Chevron, which kept their focus on oil and gas, Reuters reports.

💰 So BP and Shell this year sharply slowed their plans to spend billions on wind and solar power projects and shifted spending to higher-margin oil and gas projects.

🔎 Between the lines: Axios' Andrew Freedman tells me from vacation that the big oil companies are focused on meeting customer demand and maximizing shareholder value. That has led them to focus more on their core fossil fuel businesses at a time of geopolitical strife.

• They haven't abandoned their forays into cleaner fuels, including through investments in climate tech companies. But some of their investments, including bets on hydrogen fuels, haven't panned out — reinforcing their pivot back to what they do best.

🌐 Reality check: Doubling down on fossil fuels complicates global efforts to meet the Paris climate targets, which the oil majors have committed to.

The bottom line: Oil companies this year were profitable — but not as profitable as in recent record years, when there were higher oil prices.

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Five years ago today, a "pneumonia of unknown cause" with a total of 44 cases — later known as COVID-19 — was first reported in China.

• Why it matters: It changed the world, triggering a cascade of lockdowns that upended economies and sparked political upheaval across the globe.

Full timeline.

A marquee West Coast New Year's Eve celebration is long overdue, Axios San Diego's Andrew Keatts writes.

• Why it matters: More than 22% of Americans live in the Pacific or Mountain time zones. And every year, they celebrate new beginnings by watching a rerun.

🎇 The big picture: There's never been a major New Year's tradition that gives the Western time zones an alternative to watching a replay of the ball drop in Times Square.

• It's a 77-million-person-strong market opportunity, just waiting to be filled.

🎲 Las Vegas is making a go of it this year. Dick Clark Productions is launching a bicoastal expansion of ABC's annual "New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest" telecast, featuring "the first-ever live countdown from Las Vegas."

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