After turning back the clock on Christmas, looking very much like he was still in his prime, veteran safety Harrison Smith has been named the NFC Defensive Player of the Week.

The vintage performance from Smith helped the Vikings roll to a 23-10 win over the Detroit Lions. He finished the game with one sack, two tackles for a loss, one interception, and three passes defended.

The splash plays from Smith highlighted a dominant display from the defense as the Vikings forced the Lions into six turnovers.

It’s still unclear if Smith plans to retire once this season wraps up. He’s been a star for the Vikings since being selected in the first round 2012 NFL Draft, and if he decides to hang the cleats up for good, it’s fitting that he earned another accolade on his way out the door.

Asked about Smith earlier this week, defensive coordinator Brian Flores referred to him as one of the best players he’s ever been around. The stats speak for themselves in that respect as Smith now has 1,180 tackles, 21 1/2 sacks, and 39 interceptions across 202 games in his career.

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By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — By nearly any measure, 2025 has been a rough year for anyone concerned about freedom of the press.

It’s likely to be the deadliest year on record for journalists and media workers. The number of assaults on reporters in the U.S. nearly equals the last three years combined. The president of the United States berates many who ask him questions, calling one woman “piggy.” And the ranks of those doing the job continues to thin.

It’s hard to think of a darker time for journalists. So say many, including Tim Richardson, a former Washington Post reporter and now program director for journalism and disinformation at PEN America. “It’s safe to say this assault on the press over the past year has probably been the most aggressive that we’ve seen in modern times.”

FILE – Palestinians walk along a street past a tent camp, backdropped by buildings destroyed during Israeli air and ground operations in Gaza City, Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

Tracking killings and assaults against journalists

Worldwide, the 126 media industry people killed in 2025 by early December matched the number of deaths in all of 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and last year was a record-setter. Israel’s bombing of Gaza accounted for 85 of those deaths, 82 of them Palestinians.

“It’s extremely concerning,” said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Unfortunately, it’s not just, of course, about the sheer numbers of journalists and media workers killed, it’s also about the failure to obtain justice or get accountability for those killings.

“What we know from decades of doing this work is that impunity breeds impunity,” she said. “So a failure to tackle journalists’ killings creates an environment where those killings continue.”

The committee estimates there are at least 323 journalists imprisoned worldwide.

None of those killed this year were from the United States. But the work on American soil has still been dangerous. There have been 170 reports of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Many of those reports came from coverage of immigration enforcement efforts.

It’s impossible to look past the influence of President Donald Trump, who frequently seethes with anger at the press while simultaneously interacting with journalists more than any president in memory — frequently answering their cellphone calls.

“Trump has always attacked the press,” Richardson said. “But during the second term, he’s turned that into government action to restrict and punish and intimidate journalists.”

Journalists learn quickly they have a fight on their hands

The Associated Press learned that quickly, when Trump limited the outlet’s access to cover him after it refused to follow his lead to rename the Gulf of Mexico. It launched a court fight that has remained unresolved. Trump has also extracted settlements from ABC and CBS News in lawsuits over stories that displeased him, and is suing The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Long angry about a perceived bias against conservatives on PBS and NPR newscasts, Trump and his allies in Congress successfully cut funding for public broadcasting as a whole. The president has also moved to shut down government-run organizations that beam news to all parts of the world.

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“The U.S. is a major investor in media development, in independent media outlets in countries that have little or no independent media, or as a source of information for people in countries where there is no free media,” Ginsberg said. “The evisceration of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America is another blow to press freedom globally.”

Others in his administration take Trump’s lead, like when his press office chose the day after Thanksgiving to launch a web portal to complain about outlets or journalists being unfair.

“It’s part of this overall strategy that we’re seeing from certain governments, notably the United States, to paint all journalists who don’t simply (repeat) the narrative put out by the government as fake news, as dubious, as dodgy, as criminal,” Ginsberg said.

Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has portrayed journalists as dark figures skulking around Pentagon halls to uncover classified secrets as his rationale for putting in restrictive rules for coverage.

That’s led to the most notable example of journalists fighting back: most mainstream news outlets gave up their credentials to work in the Pentagon rather than agree to these rules, and are still breaking stories while working off-site. The New York Times has sued to overturn the rules. The newspaper also publicly defends itself when attacked by the president, such as when he complained about its coverage of his health.

FILE – Members of the media pack up their belongings in the press area of the Pentagon, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf, File)

Despite the more organized effort against the press, the public has taken little notice. The Pew Research Center said that 36% of Americans reported earlier this year hearing a lot about the Trump administration’s relationship with the press, compared to 72% who said that at the same point in his first term.

Pew’s polling shows that trust in news organizations has declined over the last decade, and journalists are likely to elicit little sympathy when their work becomes harder.

“Really, the harm falls on the public with so much of this because the public depends on this independent reporting to understand and scrutinize the decisions that are being made by the most powerful office in the world,” Richardson said.

Some reasons for optimism

The news industry as a whole is more than two decades in to a retrenchment caused largely by a collapse in the advertising market, and every year brings more reports of journalists laid off as a result. One of the year’s most sobering statistics came in a report by the organizations Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News: in 2002, there were 40 journalists for every 100,000 people in the United States and by this year, it was down to just over eight.

Asked if they could find reasons for optimism, both Ginsberg and Richardson pointed to the rise of some independent local news organizations, shoots of growth in a barren landscape, places like the Baltimore Banner, Charlottesville Tomorrow in Virginia and Outlier Media in Michigan.

As much as they are derided in Trump’s America, influential Axios CEO Jim VandeHei noted in a column recently that reporters at mainstream media outlets are still working hard and able to set the nation’s agenda with their reporting.

As he told the AP: “Over time, people will hopefully come to their senses and say, ‘Hey, the media like anything else is imperfect but, man, it’s a nice thing to have a free press.’”

David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

GELSENKIRCHEN, Germany (AP) — Thieves stole tens of millions of euros’ worth of property from safety deposit boxes inside a German bank vault that they drilled into Monday during the holiday lull, police said.

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Some 2,700 bank customers were affected by the theft in Gelsenkirchen, police and the Sparkasse bank said. About 3,000 safety deposit boxes, which made up more than 95% of the bank’s inventory, were broken into.

Thomas Nowaczyk, a police spokesperson, said investigators believe the theft was worth between 10 million and 90 million euros ($11.7 million to $105.7 million).

German news agency dpa reported that the theft could be one of Germany’s largest.

The bank remained closed Tuesday, when some 200 people showed up demanding to get inside, dpa reported.

Each safety deposit box is insured for 10,300 euros ($12,088) unless a bank customer additionally insures it privately, Sparkasse said on its website.

This picture, provided by the Gelsenkirchen Police on Monday, Dec. 29, 2025 shows a hole in a wall of the savings bank branch in the Buer district in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. (Police Gelsenkirchen via AP)

A fire alarm summoned police officers and firefighters to the bank branch shortly before 4 a.m. Monday. They found a hole in the wall and the vault ransacked. Police believe a large drill was used to break through the vault’s basement wall.

Witnesses told investigators they saw several men carrying large bags in a nearby parking garage over the weekend. Video footage from the garage shows masked people inside a stolen vehicle early Monday, police said.

The fire alarm was also triggered Saturday but authorities did not find any damage.

Gelsenkirchen is about 192 kilometers northwest of Frankfurt.

Minnesota Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson is the latest state lawmaker to call for Gov. Tim Walz to resign as fraud investigations and allegations receive increasing attention.

“I think it would be best for him to resign,” Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, told Forum News Service earlier this week. “Will he do that? I don’t know. I mean, we haven’t seen any Democrats in either the House or the Senate call for his resignation. Which, to me, is a little bit disappointing as well, too, because they gotta recognize the issues that we’re facing here in Minnesota, and that’s a significant part of it.”

Johnson joins five lawmakers who on Monday sent out a joint call for Walz to resign: Sen. Bill Lieske, R-Lonsdale; Sen. Nathan Wesenberg, R-Little Falls; Rep. Marj Fogelman, R-Fulda; Rep. Drew Roach, R-Farmington, and Rep. Mike Wiener, R-Long Prairie.

Johnson said that in the private sector, any CEO or head of a company would be held accountable in a similar situation.

“You’re seeing the same thing here. If he’s going to be the executive of this branch — we see all the fraud that’s going on throughout that — I think it is time for the governor to really realize his role in that and take responsibility,” Johnson said of Walz.

Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, was less committal during a Monday news conference when asked about calls for Walz to resign.

“Taxpayers are fed up with this. They’re frustrated. We watched our state budget explode. We watched all of our taxes and fees go up, and Minnesota taxpayers across the state are done with funding fraud,” said Demuth, who is campaigning for the Republican nomination for governor. “That’s a frustration that we are hearing from across the state, and as you saw in the letter (from the five Republican lawmakers) today.”

It’s not the first time Minnesota Republicans have asked Walz to resign. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked rioting and arson, they called for the governor and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to resign.

YouTube video

On Friday, Nick Shirley, a right-wing YouTuber, posted a video alleging millions of dollars of fraud at some of Minnesota’s day care centers. The video has received 2.2 million views on his YouTube channel and 128 million on X, and prompted responses from Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said Tuesday that the federal government has frozen all child care payments to Minnesota as a result. Walz responded to that move on X on Tuesday and said President Donald Trump is “politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”

In response to the claims in the video, Tikki Brown, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families, said Monday her employees have conducted unannounced on-site visits and have seen children at the centers seen in the video.

Brown said several of the centers have been investigated and “none of those investigations uncovered findings of fraud.”

Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul, said Demuth’s recent statement that the state GOP directed Shirley to Minnesota indicates their party places political gain over solutions.

“Republicans are playing sick games and winning devastating prizes,” Murphy said, in a statement Wednesday. “Sending a YouTuber to drive around demanding that he gets to see children isn’t an investigation; it’s creepy. And now, tens of thousands of Minnesota families will pay the price as Donald’s Trump’s agents strip away crucial funding. Our daycare system is already stressed; this reckless decision could force a collapse that affects all of us.

Murphy also said Republican lawmakers with the House fraud committee are withholding whistler blower tips from investigators.

“They care more about viral tweets and being featured on Fox News than they do about Minnesotans. DFLers will continue to work to actually stop and prevent fraud, and protect the necessary services that Minnesotans rely on,” she said.

Walz spokesperson: ‘Governor has been combating fraud for years’

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Walz said “the governor has been combating this for years and, before the viral video, had already referred these cases to law enforcement.”

“He has asked the state Legislature for more authority to take aggressive action,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “He has strengthened oversight — including launching investigations into these specific facilities. He has hired an outside firm to audit payments to high-risk programs, shut down the Housing Stabilization Services program entirely, announced a new statewide program integrity director, and supported criminal prosecutions.”

House Leader Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, echoed Johnson’s comments but also did not directly call for a resignation.

“In any organization, any company, anyone who oversaw the kind of failure that the chief executive of the state has overseen — those in charge find a way to get rid of that leader,” Niska said.

“If Gov. Walz resigns, the next person up for the job is the person who has been by his side throughout this entire failed administration as well. So it may ultimately be up to the people of Minnesota to fire Gov. Walz at the ballot box in November of 2026,” he added.

In a December interview with Forum News Service, Sen. Heather Gustafson, DFL-Vadnais Heights, said she had “no comment” on whether Walz should resign or drop out of the campaign.

Johnson said the call for a resignation is not because there is evidence that the governor is criminally guilty of anything.

“What I think the problem is, is he’s allowed a system to develop that has almost encouraged or become so well known throughout the country and the world, that you come to Minnesota and you can walk out with bags of cash,” Johnson said. “Creating that atmosphere, that environment, is not something that we expect for good government. And so if that’s how he’s running it, I just don’t think that he should be.”

Steven Schier, a political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, told Forum News Service in December he thinks a Walz resignation would not be “a good look” and would “lead to suspicions of culpability or guilt.”

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Schier also weighed in on whether Walz could drop out of the campaign.

“I think the future of Tim Walz, his political career, will be determined by his own party,” Schier said. “If they stand by him, he will be the candidate in November of 2026. If there is internal division and concern about whether he should continue, either in office or as a 2026 candidate, then he’s got serious problems, but Republicans calling for him to resign is not going to determine his electoral or governing fate.”