⏱️ Axios PM: House's Plan C

🧤Happy Friday! Today's newsletter, edited by Sam Baker, is 597 words, a 2-min. read. Thanks to Sheryl Miller for copy editing.

House Republicans will count on Democrats — not President-elect Trump — to help avert a government shutdown.

• Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his conference have agreed to vote this evening on a bill that will keep the government open through March. "We will not have a government shutdown," he told reporters.
• The newest route doesn't grant Trump's wish to raise the debt ceiling.

📜 Between the lines: Trump and Elon Musk killed the first, bipartisan iteration of the spending bill.

• Johnson didn't have the votes to pass his second, more conservative approach. It failed last night, despite Trump's endorsement.

A third option — breaking this one big bill into three smaller bills — also withered under Republican opposition.

• The caucus opted during a closed-door meeting today not to pursue that strategy and to seek a deal with Democrats instead.

Go deeper.

The next few weeks will likely be the busiest travel season ever in the U.S. — breaking the record set over Thanksgiving, which broke the record set this summer, travel groups predict.

• 40 million people are expected to fly for the holidays. Another 119 million will likely make a long road trip.
• AAA forecast ... Airline forecast.

🛬 A prolonged government shutdown could gum up air travel, Axios' Sareen Habeshian notes.

• Air-traffic controllers and TSA screeners would be expected to come to work, but they wouldn't get paid until the shutdown ends. During a five-week holiday-season shutdown in 2018, hundreds of TSA workers called in sick.

Requiring app store parental consent and age verification puts parents in charge of teen app downloads. This helps parents ensure teens download apps that are safe for them.

Why it's important: 3 out of 4 parents agree that teens under 16 shouldn't be able to download apps without approval.

Learn more.

1. 🇩🇪 A driver slammed into a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing at least two people and injuring at least 68. Authorities said it was a deliberate attack and that they had arrested the driver. Go deeper.
2. ✁ The Biden administration is scrapping unfinished regulations on student-debt cancelation, trans athletes and other priorities. The move means it'll take longer for the Trump administration to write rules on those topics because it'll have to start the process from scratch. Go deeper.
3. 🦾 OpenAI today previewed a new, more advanced model, which is still in the testing phase. The model "appears to perform insanely well," Box CEO Aaron Levie said. "There are simply no signs of a slowdown in AI right now." Go deeper.

The James Bond franchise is on ice due to extreme creative differences between Barbara Broccoli, whose family owns the rights to the Bond character, and Amazon, which owns the rights to distribute Bond movies, The Wall Street Journal reports.

• The Broccoli family has tightly controlled all things Bond — ideas, scripts, who plays 007 — since the beginning.
• They've rejected pitches for Bond TV shows and video games, been willing to take risks on film, and insisted on big theatrical releases so that a new Bond movie will always feel like an event.
• Broccoli has said Amazon's risk aversion and algorithmic focus make it a bad fit for Bond.

📺 The other side: Amazon won the right to distribute Bond movies when it bought the MGM movie studio in 2022. Bond was one of the most attractive properties in the sale.

• The company promised Broccoli a full-scale theatrical release for the next Bond movie.
• But executives also pitched spinoff TV shows, and they lost credibility in one meeting by referring to Bond movies as "content," per The Journal.

🍿 "These people are f— idiots." Broccoli has told her friends, according to The Journal.

• Keep reading (free link).

Parents want safer online experiences for their teens. That's why Instagram is introducing Teen Accounts, with automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see.

A key factor: Only parents can approve safety setting changes for teens under 16.

Learn more.

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