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FVCBankcorp chief credit officer sells $13,815 in stockWASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday voiced his support for the dockworkers union before their contract expires next month at Eastern and Gulf Coast ports, saying that any further “automation” of the ports would harm workers. The incoming president posted on social media that he met Harold Daggett, the president of the International Longshoreman's Association, and Dennis Daggett, the union's executive vice president. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings. Get updates and player profiles ahead of Friday's high school games, plus a recap Saturday with stories, photos, video Frequency: Seasonal Twice a week

Barry Keoghan breaks silence after Sabrina Carpenter split as he begs trolls to stop the 'lies'The unnamed dead of Honolulu may be revealed through DNA testing

With rising prices across the country, Americans are growing more concerned about their financial future . In a recent study from MarketWatch Guides , nearly 90 percent of respondents reported feeling financial stress. In this tense economic time, many people are turning to registered investment advisers (RIAs) for help. "The primary benefit of an RIA is the ability to plan your short- and long-term financial goals with an adviser who has experience recommending investments that meet your needs," Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek over email. "They're especially helpful if you have little to no background in investing and need guidance." But growing a client's assets through personalized planning and strategies is not the only thing a great RIA does—they must also build and maintain trust. When choosing an RIA, one must look beyond the portfolio and consider an adviser's conflicts of interest. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), RIAs are legally required to always act in their client's best interest. To ensure they are, firms must comply with federal and state regulations and disclose any activity or connections that might put their fiduciary duties at risk. In Newsweek 's latest ranking of America's Top Financial Advisory Firms 2025 , more than 15,000 SEC-registered RIAs were evaluated based on overall performance, adviser-client ratio and the breadth of financial services provided. It also identified any wrongdoing that might make them less trustworthy for clients, such as disciplinary actions and conflicts. Each firm was screened for reputational risks, including legal disputes and scandals within the last two years. The sweep searched for various legal and regulatory actions made against firms by the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), foreign and domestic courts and federal, state and foreign regulatory authorities. Disciplinary actions include: RIAs must also file compliance reports with the SEC that list any conflicts to ensure firms do not breach their fiduciary obligations to clients. These discretions include: A firm's total score was based on the total market value of its assets under management (AUM) and the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of revenue in both the past 12 months and also the past five years, as well as other factors, like adviser-client ratio and client retention. Then Newsweek /Plant-A deducted 0.5 percent from a firm's score for each self-reported conflict of interest and excluded firms with serious disciplinary actions against them. In total, 750 firms across 45 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were included in the ranking and were rated with four, four and a half, and five stars. Because RIAs must act solely in the best interest of their clients, regulatory agencies take conflicts of interest very seriously. Eliminating or at least exposing conflicts strengthens the trust between adviser and client and protects the clients from harm. According to the SEC , "an investment adviser's obligation to act in the best interest of its client is an overarching principle that encompasses both the duty of care and the duty of loyalty." Prime Capital Financial, formerly known as Prime Capital Investment Advisors, received a five-star rating on Newsweek 's ranking. The Kansas-based firm has a total AUM range over $10 billion and an AUM CAGR of 10 to 20 percent over five years. "We believe that every decision begins and ends with what is best for the client. While many firms focus solely on numbers, we prioritize understanding our clients' broader life goals and creating strategies that support their values and vision," Chief Marketing Officer Terra McBride told Newsweek over email. "Our advisers combine deep technical expertise with a commitment to building meaningful, long-term relationships." While it should be the goal for all RIAs to eliminate all conflicts of interest, some may persist. That is why current and potential clients should be aware of what each RIA is offering. Kevin Thompson, founder and CEO of 9i Capital Group LLC, told Newsweek that understanding conflicts of interest helps clients ensure they're being treated fairly and not receiving recommendations solely for the adviser's benefit. "It's critical to recognize that no business model is entirely free of conflicts," he said over email. "Clients should pay attention to how advisers are compensated." These conflicts, Thompson said, are disclosed verbally during client meetings or in engagement agreements that clients sign during onboarding. Conflicts may also be presented on a firm's website to ensure clients are making informed decisions about the relationship. Firms are also required to disclose those conflicts in their reports to the SEC and state regulators. Fort Sheridan Advisors in Highland Park, Illinois, received a five-star rating on Newsweek 's list and has a total AUM range of $500 million to $1 billion and an AUM CAGR of 20 to 30 percent over five years. The firm believes its commitment to transparent communication, personalized service and advanced technology builds loyalty and reduces client attrition, John Brinckerhoff, a strategic adviser for the firm, told Newsweek over email. The firm has made several technological improvements recently, including switching to client relationship management software, which it says is better for RIAs. Brinckerhoff said this upgrade allows them to streamline operations, improve responsiveness and ensure that the firm is meeting client needs in a timely manner. Beginning a financial planning journey can be daunting, but getting help can be the first step in reducing money anxiety and achieving personal financial goals. "The biggest mistake you can make is indecisiveness," financial literacy instructor Alex Beene said. "As stressful as diving into the investment world can be, it's far more stressful not taking the leap and realizing years down the road how much could have been gained."

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When Nathan Hecht ran for the Texas Supreme Court in 1988, no Republican had ever been elected to the state’s highest civil court. His election foreshadowed a coming transformation of the court, civil legal procedure and Texas itself. Hecht is the longest tenured Supreme Court justice in Texas history. He won six reelections and led the court as chief justice for more than a decade. He heard more than 2,700 oral arguments, authored 7,000 pages of opinions, and retires now not because he’s had enough, but because state law requires him to. Late on a Friday afternoon, just two weeks before he hung up his robe, he was still in his office, his mind mired in the work that was left to be done. “This is always a really busy time for us because the opinions are mounting up to be talked about,” he said. “It’ll be busy next week.” Hecht began as a dissenter on a divided court, his conservative positions on abortion, school finance and property rights putting him at odds with the Democratic majority and some moderate Republicans. But as Texas Republicans began dominating up and down the ballot, his minority voice became mainstream on one of the country’s most conservative high courts. In his administration of the court, Hecht has been a fierce advocate for the poor, pushing for more Legal Aid funding, bail reform and lowering the barriers to accessing the justice system. "If justice were food, too many would be starving," Hecht told lawmakers in 2017. "If it were housing, too many would be homeless. If it were medicine, too many would be sick.” Hecht’s departure leaves a vacancy that Gov. Greg Abbott, a former justice himself, will get to fill. He may elevate a current justice or appoint someone new directly to the chief justice role. Whoever ends up in the top spot will have to run for reelection in 2026. In his typical understated manner, so at odds with the bombast of the other branches of government, Hecht told The Texas Tribune that serving on the court has been the honor of his life. “I have gotten to participate not only in a lot of decisions shaping the jurisprudence of the state, but also in trying to improve the administration of the court system so that it works better and fosters public trust and confidence,” he said. “So I feel good about the past,” he said. “And I feel good about the future.” Born in Clovis, New Mexico, Hecht studied philosophy at Yale before getting his law degree from Southern Methodist University. He clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and returned to Texas, where his reputation preceded him. As a young lawyer, Tom Phillips, a former chief justice and now a partner at Baker Botts, reached out to a Dallas law firm that had promised to hire him the next chance they got. “I called them a few months later and said, ‘So I assume you never got a vacancy,’” Phillips recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, we did, but we had a chance to hire Nathan Hecht, so you’ll understand why we went ahead and did that.’” Hecht was appointed to the district court in 1981 and quickly made a name for himself, pushing the court to modernize their stenography practices and taking the unusual step of writing opinions as a trial judge. He was elected to the court of appeals in 1986 and ran for Texas Supreme Court two years later. From left, pictured are Texas Supreme Court Justices Craig Enoch, John Cornyn, Nathan Hecht, Raul Gonzalez, Tom Philips and Jack Hightower in the Texas House chamber in 1993. Republican dominance swept through the Supreme Court as swiftly as it did Texas writ large. The last Democrat would be elected to the court in 1994, just six years after the first Republican. But even among Bush-era Republicans filling the bench, Hecht’s conservatism stood out. In 2000, he wrote a dissent disagreeing with the majority ruling that allowed teens in Texas to get abortions with a judge’s approval if their parents wouldn’t consent, and a few years earlier, ruled in favor of wealthy school districts that wanted to use local taxes to supplement state funds. His pro-business bent stood out next to the court’s history of approving high dollar payouts for plaintiffs. Alex Winslow, the executive director of Texas Watch, a consumer advocacy group, told the New York Times in 2005 that Hecht was “the godfather of the conservative judicial movement in Texas." "Extremist would be an appropriate description,” Winslow said. “He's the philosophical leader of the right-wing fringe." The only other justice who regularly staked out such a conservative position, according to the New York Times , was Priscilla Owen, who President George W. Bush appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005. Hecht and Owen, who now goes by her maiden name, Richmond, wed in 2022. Wallace Jefferson, Hecht’s predecessor as chief justice, said Hecht’s sharp intellect and philosophical approach to the law improved the court’s opinions, even when he ultimately didn’t side with the majority. “He was a formidable adversary,” said Jefferson, now a partner at Alexander Dubose & Jefferson. “You knew that you would have to bring your best approach and analysis to overcome Nathan’s approach and analysis ... You had to come prepared and Nathan set the standard for that.” Hecht briefly became a national figure in 2005 when he helped Bush’s efforts to confirm Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. As her longtime friend, Hecht gave more than 120 interviews to bolster Miers’ conservative credentials, jokingly calling himself the “PR office for the White House,” Texas Monthly reported at the time. This advocacy work raised ethical questions that Hecht fought for years, starting with a reprimand from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. Hecht got that overturned. The Texas Ethics Commission then fined him $29,000 for not reporting the discount he got on the legal fees he paid challenging the reprimand. He appealed that fine and the case stretched until 2016, when he ultimately paid $1,000. Hecht has largely stayed out of the limelight in the decades since, letting his opinions speak for themselves and wading into the political fray mostly to advocate for court reforms. While Democrats have tried to pin unpopular COVID and abortion rulings on the justices in recent elections, Republicans continue to easily win these down-ballot races. Hecht is aware of the perception this one-party dominance creates and has advocated for Texas to turn away from partisan judicial elections. In his 2023 state of the judiciary address, Hecht warned that growing political divisions were threatening the “judicial independence essential to the rule of law,” pointing to comments by both Democratic politicians and former President Donald Trump. But, in an interview, Hecht stressed that most of the cases the Texas Supreme Court considers never make headlines and are far from the politics that dominate Austin and Washington. “There's no Republican side to an oil and gas case. There's no Democrat side to a custody hearing,” he said. “That's the bread and butter of what we do, and that's not partisan.” Unlike its federal counterpart, the Texas Supreme Court is often a temporary port of call on a judge’s journey. Many, like Abbott, Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, leave for higher office. Others, like Owen and 5th Circuit Judge Don Willett, leave for higher courts. Most, like Phillips, leave for higher pay in private practice. But Hecht stayed. “I didn’t plan it like this,” Hecht said. “I just kept getting re-elected.” Hecht had been considering retirement in 2013 when Jefferson, the chief justice who replaced Phillips, announced he would be stepping down. “He wanted me to consider being his successor,” Hecht said. “So I did, and here I am. I didn’t say, ‘Let's spend 43 years on the bench,’ but one thing led to another.” In 2013, Hecht was sworn in as chief justice by then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, another great dissenter whose views later became the majority. Nathan Hecht is sworn into office by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the House Chamber on Nov. 11, 2013. Hecht's sister Helen is holding the Sam Houston Bible. While the Texas Supreme Court’s political makeup has changed largely without Hecht’s input, the inner workings of the court have been under his purview. And that, many court watchers say, is where his greatest legacy lies. Hecht ushered in an era of modernization, both to the technology and the rules that govern justice in Texas. He led a push to simplify the appellate rules, removing many of the trapdoors and procedural quirks that led to important cases being decided on technicalities. The court scaled back how long cases could drag on by limiting discovery, including how long a deposition can go. And he ensured every case was decided before the term ended, like the U.S. Supreme Court. “I think people generally don't understand the impact the rules can have on the equitable resolution of disputes, but they're enormous,” Jefferson said. “Nathan recognized that at an early juncture in his career.” Hecht pushed Texas to adopt e-filing before many other states, which proved prescient when COVID hit. Hecht, who was then president of the national Conference of Chief Justices, was able to help advise other states as they took their systems online. Hecht also dedicated himself to improving poor Texans' access to the justice system, pushing the Legislature to appropriate more funding for Legal Aid and reducing the barriers to getting meaningful legal resolutions. He helped usher through a rule change that would allow paraprofessionals to handle some legal matters like estate planning, uncontested divorces and consumer debt cases, without a lawyer’s supervision. “Some people call it the justice gap. I call it the justice chasm,” Hecht said. “Because it’s just a huge gulf between the people that need legal help and the ability to provide it.” Hecht said he’s glad this has been taken up as a bipartisan issue, and he’s hopeful that the same attention will be paid even after he leaves the court. “No judge wants to give his life's energy to a work that mocks the justice that he's trying to provide,” he said. “For the judiciary, this is an important issue because when the promise of equal justice under law is denied because you're too poor, there's no such thing as equal justice under the law.” Despite the sudden departure of their longtime leader, the Texas Supreme Court will return in January to finish out its term, which ends in April. Among the typical parsing of medical malpractice provisions, oil and gas leases, divorce settlements and sovereign immunity protections, the high court has a number of more attention-grabbing cases on its docket this year. Earlier this year, the court heard oral arguments about the Department of Family and Protective Services’ oversight of immigration detention facilities, and in mid-January it'll consider Attorney General Ken Paxton’s efforts to subpoena Annunciation House, an El Paso nonprofit that serves migrants. Justices will also hear arguments over Southern Methodist University’s efforts to cut ties with the regional governing body of the United Methodist Church. Other cases will be added to the schedule before April. Phillips, who has argued numerous cases before the Texas Supreme Court since leaving the bench, said Hecht’s loss will be felt, but he expects the court to continue apace. “It’s not a situation like it might have been at some point in the past where if one justice left, nobody would know what to do next,” he said. “It’s an extremely qualified court.” As for Hecht, he’s tried to put off thinking too much about what comes next for him. He still has opinions to write and work to finish. He knows he wants to stay active in efforts to improve court administration nationally and in Texas, and he’s threatened his colleagues with writing a tell-all book, just to keep them on their toes. But beyond that, he’s waiting for the reality of retirement to sink in before he decides on his next steps. “We’ve got 3,200 judges in Texas, plus adjuncts and associate judges and others,” he said. “I really think it’s such a strong bench, and I am proud to have been a part of it. I look forward to helping where I can.” Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request.