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No other White House staffer has declared any gifts from the president, the documents show. Federal employees are prohibited from receiving outside compensation for their duties.

The White House has described the gifts as personal in nature, unrelated to the staffers' work and legal under US law.

In a statement provided to the BBC, a White House official said that the president "has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector".

"The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals' official government duties, and are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards," the official added.

The cash gifts, totalling $157,000, are marked as a "cash gift for the holidays" for Nauta, Harp and two other officials: communications advisor Margo Martin and Chamberlain Harris, a White House aide who serves as Trump's executive assistant.

The White House did not answer a separate query from the BBC on why the other 91 listed staff members - including other top aides and First Lady Melania Trump's top advisors - did not receive gifts.

The four recipients of the cash gifts are among those widely considered as close to the US president.

Harp, 35, is among Trump's longest-serving and most loyal aides. She is often trusted with typing out his frequent Truth Social posts, among other responsibilities.

Last month, she was thrust into the national spotlight after she was named as one of a small number of people who stayed with Trump as he secretly swapped planes leaving Turkey last month.

Nauta, a US Navy veteran, has also long been at Trump's side. He served as a White House military valet to the president in his first term, and later joined him as an assistant at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office.

In June 2023, he was indicted alongside Trump on charges that he mishandled national security documents. The case was ultimately dismissed.

The third recipient, Margo Martin, is well known for documenting Trump's activities on social media.

While the final recipient, 26-year-old Chamberlain Harris, officially serves as the president's executive assistant. In February, she was also appointed to the US Commission of Fine Arts which oversees the construction of the White House ballroom and other Trump-directed projects in Washington.

Cassandra Burke Roberston, a law professor and director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, told the BBC that "it's not an easy call" to say whether the cash gifts were ethical or not.

"If it were compensation, it's not allowed," she said. "Of course, that's where the administration's argument comes in, that it's a social gift done out of friendship. Not compensation."

Additionally, Robertson said that even if legal, the gifts - along with recent controversies involving prediction markets and cryptocurrencies - could raise eyebrows among the public.

"It does add to a generalised perception of really rampant conflicts of interest," she said.

There are no other known instances of a serving US president giving cash gifts to staffers at the White House.

Many presidents, however, have given souvenirs or personal mementos to staff.

President Barack Obama, for example, gave former press secretary Robert Gibbs a framed necktie that he had once borrowed ahead of the Democratic National Convention in 2004. %!s()

Known for her genre-blending soul music, Mark brings international inspiration to the forefront of her sound. Mark moved around a lot as a child, living in New York, India, Berlin and Miami. “Every place has a different sky,” Mark explains while admiring the panoramic moonroof of her 2026 Toyota RAV4 Limited. 

Before Lollapalooza, before the stages and the tours, Amber Mark’s evolution as a musician began in Berlin, when she held a guitar for the first time. Her mother, a German painter named Mia Mark, had gifted it to her and Amber quickly became enthralled. Teaching herself how to play through YouTube videos and hours of practice, she quickly fell in love with making music. 

Mark’s career began a decade ago when she uploaded her first single “Space” onto SoundCloud while interning at Roc Nation. With her first EP, 3:33 AM, Mark paid tribute to her late mother, by incorporating sounds and styles of music from the various places that they lived together throughout her childhood, while lyrically exploring themes of grief and longing. Her mother’s influence on her and the love of travel and culture she instilled in her are rooted deeply  in her work. Not long after the release of 3:33AM, Mark had drummed up a loyal fanbase, which has only continued to grow.

Her career reached a new level, when she opened for Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet tour, which coincided with the release of her second studio album, Pretty Idea, launching her into a new stratosphere. With a bigger audience and new music pouring out, Mark notes how important long car rides are to her process. With its studio-like JBL Premium Audio System, the RAV4 Limited provides the perfect sanctuary to listen to her music and allow her to be completely immersed. 

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Amber Mark is no stranger to travel and she gets her best ideas when experiencing new places and incorporating new cultural influences. While touring, she relies on her RAV4 as her preferred mode of transport, allowing her to take in the world around her and give her a quiet place of reflection amidst the fast pace of her schedule. Running errands through Chicago, preparing for her first ever set at Lollapalooza, Mark says, “I’ve been dreaming of doing Lollapalooza pretty much all of my career.” Needless to say, she is determined to do it right.

Lollapalooza’s reputation as one of the premiere music festivals in history cements it as a career-defining opportunity for artists. As a longtime partner of the festival, Toyota provides festival goers with unique experiences such as the Toyota Music Den and vehicle activations for fans to experience the newest line in 6 generations of Toyota SUVs. 

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On Sunday, under the Chicago sky, with the microphone in her hand, Amber Mark took the stage. She yelled out to the crowd, “Y’all ready to sing something? Y’all ready to dance?!” To which the crowd immediately took up the call to action. Mark and her audience seemed to have found a euphoric groove as she performed her setlist from her most popular hits “Lose My Cool” and “Sweet Serotonin” to the smooth, seductive sound of “By The End of the Night.” 

Mark certainly seized her moment. Her performances and top tier vocals proved how made for the stage she is and her genre-blending sound, inspired by her childhood experiences, paved her road from opener to headliner. With a massive world tour and a Lollapalooza appearance in her rearview mirror, Amber Mark drives on to what will surely be a big and bright future.  %!s()

From gaming after homework and running AI workloads to rendering creative projects and running engineering physics simulations, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 is the system that can check every box on your back-to-school laptop wishlist when your coursework calls for a laptop that goes beyond the ordinary.

ROG knows that a computer is more than the components you throw into a chassis. What matters just as much as the choice of components is how you treat them and how they relate to other components in the system.

The ROG Strix SCAR 18 combines components that work in harmony to maximize the gaming experience. It offers a GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 290HX Plus and makes sure you can pull every frame possible out of the pairing by letting them draw up to a combined 320 watts. That's a massive power budget that ensures neither part is starving for power even while both are operating under the heavy load of gaming, and the system can dynamically shift power to the component that needs it most, with up to 200 watts to the CPU or 175 watts to the GPU. When it’s crunch time and you need to power through some heavy work — be it 3D rendering, an engineering simulation, or editing together an entire movie — where other laptops might slow to a crawl, it’s that power that’s going to let the ROG Strix SCAR 18 keep up with you.

With great power comes great heat, and 320 watts absolutely qualifies as great power in the laptop realm. To wrangle all the heat generated by its components, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 incorporates ROG Intelligent Cooling, leveraging decades of R&D in thermal management. The cooling solution is specifically tailored to handle the 320 watts of the ROG Strix SCAR 18 with liquid metal on both the CPU and GPU to pass heat to a massive, full-width vapor chamber and triple-fan cooling system that can keep the system running at peak speeds for the long haul.

If you've ever seen two laptops with the same components somehow performing in entirely different leagues, it was most likely the power budget or cooling (or both) making that difference. With that kind of cooling, your gaming sessions and rendering sessions will stay fast and smooth no matter how long they last.

ASUS' CPU choice is also crucial, as it ensures the system can feed the GPU plenty of data so it can keep spitting out frames at a rapid rate. The GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU has 24 GB of GDDR7 VRAM—more than any other gaming laptop GPU—giving it a massive frame buffer to fill even after accounting for 4K textures and ray-tracing, so ASUS's choice of the Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 290HX Plus is natural.

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ROG has effectively ensured the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU gets to run at full tilt and even pump out extra frames through DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation without the CPU holding it back. Those frames all need somewhere to go, though, and the ROG Strix SCAR 18's Nebula display is a match made in heaven.

The ROG Strix SCAR 18 fits an 18-inch Mini LED display with a 4K resolution and 240 Hz refresh rate, ready to deliver fluid and dagger-sharp visuals at competitive-gaming speeds. With NVIDIA® Reflex ensuring ultra-low latency, that GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU needs a display that can keep up. The 240Hz refresh rate is a good start, but ROG has gone a step further with ROG Nebula ELMB, which uses 40-zone backlight strobing to enhance motion clarity by 16x for ultra-crisp detail even in fast action without sacrificing brightness or variable refresh rate support.

The Mini LED tech also works wonderfully in tandem with the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU's RT cores. Mini LED is known for its brightness, and the ROG Nebula HDR Mini LED panel achieves Display HDR 1000 certification with up to 1,600 nits of brightness and over 2,000 dimming zones to deliver stunning highlights and inky blacks for superb contrast. That's just the kind of display that will make the realistic ray-traced lighting coming from the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU's RT cores look all the more stunning and lifelike. Beyond gaming, the visual quality of the display is a great match for creative applications from design and 3D modeling to video editing and beyond.

All of this technology comes together in the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18, and it's ready to go in time for back-to-school season for the student who needs extreme computing performance. Naturally, it can handle all the typical coursework, letting you pull together research materials, chat with classmates about group projects using the FHD webcam, and draft up a paper in a flurry with its snappy keyboard. It goes much further with horsepower to train custom AI models, run engineering simulations, or render 4K video for school and game like a beast when schoolwork's done, making it an invaluable partner to students with heavy computing needs. With tool-less access to storage and memory, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 also provides an easy roadmap for upgrades down the line if your workloads need a bump in the future, so it’s a machine that can grow with your needs over the course of your education, not fall flat after a couple of semesters. While the top-of-the-line ROG Strix SCAR 18 is built to check all the boxes, it is far from the only tool in ASUS's arsenal and serves as a guide to the rest of the brand. The ROG Strix G16 and ROG Strix G18 borrow the same cohesive component integration while offering different configurations that may be better tailored to your specific needs.

You can find out more about the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 here, if you dare. %!s()

Cosmos, as the name implies, is all about space. You might think that'd already be pretty well covered in a game like No Man's Sky, but Hello Games aims to make that great big void "feel truly alive" with this update, and "more like home."

No Man's Sky COSMOS Update Trailer - YouTube

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The headline addition in Cosmos is probably the ability to own a space station, which the studio said has been the most-requested feature since No Man's Sky launched in 2016. With Cosmos, players will be able to stake their claim to their own deep space digs, build and decorate it both internally and externally, and even invite their interstellar pals over for a visit. Given the popularity of player housing in MMOs, I reckon this will be a big hit—especially since players can also now formalize those cosmic friendships through alliances with other players.

There's quite a bit more than just that, though. A new Star Map will reveal new points of interest leading to new missions and exploration opportunities, massive new "space hulks" can be salvaged and stripped for resources using the handy new gravity gun that was added earlier this year, new outposts will provide opportunities for trade, conversation, and potential danger due to biological hazards, you'll be able to build free-floating orbital bases literally anywhere amongst the stars, and speaking of stars you'll finally be able to embark upon "a perilous journey" to reach the great glowing orb at the center of your star system.

"It's real endgame stuff, but it feels important," Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray said of the Cosmos update.

"All of this is tech we get to test now, refine, and hopefully players will also experience it on our other game, Light No Fire."

No Man's Sky COSMOS Deep Dive - YouTube

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The Cosmos update is live today, alongside a new expedition called "Our Journey Continues," which recaps each of the 40 major updates to No Man's Sky since its release. "It is like a museum of each update, unlocking the features of each update as we added them, along with a spacelog of interesting facts and developers commentary for each update," Hello Games explained. "It’s been a real joy to revisit some of those moments for us."

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The full patch notes for No Man's Sky's Cosmos update are posted at nomanssky.com.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill. %!s()

When I started this Xbox retrospective project ahead of the console’s 25th anniversary this November, I knew it’d skew heavily towards original Xbox and Xbox 360 games. And while the Xbox One era wasn’t all bad, it was nonetheless one that a lot of Xbox fans would be happy to fast-forward through. Sure, the platform and messaging woes get most of the blame for Xbox’s first failed console (and before the Xbox faithful come after me, Nintendo’s had one too: anyone remember the Wii U? And heck, Sony had the Vita), but the lack of first-party games – let alone good ones – had as much to do with the Xbox One being a rough generation for Xbox as anything else.

Still, there were diamonds in the rough, and one of them would’ve been a HUGE hit in the Xbox 360 generation, but instead it was released on the wrong console at the wrong time. That game is Sunset Overdrive. On paper/in a vacuum, it should’ve been a huge blockbuster hit. Insomniac Games, not yet owned by PlayStation but long an exclusive partner of Sony’s and makers of hits like Ratchet & Clank, was signing with Microsoft to do an exclusive open-world game for the new Xbox One console that was coming hot on the heels of the wildly successful and beloved Xbox 360.

Again, we all know what happened in 2013 with the reveal, the disastrous E3, and then the launch, but for its part, Insomniac held up its end of the bargain. When Sunset Overdrive dropped in the Fall of 2014, it was absolutely brilliant – a rare open-world game not made by Rockstar that had style and substance. Its cel-shaded art style was a perfect fit for the dystopian, punk vibe (with a healthy dash of comedy mixed in!) that Sunset Overdrive brought to the table.

IGN absolutely loved it, and I advocated strongly for it internally in our Game of the Year discussions (speaking personally, nothing against Dragon Age Inquisition but I’m still salty that it beat out Sunset). But as I mentioned, its timing really couldn’t have been any worse. I’m still convinced that if it had either been released on the Xbox 360 (ignoring the technical impossibility of that) or in an alternate universe it had been a Sony-published game on the PS4, it would’ve been a massive, beloved hit. But those are the breaks sometimes. Obviously, very little of Sunset Overdrive’s fate was in Insomniac’s direct control beyond the crucial part, which was of course making an amazing game (but you can read about how it became an Xbox One exclusive if you like).

It was the rare open-world game where every quest felt fun in its own unique way. Navigating around the world via the grind rails took a good 10-15 minutes to adjust to in the very beginning, but once you got in sync with it, you’d zoom around the world, having an awesome time while doing so. It will forever haunt me that we never got a sequel; now-retired Insomniac founder Ted Price told me at the time that the studio wanted to make a sequel. Even more interestingly, he also told me that it was originally more like Fortnite. Who knows, maybe that decision haunts Insomniac!

But regardless, there’s no doubt that Insomniac is and should always be proud of Sunset Overdrive. It grinded rails so that Spider-Man could web-swing through Manhattan. Without Sunset, there probably isn’t a Spidey – or at least, Spider-Man wouldn’t have been as incredible right out of the gate as it was. Any of you out there who did play it – sadly, it never got ported to PS4 even after Sony acquired the studio, though it did come to PC in 2018 – are probably nodding your heads in agreement as you read this piece. In my opinion, it is the very best Xbox One exclusive that would’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the very best PlayStation 3, 4, or Xbox 360 exclusives.

Ryan McCaffrey

Ryan McCaffrey is the Executive Editor of Previews at IGN. He has worked in games media since 2002, spending the first decade of his career at Official Xbox Magazine before joining IGN in 2012. He is the host of Podcast Unlocked as well as a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan. %!s()