RFK Jr. Faces Off Against Senators in Senate Confirmation Hearing
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With record levels of dry powder available for investment, find out what's in store for private markets in 2025 and beyond. Listen to Crafting Capital in partnership with UBS at partners.wsj.com slash UBS, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Here's your midday brief for Wednesday, January 29th. I'm Alex Zosola for The Wall Street Journal.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump's pick for health secretary, is in front of the Senate Finance Committee today in the first of two days of his confirmation hearing. If he's confirmed, Kennedy would take over a department with an annual budget of over $1.5 trillion.

OpenAI is investigating whether Chinese AI company DeepSeek trained its new chatbot by repeatedly querying the U.S. company's AI models. OpenAI said it has seen various attempts by China-based entities to exfiltrate large volumes of data from its AI tools, likely to train their own models in a technical process called distillation. DeepSeek didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Frontier Airlines is making another run at a deal for struggling rival discounter Spirit Airlines. Spirit filed for bankruptcy in November after years of losses and a failed sale to JetBlue. Frontier is trying to persuade Spirit's bondholders that they will be better off if the two budget airlines combine. To succeed, Frontier will have to overcome resistance from Spirit and its bondholders. Spirit said in its own filing that Frontier's plan was inferior to its own and too risky.

And the Federal Reserve is expected to announce its latest decision at 2 p.m. Eastern today. In the first rate decision of the Trump presidency, the bank is almost certain to hold rates steady.

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