WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated University of Minnesota economist Christopher Phelan to be the next chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, a key position for conducting analyses of the economy and the administration's policies.
If confirmed by the Senate, Phelan would succeed Stephen Miran, a Harvard University-trained economist who worked at investment funds and joined the Federal Reserve Board of Governors last September. The council's vice chairman, Pierre Yared, had served as acting leader after Trump shifted Miran to the Fed.
Phelan's resume suggests a keen interest in the operations of central banks, a major interest of Trump, who has pressured the Fed to dramatically cut its benchmark interest rates to drive stronger growth, even though doing so could risk higher inflation.
Phelan has worked as a consultant with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and obtained his doctorate from the University of Chicago.
“President Trump has assembled the best and most experienced economic team in modern history,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai, who called Phelan “a key addition.”
Desai said that Yared, the current acting chairman, is returning to his professorship at Columbia University's business school.
NEW YORK (AP) — The man who recently pleaded guilty to New York's Gilgo Beach serial murders told his ex-wife while in jail that he killed most of his female victims in the basement of the family’s dilapidated home, the latest episode of an NBC documentary series shows.
His ex-wife, Asa Ellerup, said in a teaser for the episode airing Thursday that Rex Heuermann also told her that the eight women he has admitted to killing were his only victims.
Ellerup says later in the teaser that he told her that he killed seven of them in the basement of the family's house in Massapequa Park on Long Island while she was away.
“I said to him, ‘So Mr. Heuermann, I understand that you are confessing to me on these murders. Can you please tell me how many of these women did you kill’?,” she said in the 90-second clip. “He said, ‘Eight’.”
Ellerup said she intentionally didn’t use her former husband’s first name as a way to “put a wall up” between the two.
“When he started talking, it started feeling like that’s the Rex I know,” she said. “But I didn’t want to see that one. I wanted to see the one I needed to see.”
The latest and last installment of “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets” will be available on NBC’s streaming service Peacock. Another documentary, “Killing Grounds: The Gilgo Beach Murders,” also comes out Wednesday on Amazon's streaming service, Prime Video.
Ellerup's attorney, Robert Macedonio, declined to discuss what other new details are revealed in the new episode of the Peacock documentary, the first three episodes of which aired last June.
“This has been an extremely emotional and painful process for the family to endure and come to terms with the allegations that Rex Heuermann was the Gilgo Beach serial killer,” he said in an email. “Ms. Ellerup would like the focus to remain where it belongs — on the victims and their families, who have suffered immeasurable and lasting losses.”
Vess Mitev, a lawyer for the couple's two grown children, Victoria and Chris, said the two “echo the sentiments of their mother, and wish only to move forward as best they can, given this remarkably dark chapter in their lives.”
Heuermann’s lawyers didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Earlier episodes of the documentary showed the family struggling to reconcile their memories of the architect, who had an office in Manhattan, with the portrait of the killer described by authorities.
Ellerup, who divorced Heuermann after his arrest in 2023, steadfastly defended her ex-husband’s innocence during those earlier episodes. But her daughter eventually conceded her father “most likely” committed the brutal killings that bedeviled investigators and drew intense interest from true-crime watchers for years.
The saga came to a close earlier this month when Heuermann, 62, of Massapequa Park, admitted in Riverhead court to murdering seven women and also killing an eighth he had not yet been charged with over a 17-year span.
Heuermann said in court he strangled the women, many of them sex workers, and dismembered some of their bodies before dumping them on a desolate parkway not far from Long Island's Gilgo Beach, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Manhattan.
He’ll be sentenced in June to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Follow Philip Marcelo on X: @philmarcelo.
