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MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) — Amarion Dickerson had 27 points and 15 rebounds to help Robert Morris hold off Northern Kentucky 97-93 in triple overtime on Sunday. Dickerson blocked five shots and had three steals for the Colonials (9-5, 1-2 Horizon League). Sophomore Alvaro Folgueiras scored 21 points and added a career-high 19 rebounds and six assists. DJ Smith had 13 points. The Norse (7-7, 2-1) were led by LJ Wells, who finished with 19 points, 13 rebounds and two steals. Northern Kentucky also got 17 points and six rebounds from Trey Robinson. Randall Pettus II had 17 points. The Norse saw a five-game win streak come to an end. Dickerson's dunk gave Robert Morris a 94-92 lead with 26 seconds left in the third OT. Dilen Miller made two free throws with 3 seconds left to wrap up the victory. Josh Dilling made the second of two free throws with 8 seconds left for the Norse, forcing a second OT tied at 80. Wells hit a 3-pointer with 2:05 left and neither team scored after that, forcing the third OT tied at 86. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .Kanpur: As 2025 approaches, the Kanpur Metro Corporation spearheads significant urban development. The service expansion, commencing early in the year, will deliver considerable benefits to the residents. The extension includes five new stations, linking IIT to Kanpur Central, alongside the city's first underground metro tunnel. Officials expect to complete the IIT to Naubasta corridor by year-end while beginning work on the second corridor. Currently, the 24 km Corridor-1 (IIT-Naubasta) provides passenger services on a 9km elevated route from IIT to Motijheel. The extension will facilitate travel between IIT and Central Station. Kanpur Metro officials indicate that regular testing from IIT to Kanpur Central will begin soon. Final station work continues. The 8.60 km Corridor-2 (CSA-Barra 8) construction progresses steadily, including stations at CSA, Rawatpur, Devki Chauraha, Double Pulia, Vijay Nagar, and Barra Eight. In another achievement for the city the IIT-Kanpur completed its Phase-1 campus placements for the 2024-25 batch between December 1 and 15 resulting in 1,109 offers across various sectors. Of these students accepted 1,035 positions. International placements have increased by 27% with 28 offers. Over 250 organisations participated in the session, including prominent companies across technology, banking, and industrial sectors. Likewise, CSJMU has received UGC's Category 1 status, complementing its NAAC A+ grade. This classification grants significant autonomy under UGC Regulations 2018, allowing independent programme launches. This achievement places CSJMU amongst India's top 10% educational institutions, making it Uttar Pradesh's second university after Lucknow University to receive this status, confirmed during UGC's February 13 meeting. In the same vein, IIT-K's ‘Analakshya MSCS' represents advancement in stealth technology, supporting defence manufacturing independence. The system demonstrates superior wave absorption across frequencies, strengthening defences against radar systems and guided missiles, particularly relevant given recent security challenges. The Ground Breaking Ceremony @ 4.0 witnessed 243 industrial units invest approximately Rs 20,000 crores. A new private industrial park plans to create 250,000 jobs. The Smart City convention centre at Chunniganj approaches completion, representing a Rs 96.10 crore investment. The facility includes modern amenities and spaces for various activities. Kanpur Development Authority's 2025 plan introduces two residential schemes offering 2000 plots. New Kanpur City provides 1,750 plots across 153 hectares, whilst New Aero City features 250 plots within 1,200 acres. In terms of political developments, the Samajwadi Party faced a significant challenge when their MLA Irfan Solanki was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for his role in a fire-related incident in Kanpur's Jajmau area. However, the party managed to recover from this setback towards the year's conclusion by successfully nominating Irfan's spouse in the bypoll, who emerged triumphant in the electoral contest. Tragically, the city mourned losses in 2024, including Professor Kanwar Singh Nalwa, 39, of IIT-K, who suffered cardiac arrest during a Leh trek. Stay updated with the latest news on Times of India . Don't miss the yearly horoscope 2025 and Chinese horoscope 2025 for Rat , Ox , Tiger , Rabbit , Dragon , Snake , Horse , Goat , Monkey , Rooster , Dog , and Pig zodiac signs. Spread love this holiday season with these New Year wishes and messages .Enigma of Lone Wolf Terrorism

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Newly married and sworn as a Naval officer, left his tiny hometown in 1946 hoping to climb the ranks and see the world. Less than a decade later, the death of his father and namesake, a merchant farmer and local politician who went by “Mr. Earl,” prompted the submariner and his wife, Rosalynn, to return to the rural life of Plains, Georgia, they thought they’d escaped. The lieutenant never would be an admiral. Instead, he became commander in chief. Years after his presidency ended in humbling defeat, he would add a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded not for his White House accomplishments but “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The life of James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th and longest-lived U.S. president, ended Sunday at the age of 100 where it began: Plains, the town of 600 that fueled his political rise, welcomed him after his fall and sustained him during 40 years of service that redefined what it means to be a former president. With the stubborn confidence of an engineer and an optimism rooted in his Baptist faith, Carter described his motivations in politics and beyond in the same way: an almost missionary zeal to solve problems and improve lives. Carter was raised amid racism, abject poverty and hard rural living — realities that shaped both his deliberate politics and emphasis on human rights. “He always felt a responsibility to help people,” said Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend of Carter's in Plains. “And when he couldn’t make change wherever he was, he decided he had to go higher.” Carter's path, , pitted moral imperatives against political pragmatism; and it defied typical labels of American politics, especially caricatures of one-term presidents as failures. “We shouldn’t judge presidents by how popular they are in their day. That's a very narrow way of assessing them," Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Associated Press. “We should judge them by how they changed the country and the world for the better. On that score, Jimmy Carter is not in the first rank of American presidents, but he stands up quite well.” Later in life, Carter conceded that many Americans, even those too young to remember his tenure, judged him ineffective for failing to contain inflation or interest rates, end the energy crisis or quickly bring home American hostages in Iran. He gained admirers instead for his work at The Carter Center — advocating globally for public health, human rights and democracy since 1982 — and the decades he and Rosalynn wore hardhats and swung hammers with Habitat for Humanity. Yet the common view that he was better after the Oval Office than in it annoyed Carter, and his allies relished him living long enough to see historians reassess his presidency. “He doesn’t quite fit in today’s terms” of a left-right, red-blue scoreboard, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the former president multiple times during his own White House bid. At various points in his political career, Carter labeled himself “progressive” or “conservative” — sometimes both at once. His most ambitious health care bill failed — perhaps one of his biggest legislative disappointments — because it didn’t go far enough to suit liberals. Republicans, especially after his 1980 defeat, cast him as a left-wing cartoon. It would be easiest to classify Carter as a centrist, Buttigieg said, “but there’s also something radical about the depth of his commitment to looking after those who are left out of society and out of the economy.” Indeed, Carter’s legacy is stitched with complexities, contradictions and evolutions — personal and political. The self-styled peacemaker was a war-trained Naval Academy graduate who promised Democratic challenger Ted Kennedy that he’d “kick his ass.” But he campaigned with a call to treat everyone with “respect and compassion and with love.” Carter vowed to restore America’s virtue after the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, and his technocratic, good-government approach didn't suit Republicans who tagged government itself as the problem. It also sometimes put Carter at odds with fellow Democrats. The result still was a notable legislative record, with wins on the environment, education, and mental health care. He dramatically expanded federally protected lands, began deregulating air travel, railroads and trucking, and he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy. As a fiscal hawk, Carter added a relative pittance to the national debt, unlike successors from both parties. Carter nonetheless struggled to make his achievements resonate with the electorate he charmed in 1976. Quoting Bob Dylan and grinning enthusiastically, he had promised voters he would “never tell a lie.” Once in Washington, though, he led like a joyless engineer, insisting his ideas would become reality and he'd be rewarded politically if only he could convince enough people with facts and logic. This served him well at Camp David, where he brokered peace between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Epypt’s Anwar Sadat, an experience that later sparked the idea of The Carter Center in Atlanta. Carter's tenacity helped the center grow to a global force that monitored elections across five continents, enabled his freelance diplomacy and sent public health experts across the developing world. The center’s wins were personal for Carter, who hoped to outlive the last Guinea worm parasite, and nearly did. As president, though, the approach fell short when he urged consumers beleaguered by energy costs to turn down their thermostats. Or when he tried to be the nation’s cheerleader, beseeching Americans to overcome a collective “crisis of confidence.” Republican Ronald Reagan exploited Carter's lecturing tone with a belittling quip in their lone 1980 debate. “There you go again,” the former Hollywood actor said in response to a wonky answer from the sitting president. “The Great Communicator” outpaced Carter in all but six states. Carter later suggested he “tried to do too much, too soon” and mused that he was incompatible with Washington culture: media figures, lobbyists and Georgetown social elites who looked down on the as “country come to town.” Carter carefully navigated divides on race and class on his way to the Oval Office. , Carter was raised in the mostly Black community of Archery, just outside Plains, by a progressive mother and white supremacist father. Their home had no running water or electricity but the future president still grew up with the relative advantages of a locally prominent, land-owning family in a system of Jim Crow segregation. He wrote of President Franklin Roosevelt’s towering presence and his family’s Democratic Party roots, but his father soured on FDR, and Jimmy Carter never campaigned or governed as a New Deal liberal. He offered himself as a small-town peanut farmer with an understated style, carrying his own luggage, bunking with supporters during his first presidential campaign and always using his nickname. And he began his political career in a whites-only Democratic Party. As private citizens, he and Rosalynn supported integration as early as the 1950s and believed it inevitable. Carter refused to join the White Citizens Council in Plains and spoke out in his Baptist church against denying Black people access to worship services. “This is not my house; this is not your house,” he said in a churchwide meeting, reminding fellow parishioners their sanctuary belonged to God. Yet as the appointed chairman of Sumter County schools he never pushed to desegregate, thinking it impractical after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And while presidential candidate Carter would hail the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson when Carter was a state senator, there is no record of Carter publicly supporting it at the time. Carter overcame a ballot-stuffing opponent to win his legislative seat, then lost the 1966 governor's race to an arch-segregationist. He won four years later by avoiding explicit mentions of race and campaigning to the right of his rival, who he mocked as “Cufflinks Carl” — the insult of an ascendant politician who never saw himself as part the establishment. Carter’s rural and small-town coalition in 1970 would match any victorious Republican electoral map in 2024. Once elected, though, Carter shocked his white conservative supporters — and landed on the cover of Time magazine — by declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” Before making the jump to Washington, Carter befriended the family of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he’d never sought out as he eyed the governor’s office. Carter lamented his foot-dragging on school integration as a “mistake.” But he also met, conspicuously, with Alabama's segregationist Gov. George Wallace to accept his primary rival's endorsement ahead of the 1976 Democratic convention. “He very shrewdly took advantage of his own Southerness,” said Amber Roessner, a University of Tennessee professor and expert on Carter’s campaigns. A coalition of Black voters and white moderate Democrats ultimately made Carter the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South. Then, just as he did in Georgia, he used his power in office to appoint more non-whites than all his predecessors had, combined. He once acknowledged “the secret shame” of white Americans who didn’t fight segregation. But he also told Alter that doing more would have sacrificed his political viability – and thus everything he accomplished in office and after. King's daughter, Bernice King, described Carter as wisely “strategic” in winning higher offices to enact change. “He was a leader of conscience,” she said in an interview. Rosalynn Carter, who at the age of 96, was identified by both husband and wife as the “more political” of the pair; she sat in on Cabinet meetings and urged him to postpone certain priorities, like pressing the Senate to relinquish control of the Panama Canal. “Let that go until the second term,” she would sometimes say. The president, recalled her former aide Kathy Cade, retorted that he was “going to do what’s right” even if “it might cut short the time I have.” Rosalynn held firm, Cade said: “She’d remind him you have to win to govern.” Carter also was the first president to appoint multiple women as Cabinet officers. Yet by his own telling, his career sprouted from chauvinism in the Carters' early marriage: He did not consult Rosalynn when deciding to move back to Plains in 1953 or before launching his state Senate bid a decade later. Many years later, he called it “inconceivable” that he didn’t confer with the woman he described as his “full partner,” at home, in government and at The Carter Center. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn Carter told AP in 2021. So deep was their trust that when Carter remained tethered to the White House in 1980 as 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, it was Rosalynn who campaigned on her husband’s behalf. “I just loved it,” she said, despite the bitterness of defeat. Fair or not, the label of a disastrous presidency had leading Democrats keep their distance, at least publicly, for many years, but Carter managed to remain relevant, writing books and weighing in on societal challenges. He lamented widening wealth gaps and the influence of money in politics. He voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later declared that America had devolved from fully functioning democracy to “oligarchy.” Yet looking ahead to 2020, with Sanders running again, Carter warned Democrats not to lest they help re-elect President Donald Trump. Carter scolded the Republican for his serial lies and threats to democracy, and chided the U.S. establishment for misunderstanding Trump’s populist appeal. He delighted in yearly convocations with Emory University freshmen, often asking them to guess how much he’d raised in his two general election campaigns. “Zero,” he’d gesture with a smile, explaining the public financing system candidates now avoid so they can raise billions. Carter still remained quite practical in partnering with wealthy corporations and foundations to advance Carter Center programs. Carter recognized that economic woes and the Iran crisis doomed his presidency, but offered no apologies for appointing Paul Volcker as the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate hikes would not curb inflation until Reagan's presidency. He was proud of getting all the hostages home without starting a shooting war, even though Tehran would not free them until Reagan's Inauguration Day. “Carter didn’t look at it” as a failure, Alter emphasized. “He said, ‘They came home safely.’ And that’s what he wanted.” Well into their 90s, the Carters greeted visitors at Plains’ Maranatha Baptist Church, where he taught Sunday School and where he will have his last funeral before being buried on . Carter, who made the congregation’s collection plates in his woodworking shop, still garnered headlines there, calling for women’s rights within religious institutions, many of which, he said, “subjugate” women in church and society. Carter was not one to dwell on regrets. “I am at peace with the accomplishments, regret the unrealized goals and utilize my former political position to enhance everything we do,” he wrote around his 90th birthday. The politician who had supposedly hated Washington politics also enjoyed hosting Democratic presidential contenders as again. Carter sat with Buttigieg for the final time March 1, 2020, hours before the Indiana mayor ended his campaign and endorsed eventual winner Joe Biden. “He asked me how I thought the campaign was going,” Buttigieg said, recalling that Carter flashed his signature grin and nodded along as the young candidate, born a year after Carter left office, “put the best face” on the walloping he endured the day before in South Carolina. Never breaking his smile, the 95-year-old host fired back, “I think you ought to drop out.” “So matter of fact,” Buttigieg said with a laugh. “It was somehow encouraging.” Carter had lived enough, won plenty and lost enough to take the long view. “He talked a lot about coming from nowhere,” Buttigieg said, not just to attain the presidency but to leverage “all of the instruments you have in life” and “make the world more peaceful.” In his farewell address as president, Carter said as much to the country that had embraced and rejected him. “The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language,” he declared. “Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.” Carter pledged to remain engaged with and for them as he returned “home to the South where I was born and raised,” home to Plains, where that young lieutenant had indeed become “a fellow citizen of the world.” —- Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.

What Might The Federal Reserve Say After Cutting Rates In DecemberWhy the U.S. government is saying all citizens should use end-to-end encrypted messaging

The comedian Duncan Norvelle, whose catchphrase “chase me” made him a staple of British Saturday night TV in the 1980s, has died aged 66. He had suffered from a chest infection and sepsis. His partner Lynn Trevallion said: “His type of comedy doesn’t happen anymore, he’s probably last of the legends of true variety comedy, so many have passed now. “He was a gentle comedian, never swore on stage. Sir Ken Dodd loved Duncan, because he said he was like him, ‘a good, clean act’, and he invited Duncan on his 80th birthday to be the entertainment for him.” A clip on YouTube of Norvelle appearing on the impenetrable 80s quiz show 3-2-1 gives a flavour of his act. He sidles onstage wearing a mullet and blue tuxedo jacket, then flirtatiously offers the carnation in his buttonhole to a bearded man in the front row of the audience, inviting him to “chase me”. Though his act played on the gay stereotypes of the time, Norvelle was heterosexual. He was part of a generation of comics, including Cannon and Ball and Jim Davidson, who became TV stars after cutting their teeth in working men’s clubs and variety shows. They were eventually replaced in the mainstream by a more left-leaning, anarchic and political aware crop of comics initially known as “alternative comedians” including Ben Elton and French and Saunders. Born in Horton, in Leicestershire, Norvelle rose to standup performances in venues including the London Palladium and appeared on shows TV such as Wogan, The Bob Monkhouse Show and The Keith Harris Show. In 1985, he hosted the pilot episode for a dating show called It’s a Hoot!, which later became Blind Date presented by Cilla Black. “In the pilot, Duncan hadn’t been able to get the logistics, but Cilla was great at all the army-like manoeuvres – turn left here, look into that camera, introduce this now,” Alan Boyd, head of entertainment at London Weekend Television, told the Guardian . Norvelle had suffered a stroke in 2012 which left him partially paralysed, though he continued to perform. “He got back on stage after his stroke and just proved to everyone that he could still get a standing ovation every single time he did a show,” Trevallion said. “And he did loads and loads of shows after his stroke because they said he quite possibly would never walk or talk properly, and he could talk perfectly.” Davidson sent his “heartfelt condolences” to Norvelle’s family, adding: “Rest in peace Duncan. You were, and always will be, a proper comedian.” Comedian Jimmy Cricket, another star of the era, said: “Duncan was a charismatic performer who thrilled audiences up and down the country with his style of humour and hilarious impressions, he was also a man of indomitable spirit! RIP old friend.” Gary Bushell, the former TV critic of the Sun, wrote: “So sorry to hear we have lost loveable comic Duncan Norvelle. Angels are chasing him now.”

WYLIE, Texas and LEXINGTON, Ky., Nov. 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — LearnEV+ and CarTechIQ have joined forces to launch GlobalTechIQ, Inc., a joint venture delivering groundbreaking AI diagnostic technology for heavy-duty and off-highway vehicle repairs. This collaboration, operating under the name HeavyDutyIQ, leverages live, context-based AI solutions to transform repair processes and empower technicians with real-time, accurate recommendations. GlobalTechIQ’s AI assistant processes data from a broad array of sources, including heavy-duty OEMs, tier 1 suppliers, and industry veterans. By analyzing these inputs in real-time, the system provides context-aware, live recommendations tailored to specific symptoms and diagnostic trouble codes. This ensures technicians receive the most relevant and actionable solutions instantly. “Repair shops face increasing complexity in diagnostics, electrical system repairs, and efficient troubleshooting are some of the key challenges faced by HD technicians and repair facilities today. Adding focused AI repair assistance technology to the diagnosis and repair process will drastically reduce diagnostic time and non-productive bay time by having AI-driven probable repair solutions available for the technician,” said John J. Stoeckinger, CEO of LearnEV+. “Keeping up with ever-changing systems technology on today’s vehicles is a challenge for all repair shops. In the passenger car and light duty market, our AI assistance technology provides probability-ranked repair recommendations with fast cycle times. We expect to offer similar results in the heavy-duty and off-road markets,” said Dean Ricciardulli, CEO of CarTechIQ Inc. Learn EV, Inc. is an E-commerce training platform that educates technicians in the electric vehicles space. Using virtual and augmented reality headsets to support the platform. Learn EV, Inc. leverages the assets and industry expertise of “Independent Truck Repair Group” (iTRG) to accelerate the Platform. CarTechIQ, Inc. is a leading innovator in AI-powered automotive service and support. By using specialized AI and open large language models, CarTechIQ, Inc. equips technicians and software providers with advanced tools for efficient, informed decision-making. The company’s mission is to transform the transportation industry by providing unparalleled guidance and cutting-edge technology. For more information contact or . John J. Stoeckinger Chief Executive Officer of LearnEV+( MENAFN - UkrinForm) Law enforcement agencies have referred over 2,000 cases of questionable disability statuses issued by Medical-Social Expert Commissions (MSEC) to the Ministry of health of Ukraine. Following reviews, disability statuses for 188 individuals have already been revoked. Health Minister Viktor Liashko disclosed this information during a television broadcast, as reported by a Ukrinform correspondent. “Law enforcement has forwarded over 2,000 cases to us. We have already reviewed nearly 1,000, and 188 disability statuses have been revoked,” Liashko stated. The Minister added that 388 individuals involved in these cases have been summoned to a specialized research institute for reassessment. Liashko urged medical professionals in expert panels to strictly adhere to legal protocols in their work. He also reminded that starting January 1, 2025, MSECs will cease to function as separate legal entities. “When discussing the comprehensive reform of medical-social expertise, we have already restructured the medical aspect. This marks the first step in a broader reform. Next, we anticipate reforms from the social sector, the Ministry of Economy, and the Ministry of Education and Science. Together, these changes will complete the assessment framework for evaluating individuals' functionality, identifying their needs related to loss of function, and offering state-provided compensatory solutions,” Liashko explained. The Minister assured that the healthcare system is prepared for the elimination of MSECs. Liashko also highlighted that a list of diagnoses has been established for which disability statuses will be granted for life, eliminating the need for annual or biannual reassessments.“This has been clearly outlined in Cabinet resolutions and detailed in Ministry of Health regulations for each condition. This issue has been resolved and will be implemented in 2025 to settle the matter once and for all,” he added. As reported by Ukrinform, on December 19, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed a law eliminating Medical-Social Expert Commissions starting next year. MENAFN29122024000193011044ID1109040131 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.Pembina Pipeline Corporation Announces 2025 Guidance and Provides Business Update

The Latest: Former President Jimmy Carter is Dead at age 100

VANCOUVER — British Columbia business owner Joe Chaput will spend $5,500 a month on security guards during the holiday season and plans on upgrading his store’s video camera system for around $5,000 more. He’s not selling luxury brands or expensive jewels. Chaput sells cheese, and at Christmas, cheese is a hot commodity. He is the co-owner of specialty cheese store les amis du Fromage, with two locations in Vancouver. While cheeselifting is rare in their Kitsilano store, the outlet in East Vancouver is hit in waves, with nothing happening for a month, then three of four people trying to steal their inventory within a week. “Sometimes, you miss it. Sometimes, you catch it. The way shoplifters behave ... they tend to gravitate toward expensive things,” said Chaput. Expensive cheese is on shoplifters’ Christmas list, he said. “They tend to do the classic examples of staying away from customer service and trying to go to a different part of the store so they can be left alone to steal.” Chaput isn’t alone. Police say food-related crimes on are the rise in Canada and as prices climb for items such as cheese and butter, they become lucrative on the black market for organized crime groups, not to mention theft for local resale. Sylvain Charlebois, the director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab, said a black market tends to emerge as soon as food prices surge. “Organized crime will steal anything (if) they know they can sell it and so, they probably would have known who their clients are before even stealing anything at all, and that’s how a black market is organized,” said Charlebois. He said he believes there are two categories of people shoplifting — those who do so out of desperation because they can’t afford the food, or organized criminals, profiting from sales on the black market. Mounties in North Vancouver made cheesy headlines when they ran into a man with a cart of stolen cheese in the middle of the night in September. The cheese, valued at $12,800, was from a nearby Whole Foods Store. While the cheese was recovered, it had to be disposed of because it hadn’t been refrigerated. Const. Mansoor Sahak, with the North Vancouver RCMP, said officers believe cheese is targeted because it’s “profitable to resell.” “If they are drug addicts, they will commit further crimes with that or feed their drug habits. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Sahak. Sahak said meat is also a top target for grocery thieves, with store losses sometimes in the thousands. “So, we’re not surprised that this happened,” said Sahak. Police in Ontario have been chasing down slippery shoplifters going after butter. Scott Tracey, a spokesman with Guelph Police Service, said there have been eight or nine butter thefts over the last year, including one theft last December worth $1,000. In October, two men walked into a local grocer and filled their carts with cases of butter valued at $936, and four days later a Guelph grocer lost four cases valued at $958. Tracey said he has looked at online marketplaces and found listings by people selling 20 or 30 pounds of butter at a time. “Clearly, somebody didn’t accidentally buy 30 extra pounds of butter. So, they must have come from somewhere,” said Tracey, “I think at this point it appears to be the black market is where it’s headed.” He said the thefts seem to be organized, with two or three people working together in each case. Police in Brantford, Ont., are also investigating the theft of about $1,200 worth of butter from a store on Nov. 4. Charlebois said retailers could invest in prevention technologies like electronic tags, but putting them on butter or cheese is rare. He said up until recently grocery store theft has been a “taboo subject for many years.” Stores didn’t wanted to talk about thefts because they didn’t want to alarm people but now they feel they need to build awareness about what is “becoming a huge problem,” said Charlebois. Chaput, the cheese store owner, said he had been running the East Vancouver store for 15 years while managing the store in Kitsilano for 30 years, and he loves his customers. “It’s really one of the best parts of our businesses, seeing familiar faces and making new customers. It’s why we come to work, really. Partly it’s the cheese, and partly it’s the people,” said Chaput. He said his strategy to combat would-be thieves is to give them extra customer service to make it harder for them to steal. He admits, however, that the shoplifting causes him stress. “It’s challenging. You’re busy trying to run your business day to day and take care of customers and take care of employees. Having to deal with criminals, just kind of scratches away. It can be a bit exhausting,” said Chaput.It seemed like companies couldn’t hire information technology analysts fast enough in 2014 when Michael Deneen began his IT career. Job counts nationally soared in the 2010s and early 2020s, but then the market flattened and a profession that looked like it might grow uninterrupted started shedding jobs. Laid off twice this year from Minnesota IT jobs, Deneen said he’s found it hard to snag the next gig. “Before I could have three, four offers lined up and would have to choose between them,” the Columbia Heights man said. “It’s like I’m struggling to even get a foot in the door in places that I’m more than qualified for.” Even with the state’s relatively low 3.5 percen t unemployment rate, some mid-career Minnesotans and those just coming out of college are seeing a job market now that worries them. Recent layoffs at Cargill in the Twin Cities and last week’s announcement that Arctic Cat, the Minnesota snowmobile maker, will shutter its manufacturing operations next year in Thief River Falls and St. Cloud, have added to the anxiety. Analysts say Minnesota’s job market remains robust, but for some there’s a skills matchup problem as some sectors grow while others flatten or decline. “I’m not gonna lie, it’s been hard,” Deneen said of finding the next IT job. “I’ve had a lot of self-doubt now, like questioning is this really an industry I am good at? Is this something I should even be in anymore? I’m also 40. It’s like, I can’t really switch careers at this point.” Health care, government, leisure and hospitality and transportation are among the Minnesota sectors that continue to show strong job growth, according to state data. Other industries are growing slower, including construction and manufacturing. “We’ve heard from some folks that maybe it has taken a little longer than what they remember in the past if they were previously unemployed. Some individuals don’t say that at all,” said Sara Garbe, workforce development supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. “November and reaching December, we certainly see a slowdown of hiring and folks may mention things like that they’ve heard from recruiters that maybe a decision won’t be made until after the holidays or after the first or the last quarter of the year,” added Garbe, whose staff works with new job seekers and those in mid-career. For recent college grads who haven’t landed work, the holiday season can bring its own pressures. Raina Hofstede, 22, studied English at Harvard University. Since graduating in May and coming back to Minnesota, she said job prospects have been nearly nonexistent. “I feel kind of directionless in the time period that I’m waiting,” said Hofstede, who grew up in Coon Rapids. “I feel like I really want to plan. I’m at a point where, like, I’d love to get things moving.” She’s applied to post-undergrad internships and career-advancing work. She’s looking into publishing, creative writing spaces and museums and hopes a stint working in comedy clubs while at Harvard might intrigue an employer. The search and the uncertainty around it is a grind, she acknowledged. “I think, as time goes on, and this feels sad, but I think as time goes on, my belief in myself slowly drops a little bit more with more rejections, and so I feel like I’ll be applying to less and less competitive things as I move forward,” Hofstede said. ' Minnesota showed strong steady job growth coming out of the Great Recession in 2009, reaching nearly 3 million jobs by February 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic torpedoed that growth — the state lost more than 400,000 jobs, nearly 14 percent of its employment, in the span of a few months. Job counts didn’t return permanently to pre-pandemic levels until September last year. The current state and national unemployment rates are relatively low, although they have ticked up over the past year. Minnesota’s unemployment rate is lower than the U.S. unemployment rate at 4.2 percent. Based on the most recent data, Minnesota has six unemployed people for every 10 job openings where nationally there are nine unemployed people for every 10 openings. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier for those looking for work, waiting for answers from prospective employers. “It just kind of feels like they have no respect for a candidate or their time, or them as a person,” Deneen said of the current market. “It’s an entire game, and it shouldn’t be this way.” Garbe said technology is transforming job searches in ways that may make landing work more challenging for some in mid-career or just starting out. Companies are using automated systems or in some cases artificial intelligence systems to screen applicants before a human gets to them. She encourages job seekers to reach out to one of DEED’s more than 50 CareerForce offices across the state where analysts can review resumes or cover letters with job seekers and offer help with writing and strategy. They can also connect people to needed training or certifications. Garbe also suggests reflecting on what you’ve accomplished to boost your self-confidence if you get overwhelmed. Social media has become a resource for job seekers as they look. Groups on Reddit like r/StudentJobSearch have become a space for venting and advice with conversations about job searching and applications. LinkedIn is also seeing similar support groups, including two Deneen is in that focus on networking and project management. Hofstede said she’s found solace leaning on those around her who are going through these same experiences. She and a group of new graduates meet at their public library to sift through job postings and work on cover letters and resumes together. “Something of a little community of people who are unemployed and looking for jobs, and I like having the friends support,” she said. “It is harder to go through something uncertain like this alone.”

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College Football Playoff's first 12-team bracket is set with Oregon No. 1 and SMU in, Alabama outNo. 22 Texas A&M beats Texas Tech 72-67 in 1st meeting of former conference rivals since 2012

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — TCU leading scorer Frankie Collins will miss the rest of the season because of a broken bone in his left foot, the school said Friday. The 6-foot-2 senior guard, in his first season at TCU after spending the past two at Arizona State, is scheduled to have surgery Tuesday in Dallas. Collins leads the Horned Frogs (5-4) with 11.2 points and 4.4 assists per game. He also averages 4.4 rebounds per game. TCU said Collins broke his foot in the first half of its 83-74 loss to Vanderbilt last Sunday. He still played 35 minutes, finishing with six points and seven assists. Collins played 31 games as a freshman for Michigan's NCAA Sweet 16 team in 2021-22 before transferring to Arizona State. He started all 32 games last season for the Sun Devils, averaging 13.6 points, 4.4 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game. He could potentially get another college season through a medical redshirt. Arizona State is in its first Big 12 season. It will host TCU on Feb. 15. AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball and https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll

Indianapolis Colts coach Shane Steichen seemed to sense the question might arise after his club was eliminated from playoff consideration Sunday with a ghastly 45-33 loss to the host New York Giants in East Rutheford, N.J. The Giants were 2-13 and had lost a franchise-record 10 straight games entering the contest and their season-high point total Sunday more than tripled their season average of 14.3 points per game. It was the type of bad loss that leads to head coaches being asked about their job security. "I control what I can control," Steichen said of the employment situation. The Colts (7-9) were outplayed all contest by the team that entered the day with the worst record in the NFL -- and with their playoff hopes on the line. Last season, Steichen's first as Indianapolis coach, the Colts also fell short, losing to the Houston Texans in the final week of the season to miss the playoffs. "It was as disappointing as it gets," Steichen said of the setback against the Giants. "As the leader of a football team, shoot, I always say I've got to be better, we've all got to be better. That's a group effort, everyone's got to chip in and do their part, so stuff like that doesn't happen." Giants quarterback Drew Lock passed for 309 yards and tied his career high of four touchdowns while also running for a score. Meanwhile, the Colts also went with a reserve quarterback in veteran Joe Flacco and he turned the ball over three times on two interceptions and a fumble. He also passed for 330 yards. Flacco started because rookie Anthony Richardson couldn't play due to back and foot injuries. Indianapolis completes the season next weekend at home against the Jacksonville Jaguars. "I know it's a tough situation, obviously, when you're out of the playoff hunt, but again, I told (the team) we've got to be professional about it," Steichen said. "That's the biggest thing. We've got to show up and do our job still with one week left." The Colts last made the playoffs in the 2020 season. Their last playoff win was two seasons earlier. --Field Level Media

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Drones, planes or UFOs? Americans abuzz over mysterious New Jersey sightingsNEW YORK, Dec. 08, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces the filing of a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of common stock of Dentsply Sirona Inc. (NASDAQ: XRAY) between December 1, 2022 and November 6, 2024, both dates inclusive (the “Class Period”). A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than January 27, 2025. SO WHAT: If you purchased Dentsply common stock during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Dentsply class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=31762 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. at 866-767-3653 or email case@rosenlegal.com for more information. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than January 27, 2025. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company at the time. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs’ Bar. Many of the firm’s attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, during the Class Period, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Dentsply targeted low-income people who did not have access to good oral hygiene education, a dentist, or dental insurance, which often meant patients signing up for Byte, a direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) aligner solution, had underlying dental issues that would have made them ineligible for treatment; (2) the push for Byte growth and sales commissions caused sales employees to sell to contraindicated patients; (3) as a result of the above, the Byte patient onboarding workflow did not provide adequate assurance that contraindicated patients did not enter treatment; (4) before and during the Class Period, reports of Byte patient injuries were pouring in; (5) Dentsply knew that its Byte aligners were causing severe patient injuries for years but did little to investigate those injuries or notify the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”); (6) Dentsply had no systems in place to notify the FDA of these injuries, which Dentsply is required to do within 30 days of learning of a problem; (7) the FDA had received a sharp uptick in reports of serious injuries from Byte patients; (8) as a result of the above, Dentsply materially overstated the goodwill value of Byte; and (9) as a result of the above, defendants’ positive statements about Dentsply’s business, operations, and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. To join the Dentsply class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=31762 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email case@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor’s ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm , on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/ . Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. ______________________ Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 case@rosenlegal.com www.rosenlegal.com

Bucs rout Panthers, keep pace in race for first in NFC South

Challenges to Asean rights declaration

ROME (AP) — Robert Lewandowski joined Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as the only players in history with 100 or more goals. But is on a faster pace than anyone by boosting his total to 46 goals at age 24 on Tuesday. Still, Haaland's brace wasn't enough for Manchester City in a 3-3 draw with Feyenoord that extended the Premier League champion's winless streak to six matches. Lewandowski’s early penalty kick started Barcelona off to a 3-0 win over previously unbeaten Brest to move into second place in the new single-league format. The Poland striker added goal No. 101 in second-half stoppage time. Ronaldo leads the all-time scoring list with 140 goals and Messi is next with 129. But neither Ronaldo nor Messi play in the Champions League anymore following moves to Saudi Arabia and the United States, respectively. “It’s a nice number,” Lewandowski said. “In the past I didn’t think I could score more than 100 goals in the Champions League. I’m in good company alongside Cristiano and Messi.” The 36-year-old Lewandowski required 125 matches to reach the century mark, two more than Messi (123) and 12 fewer than Ronaldo (137). Barcelona also got a second-half score from Dani Olmo. The top eight finishers in the standings advance directly to the round of 16 in March. Teams ranked ninth to 24th go into a knockout playoffs round in February, while the bottom 12 teams are eliminated. Haaland converted a first-half penalty to eclipse Messi as the youngest player to reach 45 goals then scored City's third after the break to raise his total to 46 goals in 44 games. Ilkay Gundogan had City's second. But then Feyenoord struck back with goals from Anis Hadj Moussa, Santiago Gimenez and David Hancko. Inter Milan beat Leipzig 1-0 with an own goal to move atop the standings with 13 points, one more than Barcelona and Liverpool, which faces Real Madrid on Wednesday. The Serie A champion is the only club that hasn't conceded a goal. Bayern Munich beat Paris Saint-Germain 1-0 — the same score from the 2020 final between the two teams. PSG ended with 10 men and remained in the elimination zone. The French powerhouse has struggled in Europe after Kylian Mbappe’s move to Real Madrid. Kim Min-jae’s first-half header was enough for Bayern, especially after Ousmane Dembelé was sent off in the 56th with his second yellow. Atalanta moved within two points of the lead with a 6-1 win at Young Boys. Charles De Ketelaere scored two and assisted on three other goals for Atalanta. Also, Arsenal kept red-hot striker Viktor Gyokeres quiet in a 5-1 win over Sporting Lisbon; and Germany star Florian Wirtz scored two goals and was involved in two more as Bayer Leverkusen boosted its chances of finishing in the top eight with a 5-0 rout of Salzburg. AC Milan followed up its win at Real Madrid with a 3-2 victory at last-place Slovan Bratislava in an early match. Christian Pulisic put the seven-time champion ahead midway through the first half by finishing off a counterattack. Then Rafael Leao restored the Rossoneri’s advantage after Tigran Barseghyan had equalized for Bratislava and Tammy Abraham quickly added another. Nino Marcelli scored with a long-range strike in the 88th for Bratislava, which ended with 10 men. Bratislava has lost all five of its matches. Argentina World Cup winner Julian Alvarez scored twice and Atletico Madrid routed Sparta Prague 6-0 in the other early game. Alvarez scored with a free kick 15 minutes in and Marcos Llorente added a long-range strike before the break. Alvarez finished off a counterattack early in the second half after being set up by substitute Antoine Griezmann, who then marked his 100th Champions League game by getting on the scoresheet himself. Angel Correa added a late brace for Atletico, which earned its biggest away win in Europe. Atletico beat Paris Saint-Germain in the previous round and extended its winning streak across all competitions to six matches. AP soccer:Stock market today: Wall Street ends mixed after a bumpy week

Cubs acquire All-Star outfielder Kyle Tucker in trade with the Astros

labet88 e games US President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he was nominating staunch loyalist and retired general Keith Kellogg as his Ukraine envoy, charged with ending the two-and-a-half-year Russian invasion. Trump campaigned on a platform of ushering a swift end to the Ukraine war, boasting that he would quickly mediate a ceasefire deal between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. But his critics have warned that the incoming Republican will likely leverage US military aid to pressure Kyiv into an agreement that left it ceding occupied territory permanently or agreeing not to join NATO. "I am very pleased to nominate General Keith Kellogg to serve as Assistant to the President and Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia," Trump said in a statement on social media. "Keith has led a distinguished Military and Business career, including serving in highly sensitive National Security roles in my first Administration." A fixture on the cable news circuit, the 80-year-old national security veteran co-wrote an academic paper earlier this year calling for Washington to leverage military aid as a means of pushing for peace talks. Ukraine has received almost $60 billion from Washington for its armed forces since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, but with the more isolationist Trump taking over the White House, supporters fear the spigot will run dry. "The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement," Kellogg's research paper for the Trumpist America First Policy Institute think tank said. "Future American military aid, however, will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia." Kellogg served in several positions during Trump's first term, including as chief of staff on the White House national security council and national security advisor to then-vice president Mike Pence. Kellogg told Voice of America at the Republican convention in July that Ukraine's options were "quite clear." "If Ukraine doesn't want to negotiate, fine, but then accept the fact that you can have enormous losses in your cities and accept the fact that you will have your children killed, accept the fact that you don't have 130,000 dead, you will have 230,000–250,000," he said. Trump's announcement came as the outgoing administration of Democrat Joe Biden was hosting a news conference to urge Ukraine to enlist more recruits by reducing the minimum age of conscription to 18. Facing a much larger enemy with more advanced weapons and with stocks of volunteers dwindling, Ukraine is facing an "existential" recruitment crunch, a senior administration official told reporters. "The simple truth is that Ukraine is not currently mobilizing or training enough soldiers to replace their battlefield losses while keeping pace with Russia's growing military," said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He was pressed on what Washington considers an appropriate minimum age and he replied that "we think there's real value in them considering lowering the recruiting age to 18" -- in line with the US benchmark. He added that an additional 160,000 troops would be "on the low end" to fill out Ukraine's ranks -- but "a good start." The former Soviet republic's population has fallen by more than a quarter since its mid-1990s peak of 52 million, and authorities are desperate to shield the younger generation -- but a US congressional report in June estimated the average Ukrainian soldier is 40. Zelensky signed a decree in April lowering the draft age from 27 to 25 but the move did not alleviate the chronic troop shortages, according to US officials. ft/bjt

In a recent escalation of tensions in the Middle East, several locations in Syria have been targeted in a series of airstrikes carried out by Israel. The strikes, which reportedly targeted various military sites, have once again raised concerns about the volatile situation in the region and the potential for further conflict.

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The President's latest threat comes amid long-standing tensions between the United States and its NATO allies over defense spending. Trump has repeatedly criticized other member countries for not meeting their agreed-upon defense spending targets, arguing that the burden of maintaining the alliance falls disproportionately on the US. The President's frustration with NATO's financial arrangements has been a recurring theme throughout his time in office, but his latest threat to actually withdraw from the organization marks a significant escalation.

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The traditional narrative of the Middle East being a hotbed of anti-American sentiment and resistance to US presence is being slowly rewritten. The recent Abraham Accords, which saw the normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, have paved the way for a new era of diplomacy and cooperation in the region. This diplomatic breakthrough has not only solidified US alliances but also weakened the influence of its adversaries such as Iran and its proxies.Looking ahead, as we enter the last month of the year, the positive trends observed in November provide a strong foundation for the economic recovery and growth in the coming months. It is essential for policymakers to continue implementing supportive measures, fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and addressing any challenges to ensure sustained economic stability and prosperity.

Freiburg survives late onslaught to beat Wolfsburg in Bundesliga thrillerOn the other hand, Fan Luyuan, the relatively lesser-known co-founder of Alibaba, embodies the B-side of the Alibaba Flavor. A tech-savvy engineer with a keen eye for detail and efficiency, Fan is the mastermind behind Alibaba's technical infrastructure and operational excellence. While Ma focuses on the big picture and strategic partnerships, Fan ensures that the company's technological backbone remains robust, secure, and scalable.

ubet88 casino BEIRUT (AP) — Insurgents' stunning march across Syria accelerated Saturday with news that they had reached the suburbs of the capital and that government forces had withdrawn from the central city of Homs. The government was forced to deny rumors that President Bashar Assad had fled the country. The loss of Homs is a potentially crippling blow for Assad. It stands at an important intersection between Damascus and Syria’s coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus — the Syrian leader’s base of support and home to a Russian strategic naval base. The pro-government Sham FM reported that government forces took positions outside Syria’s third-largest city, without elaborating. Rami Abdurrahman who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Syrian troops and members of different security agencies have withdrawn from the city, adding that rebels have entered parts of it. The capture of Homs is a major victory for insurgents, who have already seized the cities of Aleppo and Hama , as well as large parts of the south, in a lightning offensive that began Nov. 27. Analysts said Homs falling into rebel hands would be a game-changer. The rebels' moves around Damascus, reported by the monitor and a rebel commander, came after the Syrian army withdrew from much of southern part of the country, leaving more areas, including several provincial capitals, under the control of opposition fighters. The advances in the past week were among the largest in recent years by opposition factions, led by a group that has its origins in al-Qaida and is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the United Nations. In their push to overthrow Assad's government, the insurgents, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, have met little resistance from the Syrian army. For the first time in the country's long-running civil war, the government now has control of only three of 14 provincial capitals: Damascus, Latakia and Tartus. The U.N.’s special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, on Saturday called for urgent talks in Geneva to ensure an “orderly political transition.” Speaking to reporters at the annual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the situation in Syria was changing by the minute. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose country is Assad's chief international backer, said he feels “sorry for the Syrian people.” In Damascus, people rushed to stock up on supplies. Thousands went to Syria's border with Lebanon, trying to leave the country. Many shops in the capital were shuttered, a resident told The Associated Press, and those still open ran out of staples such as sugar. Some were selling items at three times the normal price. “The situation is very strange. We are not used to that,” the resident said, insisting on anonymity, fearing retributions. “People are worried whether there will be a battle (in Damascus) or not.” It was the first time that opposition forces reached the outskirts of Damascus since 2018, when Syrian troops recaptured the area following a yearslong siege. The U.N. said it was moving noncritical staff outside the country as a precaution. Syria’s state media denied social media rumors that Assad left the country, saying he is performing his duties in Damascus. He has had little, if any, help from his allies. Russia, is busy with its war in Ukraine . Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which at one point sent thousands of fighters to shore up Assad's forces, has been weakened by a yearlong conflict with Israel. Iran has seen its proxies across the region degraded by regular Israeli airstrikes. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday posted on social media that that the United States should avoid engaging militarily in Syria. Pedersen said a date for talks in Geneva on the implementation a U.N. resolution, adopted in 2015, and calling for a Syrian-led political process, would be announced later. The resolution calls for the establishment of a transitional governing body, followed by the drafting of a new constitution and ending with U.N.-supervised elections. Later Saturday, foreign ministers and senior diplomats from eight key countries, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, Turkey and Iran, along with Pederson, gathered on the sidelines of the Doha Summit to discuss the situation in Syria. No details were immediately available. Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents were in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. Opposition fighters were marching toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta, he added. A commander with the insurgents, Hassan Abdul-Ghani, posted on the Telegram messaging app that opposition forces had begun the “final stage” of their offensive by encircling Damascus. HTS controls much of northwest Syria and in 2017 set up a “salvation government” to run day-to-day affairs in the region. In recent years, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani has sought to remake the group’s image, cutting ties with al-Qaida, ditching hard-line officials and vowing to embrace pluralism and religious tolerance. The shock offensive began Nov. 27, during which gunmen captured the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, and the central city of Hama , the country’s fourth largest city. Opposition activists said Saturday that a day earlier, insurgents entered Palmyra, which is home to invaluable archaeological sites had been in government hands since being taken from the Islamic State group in 2017. To the south, Syrian troops left much of the province of Quneitra including the main Baath City, activists said. Syrian Observatory said government troops have withdrawn from much of the two southern provinces. The Syrian army said in a statement that it carried out redeployment and repositioning in Sweida and Daraa after its checkpoints came under attack by “terrorists." The army said it was setting up a “strong and coherent defensive and security belt in the area,” apparently to defend Damascus from the south. The Syrian government has referred to opposition gunmen as terrorists since conflict broke out in March 2011. The foreign ministers of Iran, Russia and Turkey, meeting in Qatar, called for an end to the hostilities. Turkey is a main backer of the rebels. Qatar's top diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, criticized Assad for failing to take advantage of the lull in fighting in recent years to address the country’s underlying problems. “Assad didn’t seize this opportunity to start engaging and restoring his relationship with his people,” he said. Sheikh Mohammed said he was surprised by how quickly the rebels have advanced and said there is a real threat to Syria’s “territorial integrity.” He said the war could “damage and destroy what is left if there is no sense of urgency” to start a political process. Karam reported from London. Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Sabalenka's dominance on the court and her unwavering determination throughout the season set her apart as a standout player among her peers. Her powerful game style, fierce competitive spirit, and consistently strong performances in high-stakes matches propelled her to the forefront of the women's tennis scene and solidified her status as a force to be reckoned with.

I reduced my energy bills by switching to £30 water dispenser that boils water in 30 secondsWashington Commanders release 2023 first-round pick Emmanuel Forbes

Quite possibly bringing an end to a Hall of Fame career, the Jets have place offensive tackle Tyron Smith on injured reserve. This, according to multiple sources . Smith signed with the Jets this offseason and as was the case with so many moves, it failed spectacularly. Smith was nowhere near the player the Jets thought they were getting as he gave up more sacks through 9-plus games this year than he did in all of 2023. With Smith heading to IR, offensive lineman Xavier Newman has been activated and will give the Jets some depth along the interior O-line. Running back Kene Nwangwu was also elevated from the practice squad ahead of tomorrow’s meeting with the Seahawks. This article first appeared on JetNation.com and was syndicated with permission.

For over 80 years, the William Hall Rodgers Christmas Basket Fund has been a cornerstone of generosity and goodwill in our community. Thanks to this incredible initiative, we’ve been able to feed between 750 to 1,200 families annually, ensuring that no one is forgotten during the holiday season. Cleveland is rightfully known as the "City with Spirit," and our commitment to supporting our neighbors is exemplified by efforts like the Basket Fund and the Empty Stocking Fund. Time and again, our citizens have stepped up to make a difference, showing that Cleveland is indeed a giving community. While we are all aware that grocery prices have risen in recent years, let’s not allow that to deter us from continuing this vital tradition. Imagine a child going to bed hungry, especially during a time that should be filled with joy and celebration. Together, we can change that. By contributing to the Basket Fund, we can provide meals that bring smiles to children’s faces — just like the magic of Christmas morning. Let’s step up once again and show why Cleveland’s spirit is unmatched. Your generosity today can light up a family’s holiday tomorrow. Thank you for giving from your heart. Together, we can ensure no family goes without this Christmas. — Tom Cassada ClevelandIn a league where coaching plays a crucial role in determining a team's success, the dynamics between a head coach and a franchise are essential for building a winning culture and fostering player development. Lue's decision to reject the Lakers' offer sends a powerful message about the importance of mutual respect and appreciation in professional relationships.Looking ahead, it is imperative that we continue to have difficult conversations about race, privilege, and justice in order to create a more equitable and inclusive society. Only by working together to address these deep-seated issues can we hope to prevent future tragedies and build a better future for all individuals, regardless of their race or background.

Average rate on a 30-year mortgage in the US rises to highest level since JulyAnother factor that contributes to the Apple Watch's tendency to stick to glass surfaces is the presence of static electricity. When the watch and the glass surface come into contact, static electricity can build up between the two surfaces, creating a slight attraction force that causes the watch to stick to the glass. This phenomenon is enhanced by the thin and lightweight design of the Apple Watch, which increases the surface area of contact between the watch and the glass.

Washington Commanders release 2023 first-round pick Emmanuel ForbesThe prospect of seeing the Premier League Golden Boot winner dazzle on the hallowed turf of Camp Nou is a tantalizing one for Barcelona fans, who are eagerly anticipating the unveiling of their potential new signing. With his flair, skill, and goal-scoring prowess, the winger promises to bring a new dimension to Barcelona's attacking play and ignite the passion of supporters as they dream of glory in the seasons ahead.

A leaked letter signed by 13 B.C. Conservative MLAs attacking a fellow caucus member has exposed a rift within the upstart party, just weeks after it became the Official Opposition following a swift rise from political obscurity. The group of MLAs, which comprises almost one-third of the 44-member B.C. Conservative caucus, sent a letter dated Nov. 29 to leader John Rustad raising concerns about public comments MLA Elenore Sturko made to on Nov. 23. Sturko, a former RCMP officer who represents Surrey Cloverdale, said she thought it was appropriate for the Vancouver Police Board to accept the resignation of vice-chair Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba following comments made on social media. In screenshots shared to Reddit, one of Sakoma-Fadugba's posts discusses how "mass immigration" and "a growing aversion to assimilation" are "transforming Canada into a place where a shared identity is disappearing." B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad speaks to reporters in late October. (Mike McArthur/CBC) Another post questions Diwali celebrations at schools, saying the "push for secular education isn't about religion — it's about erasing Christian values from the lives of our children." A third references "gender transitions" while criticizing a "woke culture that pits children against their parents." Sturko said the comments were offensive, particularly to the transgender community. However, many B.C. Conservatives have rallied behind Sakoma-Fadugba, saying she is a victim of "cancel culture" and has been attacked for supporting traditional family values. The party's president, Aisha Estey, wrote on social media: "Cancel culture is alive and well at the Vancouver Police Board. She should never have resigned and shame on those who pressured her to do it." B.C. Conservative party president Aisha Estey comments on the resignation of Vancouver Police Board vice-chair Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba. (X.com) The MLAs' letter to Rustad says they believe Sturko spoke out of turn. "It is our view that the statements caused undue harm to Ms. Sakoma and called into question our commitment to the core values shared by Conservatives," they wrote. The MLAs also said under Rustad's leadership, the B.C. Conservative Party "has consistently denounced 'cancel culture' and stood for the Charter rights British Columbians enjoy to free expression and freedom of religion." They called for Rustad to ask Sturko to send a written apology to Sakoma-Fadugba and "encourage the Vancouver Police Board to advance conciliatory discussions" with the former board member. The letter's signatories are: Tara Armstrong, Rosalyn Bird, Dallas Brodie, Brent Chapman, Reann Gasper, Sharon Hartwell, Anna Kindy, Jordan Kealy, Kristina Loewen, Macklin McCall, Heather Maahs, Korky Neufeld and Ward Stamer. B.C. Conservative MLAs convened virtually for an emergency caucus meeting Friday morning. Sturko told CBC News she won't comment, since the letter was addressed to Rustad. She added she has no plans to change her statement regarding Sakoma-Fadugba, nor has Rustad asked her to do so. Sturko said she first learned about the letter on Thursday. CBC News has contacted Rustad and Estey for comment but has yet to hear back. Rustad's party campaigned on socially conservative issues including what it calls parental rights. It voiced its opposition to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI 123) guidelines in schools, saying parents should have more of a say in what's taught to their children. Rustad then created a new critic portfolio called parental rights and sports, signalling the issue will continue to be a priority for the party. SOGI 123 is not a curriculum but provides guides and resources to help teachers address discrimination and bullying, create supportive and inclusive environments for 2SLGBTQ+ students and acknowledge varying genders and sexual orientations. Sturko, a former B.C. United MLA, in June to join Rustad amid poor polling numbers and flagging confidence in B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon. A month later, Falcon made a deal with the B.C. Conservatives to suspend the party's election campaign and throw his support behind Rustad.No secrets as Bucs visit Dave Canales, Panthers for NFC South showdown

In response to questions about the United States' future involvement in NATO, Trump has made it clear that fair payment will be a determining factor. He has indicated that if NATO members do not increase their defense spending to meet the agreed-upon targets, the US may reconsider its role in the alliance. Trump's stance on this issue reflects his commitment to prioritizing American interests and ensuring that the burden of defense is more equitably shared among NATO members.

German word of the day: KrisenmodusAs China continues to lead the world in the number of intangible cultural heritage projects, it serves as a shining example of the importance of preserving and promoting cultural diversity and heritage. The recognition of the Spring Festival as an intangible cultural heritage further highlights China's rich cultural legacy and its commitment to sharing it with the world. By safeguarding and promoting its intangible cultural heritage, China not only preserves its traditions for future generations but also contributes to the global cultural dialogue and mutual understanding.MILES CITY — Closing weekend of the general deer/elk season was a bit colder than normal in southeast Montana, with hunter traffic at game check stations around the region either down a bit or close to average. Hysham The Hysham check station saw 69 parties and 124 hunters come through Dec. 1, which is very close to average for the final weekend. Harvest success of the individual hunters was near 48%, which is about 26% below average for the closer. FWP crews were able to gather harvest data on 14 mule deer bucks (no does were checked), 27 white-tailed deer (24 bucks and three does) and four elk (three bulls and one cow). The number of hunters with mule deer bucks was significantly down; typically crews check around 45 muley bucks on closing day at Hysham. The number of whitetail bucks was near average. Ashland The weather was slightly cooler, which likely facilitated good big game activity. A total of 77 hunters came through the Ashland check station, which is 29% below the 10-year average for this weekend. The harvest success rate was 47%, which is moderately above the 10-year average for the deer and elk closer at Ashland. Harvest included seven elk (one bull, six cows), 11 mule deer (nine bucks, two does), 15 white-tailed deer (12 bucks, three does), four turkeys, two pheasants and seven sharp-tailed grouse. Most hunters enjoyed their time afield and several reported seeing more mule deer than in the last couple years. Glendive Overall the Glendive check station was slower than normal. Fewer hunters came through than in past years, likely due to the freezing temps Sunday. The weather was windy and cold with temperatures around 15 degrees. A total of 11 parties and 21 hunters came through the check station, 30% lower than the average number of hunters checked on past closing weekends. Of the hunters checked, five had game for a harvest success rate of 24%. Two white-tailed deer (one buck and one doe), three mule deer (two bucks and one doe) and six ring-necked pheasants were checked. Of the hunters who came through the check station, most reported being satisfied with their hunts. Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — After losing to San Francisco in the playoffs three of the last five seasons, the Green Bay Packers wouldn’t mind seeing the 49ers get left out of the postseason entirely. The Packers (7-3) could damage San Francisco’s playoff hopes Sunday by beating the 49ers at Lambeau Field. San Francisco (5-5) dropped to .500 after losing at home to the Seattle Seahawks, though the 49ers remain just a game behind the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC West. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.

Blackhawks' Connor Bedard: '100 Things' I Could Improve amid Slump In 2nd NHL Seasonubet98 。

Mr Carter, a former peanut farmer, served one term in the White House between 1977 and 1981, taking over in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the end of the Vietnam War. After his defeat by Ronald Reagan, he spent his post-presidency years as a global humanitarian, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. His death on Sunday was announced by his family and came more than a year after he decided to enter hospice care. He was the longest-lived US president. Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia. pic.twitter.com/aqYmcE9tXi — The Carter Center (@CarterCenter) December 29, 2024 His son, Chip Carter, said: “My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights and unselfish love. “My brothers, sister and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. “The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honouring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.” Mr Carter is expected to receive a state funeral featuring public observances in Atlanta and Washington DC before being buried in his home town of Plains, Georgia. A moderate democrat born in Plains in October 1924, Mr Carter’s political career took him from the Georgia state senate to the state governorship and finally the White House, where he took office as the 39th president. His presidency saw economic disruption amid volatile oil prices, along with social tensions at home and challenges abroad including the Iranian revolution that sparked a 444-day hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran. But he also brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which led to a peace treaty between the two countries in 1979. After his defeat in the 1980 presidential election, he worked for more than four decades leading the Carter Centre, which he and his late wife Rosalynn co-founded in 1982 to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope”. Mrs Carter, who died last year aged 96, had played a more active role in her husband’s presidency than previous first ladies, with Mr Carter saying she had been “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished”. Earlier this year, on his 100th birthday, Mr Carter received a private congratulatory message from the King, expressing admiration for his life of public service.

Left-hander Max Fried agrees to $218 million, 8-year contract with Yankees, AP source says DALLAS (AP) — A person familiar with the negotiations tells The Associated Press that Max Fried and the New York Yankees have agreed to a $218 million, eight-year contract, the largest deal for a left-handed pitcher in baseball history. New York made the move two days after outfielder Juan Soto left for a pending $765 million, 15-year contract with the rival Mets. Fried, who turns 31 in January, gets the fourth-highest contract among pitchers behind the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole and Washington’s Stephen Strasburg. Fried broke the mark for lefties set by David Price at $217 million. Mbappe, Vinicius and Bellingham on target as Real Madrid beats Atalanta 3-2. Liverpool wins again Real Madrid’s big stars turned on the style to revive the Spanish giant’s faltering Champions League title defense. Galacticos Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Junior and Jude Bellingham all scored in a 3-2 win at Italian league leader Atalanta. It was only Madrid’s third win in the competition’s revamped league phase and leaves the 15-time champion in the unseeded playoff positions in 18th place. In contrast Liverpool leads the way after maintaining its perfect record in Europe this season after a 1-0 win against Girona. Mohamed Salah scored his 50th Champions League goal to seal it for Liverpool. Analysis: After Juan Soto's megadeal, could MLB see a $1 billion contract? Probably not soon For the second straight Major League Baseball offseason, a norm-shattering contract has been the talk of the winter, with Juan Soto agreeing with the New York Mets on a $765 million, 15-year deal that’s the richest in baseball history. It comes almost exactly one year after the Los Angeles Dodgers forked out a princely sum of $700 million on a 10-year, heavily deferred deal for two-way Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani. The way it’s going, a contract approaching $1 billion doesn’t seem out of the question. But several factors are working against it — at least in the near future. Joe Burrow's home broken into during Monday Night Football in latest pro-athlete home invasion ANDERSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio (AP) — Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow’s home was broken into during Monday Night Football in the latest home invasion of a pro athlete in the U.S. Authorities said Tuesday no one was injured in the break-in, but the home was ransacked. Deputies weren’t immediately able to determine what items were stolen. Both the NFL and NBA issued alerts to players following prior break-ins, urging them to take precautions. The homes of Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce were broken into in October. In the NBA, Milwaukee Bucks forward Bobby Portis and Minnesota Timberwolves guard Mike Conley Jr. had their homes broken into. Scottie Scheffler in a landslide to win PGA Tour player of the year for third straight time Scottie Scheffler is the PGA Tour player of the year in a vote that had about as much drama as some of his victories. Scheffler earned 91% of the vote in winning the Jack Nicklaus Award for the third straight season. He joins Tiger Woods as the only players to win three straight times. Woods won it five times in a row, and three straight times on another occasion. Scheffler won seven times on the PGA Tour against only the strongest fields. He also won the FedEx Cup. He also won the Masters green jacket and an Olympic gold medal. MLB investigated to ensure no early Sasaki deal in place, pitcher likely to pick team mid-January DALLAS (AP) — Major League Baseball investigated to ensure no team had an advance deal in place for Roki Sasaki, and the agent for the Japanese pitcher says picking a club will be “like the draft in reverse.” On the first day of Sasaki’s 45-day window to sign with an MLB team, agent Joel Wolfe says the 23-year-old right-hander likely will sign shortly after the 2025 international signing pool window opens on Jan. 15 and wouldn’t wait until the Jan. 23 deadline. Sasaki helped Japan win the 2023 World Baseball Classic and has a fastball clocked at 102.5 mph. Cubs Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg says cancer has returned, spread CHICAGO (AP) — Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg says the prostate cancer he thought had been eliminated by radiation has returned and spread. The Chicago Cubs great made the announcement on Instagram on Tuesday. Sandberg announced in January that he had metastatic prostate cancer and in August said he was cancer-free after chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Sandberg was the National League MVP in 1984 and a 10-time All-Star during 15 seasons for the Cubs from 1982 to 1997, with 282 home runs and 344 stolen bases. After his playing career, he served as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies from 2013 to 2015, going 119-159. Nolan Arenado open to switch from third base to first and leaving Cardinals for a team he approves DALLAS (AP) — Nolan Arenado is open to a trade from the St. Louis Cardinals, at age 33 wanting to be on a World Series contender. Agent Joel Wolfe says “it’s like his biological clock is ticking and if the team’s not winning it’s driving him crazy every day.” An eight-time All-Star and 10-time Gold Glove third baseman, Arenado is open to a switch to first base. He hit .272 with 16 homers and 71 RBIs this year, his poorest season in a decade. St. Louis acquired Arenado from Colorado ahead of the 2021 season. Washington Nationals win lottery for No. 1 pick in next amateur baseball draft, Angels No. 2 DALLAS (AP) — The Washington Nationals will have the No. 1 overall pick in the amateur draft next summer. The Nationals won the draft lottery through a drawing of ping-pong balls at the winter meetings in Dallas. Unlike last year, when the Nationals were ineligible after initially coming out with the top spot, they will get to make the first pick in July in Atlanta during All-Star Game festivities. The Los Angeles Angels got the second overall pick for next summer. Seattle, Colorado, St. Louis and Pittsburgh round out the six lottery picks. Lindsey Vonn will serve as a forerunner, test out the course before World Cup races at Beaver Creek Lindsey Vonn will test out the downhill and super-G courses as a forerunner before the World Cup races this weekend in Beaver Creek, Colorado. The U.S. Ski Team confirmed her role. A forerunner goes before the field to make sure the course is running smoothly and the timing system is properly working. There’s a downhill race slated for Saturday on the tricky Birds of Prey course and a super-G on Sunday. The 40-year-old Vonn is on the comeback trail nearly six years since her last major race.Stock market today: Wall Street drifts lower as it waits for inflation data

As Hambantota International Port (HIP) gears up to enhance its container operations with the introduction of advanced crane technology in early February 2025, Hambantota International Port Group (HIPG) CEO Wilson Qu emphasised the port’s commitment to exploring untapped markets to expand its portfolio. This strategic initiative aims to significantly boost container volumes and solidify Sri Lanka’s position as a competitive force in global maritime trade. To achieve this, the port is implementing a comprehensive seaside and landside strategy designed to position HIP’s container division strategically for future growth. The port’s landside strategy is progressing actively to attract investors to its industrial zone. Recently, an agreement was signed to establish a sponge-mattress factory within the zone. This business, targeting export markets in the USA, Europe, and Canada, marks a significant milestone as the first agreement finalised since the port launched container operations. Currently, the port is handling an increasing number of inquiries and anticipates finalising several additional agreements in 2025. The industrial zone is poised to create substantial employment opportunities while fostering a collaborative environment where Sri Lankan entrepreneurs can either partner with international companies or invest independently to meet rising international demand. HIPG’s industrial zone will also generate more gateway cargo, drawing liners to the port and significantly enhancing connectivity. This initiative provides a considerable logistical advantage for cargo originating in the region, further solidifying the port’s role as a strategic hub in global trade. “Hambantota Port’s strategic location on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, combined with the island’s central position along key maritime routes, offers a unique opportunity to attract customers who may not have previously considered Sri Lanka a viable option,” the CEO explained, emphasising that HIPG’s strategy goes beyond geopolitical influences and traditional market segmentation. “Instead, our focus is on delivering competitive commercial rates and exceptional service with investment in infrastructure and superstructure, because we are well aware that the port cannot rely solely on its location.” As part of its seaside strategy, the port is entering the relay cargo market, representing a new opportunity for the country, which has a set goal to handle 10 million TEUs between 2025 and 2026. HIPG is also targeting the region’s container market, particularly transhipment. Currently, more than 70% of containerised cargo from the BIMSTEC countries bypasses Sri Lankan ports, presenting a substantial opportunity for HIP to capture a significant portion of this untapped market. Through aggressive and strategic marketing to this segment, HIP aims to position itself as a key hub and unlock untapped potential in the region. Relay cargo refers to the transfer of cargo between two ships at an intermediate port, which involves vessels from the same carrier. It is a strategic move aimed at improving operational efficiency and connecting services across different regions. By utilising an intermediate port, shipping lines can optimise their routes, streamline operations, and reduce overall transit times. In contrast, transhipment involves the movement of cargo between ships — often from different carriers, at an intermediate hub port when there is no direct route between the origin and the destination. By leveraging Sri Lanka’s strategic location and offering tailored landside and seaside solutions for container operations, the Hambantota International Port is poised to redefine regional shipping dynamics and establish itself as a major player in the global logistics sector.Jimmy Carter, a man of implacable faith, lived his valuesNone

Stock market today: Wall Street drifts lower as it waits for inflation data

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Nvidia has long been a major player in the technology sector, particularly in the gaming and data center markets. Its GPUs are widely used for high-performance computing, gaming, artificial intelligence, and other applications. However, concerns have been raised about Nvidia's growing influence and potential anti-competitive behavior.

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The uncertainty surrounding Emerson's situation underscores the challenges facing Barcelona as they look to rebuild their squad and compete at the highest level. The club's financial constraints have forced them to adopt a more cautious approach in the transfer market, with the need to balance the books becoming increasingly critical.

The DEI logo, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is a symbol of unity and acceptance that has been embraced by many individuals and organizations around the world. However, some netizens took issue with Dei's use of the logo, accusing him of appropriating a movement that he had no connection to. The criticism quickly escalated, with vicious comments and accusations being hurled at the designer from all corners of the internet.NoneIn recent years, the development of autonomous driving technology has been a focal point for numerous companies in the automotive industry. While Huawei has made significant strides in the field of autonomous driving with its Huawei HiCar system, it is interesting to note that automotive companies seem to be more inclined to partner with Momenta, a Chinese autonomous driving technology startup. This raises the question: why are automotive companies showing a preference for collaborating with Momenta over utilizing Huawei's advanced innovations in this space?

In conclusion, the outlook for monetary policy in the first half of next year points towards a continuation of the current easing bias, with further interest rate cuts and reserve requirement ratio reductions likely on the horizon. As policymakers navigate the challenges of a sluggish economy and uncertain global environment, their ability to calibrate policy responses effectively will be key to restoring confidence and sustaining growth in the coming months.The incident serves as a reminder of the importance of robust disaster response plans and fire safety measures in data center operations. With the increasing reliance on cloud computing and data storage services, ensuring the security and integrity of data centers is paramount for businesses and individuals alike.

Over half of Canadian businesses regret recent software purchases according to a new survey. Yet a significant 69 percent still plan to increase their software spending in 2025, highlighting a growing reliance on technology to drive growth and efficiency. This is according to a survey from the firm Capterra . Technological advancements, particularly in areas like generative AI, have emerged as the most influential external factor shaping business goals, with 59 percent of Canadian companies citing it as a key driver. This influence surpasses even the pressures of competition and labour market challenges, highlighting a clear shift in strategic priorities (by 53 percent and 40 percent of Canadian professionals, respectively). The survey indicates that businesses anticipate growth, with 82 percent of decision-makers expecting increased revenue, there’s a noticeable alignment between business expansion and tech investments. Companies are focusing on software that supports scalability and operational performance, with learning management, business intelligence, and IT support tools leading the charge. Over the past 12 months, Canadian businesses have invested heavily in software that supports employee development, collaboration, and learning—all essential capabilities for a growing company. The most widely adopted software type was learning management (55 percent), followed by business intelligence (BI) software (54 percent), and help desk and IT support (53 percent). The journey has potential hurdles. For example, a significant 56 percent of decision-makers report regretting at least one tech purchase in the past 18 months. Security concerns, data management, and compatibility issues are among the primary challenges they face. Many of these issues can be avoided by being mindful of key challenges associated with purchasing software. Canadian businesses say the top three challenges they face in buying software include security concerns (48 percent), data management (35 percent), and compatibility with existing systems (35 percent). Among software buyers who expressed dissatisfaction with a purchase, 36 percent report that this stems from the software being more expensive than expected. Beyond the subscription cost, businesses should consider the total cost of ownership, which may include fees for implementation, customization, data migration, user training, or customer support. Another 34 percent of regretful buyers cited difficulties with training and onboarding, and 31% cited poor technical support. This demonstrates the need for businesses to set clear expectations for customer support requirements with potential vendors early on in the evaluation process. Additionally, the importance of vendor reputation and comprehensive customer support has become increasingly evident, as businesses strive to avoid buyer’s regret. Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news.Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.Italian football fans were stunned when it was revealed that 22-year-old Fiorentina midfielder had to undergo surgery to have a defibrillator implanted due to a heart condition. The news has left the talented young player with no other choice but to bid farewell to Serie A and consider playing in other leagues if he wants to continue his football career.

NEW YORK (AP) — Brian Thompson led one of the biggest health insurers in the U.S. but was unknown to millions of people his decisions affected. Then Wednesday's targeted fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk thrust the executive and his business into the national spotlight. Thompson, who was 50, had worked at the giant UnitedHealth Group Inc for 20 years and run the insurance arm since 2021 after running its Medicare and retirement business. As CEO, Thompson led a firm that provides health coverage to more than 49 million Americans — more than the population of Spain. United is the largest provider of Medicare Advantage plans, the privately run versions of the U.S. government’s Medicare program for people age 65 and older. The company also sells individual insurance and administers health-insurance coverage for thousands of employers and state-and federally funded Medicaid programs. The business run by Thompson brought in $281 billion in revenue last year, making it the largest subsidiary of the Minnetonka, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group. His $10.2 million annual pay package, including salary, bonus and stock options awards, made him one of the company's highest-paid executives. The University of Iowa graduate began his career as a certified public accountant at PwC and had little name recognition beyond the health care industry. Even to investors who own its stock, the parent company's face belonged to CEO Andrew Witty, a knighted British triathlete who has testified before Congress. When Thompson did occasionally draw attention, it was because of his role in shaping the way Americans get health care. At an investor meeting last year, he outlined his company's shift to “value-based care,” paying doctors and other caregivers to keep patients healthy rather than focusing on treating them once sick. “Health care should be easier for people,” Thompson said at the time. “We are cognizant of the challenges. But navigating a future through value-based care unlocks a situation where the ... family doesn’t have to make the decisions on their own.” Thompson also drew attention in 2021 when the insurer, like its competitors, was widely criticized for a plan to start denying payment for what it deemed non-critical visits to hospital emergency rooms. “Patients are not medical experts and should not be expected to self-diagnose during what they believe is a medical emergency,” the chief executive of the American Hospital Association wrote in an open letter addressed to Thompson. “Threatening patients with a financial penalty for making the wrong decision could have a chilling effect on seeking emergency care.” United Healthcare responded by delaying rollout of the change. Thompson, who lived in a Minneapolis suburb and was the married father of two sons in high school, was set to speak at an investor meeting in a midtown New York hotel. He was on his own and about to enter the building when he was shot in the back by a masked assailant who fled on foot before pedaling an e-bike into Central Park a few blocks away, the New York Police Department said. Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said investigators were looking at Thompson's social media accounts and interviewing employees and family members. “Didn’t seem like he had any issues at all,” Kenny said. "He did not have a security detail.” AP reporters Michael R. Sisak and Steve Karnowski contributed to this report. Murphy reported from Indianapolis. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Get local news delivered to your inbox!PNC Financial Services Group Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of Fifth Third Bancorp ( NASDAQ:FITB – Free Report ) by 0.4% during the 3rd quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The fund owned 261,039 shares of the financial services provider’s stock after purchasing an additional 945 shares during the period. PNC Financial Services Group Inc.’s holdings in Fifth Third Bancorp were worth $11,183,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC. A number of other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of the business. Venturi Wealth Management LLC boosted its stake in shares of Fifth Third Bancorp by 89.5% during the third quarter. Venturi Wealth Management LLC now owns 669 shares of the financial services provider’s stock worth $29,000 after buying an additional 316 shares during the period. Hexagon Capital Partners LLC lifted its position in Fifth Third Bancorp by 56.9% during the 3rd quarter. Hexagon Capital Partners LLC now owns 860 shares of the financial services provider’s stock worth $37,000 after acquiring an additional 312 shares during the period. MidAtlantic Capital Management Inc. purchased a new position in shares of Fifth Third Bancorp in the 3rd quarter valued at approximately $39,000. American Capital Advisory LLC acquired a new position in shares of Fifth Third Bancorp in the second quarter valued at approximately $34,000. Finally, Catalyst Capital Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Fifth Third Bancorp during the third quarter worth approximately $53,000. 83.79% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds. Insider Activity at Fifth Third Bancorp In other news, EVP Kristine R. Garrett sold 7,500 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Monday, October 28th. The stock was sold at an average price of $43.67, for a total value of $327,525.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now owns 55,913 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,441,720.71. This trade represents a 11.83 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link . Also, EVP Jude Schramm sold 20,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction on Monday, August 26th. The stock was sold at an average price of $42.00, for a total transaction of $840,000.00. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 114,422 shares in the company, valued at approximately $4,805,724. The trade was a 14.88 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Company insiders own 0.50% of the company’s stock. Fifth Third Bancorp Price Performance Fifth Third Bancorp ( NASDAQ:FITB – Get Free Report ) last issued its earnings results on Friday, October 18th. The financial services provider reported $0.78 earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.83 by ($0.05). The firm had revenue of $2.19 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $2.16 billion. Fifth Third Bancorp had a return on equity of 14.58% and a net margin of 16.58%. The company’s quarterly revenue was up 1.2% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the business posted $0.92 earnings per share. Sell-side analysts predict that Fifth Third Bancorp will post 3.34 earnings per share for the current year. Fifth Third Bancorp Increases Dividend The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, October 15th. Stockholders of record on Monday, September 30th were given a $0.37 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Monday, September 30th. This represents a $1.48 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.09%. This is a positive change from Fifth Third Bancorp’s previous quarterly dividend of $0.35. Fifth Third Bancorp’s dividend payout ratio is presently 49.17%. Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades A number of equities research analysts recently commented on the stock. Evercore ISI raised their price objective on shares of Fifth Third Bancorp from $46.00 to $47.00 and gave the company an “in-line” rating in a research report on Wednesday, October 2nd. Wells Fargo & Company lifted their price target on Fifth Third Bancorp from $52.00 to $54.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a research note on Friday, November 15th. Baird R W cut Fifth Third Bancorp from a “strong-buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a research report on Monday, October 21st. Morgan Stanley boosted their target price on shares of Fifth Third Bancorp from $47.00 to $51.00 and gave the stock an “equal weight” rating in a research report on Monday, September 30th. Finally, StockNews.com cut shares of Fifth Third Bancorp from a “hold” rating to a “sell” rating in a research note on Wednesday, November 6th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have given a hold rating and nine have given a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, Fifth Third Bancorp presently has an average rating of “Hold” and an average target price of $43.62. View Our Latest Stock Report on Fifth Third Bancorp About Fifth Third Bancorp ( Free Report ) Fifth Third Bancorp operates as the bank holding company for Fifth Third Bank, National Association that engages in the provision of a range of financial products and services in the United States. It operates through three segments: Commercial Banking, Consumer and Small Business Banking, and Wealth and Asset Management. Further Reading Want to see what other hedge funds are holding FITB? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Fifth Third Bancorp ( NASDAQ:FITB – Free Report ). 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Overall, the decision to partner with Momenta over Huawei reflects a strategic move by automotive companies to align themselves with specialized providers who can offer tailored solutions and address specific industry challenges, ultimately positioning them for success in the evolving landscape of autonomous driving technology.As the situation continues to unfold, authorities are scrambling to contain the outbreak and prevent further loss of life. Questions are being raised about the quality and safety of the treatments at Herbal Valley, with calls for a thorough investigation into the practices and protocols of the healing center.

Social media channels lit up with the buzz surrounding the long-awaited launch, with users expressing both their jubilation at the release and their frustration at being unable to access the platform due to server constraints. The sheer volume of traffic from global users attempting to log in simultaneously led to widespread system crashes, leaving many disappointed and unable to experience the new platform firsthand.

Visa restrictions are a common tool used by governments to regulate the movement of individuals who are deemed to pose a threat to national security or stability. In this case, the Chinese government has decided to exercise its right to restrict the entry of certain US individuals into its territory as a means of safeguarding the interests of Hong Kong and upholding its sovereignty. This decision is a clear signal that China will not tolerate any foreign interference in its internal affairs, especially when it comes to sensitive issues such as Hong Kong.

In conclusion, the decision of the Syrian Prime Minister to transfer power to the opposition is a positive development that brings hope for a brighter future for the people of Syria. By ensuring a coordinated power transition that prioritizes service continuity and the well-being of the people, we can pave the way for a more stable, prosperous, and peaceful Syria.Registration deadlines are approaching for Talbot County Parks & Recreation’s lineup of programs designed to keep participants active and engaged during the colder months. From hitting the ice, to dancing through the season, to picking up a paddle for pickleball or joining the youth basketball league, these programs offer something for everyone. Early sign-up is encouraged to secure a spot. Youth Basketball League The Talbot Youth Basketball League is open to boys and girls in grades one through eight. The first and second grade league is coed, while the other age groups are separate by gender. Teams will practice once a week with games on Saturdays for eight weeks. Registration for the league closes on Monday, Dec. 9. Player evaluations will take place on Tuesday, Dec. 17, and practices will begin the week of Jan. 6. Games will start on Saturday, Jan. 11. More information can be found at talbotparks.com/programs/basketball/ . Ice Skating Programs Discover the joys of skating with a diverse array of winter ice programs at the Talbot County Community Center. Whether for beginners or advanced skaters, there’s a class tailored to every skill level: Learn to Skate: Introduces foundational skating skills in a supportive environment. Adult Ice Skating Lessons: Adult ice skating lessons are designed for beginners and include six 30-minute sessions. Jamie Webb Ice Hockey: Offers aspiring hockey players expert instruction and practice opportunities. Power Hockey Skate: Focuses on enhancing speed, strength and control for intermediate skaters. Power and Edge Skate: Helps advanced skaters refine edge work and technique. For more details on skating programs, visit talbotparks.com/programs/ice-skating . Dance Through the Winter Season These sessions are tailored to nurture imagination and physical fitness: Tiny Toes/Preschool Ballet: Designed for ages 2-3, this class encourages motor skill development through music and dance with instructor Bri Garland from To the Pointe Dance Company. Hip Hop, Ballet Stories, and More: Winter sessions include fairytale ballet featuring Disney princesses, “Disney Grooves” Hip Hop, “Fairies” Ballet Stories, and “Disney Channel Favorites” Hip Hop, with classes available for ages 4-12. For full class descriptions and registration details, visit talbotparks.com/programs/dance . Drop-In Indoor Pickleball For those seeking a fun, fast-paced activity this winter, drop-in indoor pickleball is the perfect choice. All skill levels are welcome, and no registration is required. Pickleball sessions are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. For a full schedule and details, visit talbotparks.com/programs/pickleball . Registration Deadlines All program registration deadlines except for youth basketball are in early January, and spots fill up quickly. “Winter programs offer a wonderful opportunity to stay active and try something new during the colder months,” said Emily Gilmer, Parks & Recreation director. “From skating to dancing, and even pickleball, these activities are designed to inspire creativity, build skills, and bring the community together.”None

By enhancing these unconventional measures, policymakers can better respond to the dynamic needs of the economy and provide timely support to businesses and households. This flexibility is crucial in managing the impact of crises and ensuring a swift and sustainable recovery.In the annals of Beijing's sporting history, there is a name that elicits both admiration and bewilderment: Zhang Wei. Hailed as a prodigy in his youth, Zhang was touted as the future star of Beijing's professional basketball scene. Blessed with incredible talent and a natural flair for the game, he quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the highest-paid players in the league.Furthermore, Ricoh places a strong emphasis on ethical business practices and social responsibility. The company upholds the highest standards in corporate governance, transparency, and accountability. Ricoh's Code of Conduct outlines its commitment to upholding human rights, labor rights, and ethical principles throughout its operations and supply chain. By partnering with like-minded suppliers and engaging with stakeholders, Ricoh works to create a positive impact on society and the environment.Known for their impeccable hosting skills, He Jiong and Wang Han have a natural ability to connect with the audience, making everyone feel welcome and comfortable. With their infectious energy and genuine smiles, they have created a sense of warmth and unity that transcends cultural boundaries and brings people together in joyous celebration. Whether it's cracking jokes, playing games, or interacting with guests, their charm and charisma never fail to capture the hearts of viewers of all ages.

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No. 23 Texas A&M aims to hand Oregon first loss at Players EraNoneFeyenoord completed an incredible comeback to draw 3-3 away to the reigning champions of England, Manchester City, in the UEFA Champions League on Tuesday. The Rotterdammers were 3-0 down with 20 minutes left to play, but goals from Anis Hadj Moussa, Santiago Gimenez, and David Hancko ensured that Brian Priske’s side got a draw that will live long in the memory. Feyenoord started the match with their captain, Quinten Timber, in the starting line-up. The midfielder missed the win against SC Heerenveen at the weekend due to an ankle injury but was fit to return for this match. Timon Wellenreuther made a terrific stop to prevent the home side from taking the lead in the first ten minutes. A cross from Manuel Akanji was headed toward goal by Erling Haaland, and it was about to find the target via the inside of the post before the German clawed it away. Wellenreuther was making up for his poor form earlier in the season with a terrific display as he made another fine save to knock Phil Foden’s effort around the post when the Englishman shot from distance in the 23rd minute. Feyenoord seemed to have weathered the English champions' early storm, but Pep Guardiola’s side were gifted a penalty in the 41st minute. Timber was penalized for kicking Haaland. The striker took the penalty himself and scored, sending Wellenreuther the wrong way. Luck did not seem to be on Feyenoord’s side on the night when City made it 2-0 within five minutes of the second half starting. A corner was headed out to Ilkay Gündogan, whose volley was going straight at Wellenreuther before it was deflected into the goal by Hancko. It got worse four minutes later when Haaland got his second of the match to make it 3-0. Feyenoord’s high line was bypassed, sending Matheus Nunes sprawling down the wing with plenty of space ahead of him. He then picked out Haaland, who timed his sliding effort perfectly to score. Feyenoord’s first goal of the game came in the 74th minute, and many will have thought it was a consolation goal at that point. A mistake by Croatian defender Josko Gvardiol was punished by Hadj Moussa, who kept his calm to dribble past Ederson in the city goal before converting from an acute angle. The atmosphere in the Etihad Stadium was still reasonably calm, with City fans and players still thinking the game was won. But that soon changed when Feyenoord scored again in the 81st minute. A cross to the far post was met by Jordan Lotomba, who knocked it across the goal, surprising Ederson and leading to an assist for Santiago Gimenez, who tapped home from close range. City was reeling, and the incredibly dramatic comeback was completed in the 89th minute. Igor Paixao got to the ball before Ederson, who had come out of his goal. The Brazilian then played a perfect cross to David Hancko at the far post, who nodded it home to send the traveling Rotterdammers into wild celebrations. The drama kept coming in the match as Jack Grealish’s deflected effort hit the crossbar a minute later. But Feyenoord held on for a wholly unexpected point. According to OptaJoe, a site specialising in sports stats, it was the first time that a team had been leading by three goals as late as the 74th minute in the UEFA Champions League without going on to win the game. The point puts Feyenoord in 20th position in the 36-team league, a spot that guarantees progress to the play-off round. However, they could drop out of these positions if results go against them in tomorrow’s fixtures. Their next match is at home against Sparta Prague on December 11.

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Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, in New York City. NEW YORK - Wall Street stocks retreated from records on Dec 5, taking a breather from a post-election rally ahead of the release of key US jobs data. The broad-based S&P 500 dipped 0.2 per cent to 6,075.11, ending a streak of four straight records. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.6 per cent to 44,765.71, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index slipped 0.2 per cent to 19,800.26. Mr Aaron Clark, an equity portfolio manager at GW&K, said investors “are probably not willing to step in” ahead of November employment data on Dec 6. “We’ve seen record inflows into equities,” said Mr Clark, who thinks the market could be poised for additional gains later in December. “The path of least resistance is higher,” he said. All three major indices notched record closes on Dec 4, boosted partly by lacklustre US economic data that strengthened expectations the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates later in December. Among individual companies, UnitedHealth Group slumped 5.2 per cent as New York police continued to search for the killer of Brian Thompson, the CEO of the company’s health insurance division. The incident has sparked online debate over the policies of US health insurers who are often criticised for rejecting claims. Other insurers such as Cigna and Humana also fell, by 1.7 per cent and 2.3 per cent respectively. American Airlines surged 16.8 per cent after announcing a deal in which Citi will serve as the exclusive issuer of co-branded credit cards. Citi, which will acquire Barclay’s credit card portfolio as an aspect of the arrangement, climbed 1 per cent. AFP Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you. Read 3 articles and stand to win rewards Spin the wheel nowAt the beginning of this year, the Mirror launched a campaign to demand justice for victims of domestic violence . Each week, two women die and thousands more suffer physical or mental abuse at the hands of their husbands or partners. Our Justice for our Daughters campaign was set up to ensure anyone guilty of such crimes receives the punishment they deserve. In a significant breakthrough, the Ministry of Justice has now ordered judges to consider stronger sentences for murders involving strangulation or when the killing is connected to the end of a relationship.Ministers have also instructed the Law Commission to review sentences for homicide to end the anomaly whereby someone who kills someone with a weapon in the home gets a shorter mandatory sentence than the same crime outside of a domestic setting. These two measures were key demands of our campaign. But we will keep campaigning until there is a justice system that truly serves victims of domestic homicide and abuse. Peer pressure Tory peer Lord Rami Ranger was yesterday stripped of his CBE after the standards watchdog found he bullied and harassed a journalist. If his behaviour merits losing an honour, you would think it would also merit him being drummed out of a political party. But the Conservatives restored the whip to the peer. Many will question whether the fact he has given £1.5million to the party through his companies influenced the decision. After all, the Tories have form. They continue to accept donations from Frank Hester despite his comments about Diane Abbott, which the leadership agreed were “racist and wrong”. Welcome sight The Princess of Wales looked a picture of health as she arrived for her carol service in Westminster Abbey. Her beaming smile added even more Christmas cheer to the occasion.This Week in AI: AI Opens Door for Retailers to Gather Insights and Drive SpendingAuthored by David B. Collum, Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology - Cornell University (Email: dbc6@cornell.edu , Twitter: @DavidBCollum), Dave Collum’s annual Year in Review covers a wide range of topics including finance, geopolitics, conspiracy theories, healthcare, energy, and cultural issues, with a focus on skepticism towards mainstream narratives and the potential for significant societal and economic shifts. Every year, David Collum writes a detailed “Year in Review” synopsis ( 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 ) full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. This year’s is no exception, with Dave striking again in his usually poignant and delightfully acerbic way. Click here for a PDF version of this report! Part 1 Part 2 (Coming Later This Week) Part 3 (Coming in January of 2025) I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. ~ Richard Feynman What is a woman? ~ Matt Walsh We have reached crisis levels of doubt. It is The Age of Unenlightenment or what Brett Weinstein calls the Cartesian Dark Ages. ref 1 NSA analyst and radical Islam expert Stephen Coughlin says he no longer knows who is calling the shots. ref 2 How do you know what is a fact? AI-generated images and videos have reached near-perfection. The pathological liars in the mainstream media spew agitprop for the pathological liars inside the beltway, all backed by the pathological liars of the Deep State running the fact-check programs. I use the Deep State phrase first introduced by Berkeley scholar Peter Dale Scott as a catch all to avoid wading through all the possible three- and four-letter agencies domiciled in multiple countries that might be the culprit du jour. A more pejorative and colloquial synonym, “The Blob”, was coined by Obama but has only recently begun trending. If this is all new to you, check out Mike Benz on the Joe Rogan Experience for a crash course (#2237). ref 3 My frustration levels soar when I try to provide what I believe is an uncomfortable truth and my victim responds, “I Googled it, and you are wrong.” Oh for fuck’s sake: how many Deep-State-sponsored fact-checkers told you that? It feels like we are suffering from a non-kinetic assault from somebody using Sun Tsu’s Three Warfares Doctrine: psychological warfare, media warfare, and legal warfare. ref 4 I have no idea where this is coming from, but I have ground my brain to mush trying to understand why so many of our leaders show no evidence of foundational beliefs in the American Experiment. Paul Harvey nailed it in his 1965 diatribe, “If I Were the Devil.” ref 5 Take the three minutes to listen. When finished, ask what Paul would add to a 2024 revision. Walter Kirn: I feel that my information gathering system is broken. Matt Taibbi: Yup. I feel the same way. ref 6 There are days in which I yearn for the return of the era of frontier justice. You couldn’t afford to be a dickweed in the olden days because it was too easy for someone to lay waste to you when nobody was looking. Throughout this document you will be introduced to people and ideas that make you wish some form of justice would return. I have a solution. We try to use the justice system under the new administration, but if that fails, we round up some of the most serious miscreants—I’m thinking Fauci et al. , a few Soros-funded prosecutors in the Department of Justice, and maybe even some of those iatrogenic doctors irreversibly damaging kids—and give them an all-expense paid trip—a three-hour tour—to the tropical paradise called “Snake Island.” Snake Island is a biological anomaly. It is teaming with the most venomous snakes in the world—an estimated 5 snakes per square meter. They feed on shorebirds that must be killed instantly. It is against international law to go there, which strikes me as government overreach. Let’s do a dump-and-run of these cretins: “We’ll be back in a couple hours, gents.” Conspiracy Theory. Every year I denounce people who shy away from conspiracy theories. When you find yourself saying, “I am not a conspiracy theorist but...” you just revealed that you are one. Embrace the label. Men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you disagree, I am baffled that you made it this far through this document. Buckle up because it is gonna get much worse. Michael Shermer, a professional debunker of conspiracy theories, included in his book Conspiracy a series of metrics somebody came up with to determine whether a theory is weak or strong. Michael morphed it into a metric of how nuts you are. He should know because he is a professional! He probably works for the See Eye Ay. As an aside, the word “debunk” is inherently flawed because it implicitly presumes the conclusion that something is wrong, and then you set out to prove it. I read and write to see where it takes me. It might show my suspicion I was right or wrong, but the theories I choose to examine—the rabbit holes I go down—are pre-determined to be worthy of further study. Occasionally, I am told to “stay in your lane.” I try to resist my favorite response—“You sack of shit”—which happens to be exactly the phrase I use when somebody doesn’t use their blinker. Then I calmly point out that nothing important is accomplished by people worried about staying in their lane. Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great. ~ Cher Let’s see how you do on the Collum Conspiracy Test (CCT) to obtain your CCT score (CCTS). Read the 30 declarative statements listed below that are in conflict with standard narratives. Keep score on a Post-it by giving yourself: I’ll give you my CCTS when you are done. Now for the quiz... If you got a perfect CCTS of either zero or 60, get professional help. You have an unstable personality. A CCTS above 50 suggests you only spotted the explicit sanity checks; you are a loon but not necessarily at risk of harm to yourself or others. A score of 40–49 tags you as a World-class rabbit chaser. A CCTS of 20–39 places you in the Zerohedge bell curve. Below 20 means you are not a die-hard conspiracy theorist but occasionally spot oddities. I hasten to add that, if you think the world is that straightforward, the Joe Rogan–Marc Andreessen podcast (#2234) ref 7 and Rogan-Mike Benz mind bender ref 8 combo platter will adjust your attitude. As promised, I scored 40; exactly which declarations scored me points is my business, although this Year in Review and previous Year in Reviews ref 9 , 10 , 11 offer some insights. Also, my scale is conservative... I did a curious experiment using Twitter’s “Grok” AI product. The result was rather humorous and serves a dual purpose as a stylistic biographical sketch and bolus for my insatiable narcissism. This is unedited. No phrases like “insufferable douche bag” were deleted: Hey Grok: Describe the general theme of posts on Twitter by @DavidBCollum Grok: Ah, @DavidBCollum, a character on Twitter, or should I say, X, whose posts could be described as a cocktail of wit, skepticism, and a dash of financial insight, all served with a side of humor. Here’s the general theme of his posts: In essence, @DavidBCollum’s X posts are a blend of financial wisdom, cultural critique, personal life, and a good dose of humor, all served with a side of skepticism towards the mainstream narrative. If Twitter were a bar, he’d be the bartender who knows all the good stories, tells them with flair, and makes you question your drink’s price. One of my Twitter buddies, @BenjaminWHart, has been calling me Andy Rooney for years now. I should just declare victory, type QED, quit while I’m ahead, and get a real life. This is the greatest thing I have ever seen that didn’t include female nudity of some kind. ~ John Ziegler, journalist This 2024 Year in Review, also called the Urine Review by my wife or YIR for short, comes in three parts. Bob Moriarty: When are you going to release part three? We wait patiently. Me: Not clear, but I am writing. It is a monumentally complex task compared to the other chapters. Moriarty: I hate it when you whine. Warning: I have provided an overview and implications of the election, but you will be shocked and disappointed (or not) at how little I dug into the nearly 200 pages of notes I had collected. Kilograms of ATP got fried and countless hours of my life were squandered trying to understand Biden and then Harris. And then—*poof*—on November 5th these two DNC Trojan Whores were both gone. We became unburdened by what could have been. 11/5 will live in infamy as the DNC’s 9/11. But all those quotes and anecdotes underscoring the total absurdity of the election seem irrelevant now. I am confident, however, that we collectively dodged a bullet by sending these two sociopaths to the political light. My wife created this for me in 2016... Of course, Trump’s victory was a bipartisan surprise as the polls convinced the Left that Kamala was a legitimate contender while those of us on the Right believed The Blob would find a way to stop Trump at any cost. The election was disruptive on so many levels, and has left us with a geopolitical landscape smothered by a pea-soup fog. I am confident that the Trump Presidency 2.0 will have little connection to the 1.0 release. I am optimistic because the system is broken and needs to be razed and rebuilt. The team he is assembling, for better or worse, includes some young brawlers with a sense of purpose gained from locking horns with the system. It is personal for many of them. Thus, the razing part looks like a lock whereas the reconstruction will be a far trickier task. As to the apparent non-trivial number of apparent losers being hired, I urge people to assume that they were vetted by The Donald’s inner circle and fit nicely in whatever is his plan. Doubtless, Trump et al. will generate plenty of material for a 2025 Urine Review. Source Material. You are born into the last chapter of a whodunnit mystery. If you wish to follow the thread you must read the preceding chapters. My efforts to do so are often reflected in the books I read compiled in the “Books” chapter (Part 2). I choose them carefully because my time is precious. They are invariably from the non-fiction shelf, although I often wonder if they have been shelved wrong. Jonathan Turley’s The Indispensable Right , for example, scrutinizes the battles for free speech in America at the Supreme Court level. It is scholarly and riveting, which are two words that are usually juxtaposed. Jonathan forces you to view free speech through a different lens. I write so that knowledge of these important matters may not fade away like the fleeting memories of a passing dream. ~ Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647, source vague I have come to realize that history is a highly fluid series of opinions that are prone to revision. By example, the section entitled, “A Revisionist History of WWII and FDR” is about a journey through a half dozen books that blindsided me. I gave a 20-minute talk on that topic at the New Orleans Investment Conference. ref 12 , 13 Yup. The revised history of WWII and FDR in 20 minutes. I also love ZeroHedge. Strap on your bullshit filter, but ZeroHedge is often at the vanguard of breaking stories. Twitter has become the other go-to place for the global events of the day. Love him or hate him, Elon saved the day by buying Twitter for the low, low price of $44 billion and then firing 90% of its employees who were contra-functional. Many are now working for FEMA where special skills are neither needed nor encouraged. Elon also brought in a number of new functions including its AI chatbot, Grok, and another AI-based editorial function in which a Tweet can be automatically clarified or revised based on follow up comments. I should add that this document was created without AI except when explicitly mentioned. Twitter was the only place to keep track of the rising stardom of Catturd and Brendan Dilley, legendary memers, and Hailey Welch, known by her boyfriends and now the world as Hawk Tuah Girl. Haliey is more than just a hot chick from the sticks; she pulled off a pump and dump on a new crypto. ref 14 That is how you “Hawk Tuah!” Twitter was also the only place to get the unabridged story of the assassination of Peanut the Squirrel by the New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), first reported on November 1. The head of the DEC had to go into hiding. ref 15 The memes—oh those fabulous Twitter memes—smothered the election posts for 24 hours. 11/1 is the 9/11 of 2024. No squirrel has done more to underscore the evils and overreach of government since Rocky the Flying Squirrel battled the Rooskies. You can’t help but notice that the political right dominates the meme world, which turns out to be of consequence. My theory is the left has no sense of humor. Twitter also serves as my LinkedIn, providing extraordinary digital networks and resources, but it can also break your spirit... Or get a little nasty at times... That Dave Collum guy. I think he is the greatest. I think he is smart as fuck. I enjoy reading his stuff. I enjoy reading his letter. I enjoy listening to him. But I don’t agree with everything he says. I agree with maybe half of it. But he is entitled to his point of view, and I’m entitled to mine, but it’s guys like that that make you think. ref 16 ~ Mark Cohodes (@AlderLaneEggs) This nugget of sociobiology serves as a reminder that this is my Year in Review, not yours. I am offering to share it at fair market value—no cost. You’re welcome. Don’t I risk losing readers? Nope. You’re it. Creating this review forces me to organize 500–700 pages of notes, quotes, and jokes before they go down the memory hole never again to see the light of day. This section is all me—my 2024 Dear Diary entry. I am often asked some variant of, “How do you still work at Cornell with those ideas?” My first answer is that Cornell University is a great institution that has a faction of nutjobs on the faculty. This question has, however, become more than rhetorical on occasion. In 2020 I got my ass whooped by a cancellation because of a statement on social media that got me publicly denounced in an open letter by the former President. The heinous crime: I supported the police in a Tweet. Oh the humanity! I still have a little scar tissue from sleeping with loaded rifles and steak knives strategically placed around the house. (I am not joking.) Occasionally somebody will denounce me on Twitter and tag Cornell (@Cornell). Trying to undermine somebody’s livelihood because you are offended is sinister. You certainly have the right to be offended, but you don’t have the right to never be offended. I respond to such subtle jabs by leaving @Cornell in the thread and then “bitch slapping” the asshat. It is better than hunting them down like a mad dog and “beating them with a bag of oranges”, which is my natural instinct. ( 23andMe DNA traced me back to an inbred tribe in the Neander Valley.) We have an enormous number of expensively schooled imbeciles who are badly educated at great expense. ~ George Will The younger generation is getting harder to understand and very easy to offend. I feel like Jane Fookin’ Goodall on her first day. They have no sense of humor because every joke has an edge—a butt of the joke—and they don’t think that is fair. I got into a kerfuffle with my class on day one by dropping too many jokes that would have been innocuous in smaller doses, but it largely subsided when they realized that I care about them and that many of my stories and anecdotes provide serious career and life lessons, albeit deeply embedded in my Tourettes-like outbursts. I talk to them about the highly distracting digital world that must be resisted. If you have been following social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s work such as Coddling the American Mind or his latest, The Anxious Generation , you realize it is not their fault: smart phones and social media have turned their brains into tapioca pudding. You might as well park them in front of a one-armed bandit in Las Vegas for 15 hours a day. Now imagine a 12-year-old boy with ritalin coursing through his veins deep-diving Pornhub. Would that kid ever study? Would he ever leave his room? If he somehow managed to get a date—the stats showing a collapse of teen dating are horrifying—would you want your daughter to beta test his new-fangled skills? As parents, do not underestimate the severity of this problem. OK. I got off topic again. I tend to do that. Overall, my year was uneventful, with most of it fitting neatly in the sections on “Investing” and “Healthcare”. I wrapped up my research program this year after a 45-year streak of pretty credible success. The final chapter was my call: I burnt the ships in the harbor by not submitting grant renewals. Credentialed experts and The ScienceTM say that, in addition to the void left by less responsibility, your serotonin and dopamine levels drop, which is offset by being too old to give a fuck. I can feel it. Here is a funny story. Cornell suffered a period of tremendous turbulence arising from Palestinian protests. One of my colleagues in the humanities in a moment of minimal clarity noted that he was “exhilarated” by Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7th, 2023. He seems to be light on the humanity part. This period of rampant free speech cost Cornell and Universities across the nation a ton of shekels as Jewish bazillionaires started disowning them. Imagine, however, if a WWII veteran came back to Cornell in 1969; it would have looked way worse. If you were donating to your alma mater thinking its faculty was a pillar of mental stability, that one’s on you. But the chaos just wouldn’t subside, so one night I gripped and ripped a tweet: I got a call from my brother-in-law who happens to be a trustee and knows everybody . He opens the convo by reciting part of that tweet. The dialog ensued: Me: “How the hell did you see that?” Brother-in-law: “My boss sent it to me.” Me: “Your wife? How did she see it?” Brother-in-law: “My other boss.” Me: “You are self employed. You don’t have a boss.” Brother-in-law: “The Chairman of the Board of Trustees.” As the story goes, the Chairman cold-called him and asked if he by chance knew this guy Collum. Apparently, a faculty member who isn’t whining like a little punk-assed bitch about being oppressed is a trustee-level moment. “Yes. He is my brother-in-law.” Laughter ensued. Enjoy every sandwich. ~ Warren Zevon on his deathbed He who frames the question wins the debate. ~ Randall Terry This year, I did a Zerohedge Debate organized by Liam Cosgrove of The Grayzone and moderated by Bill Fleckenstein. Steve Keen asserted mankind would largely end by 2050—that is not one of my snarky fake claims—whereas I dismissively called it a gigantic grift to monetize the sun. ref 1 , 2 My intellectual high-water mark was the allusion to AI as “squeegeeing drippings from the floor of the internet.” My now-annual trip to the House of the Rising Sun for Brien Lundin’s New Orleans Investment Conference is always a blast where I meet up with old friends, press the flesh with digital friends, and make new friends. Brien dug long and hard to eventually find the bottom of the barrel (me). You can spot some serious contemporary legends. You think that is cool? Take a look at past participants... I averaged one podcast per week (>70 year-to-date). In one with Mike Farris and Diana West on her studies of WWII (see the section “Revised History of WWII and FDR”), Diana noted that her twice-weekly appearances on The Lou Dobbs Show to discuss current events prevented her from thinking deeply or writing seriously. That captured what I was experiencing. Podcasts do, however, serve a purpose much the way gigs at comedy clubs help comedians test drive their ideas. My list of podcasts below is for archival purposes. Mike Farris takes the gold for most invites. Nick Bryant is the scholar on pedophile networks. His chat was important to my studies of child trafficking (Part 3) and in expanding my network of experts and confidants. Tommy Carrigan’s four-way Rumbles in the Jungle with Tom Luongo and Jim Kunstler are always raucous. My interview with Michelle Mikori set the click-count record this year, but the comments section suggests the viewers would have enjoyed it without the audio on. A couple of sites offer bot-driven compilations, including one that professes to rate them. ref 3 , 4 I like the freedom of podcasting. With podcasting, you can really mess around with the form and the format. You can do as much time as you like without having to pause for commercials. ~ Adam Carolla Here is a list of podcasts and links for 2024: Collum could narrate a proctology exam & make it interesting. ~ Vincent J. Curtis (@VincentJCurtis1) I once live-tweeted a cystoscopy: “It burns! It burns!” I will rise to meet Vincent’s challenge. Last year I had a 1.5 inch bladder stone removed by Dr. Darth Vader with his light saber. He inflicted superficial damage that forced him to re-insert the catheter and leave it for a week. Why an entire week? Because he works on Wednesdays. I was not happy about that. This year, my prostate, which was very large due to old age in manly sort of way I guess, was removed by a surgeon named Dr. Weiner. The non-statistical probability of choosing a career that reflects your name is called “nominative determinism”, ref 1 which suggests you should steer clear of Doctors named Butcher, Hack, or Ripper. It is not a perfect rule: Dr. Richard Titball is not a gender reassignment surgeon but rather a professor of biochemistry. ref 2 His students must be ruthless as evidenced by my irresistible urge to make him the “butt” of my joke. You will not hear this often, but I highly recommend the procedure. I went from two-minute dribbles with countless sleep interruptions to blowing out 14 ounces in 4–5 seconds in a 6–8 foot arc. (I should add that those were separate measurements; I am not that talented...yet.) Livin’ the dream. But let me give you old farts a little advice. For the first couple of post-op urinations, sit your ass down unless you wish to see a replay of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. It was a ten-minute cleanup of the floor and walls. When I was a kid, I wanted to be older. This is not what I expected. The only room I can enter and remember why I went there is the bathroom. Over-nourishment makes me hold my breath while I tie my shoes. I can no longer get off the floor without grunting. I am dotting my ‘t’s and crossing my ‘I’s. As my hearing gets worse, the blinker on my car runs unabated. I repeat: old age is not for pussies. The decay of our healthcare system continues. For the first time in US history, life expectancy is dropping. Last year I took a cue from Gretchen Morgenson’s and Josh Rosner’s These are the Plunderers ref 3 and wailed on the swath of destruction to the healthcare system by the private equity Borg. ref 4 Monetary policy incentivizes private equity strip-mining of companies by making capital too cheap. When you buy up hospitals, sell off their assets, and sell the shells to dumb money with a 47% probability of bankruptcy down the road, you are a menace to society. Healthcare is now almost completely corporatized, which means that there is a big middleman who wants the Big Vig. Doctors must act in the corporate interests ref 5 by upselling costly tests and treatments. I am not breaking any HIPAA rules: this is my chart. Are they upselling me? The growing number of doctors in the US has not kept up with the demand as the aging boomers increasingly burden the system. It remains a challenge to attract doctors to less profitable subdisciplines and practices in rural settings. Ken Langone endowed NYU Medical School several years ago, making it free and the most desirable med school in the country. As the movement toward endowed tuitions has spread to other schools, the stated logic is that graduates can serve the public better if they are debt free. ref 6 Alas, tuition benefits have not achieved their stated goals but have made being a doctor even more profitable. Meanwhile, the wait time to get an appointment has increased 24% in 20 years ref 7 (much worse from personal experience), which starts looking serious when you have a big, bloody turbocancer lesion hanging off your face. Firing doctors for refusing to vaccinate was about as helpful as defunding the police. ref 8 The soft corruption infecting the healthcare system over the decades undercuts the quality of patient care. The CDC set up a not-for-profit organization ref 9 to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars from pharma to put a chokehold on healthcare. ref 10 I highly recommend The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy; ref 11 your blood will boil. For a less biased treatment, and I say less biased because Kennedy hates Tony Fauci, try Sickening by Harvard’s John Abramson in which he describes his role in the scandal in which Vioxx caused 60,000 deaths ref 12 as well as other disasters emanating from the highly conflicted clinical trial-industrial complex. ref 13 A recent study found that clinical trials paid for by pharma showed 50 percent higher drug efficacies than those funded independently. ref 14 This so-called ”sponsorship effect” worked so well with the bond rating agencies leading up to the Great Recession. This year I added Sharyl Attkisson’s Follow the Science to my reading list. She brilliantly describes 25-year career at CBS writing about science and the pharmaceutical industry. Her journey has led to her deep-seated revulsion of the Pharma Blob. ref 15 I also forced myself through The Pfizer Papers , ref 16 which is more of a reference book than a reading book. An army of 3200 volunteer doctors and scientists mowed through gazillions of documents pried loose from Pfizer by a FOIA request. I elaborate in the section entitled “Covid-19 and the Vaccine.” Plot spoiler: Pfizer knew from the very start that the vaccine was wreaking havoc. I would suggest that the whole imposing edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes is, like the celebrated Tower of Pisa—slightly off balance. ref 17 ~ King Charles (no kidding) In my consultations with colleagues across academia, I sense a widely held belief that the quality of students has dropped precipitously. This stems from a host of factors including iPhone addiction, helicopter parenting, participation trophies, and upbringings in which no-pain no-gain seems to have gone out of favor. The common refrain is, “Why should I learn it if I can just look it up?” The simple answer is that you need an operating system to think. Why is this being mentioned in a section on healthcare? Your future doctors may be surgically rooting around in your chest cavity like a truffle pig guided by YouTube videos. We return to related issues in the section on “College”, but I urge you to find doctors who are old enough to not be the iPhone Walking Dead. Let’s shoot back. Rumor has it Trump won the election, and Kennedy is being put in charge of Health and Human Services. There is no reason to doubt that he will be the most aggressive leader of that massive government organization in its history. At the next level down, the frontrunner to run the National Institutes of Health is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Medical School. He is a mild-mannered, very bright health policy expert who has developed new attitudes about the healthcare system as one of the three creators of the Great Barrington Declaration. ref 18 (For laughs, I looked at Wikipedia’s writeup on the Great Barrington Declaration, ref 19 and it is a complete sack of propaganda to push the authoritarian narrative that I have come to expect from that once revolutionary idea.) Both Kennedy and Bhattacharya have battled the Healthcare Balrog and emerged victorious. They could be revolutionary. While on the topic of eating organic food, brother-sister pair, Calley and Casey Means, appeared out of nowhere in a Tucker Carlson interview discussing decidedly unhealthy food and healthcare. ref 20 This was not by chance but rather the first salvo in the battle to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) that is a major plank of the Trump administration. Ozempic, Wegovy, and other related anti-obesity drugs hit the ground running this year. The drug companies have restrictions on what they can advertise off-label, but they bypass the restrictions by exploiting famous Hollywood butterballs trying to become marketable again. We have created the ‘solution’ to treat the problem, without really being disciplined and empathetic enough to stop the creation of obese children in the first place. ref 21 ~ Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, pediatrician I am guessing that somewhere down the road we will discover huge side effects. You are treating the symptom not the disease. Bypassing the most overt phenotype arising from eating dogshit—Dunlop’s Syndrome in which your “belly done lops over your belt”—may not be healthy. And yet some health authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend it for teens, which will enable consequence-free Cheeto-Mountain Dew diets while they sit around staring into their iPhones. ref 22 Yay. That cannot be good, but I am expecting worse. Side effects include Anxiety, insomnia, and depression, all accompanied by a 45% rise in “suicide ideation.” ref 23 Muscle loss ref 24 seems to be causing “Ozempic Eyes” or “Ozempic Face” ref 25 in which you pick up that starving-POW look. When you are talking about the human biome, it is likely to be FAFO (fuck around find out.) At least your pall bearers will thank you. That BBC headline is spot on: death is the leading cause of not ageing. The profitability of a drug that must be taken for life causes spittle to drool down the chins of pharma CEOs. At $1000 per month without prescription coverage, Ozempic Wallet may become a thing. Euthanasia seems to be cool again. A depressed 28-year-old Dutch woman scheduled to be euthanized in May found happiness as the big day approached. ref 26 In Canada, its popularity has exceeded that of the ice bucket challenge. The CEO of United Health got assassinated by a pro. ref 27 Inscriptions on the bullet casings—“Deny, Depose, Defend”—suggested the company’s record of having the highest denial of coverage percentage in the business ref 28 left one critic a little grumpy and offered him complementary body piercings. This is a rapidly evolving story. The perpetrator has supposedly been identified, leaving the world mystified about why and even if he did it. ref 29 Note to the Elites: this is the shit that happens when the plebes feel like they have no civilized path forward. This is a Fourth Turning move. With especially poor timing, insurance company Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced that they would not cover the cost of anesthesia if the surgery took longer than a prescribed time. That policy was retracted fast , ref 30 presumably straight from the desk of the CEO trying to avoid the wireless hole puncher. I suspect that the announcement was already in the chamber to be fired out to the public when the United Health CEO got whacked. FAFO. The new shingles vaccine, Shingrix, was released in time to battle the shingles pandemic among the recently vaccinated. But they are provided for free! Yeah. Right. Government handouts mean you are paying. How broke will we be when all pharma products are free? That would have tremendous palliative benefits of reducing the diseased CPI. And since you have no idea what is in those devilish jabs, I should point out that Shingrix is an mRNA gene therapy. Are you going to jump on that bandwagon again and hope it doesn’t cause bleeding from every orifice? I’ll pass, thankyou very much. I’ve seen claims that healthcare is approaching 20% of US GDP. I have witnessed a huge spike in construction of healthcare facilities in my little college town of Ithaca. Economists love GDP, but let’s unwrap that. Would you be better off if you needed no healthcare whatsoever? Of course. Soaring boomer healthcare costs reflect the cost of keeping a rapidly depreciating fleet of aging Chevy Chevettes, Ford Pintos, and Corvairs on the road. And a headline from Bloomberg... Health and Human Services’s 2025 budget includes the keyword “equity” 829 times. Hundreds of billions are spent chasing the DEI bogey while your health falters. ref 31 And, by the way, why is DEI considered so profoundly important while tagging a hire as a DEI hire is verboten? Dear Kamala: the gold miners are gouging the price of gold. It’s up 10% per year under President Jill Biden. Can you please tell them to stop? Thanks. ref 1 ~ Zerohedge Gold had both a strong year (+30% ytd) and was not particularly newsworthy. Gold bugs always look forward to Ronald-Peter Stöferle’s and Mark J. Valek’s In Gold We Trust comprehensive treatise on the yellow metal and related topics. ref 2 I am not a technical analysis guy but the most highly respected technical analyst of gold, Mike Oliver, said gold would launch if it broke $2500. Although I would not call $2600 a launch, it held above that level to close the year at $2650 (as of 12/16/24) despite a sell-the-news $200+ swoon following the 2024 US elections. While some viewed the election sell-off to be about fundamentals, I think it was just an unwinding of a doom bet on election carnage (rioting, eating cats and dogs, shit like that). Despite detractors, gold is the #2 reserve currency below the dollar. Most are unaware that gold “IPO’d” in August 15, 1971, it has delivered a nearly 8% annualized return priced in dollars. The claim that gold is 5x gain relative to equities and bonds if that is a mean regressing proportionality. Remember that what follows this period of recessionary deflation will be MMT or some facsimile thereof. That is the ‘big bomb of debt’ monetization that ends up sending gold beyond a bull market towards a parabolic surge. ~ David “Rosie” Rosenberg A few nuggets are worthy of mention: Another wage-price spiral attributable to rising oil prices would be very reminiscent of the Great Inflation of the 1970s, when the price of gold soared. In this scenario, $3,500 per ounce would be a realistic target for gold through 2025. ~ Ed Yardeni (@yardeni) The most likely wildcard path to a gold price of $3,000/oz gold is a rapid acceleration of an existing but slow-moving trend: de-dollarization across “Emerging” markets central banks that in turn leads to a crisis of confidence in the U.S. #dollar...” ref 10 –Citigroup analysts Silver is schizophrenic in that it is less of a monetary metal than gold and much more of an industrial metal. As shown below, US traders smack it around, but that is just day trading. When powerful short sellers in the big banks get caught offsides on a big bet, the price will likely get stepped on temporarily. The silver bulls view silver as a leveraged play on gold, but will that be true going forward? A bullish argument is that Joe Sixpack gets more bang for the buck for silver—an ounce for $30. But that seems like a relevant rallying cry only in the final meme/mania phase, and this is no mania yet. The gold–silver ratio is said to have been 7:1 in ancient Rome and is now in the ballpark of 90:1. Some say that the 16:1 ratio in the Earth’s crust is the target for mean regression, but that is probably too simplistic given the complexities of the mining industry. Doomberg warns that there are no big advances in battery technology, and the incremental advances are all in large companies. He urges you to never invest in a story stock promising a breakthrough. Silver’s importance in the Samsung’s newest rechargeable batteries does seem encouraging. The importance of silver in solar panels and the difficulties in recycling them makes silver a good bet should the climate cult continue to help the climate grifters who, in turn, are playing into the hands of the authoritarians. That every electronic device on the planet uses largely non-recyclable silver should drive demand for silver. ref 13 One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing, unless there is something to do...I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up... I wait for a situation that is like the proverbial ‘shooting fish in a barrel.’ ~ Jim Rogers, in Market Wizards Let’s begin with savings. I think you save for retirement whereas you invest to fight inflation. Four decades ago (1981), I was a cash-poor new homeowner. I began furnishing it from yard sales but eventually progressed to 18th and 19th century American antiques. They were in a bull market as boomers began homesteading and caught the country bug in large numbers. I now live with really nice furniture that may not be worth what I paid but has not followed IKEA crap off the depreciation cliff. I was doing OK in these formative years including steady flows into retirement accounts, but one day I was reading a USAir magazine story that asked rhetorically, “Are you saving enough for retirement?” I realized I could do better and followed their suggestion to increase the rate of savings incrementally. For many years now I have sheltered 25–30% of my gross salary into retirement. This was true even during the kids’ college years. Last year, for example, I socked away 25% despite purchasing a new SUV for my wife and some aggressive distributions to the next generation. Well, this year, owing to wrapping up my research program, the 25% of my salary deriving from Federal grants evaporated, and my savings dropped to 4%. Technically speaking, I lived paycheck-to-paycheck. I also realized, however, that next year I turn 70 and will get nearly $60,000 per year salary boost from Social Security, which was good timing. I am, however, pondering retirement so that I can go to my office everyday as usual but work for free. Raising children is an enormously expensive endeavor. ~ Malcolm Gladwell My son, a professional violinist, went on a 6-week whirlwind tour of Europe shopping for a new violin. He found nothing of interest until, on nearly the last day, this 1725 Carlo Antonio Testore came across the auction block at Tarisio, and, with 100% funding by the Bank of Dad (BoD), he grabbed it. This six-digit purchase (with all six to the left of the decimal point) is owned by the BoD; he will inherit it. Was it a good buy? I think so. The kid has a good head, keen eye, and fabulous ear. I do not include this violin in my personal savings calculations; it is a hard asset. The mid-19th-century dining room table with the stunning tiger maple on which the Testore resides cost $700. That was a good buy too. An interesting aside, a 1714 Stradivarius is about to cross Sotheby’s auction block at an estimated World-record-beating $12–18 million. ref 1 (Of course, the very best are owned by institutions and will never hit the auction block.) To recap my 45-year investment history, I was 100 percent long-bonds via TIAA from 1980–1987 until a discussion with a colleague in the wake of the ’87 crash convinced me I should hit the equities hard. I averaged in , but did so aggressively, and became wildly enthusiastic about tech by the early ‘90s. I was a poster child for the bubble. However, I had learned enough about markets to conclude that something was wrong. In July of 1998 I jettisoned half of my CREF-based index funds and watched the market tank into the Asian Flu. Feeling half genius and half moron, I was determined to get the second half out if the market rallied back. It did, and I was out of indexes by early ’99 and had tight stops on tech favorites as well as a handful of other real winners. They were all gone by mid ’99, pocketing 700% each on Worldcom and Dell, for example. (I never bought a dot-com.) Without a single share of an equity, I paid off the tail-end of my mortgage (debt-free ever since) and went long gold (cost basis 10% of My Net Worth Positions 1.0–10% of My Net Worth Positions 0.10–1.0% of My Net Worth Positions 50%). The bottom is in when the Fed stops dropping rates. The Fed started dropping rates in March 16th, 2024. Let the games begin. I hasten to add that these correlations of rates and returns don’t necessarily indicate causation. The greatest credit event of all would be a recession in which US yields went up, not down. ~ Michael Hartnett By the end, we’re 40 times leveraged with 0.1% growth to get what looks like 4% growth...find me an economist who can tell me what the real unleveraged growth of America is, and people will have an epileptic fit even thinking about it because it’s teeny. ~ David Murrin I am getting increasingly concerned that we have to endure another decline of 5 percent or more before the year is out. ref 33 ~ Sam Stovall, CFRA Research’s chief investment strategist, way over his skis I feel like a lot of what’s perceived as wealth is an inflation illusion. ~ Stephanie Pomboy The Magnificent Seven. The Mag 7—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—are the modern-day Nifty Fifty of 1967 or the 14 Japanese companies rounding out the top 20 companies in the world in 1989. Both offered up spectacular gains, culminating in catastrophic prospective losses. Sometimes the ten largest are discussed, but they lack the catchy name recognition. The Mag 7 are collectively overpriced, moreso than when I launched a diatribe against them in 2022, gloating about their recent beatings only to watch them humiliate me. ref 37 Nvidia (NVDA) has become the market and will be the focus of my scorn. Before projectile vomiting my sour Nvidia grapes, I want to share a few random bullets about the collective Mag 7 and the other players in the Mag 7—the Mag 6—that caught my attention. The only thing less valuable than Tesla stock is a fully grown adult at P. Diddy’s house. ref 38 ~ Lewis Black If you think Silicon Valley knows what it’s doing financially, you really have to rethink things. ~ Jim Chanos, Kynikos Apple’s index representation is set to increase after Buffett’s sale fully unleashed the amount of stock available for trading. In turn, index-tracking funds will need to purchase the shares to mimic its growing heft. ref 43 ~ Bloomberg, failing to understand the definition of “float” ref 44 Nvidia (NVDA) is the poster child of the New Era. I have seen cats chase laser pointers with less enthusiasm. I suspect NVDA and its CEO will be pictured on milk cartons when the next big whoosh lays waste to the indices. Some hang the Ponzi moniker on NVDA owing to massive valuations (50x revenues), shady dealings with Coreweave, and a CEO with bad press from past shenanigans. ~Me, 2023 YIR Nvidia. While nuclear-powered AI is said by some to be the greatest thing since the internet, profits from AI seem to not be materializing. The big players could spend huge bucks just to keep up with each other. Google is at risk of its invader-proof moat drying up. If the generations of technology roll over faster than the R&D can be amortized, AI companies could suffer death by creative destruction. ref 46 Meanwhile, the pick and shovel maker Nvidia has become the first $3 trillion company with a capacity to gain or lose hundreds of billions of dollars in a single day. They added more than the equivalent of Goldman Sachs in one night. Nvidia has become the technology market. To get to a [pre-10:1-share-split] $740 share price simply requires NVDA to maintain a monopolist-like operating profit margin of 55% for the next decade, while also growing sales 10x to more than $600bn. For context, the entire industry sold $527bn worth of chips last year. ~ Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) not knowing that the price would soon double The U.S. Supreme Court will hear Nvidia’s appeal of a court ruling that accuses the company of committing securities fraud. ref 60 ~ Bezinga Headline NVDA investors won’t want to read (and apparently didn’t) Nvidia gets subpoena from US DoJ, Bloomberg News reports –Reuters, another headline NVDA investors didn’t read Nvidia has been a high-wire act for some time. ref 64 ~ Marc Cohodes, 2002 There are a number of people who could have put Jensen in jail. ref 65 ~ Marc Cohodes, 2024, quoting a source I think it is the biggest bubble I’ve ever seen. Nvidia is up $1 trillion in one month. ~ Fred Hickey, The High-Tech Strategist Nvidia is highly unlikely to be a long-term winner as the demand for picks and shovels occurs at the beginning of a gold rush, and then rapidly fades. ref 69 ~ Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research So there you have it. Nvidia is the market. It has offered investors >170% one-year return and a 2400% five-year return. Will their 80% profit margins and valuations at >40x revenue and 100x levered-free cash flow hold up over time? During the dot-com bust Nvidia swan dived 90%. Could the drop be bigger this time? I said yes, ref 70 but what do I know? Here is the bullish case that says they just keep going up. ref 71 AI will likely be transformative and highly profitable, but probably to those who can buy the body parts at a deep discount after a period of carnage. Nvidia provides the infrastructure—the pipes—for AI. Corning provided the infrastructure—the light pipes—for the telecom sector and internet. I have a few questions. Will history refer to the “Magnificent Seven” as a success story or will they become the “Malignant 7” and join the Nifty Fifty and Dotcoms in the Hall of Shame? That I need not even define “Mag Seven” for the reader is a tell. The Yahoo Finance page has a picture of Jensen Huang every...single...day. He has been on countless magazine covers. This seems like the magazine cover jinx that is now an infamous top call, but—and this is Kim Kardashian-sized but—Jensen has not yet been on The Economist . However, as they said in Starwars, there is another... Market Bullets. Before my final wrap up, let’s peek at a couple of funny stories of the type that emerge before the proverbial tide recedes. Chewy surges after ‘Roaring Kitty’ discloses stake. ~ Yahoo Finance Headline When a stock surges 90% because of the “Return of Roaring Kitty”, you know we are currently living in one of the most speculative environments in history. ~ Otavio Costa By the way, what does a whale that can move markets by simply spouting out his blowhole actually look like? This is Roaring Kitty. Are you not entertained now? The Game is indeed nearly over. In conclusion, we are witnessing the great cycle of life. As the markets pull out of some secular low and climb the wall of worry, credit loosens, entrepreneurs begin taking baby steps at creating new wealth, eventually reaching a climax—a blow-off top. Prior to the collapse, the smart guys will have already snuck out the back door to safe havens, leaving the risk in pension plans run by Hillbillies. As the collapse wreaks havoc and crushes the nouveau poor, the “elites” will foreclose on the malinvestment and confiscate the portions of the wealth that survive the washout for pennies on the dollar. Who bought the real estate that went on the auction block in 08–09? Not you or me. Après le deluge, the cycle starts all over again. A 1994 paper by Romer and Akerloff described the great wealth transfer of the boom-bust cycle. I’ve saved my really big concern for last. We appear to be in yet another investment mania. Wall Street guys call it a “blow-off top”, which is coded language for getting you to keep putting your money in through fear that you will miss the best part—the Grand Finale. Lincoln made that mistake too. Yet, somehow, nobody seems euphoric. The Roaring 20s got their name for a reason. The dot-com boom felt like we had catapulted into the future. The housing mania that drove the markets to the ’07 top was euphoric as nouveau homeowners thought Oprah would be giving everybody a house and a pony. During this latest high, by contrast, the Left Half think their lives are over because the Orange Man won. The Right Half voted for the radical reform because they have had enough of the Left Half. The Bottom Half are working two jobs to pay their bills because of the surging cost of living. The Top Half will do anything to avoid returning to the Bottom Half (including selling into a panic). Politicians are despised, the mainstream media is hated, and the healthcare profession killed people. Universities are viewed as neo-Marxist training camps and too damned expensive. It feels like a mix of 1860 USA and 1789 France. Here is the Really Big Question: If everybody is so grumpy at the top, what the hell is the next recession and accompanying bottom going to look like? There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. ~ Albert Einstein, 1932. To state the obvious, energy runs the world. The entire growth of civilization is about harnessing enthalpy (heat) to overcome entropy (chaos). Without the constant input of enthalpy, civilization will decay into a state of maximum entropy, and Bartertown may be our best-case scenario. Beginning with The Quest for Fire , every major advance in cultural evolution demanded increasing energy efficiency from trees, peat bogs, whale blubber, coal, oil, natural gas, and the atom. I am convinced that anthropogenic climate change is a load of anthropogenic crap brought to us by tens of trillions of dollars of anthropogenic grift and global authoritarianism. I have run out of patience with policymakers, corporate decision-makers, and investors who collectively throw up their hands and say, ‘Don’t blame me.’ There is no excuse to fall for the myth of being victimized by the unprecedented. –Stephen Roach in Myth of the Unprecedented Here is where I cut the psychopaths some slack: maybe they are in a position to see that changes are coming and, to quote a famous former governor, “Fuck your freedoms.” The Club of Rome was not nuts asserting exponential growth on a finite orb is arithmetic nonsense as brilliantly described in talks by Albert Bartlett. ref 1 The obvious and final play is nuclear. Perceived risk is amplified by the vivid imagery of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima setbacks; there were no fatalities at the former two, and an estimated 31 died in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl. By contrast, wind turbines kill several dozen people per year. My interest in energy and electric vehicles is a combination of curiosity, investment opportunity, and tracking the twisted globalists’ quest for global domination. There are plenty of energy experts; I find the pseudonymous Doomberg to be a fabulous source of grounded wisdom. ref 2 The energy transition is failing and will fail. ref 3 ~ Barry Norris, the founder and chief investment officer of UK hedge fund Argonaut Capital Partners LLP Electric Vehicles. The electric vehicles (EVs) came on too fast. You cannot legislate solutions to technical problems. The EV market appears to be heading for a shakeout that is not just about a bursting bubble on Wall Street. It is bullet time: Something super weird is going on, as Tesla was the *only* car company attacked! ref 11 ~ Elon Musk on the German attacks on Giga factory The investment community’s belief that EVs will displace the internal combustion engine remains as strong as ever. We vigorously disagree... Despite claims to the contrary, our research suggests EVs are less energy efficient than internal combustion engine automobiles. As a result, they will fail to gain widespread adoption. ref 15 ~ Goehring & Rozencwajg Electric vehicles (EVs) are piling up on lots across the country as the green revolution hits a speed bump, data show. ref 18 ~ USA Today, November 14, 2023 The road to electrification could be bumpier than anticipated. ~ Stephen Scherr, Hertz CEO...oops...ex-CEO The Twittersphere pointed out that Volkswagen was run by Nazis. She deleted her Twitter account. Well, hells bells. Let’s get more government in the game... I have a particular fondness, I must tell you, for electric school buses. I love electric school buses! I just love them for so many reasons! Maybe because I went to school on a school bus. Hey, raise your hand if you went to school on a school bus! ~ Kamala Harris, former future President The bottom line seems to be that EVs cost way more than ICEs to buy, finance, insure, and repair. They hold value like bananas left on the countertop. You can’t refuel them in two minutes. They can catch fire, rip through tires because of the excessive weight, get written down near zero after a fender bender because the integrity of the battery is unknowable, experience software crashes worse than Windows 95, witness precipitous drop in miles per charge in cold weather, strain the grid, and bankrupt rental agencies because of all of the above. ref 34 Otherwise, they’re great! That leads to the ultimate question: where will we get all the green energy to power all those green cars? The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself. ~ President Franklin D. Roosevelt Biomass-Derived Energy. I’ve written about biomass before. its problems were vividly laid bare by, of all people, Michael Moore in his Planet of the Humans documentary. ref 35 Destroying the World’s arable soils so that you can drive your car is insane. Of course, the corn lobby will keep the ethanol subsidies coming much the way wool subsidies refuse to die. Otherwise, I sense the idea has already died on the vine. We built a heck of a lot of wind capacity in 2023 in the United States, but the actual amount of wind electricity produced went down simply because you have wind droughts. ref 36 ~ Dan Kish, energy economist, Institute for Energy Research (IER) Wind Turbines. Wind is close behind. Construction and disposal of wind turbines are environmentally brutal. The ornithologists detest the deaths of migratory birds while missing the possible benefits of catching them with nets to make raptor stews. Turbines turn pristine landscapes into eyesores. I used to fish off Wolf Island in the Saint Lawrence River. It is now a big wind farm. Next time you drive by a windfarm, count how many turbines are not turning. Wind turbines seem likely to follow biomass into the dustbin of history. If you want an interesting takedown, listen to this 4-minute riff on wind turbines in the show Landman . ref 37 Let’s shoot them with a few bullets anyway. Solar Power. Cradle-to-grave analyses of the efficacy of alternative energies require a detailed investigation of the overall cost, resource depletion, net energy cost after the consumption of fossil fuels have been accounted for, and all of the above when it comes time for the grave. Analyses by many including David MacKay, ref 43 , 44 , 45 whose work came highly recommended by energy security analyst Iddo Wernick, ref 46 have convinced me alternative “green” energies cannot replace fossil fuels. The incentives for those in the alternative energy industry to carry out such detailed analyses is akin to the incentives of Pfizer to find all the flaws in their drugs and vaccines. The problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle. ref 47 ~ Forbes Hundreds of millions of solar panels are in service; most have a lifespan of under 30 years. Each year, their electric output drops by at least half a percent, and given enough time they must be replaced. Best I can tell, nobody has figured out how to solve the “intractable problem of hazardous waste disposal” ref 48 once the solar panels have gone to the light. I am by no means an expert, but this serves as a warning to eco-bliss-ninnies who embrace alternative energies without much thought. Developers who pocketed huge profits and are arguably responsible for them cradle-to-grave will be long gone when that grave part arrives. I am just topping off years of casual reading about energy, admittedly accruing wisdom incrementally: As Europe and the rest of the World get pounded by energy shortages, people may soon be begging for nuclear power plants in their backyards — NIMBY turns RIMBY (right in my backyard). ~ Dave Collum, 2023, cited In Gold We Trust Nuclear Energy. I have been confident for awhile now that nuclear power was going to return. It must return. The bombing of the Nordstream pipeline struck me as a trigger. Freezing a few asses off in a chilly Northern European winter would have the Germans begging for a plant in their backyards. That didn’t happen, but there emerged an urgent push for nuclear energy that came with little warning inside the Trojan Horse of AI. Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter. ~ Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Chips used for AI suck up 5–10x more power than standard CPU systems. ref 58 I call it a Trojan Horse because I believe the enthusiasm for AI is not just putting pressure to find better sources of energy. AI is being used to generate the “buzz” to get sign-off by the public on nuclear energy. I can imagine a future in which Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are the largest components in the XLE energy index. All the cool kids like Gates, Fink, Jensen, and Altman are on the bandwagon. Moreover, the timescales often cited are in years not decades. Something has changed. The big money is all in, which means nuclear energy is surging. I am playing catchup here, but the “next gen” or “second gen” small modular reactors (SMRs) can be mass produced. Our nuclear sub fleet illustrates the basic idea. Cost estimates are all over the map, but the wild variations appear to trace to regulatory uncertainties, which can be bulldozed if the mood is right. Energy whiz Doomberg did a back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that the footprint of a traditional reactor is

NEW YORK and AMSTERDAM , Dec. 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- S&P Dow Jones Indices ("S&P DJI"), the world's leading index provider, today announced the results of the annual Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) rebalancing and reconstitution. The DJSI are float-adjusted market capitalization weighted indices that measure the performance of companies selected using environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. The DJSI, including the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI World), were launched in 1999 as the pioneering series of global sustainability benchmarks available in the market. The index family is comprised of global, regional and country benchmarks. As a result of this year's review, the following top three largest companies based on free-float market capitalization have been added to and deleted from the DJSI World. All changes are effective on Monday, December 23, 2024 . Additions: Airbus SE, Schlumberger Ltd, BAE Systems Plc Deletions: Alphabet Inc 1 , UnitedHealth Group Inc, ASML Holding NV 2 The full results and list of DJSI constituents will be available as of Monday, December 23 2024 , at https://www.spglobal.com/esg/csa/djsi-annual-review S&P Dow Jones Indices will be renaming a number of its sustainability and ESG-related indices (see Index Announcement ). As part of this update, the family of Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) will be renamed Dow Jones Best-in-Class Indices. The changes will become effective on Monday, February 10, 2025 . The S&P Global CSA Scores will continue to be a key factor in selecting constituents for the DJSI when they are renamed Dow Jones Best-in-Class Indices in February 2025 . For more information about the DJSI methodology, please visit: www.spglobal.com/spdji . ABOUT S&P DOW JONES INDICES S&P Dow Jones Indices is the largest global resource for essential index-based concepts, data and research, and home to iconic financial market indicators, such as the S&P 500® and the Dow Jones Industrial Average®. More assets are invested in products based on our indices than products based on indices from any other provider in the world. Since Charles Dow invented the first index in 1884, S&P DJI has been innovating and developing indices across the spectrum of asset classes helping to define the way investors measure and trade the markets. S&P Dow Jones Indices is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), which provides essential intelligence for individuals, companies, and governments to make decisions with confidence. For more information, visit: www.spglobal.com/spdji . 1 Still member of DJSI World Enlarged and DJSI North America 2 Still member of DJSI World Enlarged S&P DJI MEDIA CONTACTS: spdji.comms@spglobal.com View original content: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sp-dow-jones-indices-announces-dow-jones-sustainability-indices-2024-review-results-302331745.html SOURCE S&P Dow Jones Indices

(Reuters) – Data analytics firm Palantir Technologies and defense tech company Anduril Industries have partnered to use defense data for artificial intelligence training, the companies said on Friday. The partnership will leverage Palantir’s AI platform to structure, label and prepare defense data for training to deploy those models onto national security systems, while Anduril’s systems will aid in the retention and distribution of government defense data. Companies across sectors have increasingly shifted focus toward AI to automate their workflows. However, its application in defense is still nascent, as data needed to train models in the sector is sometimes sensitive. “U.S. companies are developing world-leading models but struggling to deploy them at scale with government partners for defense applications,” the companies said. The partnership comes days after Anduril announced a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI aimed at developing and deploying advanced AI solutions for national security missions. Founded in 2017, Anduril offers autonomous solutions across a wide range of defense operations and also has experience automating robotic systems in tactical areas. Palantir, one of the largest beneficiaries of the GenAI boom, has seen strong spending from governments and rising demand for its software services from businesses looking to adopt the technology. (Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona) Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content. var ytflag = 0;var myListener = function() {document.removeEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);lazyloadmyframes();};document.addEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);window.addEventListener('scroll', function() {if (ytflag == 0) {lazyloadmyframes();ytflag = 1;}});function lazyloadmyframes() {var ytv = document.getElementsByClassName("klazyiframe");for (var i = 0; i < ytv.length; i++) {ytv[i].src = ytv[i].getAttribute('data-src');}} Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );NASHVILLE — The Supreme Court on Wednesday will consider for the first time whether states can ban certain gender transition medical treatments for young people – a closely watched case brought by three transgender teens, their parents and a doctor, all seeking to ensure health care access they say is critical. At issue is a Tennessee law barring transgender minors from using puberty blockers and hormones, treatments the state characterizes as risky and unproven. Lawmakers said the state should instead encourage adolescents to “appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.” The court’s ruling might have implications for the more than 100,000 transgender adolescents living in Tennessee or one of the 23 other states that has banned using the drugs to treat minors with gender dysphoria. The question of whether and how to medically treat young people whose gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth has become a polarizing issue, one President-elect Donald Trump seized on in advertisements targeting transgender people during his campaign. The Supreme Court in 2020 extended employment protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers, but it has yet to rule on the constitutionality of lower court decisions involving bathroom access, athletes and medical treatment for transgender minors like 16-year-old L.W., one of the Tennessee teens behind the case at the high court. Her parents, Brian and Samantha Williams, now drive her five hours to receive care in North Carolina. The teen started gender care treatments when she was 12 and said they have allowed her to “get to be myself a little bit more.” “It took a huge stressor off my back,” L.W. said in an interview. “I have more friends now because I’m more confident, and I’m more able to socialize.” The Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union are representing the parents and teens, who are referred to in court filings by their initials or a pseudonym to protect their identity. The families say the Tennessee law amounts to unconstitutional sex discrimination and a broad restriction on treatments that nearly every major medical association says are appropriate and effective for minors. ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, who is arguing on behalf of the families, will be the first openly transgender lawyer to present a case before the Supreme Court. Tennessee’s Republican attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti says in court filings that states have long had the power to regulate medicine and that there is nothing unconstitutional about restricting the use of a drug for certain purposes, even when it can be used for treating other conditions, or imposing age limits for health treatments when the risks and rewards are too uncertain. One potential wild card in the resolution of the case is the incoming Trump administration and the possibility that the next solicitor general will flip the federal government’s position to align with Tennessee’s view. If that were to happen, the court could allow the ACLU to continue challenging the law on its own, which would keep the justices on track to issue a ruling by the end of June. Trump transition officials did not immediately respond to questions about the case before the court, but his team has said Trump intends to fulfill his campaign promises, which included a crackdown on gender transition care for minors. PATIENTS AND LAWMAKERS CLASH L.W. said she began to suspect she was trans in 2019, when she was 11. She’d long felt as if she were “drowning,” but she didn’t understand why. She wore baggy clothes to obscure her body, and she panicked the first time she saw a few facial hairs above her lip. She was so uncomfortable in boys bathrooms, she avoided ever using one at school. Eventually, she developed urinary tract infections. After a cousin came out as trans, L.W. began researching on YouTube and Google. But she was scared, so she didn’t tell her parents she thought she was trans until just after Thanksgiving in 2020, more than a year after she’d first put a name to her feelings. Brian and Samantha Williams both had gay friends, and they told L.W. they supported her, but neither felt comfortable immediately taking her to a doctor. L.W. was 12, and Brian worried the distress she felt might be normal puberty angst. “It’s not like we took this thing lightly and just did it,” Brian said. The family went to a progressive church, and the church had a therapist on staff who specialized in trans youth, so Samantha and Brian signed L.W. up for counseling. After roughly six months, the therapist diagnosed L.W. with gender dysphoria and recommended a team of doctors at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. At Vanderbilt, L.W. underwent tests, then, in the summer of 2021, her doctors prescribed the drug Lupron to stop her body from going through male puberty. The medication, which has been used for at least 30 years on patients who start puberty too early, is largely reversible, but it can affect a young person’s bone density if taken long term without hormone therapy. The teen said she felt instantly relieved. To her, the benefits “strongly outweighed” any side effects. At the time, no state had banned trans adolescents from receiving the kind of care Vanderbilt’s team offered. Doctors nationwide had been treating a few thousand young people a year with hormones and puberty blockers, according to data compiled for Reuters – a tiny fraction of America’s adolescent population. They faced little pushback. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have found that a majority of trans adolescents experience “satisfaction,” “confidence” and “improvements in psychosocial functioning” after such treatment. Almost as soon as L.W. left her first appointment, she asked to start estrogen, but her doctors and her parents decided to wait. L.W. went in for regular evaluations, and in September 2022, more than a year after she started Lupron, her doctors agreed to prescribe estrogen. Hormone therapy made life feel possible in ways it never had before, L.W. said. She started hugging her family. She recorded music and built Lego models. She and her younger brother staged Airsoft matches with other teenagers. Neighbors even told Samantha that L.W. talked to them for the first time. L.W.’s journey felt personal to her, a singular distress followed by her own unique wins. But her time at Vanderbilt coincided with a historic rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses. In 2021, about 42,000 young people nationwide received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, nearly triple the number in 2017, according to data the technology company Komodo Health Inc. compiled for Reuters. The vast majority were not prescribed hormones or puberty blockers, the data shows. Still, as the numbers rose, lawmakers and activists across the country began to raise questions about gender clinics and the treatments doctors were offering. The same month L.W. started estrogen, the conservative podcast host Matt Walsh accused Vanderbilt of castrating, sterilizing and mutilating children for profit. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) promised to investigate the hospital. That fall, Walsh and a group of Republican state legislators held a “Rally to End Child Mutilation” in downtown Nashville. Only Arkansas and Alabama had passed bans on transition-related care at that point. But lawmakers in other conservative states signaled that they intended to prioritize similar restrictions. In March 2023, Tennessee adopted the legislation now before the Supreme Court. The law, known as SB 1, prohibits health-care providers from prescribing any puberty blocker or hormone for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify or live as “a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Providers who violate the law can be fined $25,000 for each prohibited treatment and are subject to disciplinary measures and potential civil liability in private lawsuits. Throughout the hearings on the legislation, Republican lawmakers treated gender dysphoria as if it were an illusion. A co-sponsor of the House bill described transitioning as a “fiction” and “fantasy.” Another representative said, “If you don’t know what you are, a boy or girl, male or female, just go in the bathroom and take your clothes off and look in the mirror and you’ll find out.” The Williams family watched the hearings, and Brian was infuriated. The lawmakers didn’t know his daughter. He and Samantha had taken L.W. to experts. They’d had what felt like a million hard conversations, and they’d followed the best evidence available. “All of a sudden to have a state come down and say that that’s not the right thing to do, that’s it’s abusive, that it’s wrongheaded, it’s just infuriating because I feel like I’m doing all the right stuff,” Brian said. EXPERIMENTATION OR DISCRIMINATION? After the bill became law, everyone in the Williams family agreed that discontinuing care wasn’t an option. L.W. was happy in ways she’d never been before she transitioned. If she stopped taking puberty blockers and estrogen, her body would begin to go through male puberty. She told her parents that was too painful to contemplate, let alone experience. Moving didn’t feel possible either. L.W.’s brother sobbed every time he thought about leaving his friends, and Brian’s elderly parents live in Nashville and rely on his help. That spring, Samantha saw an ACLU form that invited families to describe how they’d been affected by the legislation. She didn’t imagine, as she filled out the form, that she was signing up for a lawsuit that would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. She only knew that she wanted to protect her daughter and she didn’t want to feel helpless anymore. Tennessee gave families four months to wean kids like L.W. off the medications, but in June, before the ban even took effect, Vanderbilt shut down its clinic. In June 2023, a District Court judge temporarily blocked the law, saying it discriminates based on sex and treats some teens differently because they are transgender. The judge said the benefits of the treatments are well-established and noted that Tennessee’s law bans the medications for a small subset of minors while making them available for adolescents who use them for other health issues. “If Tennessee wishes to regulate access to certain medical procedures,” wrote U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson, a Trump nominee, “it must do so in a manner that does not infringe on the rights conferred by the United States Constitution, which is of course supreme to all other laws of the land.” A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit soon reversed Richardson’s decision, rejecting the families’ claims of discrimination and allowing the state to enforce the law while litigation continues. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton said the law regulates gender transition treatments for all minors, regardless of sex, and concluded that Tennessee lawmakers could have rationally determined that the law was an appropriate response to perceived risks associated with the treatments. Sutton, a nominee of George W. Bush, also said courts should be wary of intervening in a highly contested political dispute. Judge Helene N. White, another Bush nominee, agreed with the majority that the Constitution envisions states acting as laboratories for democracies to resolve political debates, but dissented from the majority ruling. “When a fundamental right or freedom from discrimination is involved, experimentation has no place,” she wrote. At the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar is asking the justices to return the case to the 6th Circuit to apply a more stringent level of review, which she says should be triggered by a law that discriminates based on sex. The state, she wrote, ignores the benefits of gender-transition care and overstates the health risks. She also said the law’s stated goal of having teens “appreciate their sex” is based on stereotypical understandings of gender and cannot be used to justify the ban. Skrmetti, the Tennessee attorney general, said the state has the authority to protect minors from the risks of gender-transition treatment, and the federal government should not discount lawmakers’ concerns. He also objected to Prelogar’s characterization of the law as driven by stereotypes. It is not unconstitutional discrimination, Skrmetti argued, to say that drugs can be prescribed for one reason, but not another. L.W. will be in the courtroom on Wednesday, but she said she can’t comprehend the gravity of the case she’s a part of. Mostly, she has tried to continue to live the life gender care has made possible. The day the ACLU filed its petition, she went to high school, and she only told a few people in the Gender-Sexualities Alliance, or GSA, about the case. That night, she worried, briefly, that her name would be on a case that might be remembered along the same lines as Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that ruled it was constitutional for states to enact segregation laws. Eventually, L.W. decided it was out of her control, and plus, she had the drivers’ test for her learner’s permit to worry about, so she set aside her fears and let her lawyers handle the hard parts. She is a junior in high school now. She DJed a party this Halloween. She has broadened her social life, and she adopted a kitten the family named Mushroom. She wants to spend her free time traveling to look at colleges with aviation programs, but for now, she and her mother still make regular trips to get treatment in North Carolina. Traveling out of state for health-care she’d rather get at home is arduous. Until recently, her mother had to take unpaid time off work, and L.W. has to call in sick to the magnet high school where she takes three Advanced Placement classes. “I hate taking days off school, it’s, like, the worst thing ever,” she said. “I have very, very difficult classes. So I’ve got a lot to catch up on if I miss a single day.” The drive used to take five hours each way, but Hurricane Helene washed out one of the roads they take, and now, the journey will be much longer. Comments are not available on this story. Send questions/comments to the editors. « Previous Next »

Bitcoin has surpassed the $100,000 mark as the post-election rally continues. What's next?Bitcoin shot past $100,000 for the first time on Thursday, taking the limelight away from stock markets that wavered as investors tracked political crises in France and South Korea. Oil prices fell modestly despite a move by the OPEC cartel and its allies to extend their supply cuts amid concerns about oversupply. Wall Street's main stock indexes retreated from records, while Paris and Frankfurt forged higher despite political uncertainty in Paris. Bitcoin reached a high of $103,800.45 before dipping below the symbolically important level to $99.154 near 2200 GMT. The digital asset has now soared more than 50 percent since the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to make the United States the "bitcoin and cryptocurrency capital of the world". "Bitcoin smashed through $100,000 as the Trump Trade powered on with force," noted Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell. The historic level was broken after Trump picked crypto proponent Paul Atkins to take over as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the markets regulator. Atkins is founder of risk consultancy firm Patomak Global Partners, whose clients include companies in the banking, trading and cryptocurrency industries. Atkins "is unlikely to be as anti-crypto as his predecessor Gary Gensler", said Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB trading platform. "Thus, politics is driving bitcoin. We doubt that the rally will stop here," she added. Stock markets struggled for direction ahead of important US jobs figures on Friday. Aaron Clark, an equity portfolio manager at GW&K, said investors "are probably not willing to step in" ahead of Friday's November employment data. "We've seen record inflows into equities," said Clark, who thinks the market could be poised for additional gains later in December. Paris closed higher despite the historic no-confidence vote that ousted the government of French Prime Minister Michel Barnier. President Emmanuel Macron vowed to name a new prime minister in the coming days to prevent France from sliding deeper into political turmoil, rejecting growing pressure from the opposition to resign "The French political crisis failed to knock European indices off course," said Coatsworth, an analyst at AJ Bell. Frankfurt was also in the green but London was flat. Most Asian stock markets finished higher but Seoul closed in the red. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol clung to power Thursday, his party announcing they will oppose an impeachment motion after his short-lived imposition of martial law stunned the world. "The silver lining we think is that the swift reversal of the martial law underscores the resilience of South Korea's institutions," said analysts at BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions. "For now, we expect limited implications for the economy and financial markets as the Bank of Korea and the ministry of finance have responded swiftly by reassuring investors," they added. New York - Dow: DOWN 0.6 percent at 44,765.71 (close) New York - S&P 500: DOWN 0.2 percent at 6,075.11 (close) New York - Nasdaq: DOWN 0.2 percent at 19,700.26 (close) London - FTSE 100: UP 0.2 percent at 8,349.38 (close) Paris - CAC 40: UP 0.4 percent at 7,330.54 (close) Frankfurt - DAX: UP 0.6 percent at 20,358.80 (close) Tokyo - Nikkei 225: UP 0.3 percent at 39,395.60 (close) Hong Kong - Hang Seng Index: DOWN 0.9 percent at 19,560.44 (close) Shanghai - Composite: UP 0.1 percent at 3,368.86 (close) Euro/dollar: UP at $1.0591 from $1.0511 on Wednesday Pound/dollar: UP at $1.2760 from $1.2701 Dollar/yen: DOWN at 150.09 yen from 150.59 yen Euro/pound: UP at 82.97 from 82.75 pence Brent North Sea Crude: DOWN 0.3 percent at $72.09 per barrel West Texas Intermediate: DOWN 0.4 percent at $68.30 per barrel burs-jmb/arp

[Opinion column written by Shomari Talbot-Woolridge] The recent op-ed, What About the Youth?, raises important questions about the challenges facing young Bermudians. However, it fails to acknowledge the steps the Progressive Labour Party [PLP] has taken to address those issues while conveniently ignoring the failures of the One Bermuda Alliance [OBA] when they held the reins of government. There’s no denying that young people in Bermuda are grappling with significant obstacles. The rising cost of living, lack of affordable housing, and limited employment opportunities create barriers to success. For many, dreams of higher education or home ownership feel increasingly out of reach. These are real issues that demand urgent action, and the PLP is delivering them. The high cost of living remains one of Bermuda’s most pressing issues. Young people often feel the brunt of this, with skyrocketing rents, stagnant wages, and limited affordable options for higher education. These challenges are compounded by the economic pressures of the post-COVID era, which has exacerbated income inequality and job insecurity. Mental health is another critical area. Young Bermudians are navigating a rapidly changing world, and the pressures of modern life are taking a toll. This is why the government’s focus on mental health—through initiatives like the Youth Mental Health Summit and expanded access to services—is so essential. Critics who claim the government has ignored the needs of young people overlook the significant strides the PLP has made. Under the PLP, funding for scholarships has been restored and expanded after being gutted by the OBA. Programs like the National Education Scholarship, the Further Education Award, and the Bermuda College Promise are opening doors for students who might otherwise be left behind. These initiatives ensure that financial barriers don’t dictate a young person’s future. Recognizing that not all careers require a university degree, the PLP has introduced vocational training programs tailored to Bermuda’s economic needs. Partnerships with local industries are creating pathways to well-paying jobs in technology, renewable energy, and agriculture. The government is tackling mental health head-on, recognizing its critical role in young people’s lives. Investments in school-based services and community resources are providing much-needed support to those struggling with anxiety, depression, and other challenges. While the cost of living remains high, the PLP is taking steps to provide relief. From expanding affordable housing initiatives to increasing benefits for HIP and FutureCare participants, these policies are laying the groundwork for a fairer and more affordable Bermuda. The contrast with the OBA could not be clearer. During their tenure, scholarship funding was slashed, leaving countless students without the means to pursue higher education. The now-famous student sit-in of 2016, where young Bermudians protested at the House of Assembly, highlighted the depth of frustration and disillusionment under the OBA’s leadership. Their demands for better funding and support were met with indifference and inaction. Additionally, the OBA’s neglect of public education and youth programs led to an erosion of trust among young Bermudians. Promises of “shared sacrifice” resulted in cuts to vital services while failing to address systemic issues like income inequality and job creation. While it’s easy to critique, solutions require vision and effort. The PLP has consistently demonstrated its commitment to addressing Bermuda’s challenges, particularly those affecting our youth. Could we do more? Of course—there is always room for improvement. But the Opposition’s record of neglect leaves them ill-equipped to lecture on supporting young people. Instead of recycling tired talking points, the OBA should join the government in developing constructive solutions. Bermuda’s young people deserve more than empty criticism; they deserve action. The PLP is focused on building a Bermuda that works for everyone, particularly our youth. Whether through expanded scholarships, mental health support, or workforce readiness programs, the government is investing in the next generation. The challenges we face are significant, but together, we can create a future where every young Bermudian has the opportunity to thrive. The path forward requires collaboration, accountability, and a commitment to bold solutions. The PLP is ready for that challenge. Is the Opposition? :