x99bet Qualcomm, to put it mildly, has been on a roll . As emphasized in the company’s recent Investor Day event (on the back of a terrific annual earnings report), all parts of the company’s business are running hot, with particular strength in the automotive market and big momentum just beginning in processors for AI PCs. At the same time, Qualcomm continues to be a dominant player in smartphones, where its growth is easily outpacing the market. The short version of this story is that over the past few years—and especially since Cristiano Amon became CEO in 2021—Qualcomm has done a knockout job of diversifying beyond mobile devices, such that it is now a significant player in automotive, IoT and even the once-unassailable PC market. Let’s dig in to see what’s happening for this increasingly influential chip giant and where it may be headed next. Continued Strength In Mobile And Overall First and foremost, I think the company has done a really good job both in its business performance and the way it talks about it. There’s something compelling about a straightforward presentation of results that boils down to: “Here’s what we said we were going to do, and we did it.” Kudos to Amon and his C-suite for that. Smartphone silicon is still the meat of Qualcomm’s business, representing $24.9 billion of revenue (out of $39 billion total) for the fiscal year that closed at the end of September 2024. That means 10% year-over-year revenue growth, which is probably 2x the overall growth of the mobile market. But it’s significant that there was another $14 billion of annual revenue for the company outside of handsets, with strong growth in recent quarters for automotive and IoT. Qualcomm has laid out a technology and IP portfolio that you have to be impressed with, and which is obviously gaining great traction in the marketplace—with improved operating margins, earnings per share and so on as proof. In the mobile market, the company’s newest Snapdragon 8 Elite processors continue to set the tone, with Qualcomm claiming that these processors have the fastest mobile CPUs and NPUs for AI processing. The handsets based on this silicon are already available in China, and their performance aligns with Qualcomm’s claims. We haven’t tested them at Signal65 yet, but hopefully we can do that soon. The company’s expertise in designing chips with great connectivity that operate at low power is also serving it well across other target markets. The center of gravity for computing is bifurcating, where, aside from datacenter AI training, performance per watt is the name of the game. Qualcomm continues to emphasize strong partnerships, collaborating with a wide range of leading companies across multiple sectors of the tech landscape. This was reflected in the many Investor Day cameos from CEOs including Andy Jassy of Amazon, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, Yuanqing Yang of Lenovo and so on. Big Design Wins In Automotive It’s no accident that the non-tech company leaders who made appearances at the event included Ola Källenius of Mercedes-Benz, Wang Chuanfu of BYD and Mary Barra of General Motors. While Qualcomm’s automotive revenue for fiscal 2024 was “only” $2.9 billion, that represents 55% YoY growth for the segment, and the company now has a jaw-dropping $45 billion-plus pipeline with its automotive customers. It’s absolutely incredible to me how quickly the company got traction in advanced driver-assistance systems, as I remember first taking a secret car trip at CES 2019 that was powered by Qualcomm ADAS. In the years to come we’re going to hear even more about software-defined vehicles. Automobiles—from passenger cars to heavy trucks—are continuing their evolution toward becoming computing platforms on wheels, and Qualcomm is aiding that evolution. Its Snapdragon Digital Chassis integrates AI, safety and infotainment systems, plus the company is heavily involved with telematics and ADAS that enable modern safety measures and autonomous driving. The company is drawing on two decades of experience in automotive, where its expertise in highly connected low-power chips delivers important performance benefits, and it’s easy to predict that this part of Qualcomm’s business will only grow more important over the coming years. What’s less clear is the future of full self-driving autonomy, but robotaxis are a ways away from mass adoption. Regardless, as Qualcomm has demonstrated, if it chooses to enter a space and can win at it, it does. Industrial IoT Is A Big Target Qualcomm also continues to scale its industrial IoT solutions across verticals including manufacturing, logistics and healthcare. It’s worth keeping in mind that the company’s definition of “IoT” is expansive, basically including all types of devices besides phone handsets that connect at the network edge. It’s also worth noting that revenues for this part of Qualcomm’s business slipped slightly in fiscal 2024 (from $5.9 billion to $5.4 billion), although growth was strong in Q4 (up 22% YoY), and the company has ambitious plans for this segment going forward. As my colleague Bill Curtis puts it, “AI brings order to the chaos of IIoT.” The emerging consensus in this area is that the makers of IIoT devices will continue to use a wide range of architectures because of the varied use cases in different industries. In other words, sensors in a hospital are going to work quite differently from sensors in an oil refinery, and that’s not a problem—so long as cloud and edge IT platforms bring order to the chaos, in part by intelligently using AI. In my view, Qualcomm is extremely well positioned to serve this market, and I’m eager to see what the company will do in the future with AI on the industrial edge. The company is likewise bullish about it, projecting up to $14 billion in annual revenue for IoT by 2029, and $22 billion in combined automotive and IoT revenue in the same timeframe. Timing and pace at an event like this are significant. The company opened the event with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy discussing the future of warehouses, logistics and transportation. This says that the industrial IoT message is top-of-mind for Qualcomm. It reminds me of where automotive was before the company turned into a $45 billion juggernaut. Qualcomm attempted to buy NXP to fill this slot, was thwarted by China regulators and is now building the capability itself. The long-tail channels and distributors are paramount for scale, but I do believe that Qualcomm will do well with its sweet-spot customers—tech giants like Amazon. Success With AI PCs, And It’s Still Early Days My colleagues and I at Moor Insights & Strategy have covered the growth of the AI PC market closely in 2024, and Qualcomm has been deeply involved in that growth—far more so than anyone could have projected even five years ago. A few months back I wrote about the “miracle” the company pulled off with the Snapdragon X platform that powered every single design in the first wave of Copilot+ PCs released this year. In this context, I want to emphasize how early we still are in the lifecycle for AI PCs. On one hand, the AI PC market is about to shift significantly as AMD and Intel bring their first Copilot+ PC-certified processors to market, which will inevitably carve into Qualcomm’s market share. On the other hand, only a tiny fraction of today’s PCs are AI PCs, but by the end of this decade, probably every PC sold will qualify as an AI PC, so Qualcomm has a lot of room to run. In line with that, at the Investor Day event the company said that it wants to have Snapdragon X chips in more than 100 PC models by 2026—a target I expect it to hit. If anything, I think the projections that Qualcomm has shared for PCs are conservative. The company’s PC revenue target for 2029 is pegged at $4 billion. Put that in context with recent quarters from AMD and Intel, which total $9 billion-plus. So Qualcomm is citing a number for 2029 that would represent roughly 10% revenue share in 2024, and I think that’s conservative. Obviously, it’s a cutthroat market, but given how well Qualcomm has been executing, I believe it can probably do even more. Bigger picture, what Qualcomm is building with on-device, edge and cloud AI could be huge. There are obvious benefits of using on-device AI, including lower latency, better efficiency and inherently better privacy/security. What it’s doing with AWS and others to blend edge and cloud capabilities should lower costs for developers and improve AI scalability. The details Amon and his lieutenants shared during Investor Day were great, but in multiple different areas of AI I’m sure the company is only scratching the surface of what will come in the next few years. Diversification + Discipline = Success What we’re seeing from Qualcomm is the payoff of a smart diversification strategy that’s been implemented with discipline over the past several years. Five years ago, I was questioning what the company could do with AI and with PCs. To its credit, Qualcomm stepped up, hired some pretty incredible people and leaned into the hard work. Today it has an AI-enabled platform—for phones, PCs, IIoT, automotive—that customers can truly leverage. That’s just really, really smart. Of course there are some open questions. For one thing, my colleague Anshel Sag will continue to track what Qualcomm does in XR and spatial computing, which has been one of the Next Big Things in tech for a long time without actually paying off yet. Whenever it does, Qualcomm should be at the heart of it. And although I love what the company is doing on-device and at the network edge, it’s less clear what the strategy is for the datacenter. While we’re at it, I’m also watching closely to see what happens between Arm and Qualcomm on the legal front this month and beyond. At AWS’s recent re:Invent show, the company disclosed that 50% of its new capacity comes from Arm-based Graviton chips. This means 50% Arm and 50% x86. Qualcomm has an incredible core and could leverage this into the datacenter as long as it married it with the right platform and ecosystem. Also, it has placed inference silicon at both AWS and G42, but what could it do if it invested hard there? That may be a bridge too far. Maybe that’s the step after its potential IoT success. All in all, though, Qualcomm’s vision makes sense to me. It did what it said it would do, and now it’s telling the world what’s next. The markets it’s getting into make sense, given its history and its prowess in intellectual property. And then there’s the potential accelerating effect from AI. Several years ago the company decided that it would never again be so reliant on a single market, and now the moves it has made to support that decision are paying off.A New Hampshire high school banned two parents from its grounds after they wore wristbands protesting boys participating in girls’ sports. Two months later, the school remained adamant about its decision in a court hearing on Friday. The controversy began in September when parents complained to the Bow High School athletic director about their daughters’ soccer team having to compete against a team with a boy on the roster, the reported. “Where’s your courage? Where’s your integrity? Stand up for real women or get out of the way,” soccer dad Anthony Foote wrote in an email to athletic director Mike Desilets. When the school told the parents nothing could be done because of the federal judge’s ruling that the word “girl” included , the parents took a stand at the next game on Sept. 17. Multiple parents wore bright pink wristbands which read “XX,” of course implying the fact that girls have two x chromosomes. Officials stopped the game, demanding the parents remove the wristbands. Police issued “No Trespassing” letters to Foote and fellow soccer dad Kyle Fellers. Foote said he was banned from the school until Sept. 23, which meant missing his daughter’s homecoming soccer game. Superintendent of Schools Marcy Kelley signed the order, saying the pink wristbands violated the school’s policy against “threatening, harassing, or intimidating ... any person.” Kelley added that the wristbands violated its policy “that no person shall ‘impede, delay, disrupt or otherwise interfere with any school activity.'” “The District had to obtain additional police presence to ensure order. The District had to order you to remove the armbands and as a result of your ‘protest’ and other actions, play was temporarily stopped,” Kelley said. Foote, his wife, Fellers and other parents filed a lawsuit against multiple school administrators, including Kelley and Desilets, according to . The parents testified Thursday at a hearing in the United States District Court in Concord, New Hampshire. Foote said that the protesters hadn’t intended to harass or target anyone, merely protest the participation of . “I don’t care what Parker wants to do with his life,” Foote told the New Hampshire Journal. “What I do care about is that my daughter could be , maybe not by Parker because he’s not the biggest kid on the field. But there’s a chance that next time will be different.” Kelley and Desilets claimed otherwise, saying the protests wouldn’t stop with the wristbands, citing strongly worded emails to school administrators and social media posts encouraging other parents to attend and protest the game. One parent reportedly told school officials hearsay of plans to heckle the “transgender” player on the other team — male Parker Tirrell. The protesters were supposedly going to wear dresses and make fun of Tirrell. “When we suspect there’s some sort of threat . . . we don’t wait for it to happen,” Kelley said at the hearing Friday. Tirrell and another student had previously challenged the state law prohibiting boys from participating in girls’ sports — . The judge ruled that the players could temporarily participate in the games during the ongoing lawsuit, Fox News reported. At that time, Tirrell’s next game would be the Sept. 17 game in question, in which he played nearly the whole game, the New Hampshire Journal reported. We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. .SYDNEY and NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TransPerfect Legal , a global leader in legal technology, AI, and advisory services, has been named a top eDiscovery provider in Australasian Lawyer and New Zealand Lawyer's 2024 Service Provider Awards. In evaluating nominees, judges considered excellence in service delivery, innovation, and demonstrated commitment to research and development. This is the third consecutive year TransPerfect Legal has been recognised by Australasian Lawyer as a leading eDiscovery service provider. TransPerfect's first Australian office opened in Sydney in 2007, with a dedicated TransPerfect Legal support team, servers, and forensic lab added in 2019. Rapid growth followed and with the high demand for its services in Australia, the company later added a Melbourne office. "To be recognised for a third consecutive year is a testament to our local support team and our amazing clients, and I am deeply grateful for both,” remarked Tom Balmer, Director, APAC, TransPerfect Legal. Phil Shawe, TransPerfect President and Co-CEO, stated, "This award shines a light on our team's technical expertise and steadfast commitment to clients in Australia and New Zealand.” About TransPerfect Legal TransPerfect Legal is a global leader in legal technology, AI, and advisory services for Am Law 200 and Global 100 law firms as well as corporate legal departments. 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The Chip Overload! Inside Microsoft’s Strategic Moves

MacKenzie Scott continues to make medical debt relief a priority in her mysterious giving. This week, Undue Medical Debt, formerly RIP Medical Debt, announced it had received a rare third gift — $50 million — from the billionaire philanthropist, signaling her satisfaction with the group’s efforts to purchase medical debt in bulk from hospitals and debt collectors. Scott has donated a total of $130 million to the organization since 2020. Medical debt is increasing despite most of the U.S. population having some form of medical insurance. Nearly 100 million people are unable to pay their medical bills, according to Third Way, a left-leaning national think tank. Overall, Americans owe about $220 billion in medical debt, with historically disadvantaged groups shouldering the bulk of the burden. Lower-income people, people with disabilities, middle-aged adults, Black people, the uninsured, and people living in rural areas are among the groups most likely to be affected by medical debt, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation . Undue Medical Debt buys debt at a discounted price, estimating that it erases about $100 in debt for each $1 donated. The group also collaborates with policymakers to encourage the adoption of measures to curb what people owe for medical care. Scott first gave Undue Medical Debt a $50 million donation in 2020, followed by a $30 million donation in 2022. With that money, the group has relieved nearly $15 billion in debt for more than 9 million people, CEO Allison Sesso said. That’s a significant leap from the $1 billion in debt relieved from 2014 to 2019, she noted. “I’m frankly astounded by this most recent gift from MacKenzie Scott and feel proud to be a steward of these funds as we continue the essential work of dismantling the yoke of medical debt that’s burdening far too many families in this country,” said Sesso. The continued funding has allowed Sesso “to not have to worry about my next dollar,” she said, and “think more strategically about the narrative around medical debt — she has helped us push that conversation.” Undue Medical Debt was started in 2014 by two former debt collection executives, Jerry Ashton and Craig Antico, who were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement’s advocacy for debt relief. Growth initially was slow. But with Scott’s gifts, the nonprofit has been able to staff up, produce more research, and develop relationships with policymakers who have pushed for changes to hospital billing practices to relieve debt and prevent people from accumulating it in the first place, Sesso said. Undue Medical Debt’s public policy arm has worked with lawmakers in North Carolina, which in July became the first state to offer additional Medicaid payments to hospitals that agree to adopt debt relief measures, she said. The policy change followed the publication of a 2023 report from Duke University, which found that one in five families in the state had been forced into collections proceedings because of medical debt. Since 2020, the organization’s staff has grown from three to about 40, Sesso said. Those hires included an anthropologist who collects stories from people set back by medical debt to inform the group’s research and advocacy work. Scott’s gifts also have helped improve Undue Medical Debt’s technology to identify people eligible for debt relief and to find hospitals from which it can purchase medical debt, among other things, Sesso said. “This coming year, because of this MacKenzie Scott grant, we’ll be able to add more people, making sure that we can support that growth on an ongoing basis,” Sesso said. Few repeat grantees Few organizations have received more than one gift from Scott. Other multi-grant recipients include Blue Meridian, an intermediary group that has directed billions of dollars to nonprofits around the world, and GiveDirectly, which provides no-strings-attached cash payments to low-income people globally. GiveDirectly has received $125 million from Scott since 2020. Blue Meridian has not disclosed amounts for the four gifts it’s received since 2019. Scott’s contributions to those two organizations were for specific causes like GiveDirectly’s U.S. poverty relief fund, said Christina Im, a senior research analyst at the Center for Effective Philanthropy. In the case of Undue Medical Debt, the timing of Scott’s first gifts in 2020 and 2022 seemed to correspond with COVID-relief efforts, she said. Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is worth an estimated $32 billion but provides few details about her grantmaking decisions. Without further information, it’s hard to know what prompted this third donation to Undue Medical Debt, but Scott has said in public statements that she wants to help those who are most in need and bear the brunt of societal ills, said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s vice president for research. “I have not seen a lot of other folks funding in this area,” Smith Arrillaga added. Anger over health care costs Scott’s latest gift to Undue Medical Debt comes amid national debates about medical insurance and the cost of medical treatments. The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 in Midtown Manhattan has heightened these conversations, with some lionizing the man who allegedly committed the crime. “That’s no way to get change, full stop,” Sesso said in reference to Thompson’s murder. “But I think the anger around insurance companies and having access to care is very clear.” The U.S. has one of the most expensive health care systems in the world. And the amount of medical debt carried by individuals seems to be increasing, noted Adam Searing, a public interest attorney and associate professor at Georgetown University, where he focuses on Medicaid and other health coverage programs. Searing previously served for 17 years as director of the Health Access Coalition at the nonprofit North Carolina Justice Center, advocating for the uninsured and underinsured. During that time, he heard from people losing their homes due to liens from hospitals. Sometimes those liens could be delayed, but it still meant that the debtors couldn’t pass those homes along to their children or grandchildren, he said. “Those stories stuck with me,” he said. “It really has an impact on families.” Relieving debt allows people to get their lives back on track and become financially secure after a major illness or series of expensive bills, Searing said. For philanthropists, it’s also a cause that is largely nonpartisan. Scott shining a spotlight on the issue is undoubtedly “a good thing,” he said. “I think it will have a big effect.” _____ Stephanie Beasley is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as part of a partnership to cover philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment Inc. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy . Stephanie Beasley Of The Chronicle Of Philanthropy, The Associated PressTrump's 'Made in USA' Bitcoin is a promise impossible to keepThe Kremlin fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine on Thursday in response to Kyiv's use this week of American and British missiles capable of striking deeper into Russia, President Vladimir Putin said. In a televised address to the country, the Russian president warned that U.S. air defense systems would be powerless to stop the new missile, which he said flies at ten times the speed of sound and which he called the Oreshnik — Russian for hazelnut tree. He also said it could be used to attack any Ukrainian ally whose missiles are used to attack Russia. “We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against military facilities of the countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities,” Putin said in his first comments since President Joe Biden gave Ukraine the green light this month to use U.S. ATACMS missiles to strike at limited targets inside Russia. RELATED STORY | Russia says Ukraine fired 6 US-made missiles at the Bryansk region, days after Biden policy shift Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh confirmed that Russia’s missile was a new, experimental type of intermediate-range missile based on its RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile. “This was new type of lethal capability that was deployed on the battlefield, so that was certainly of concern," Singh said, noting that the missile could carry either conventional or nuclear warheads. The U.S. was notified ahead of the launch through nuclear risk reduction channels, she said. The attack on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro came in response to Kyiv's use of longer-range U.S. and British missiles in strikes Tuesday and Wednesday on southern Russia, Putin said. Those strikes caused a fire at an ammunition depot in Russia's Bryansk region and killed and wounded some security services personnel in the Kursk region, he said. RELATED STORY | Biden authorizes Ukraine's use of US-supplied long-range missiles for deeper strikes inside Russia “In the event of an escalation of aggressive actions, we will respond decisively and in kind,” the Russian president said, adding that Western leaders who are hatching plans to use their forces against Moscow should “seriously think about this.” Putin said the Oreshnik fired Thursday struck a well-known missile factory in Dnipro. He also said Russia would issue advance warnings if it launches more strikes with the Oreshnik against Ukraine to allow civilians to evacuate to safety — something Moscow hasn’t done before previous aerial attacks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov initially said Russia hadn’t warned the U.S. about the coming launch of the new missile, noting that it wasn't obligated to do so. But he later changed tack and said Moscow did issue a warning 30 minutes before the launch. Putin's announcement came hours after Ukraine claimed that Russia had used an intercontinental ballistic missile in the Dnipro attack, which wounded two people and damaged an industrial facility and rehabilitation center for people with disabilities, according to local officials. But American officials said an initial U.S. assessment indicated the strike was carried out with an intermediate-range ballistic missile. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post that the use of the missile was an "obvious and serious escalation in the scale and brutality of this war, a cynical violation of the UN Charter.” He also said there had been “no strong global reaction” to the use of the missile, which he said could threaten other countries. “Putin is very sensitive to this. He is testing you, dear partners,” Zelenskyy wrote. “If there is no tough response to Russia’s actions, it means they see that such actions are possible.” The attack comes during a week of escalating tensions, as the U.S. eased restrictions on Ukraine's use of American-made longer-range missiles inside Russia and Putin lowered the threshold for launching nuclear weapons. The Ukrainian air force said in a statement that the Dnipro attack was launched from Russia’s Astrakhan region, on the Caspian Sea. “Today, our crazy neighbor once again showed what he really is,” Zelenskyy said hours before Putin's address. “And how afraid he is.” Russia was sending a message by attacking Ukraine with an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of releasing multiple warheads at extremely high speeds, even if they are less accurate than cruise missiles or short-range ballistic missiles, said Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “Why might you use it therefore?” Savill said. "Signaling — signaling to the Ukrainians. We’ve got stuff that outrages you. But really signaling to the West ‘We’re happy to enter into a competition around intermediate range ballistic missiles. P.S.: These could be nuclear tipped. Do you really want to take that risk?’” Military experts say that modern ICBMs and IRBMs are extremely difficult to intercept, although Ukraine has previously claimed to have stopped some other weapons that Russia described as “unstoppable,” including the air-launched Kinzhal hypersonic missile. David Albright, of the Washington-based think tank the Institute for Science and International Security, said he was “skeptical” of Putin’s claim, adding that Russian technology sometimes “falls short.” He suggested Putin was “taunting the West to try to shoot it down ... like a braggart boasting, taunting his enemy.” Earlier this week, the Biden administration authorized Ukraine to use the U.S.-supplied, longer-range missiles to strike deeper inside Russia — a move that drew an angry response from Moscow. Days later, Ukraine fired several of the missiles into Russia, according to the Kremlin. The same day, Putin signed a new doctrine that allows for a potential nuclear response even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power. The doctrine is formulated broadly to avoid a firm commitment to use nuclear weapons. In response, Western countries, including the U.S., said Russia has used irresponsible nuclear rhetoric and behavior throughout the war to intimidate Ukraine and other nations. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that Russia’s formal lowering of the threshold for nuclear weapons use did not prompt any changes in U.S. doctrine. She pushed back on concerns that the decision to allow Ukraine to use Western missiles to strike deeper inside Russia might escalate the war. ′′They’re the ones who are escalating this,” she said of the Kremlin — in part because of a flood of North Korean troops sent to the region. More than 1,000 days into war, Russia has the upper hand, with its larger army advancing in Donetsk and Ukrainian civilians suffering from relentless drone and missile strikes. Analysts and observers say the loosening of restrictions on Ukraine's use of Western missiles is unlikely to change the course of the war, but it puts the Russian army in a more vulnerable position and could complicate the logistics that are crucial in warfare. Putin has also warned that the move would mean that Russia and NATO are at war. “It is an important move and it pulls against, undermines the narrative that Putin had been trying to establish that it was fine for Russia to rain down Iranian drones and North Korean missiles on Ukraine but a reckless escalation for Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons at legitimate targets in Russia,” said Peter Ricketts, a former U.K. national security adviser who now sits in the House of Lords.FIL:E – People photograph the New York Stock Exchange in New York’s Financial District on Dec. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File) New York, United States — Wall Street stocks were little changed on Thursday while Asian equities rose in thin Boxing Day trade, extending their “Santa Claus Rally” with several bourses still shut for the holiday. Japan’s Nikkei index closed up 1.1 percent, boosted by comments from the Bank of Japan governor and share price gains for top-selling automaker Toyota. China’s plans for massive bond issuances in 2025 also bolstered investor sentiment. “Even though many in the region are still shaking off a bit of a holiday hangover, with several markets closed for Boxing Day, Asian stocks opened higher, riding a favorable wave from China’s financial bond juggernaut,” said Stephen Innes from SPI Asset Management. In New York, major indices veered in and out of positive territory in a sleepy post-Christmas session. The broad-based S&P 500 finished down less than 0.1 percent. Large technology companies that have led the market in much of 2024 mostly took a breather. These included Netflix, Tesla and Amazon, all of which declined. “What’s interesting today is that we’re seeing small stocks bounce back a little bit,” said Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers, noting that the Russell 2000 index put on 0.9 percent. Holiday consumer data showed a 3.8-percent increase in US retail spending from November 1 to December 24, according to a Mastercard SpendingPulse review of a key period for retailers. London Stockton, an analyst at Ned Davis Research, noted that the “Santa Claus rally could still be alive, with strong seasonality into the end of the year.” Stock markets have traditionally fared well in the last five trading days of the year and the first two in the new year, a trend known as the “Santa Claus rally.” Among a number of possible reasons advanced by experts include the festive holiday mood and purchasing ahead of the end of the tax year. Innes said remarks from Bank of Japan governor Kazuo Ueda in which he refrained from signaling a potential interest rate hike next month also “influenced bullish regional sentiments.” Japanese market heavyweight Toyota ended nearly six percent higher after reports in the Nikkei business daily said it aimed to double its return on equity — a key measure of a company’s financial performance. New York – Dow: UP 0.1 percent at 43,325.80 (close) New York – S&P 500: DOWN less than 0.1 percent at 6,037.59 (close) New York – Nasdaq: DOWN 0.1 percent at 20,020.36 (close) Tokyo – Nikkei 225: UP 1.1 percent at 39,568.06 points (close) Hang Seng: UP 1.1 percent at 20,098.29 points (Tuesday close) Shanghai – Composite: UP 0.1 percent at 3,398.08 points (close) Euro/dollar: UP at $1.0424 from $1.0414 on Tuesday Pound/dollar: DOWN at $1.2526 from $1.2538 Dollar/yen: UP at 158.00 yen from 157.06 yen Euro/pound: UP at 83.19 pence from 83.05 pence West Texas Intermediate: DOWN 0.7 percent at $69.62 per barrel Subscribe to our daily newsletter By providing an email address. I agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge that I have read the Privacy Policy . Brent North Sea Crude: DOWN 0.4 percent at $73.26 per barrel

Caring mental mechanic swears by results

Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough. Start with the specious lawsuits brought against President-elect Donald Trump, to the great glee of many of his “Never Trump” and Democratic detractors. Some of them, especially Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s March 2023 indictment charging that Trump’s signing off on allegedly false business records in 2017 somehow swindled the electorate in 2016, had an immediate turnabout effect. Michael Barone Within a few weeks, what had looked like a close Republican primary race between Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) became a runaway romp for Trump. Bragg got a Manhattan jury to vote for conviction, but Trump has had the last laugh. But in the meantime, he has filed a couple of antic lawsuits of his own. And, contrary to many observers’ expectations, none has been dismissed. His targets are the political press. But just as flimsy prosecutions such as Bragg’s threatened to limit free speech by a political candidate, Trump’s — how should one put it? — creative lawsuits threaten to limit political speech all around. The first lawsuit is brought against the Des Moines Register’s well-known pollster Ann Selzer, whose Oct. 28-31 poll showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by 47% to 44% in a state he had carried 53% to 45% in 2020. The result was all the more startling because Selzer had a record of accurately gauging late shifts of opinion in the state. The instant reaction of many analysts, professional and amateur, was to wonder whether the bottom was falling out of Trump’s campaign in Iowa and nationally. Turns out, it wasn’t. Other polls showed nothing like such a shift from 2020, and Trump carried Iowa 56% to 43%. Selzer’s postelection analysis, as former Washington Post poll analyst David Byler wrote, showed that if she had adjusted her raw results in ways most pollsters do in this post-landline-telephone era, she would have shown Trump ahead. Her methods, which had spotlighted last-minute shifts in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses, failed in a race in which opinion was more deeply rooted. Trump’s preposterous claim is that Selzer presented fake numbers to harm his campaign. I can’t imagine a jury would agree. More importantly, political campaigns are full of sound and fury, dubious claims and downright lies. Elections are adversary processes, with both sides having a say. Trump’s other creative lawsuit, as Ben Smith reports in Semafor, was brought in 2022 against the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation, for issuing and refusing to rescind awards to journalists who wrote stories about what Trump calls, picturesquely but accurately, “the Russia, Russia, Russia” collusion hoax. Trump’s lawyers attack the board for issuing awards “particularly when many of the key assertions and premises of the Russia Collusion Hoax that permeated the Awarded Articles had been revealed by the Mueller Report and congressional investigations as false.” That, aside from the eccentric capitalization, is a fair comment. As Smith admits, much reporting on supposed Russia collusion, “with its breathless cable news and social media cheerleading, did not seriously bear out,” and “some of that reporting ... was powered by a delusion.” Smith also admits, at least via hyperlink, that he, as then-editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, first published the specious and always dubious Steele dossier. Trump has a legitimate grievance against the Democrats who concocted that document and peddled the Russia collusion canard in an effort to force him from office — an enterprise that weakened the credibility of their legitimate criticisms of him for not accepting the result of the 2020 election. It would be desirable for both Democrats and Republicans, and for the press, to return to the norm of recognizing as legitimate the results of elections, however distasteful. Enough turnabout. It would be desirable as well for Trump to drop his creative lawsuits, however gratifying it might be to submit his journalistic tormenters to the ordeal of depositions. As Eli Lake writes in the Free Press, he “should take the win and move on.” It would be desirable, thirdly, for the press to admit error, as Selzer and Smith, perhaps a little less forthrightly, have done. It is better to get into the habit of doing so voluntarily rather than risk lawsuits that may establish restrictions. The Russia collusion hoax did great harm to a duly elected president and, therefore, to the country, and it was always based on a dubious theory and on exceedingly thin, if not nonexistent, evidence. The press owe, not to Trump but to the public, a full accounting. Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available. © 2024, Creators.comWhen I think back on what I read his year, on what stuck, and stuck , refusing to unstick, the common denominator was my surprise at my own surprise. A fresh take! A subject I’d assumed I knew! An antidote to heard-it-all-before-ism, that cynicism we develop from having access to every story ever told, every opinion ever voiced and every song ever sung, behind a black mirror in your pocket. Cults? Bret Anthony Johnston’s “We Burn Daylight” found a love story in the old ugliness of Waco. Dystopia? The heroine of Anne de Marcken’s “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over” is dead, yet still longing for a failed world. Chicago’s Jesse Ball, never at a loss for experimenting, returned with “The Repeat Room,” mashing Kafka, fascism and our courts into a revealing sorta-thriller. And those aren’t even three of my 10 favorite books of 2024. Surely you have your own? Social media is awash in lists of reads from last month, last week, last year, driven by the same shock of recognition that there’s plenty new under the sun. “Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil,” by Chicago’s Ananda Lima, impressively remade the Faustian bargain. James Marcus’ “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson”; Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde”; Keith O’Brien’s “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose and the Last Glory Days of Baseball” — each a cool breeze in the typically formal category of biography. Ian Frazier’s “Paradise Bronx” found a wandering epic in the history of a neglected borough; Tana French continued to retool detective writing in “The Hunter”; and Katherine Rundell’s “Vanishing Treasures” not only brought a strange, hilarious appreciation to endangered animals, her underrated fantasy “Impossible Creatures” invented a world of new ones. Rebecca Boyle’s glowing history “Our Moon” looked into the sky and reminded us that seeing something every day is not the same as knowing it. None of those books are in my top 10, either. That’s how much good stuff there was. What follows then are 10 favorites, the stickiest of stickers, in no order. If you need a stack of fresh takes for 2025, start here: “Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation” by Brenda Wineapple: If you’re eager for answers to the presidential election, start here. If you’re merely looking for gripping history you assumed you knew — ditto. Wineapple, one of our great contemporary American historians, recounts the players, causes and events leading to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. A Tennessee school teacher, accused of teaching evolution, was defended by Chicago’s Clarence Darrow. But as Wineapple shows with impeccable research and accessible storytelling this was never about proving science, but about harnessing intolerance and exploiting the national tension between ignorance and truth. Wineapple doesn’t explicitly lay out the trial’s resonance 100 years later. She doesn’t need to. “Headshot” by Rita Bullwinkel: Debut novel of the year, a sports drama that doesn’t find headlong momentum in triumph but how a group of teenage girls define themselves through competition and each other. Structured around seven bouts at an amateur tournament in Nevada, Bullwinkle’s novel pulls readers in and out of real-time thoughts, pausing over futures. One boxer will be a wedding planner; another won’t be able to hold a cup of tea, her teen boxing reaching out into old age. In their minds is where the action is most brutal: Some can’t shake tragedies; some find themselves fond of violence. Bullwinkle keeps us in the moment, never parsing their psychology, and certainly not leading us toward cinematic bombast. One fighter, as she wins, notices “warmth radiating through her chest.” But it’s a warmth, Bullwinkle writes, “she’ll feel again very few times in her life.” “James” by Percival Everett: I didn’t want to include this. If only because, if you’re up on literary fiction, you expect it. This is the book of the year , an instant classic. What’s left to say? Well, it’s one of the few instances when the hype matches the quality. Everett, whose decades of obscurity are now gone, is on all burners here — humor, pacing, language, making room for a reader to rest. His companion to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is too alive to be a 21st-century corrective. Reading Twain is not necessary, only knowing that Everett’s James was Twain’s simple and loyal Jim. And James is boundless, turning on and off his intellect to appease white people, noting the irony of having to pretend that he doesn’t understand the word “irony,” always playing the long game to escape from slavery: “I never felt more exposed or vulnerable as I did in the light of day with a book open.” “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” by Emily Nussbaum: You’re wondering: Do we need this book? Nussbaum, who won a Pulitzer Prize as TV critic for the New Yorker, asks it herself. Then directs us to a better question: Who knew the development of the most hated TV genre offered so much insight into social experiments, human cruelty, technology and the blur between high and low art? It’s a poke through roots (“The Gong Show,” cinema verite) and a cache of interviews (including Rodney Alcala, the killer subject of Netflix’s “Woman of the Hour”). Nussbaum is such a fun guide you reveal in your own rubbernecking even as you sweat the apocalyptic ramifications of, she writes, “filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect.” “The History of Sound: Stories” by Ben Shattuck: Ever close a book and just ... sigh? There’s nothing overtly gimmicky to the dozen stories in this graceful collection, rooted in New England pubs and logging camps and prep schools, spanning the 1600s to now. Shattuck — whose excellent “Six Walks” retraced the footsteps of Thoreau — is more interested in natural echos of ambivalence, uniting characters across stories without fuss, in sometimes funny ways. One tale, a harrowing account of a lost utopian community in backwoods Maine, is revisited in another tale, but as an academic paper written centuries later that gets the history of that community completely wrong. A (faux) Radiolab transcript about the mysterious photo of an extinct seabird is matched later to a bittersweet response, the story of the struggling husband who snapped the picture. If it sounds like last year’s “North Woods” (also set in New England, spanning centuries), that’s not a bad thing. “The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America” by Sarah Lewis: Lewis, a Harvard University cultural historian with a specialty in how visual arts shape the world, is one of a few innovators worthy of that overused title “disruptor.” She works here in the period from the Civil War to Jim Crow, showing how civic leaders (Woodrow Wilson, P.T. Barnum) willfully disregarded evidence that race was a myth, establishing racial hierarchy. It’s a fascinating history of cultural blindness, centered on the Caucasus region in Europe, from which we derive “caucasian,” and where scholars rooted whiteness. Americans sympathized with the Caucasus people as they went to war against Russia — and then photos circulated showing a population far from just white. It’s a handsome, art-filled book about how choosing to ignore facts creates the illusion of truth. “Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis” by Jonathan Blitzer: Clarity. If there’s something Blitzer, a New Yorker staff writer, brings to the intractable debate on immigration, it’s an accessible, unimpeachable clear-eyed account of how the US came to the assumption that fixing the border crisis was either simple (“Deport!”) or, as he quotes Rahm Emanuel, so broken it’s “the third rail of American politics.” This urgent, sad freight train of reporting doesn’t offer solutions, but rather, a compelling origin tale for why the influx of Central America migrants and the fear of immigration in the United States are pure cause-and-effect, and how the U.S. bears responsibility. We meet families, policymakers, border officials, activists, and get a history lesson full of military actions perpetrated by U.S. corporations, cash and politics. “The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster” by John O’Connor: Ignore the title. This isn’t that book. It’s a tale of how folklore gathers steam, why we believe what we want to believe, and what happens when “the unbelievable is the only thing people believe,” facts be damned. O’Connor, a journalist from Kalamazoo, Michigan, cleverly uses the legend of Sasquatch and those who think too much about him to explore the persistence of hope beyond hope. Along the way, it’s also an entertaining travelogue of local legends, true believers and the sort of dense acreage seen from planes that could hold anything — right? O’Connor himself is skeptical of a massive wildman on the loose, but gracefully honors the metaphor and sacred beliefs required for myths, zeroing with wit and curiosity why it’s an essential fact of humanity that we need mystery to go on. “Lazarus Man” by Richard Price: I think of Price, that great chronicler of city life, author of “Clockers,” screenwriter for “The Wire,” as a community novelist, in the tradition of “Winesburg, Ohio” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” No more so than with this discursive, pointedly meandering novel, his first in a decade. His writing mimics hardboiled noir then settles on the multitudes, the granular detail, staccato dialogue. Loiters are “a languid pride of lions.” A sudden apartment collapse generates a “night-for-day rolling black cloud.” That mysterious implosion of a five-story apartment complex in East Harlem is just a catalyst for a cataloging of the lives transformed in its aftermath: the unlikely media star created by merely surviving, a cop sleeping with her partner, a mortician who wants his card thrust into the hands of whoever watches the rescue. And on. Why the building fell is an afterthought to the ways we doubt ourselves, transcend and move on, imperfectly. “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey: Speaking of rhapsodic community novels. Here is the story of six astronauts on the international space station, circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, on an average day, peering down at a seemingly uninhabited planet. Or as Harvey describes, only alive when day goes to night and lights flick on. This is a novel of distance and perspective, with no real plot. Aliens wander past, but don’t invade. The station turns without incident. No one goes nuts. And yet, in lyrical bursts, our travelers soak in cosmic hugeness: “Sometimes they want to see the theatrics, the opera, the earth’s atmosphere, airglow, and sometimes it’s the smallest things, the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia.” Harvey is out to reclaim wonder itself from everyday lack of interest — and in a way, reclaim the novel as a place for feeling . Mission accomplished.

'Not in reality': Expert says Trump's major 'made in USA' promise all but impossibleMcCormick & Co. Inc. stock falls Friday, underperforms marketYvonne Lim moving back to S'pore after 10 years in Taiwan

Republicans lash out at Democrats' claims that Trump intelligence pick Gabbard is 'compromised'

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Commerce Department’s efforts to curb China’s and Russia’s access to American-made advanced computer chips have been “inadequate” and will need more funding to stymie their ability to manufacture advanced weapons, according to a report published Wednesday by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Biden administration imposed export controls to limit the ability of China and Russia ability to access U.S.-made chips after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. The agency’s Bureau of Industry and Security, according to the report, does not have the resources to enforce export controls and has been too reliant on U.S. chip makers voluntarily complying with the rules. But the push for bolstering Commerce’s export control enforcement comes as the incoming Trump administration says it is looking to dramatically reduce the size and scope of federal government . President-elect Donald Trump has tapped entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” to dismantle parts of the federal government. The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. BIS’s budget, about $191 million, has remained essentially flat since 2010 when adjusted for inflation. “While BIS’ budget has been stagnant for a decade, the bureau works diligently around the clock to meet its mission and safeguard U.S. national security,” Commerce Department spokesperson Charlie Andrews said in a statement in response to the report. Andrews added that with “necessary resources from Congress” the agency would be “better equipped to address the challenges that come with our evolving national security environment.” In a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, chair of the subcommittee, pointed to an audit of Texas Instruments that showed the Russian military continued to acquire components from Texas Instruments through front companies in Hong Kong to illustrate how the export controls are failing as an effective tool. The committee’s findings, Blumenthal said, suggest that Texas Instruments “missed clear warning signs” that three companies in its distribution chain had been diverting products to Russia. Texas Instruments did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “While Congress must provide BIS more resources to undertake its critical mission, it is long past time for BIS to make full use of the enforcement powers Congress has conferred upon it and take aggressive steps to cut the flow of U.S. semiconductors into the Russian war machine,” Blumenthal wrote. It’s not just Texas Instruments that’s the issue. The subcommittee in September published a report that found aggregated exports from four major U.S. advanced chip manufacturers nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022 to Armenia and Georgia. Both of those countries are home to front companies known to assist Russia in acquiring advanced chips made in the U.S. despite export controls. China, meanwhile, has created “vast, barely disguised smuggling networks which enable it to continue to harness U.S. technology,” the subcommittee report asserts. Washington has been gradually expanding the number of companies affected by such export controls in China, as President Joe Biden’s administration has encouraged an expansion of investments in and manufacturing of chips in the U.S. But Chinese companies have found ways to evade export controls in part because of a lack of China subject matter experts and Chinese speakers assigned to Commerce’s export control enforcement. The agency’s current budget limits the number of international end-use checks, or physical verification overseas of distributors or companies receiving American-made chips that are the supposed end users of products. Currently, Commerce has only 11 export control officers spread around the globe to conduct such checks. The committee made several recommendations in its report, including Congress allocating more money for hiring additional personnel to enforce export controls, imposing larger fines on companies that violate controls and requiring periodic reviews of advanced chip companies’ export control plans by outside entities. ___ Boak reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Cover Five: With pressure rising, Matt Rhule delivers Nebraska a bowl bid in Year 2

A goal three minutes from time for Ademola Lookman has lifted Atalanta to the top of Serie A. Lookman scored in the dying stages to beat AC Milan 2-1 on Friday, a victory that secured Atalanta's ninth win in a row. It was a fitting gift to coach Gian Piero Gasperini, who was awarded the coach-of-the-month award earlier in the day for guiding his team to a perfect record in November. Charles De Ketelaere put the home side ahead with a towering header after 11 minutes, only for Milan to level 11 minutes later when Theo Hernández released Rafael Leão on the right wing and his inviting cross was converted by Álvaro Morata. Milan, who lost Christian Pulišić to a knock before half-time, looked set to end Atalanta's impressive run but Lookman nipped in at the back post to nod home a corner in the dying moments. Atalanta have 34 points, two more than Napoli, who have a game in hand against Lazio on Sunday. Milan are in seventh place. At the San Siro, Serie A champions Inter defeated Parma 3-1 to extend the Milan club's unbeaten run to 13 games. Federico Dimarco put the hosts ahead five minutes before half-time when he worked a neat one-two with Henrikh Mkhitaryan and fired a low shot past Zion Suzuki. Nicolò Barella made it two eight minutes into the second half when he finished a fast counterattack with aplomb. Marcos Thuram's 10th goal of the season made it 3-0 in the 66th. A Matteo Darmian own goal brought some late consolation for Parma.Volvo Cars Australia hasn’t given up on its trusty XC90 just yet, with the popular large SUV’s second facelift originally not intended for our market now confirmed for launch during the first half of 2025. Revealed in September, the 2025 Volvo XC90 is the third iteration of the second-generation model first launched globally in 2015, boasting a more comprehensive set of design revisions and Volvo’s latest technologies to bring it in line with the Swedish brand’s newest models like the all-electric EX90 . Headlining the changes are a new face more akin to Volvo’s new electric range of ‘EX’ models, as well as a new 11.2-inch high-resolution infotainment system running the brand’s latest interface. Volvo has applied some less obvious changes, like improved storage space in the centre console, a relocated wireless smartphone charger, redesigned gear selector and additional sound insulation to make the cabin quieter. 100s of new car deals are available through CarExpert right now. Get the experts on your side and score a great deal. Browse now . Beyond that, “the best-ever Volvo XC90” is more or less the same under the skin – and it already had proven and capable underpinnings. Volvo is keen to label the available T8 plug-in hybrid version as an “electric car with a back-up plan”, quoting over 70km of WLTP-certified electric driving range, and a further 800km of range from the turbocharged petrol engine (based on fuel economy of 8.6L/100km once the battery is depleted). Globally, the existing B5 and B6 mild-hybrid versions also carry over. It’s unclear if all three powertrain variants will continue in Australia into 2025, or whether the T8 will become more widely available. Full pricing and specifications for our market will be detailed closer to launch but, for reference, the existing range is priced from $99,940 plus on-road costs for the Ultra B5 Bright, climbing to $128,390 before on-roads for the Ultra T8 Plug-in Hybrid flagship. Given the expected upgrades, we could see the upgraded XC90’s starting price in Australia start above six figures, unless base pricing reduces closer to the $86,990 entry point from a few years ago when the more affordable Momentum grade was offered (which could be called Plus in today’s nomenclature). Stay tuned to CarExpert for more details. MORE: 2025 Volvo XC90 gets new lease on life MORE: Everything Volvo XC90

Islamists on Facebook and X are sharing pictures bearing the religious slur TMD or Total Malaun Death, with Malaun being a dehumanising reference to Hindus in line with 'kaafir' as the Muhammad Yunus government fails to act amidst the ongoing orgy of violence directed at minorities, especially Hindus. Amidst the ongoing persecution of minorities in Bangladesh, social media platforms are rife with posts calling for the total annihilation of Hindus. Islamists on Facebook and X are sharing pictures bearing the religious slur TMD or Total Malaun Death, with Malaun being a dehumanising reference to Hindus. More than 200,000 posts with hashtag ‘TMD’ have already been made in Bangladesh, the South East Asian nation that has been marred with anti-minority violence since the ouster of Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina in August this year. A raft of Islamists in Bangladesh are calling for the destruction of Malaun, a derogatory slang equivalent to kaafir that Islamists often use to degrade non-Muslims and normalise atrocities against them. One of the posts going viral on Facebook endorses TMD while insulting the Indian flag. Not just Facebook, but Islamists from Bangladesh have also leveraged the microblogging platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to trend #TMD and rally extremists against the beleaguered Hindu minorities. As witnessed in the past, social media platforms have the power to mobilise like-minded people towards a common goal and have often been employed by religious bigots to push their ulterior motives. #TMD or Total Malaun Death. Malaun is a religious slur for Hindus in Bangladesh. Insanely viral Facebook posts in the last 24 hours by Bangladeshi Facebook users. Some screenshots. pic.twitter.com/cfFxyJblvF Many on X have raised alarm over the deteriorating situation in Bangladesh, haplessly exhorting its interim Prime Minister Muhammad Yunus to take concrete action to stop attacks against Hindus and other minorities. But the government, propped up by Islamists themselves, has found little political will to act against its benefactors, turning a blind eye to the predicament of religious minorities as extremist mobs go on a rampage attacking commercial establishments, places of worship, and residential colonies. But the explicit calling of the annihilation of Hindus in Bangladesh has heightened concerns, especially in the aftermath of the arrest of prominent Hindu leader and ISKCON monk Chinmoy Krishna Das earlier this week. Besides, the Bangladesh government, in its affidavit in the High Court, referred to ISKCON as a “religious fundamentalist group”—providing a grim picture of the plight of Hindus in the country. Das was arrested following his emergence as the champion of minority rights in a nation convulsed by Islamist supremacism. Even as the interim government in Bangladesh has opened a front against ISKCON, the persecution of Hindus has been going on unabated since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, a leader who had managed to leash the Islamist impulses of the extremists with her strict policing controls. But minorities, especially Hindus, have been at the receiving end of Islamic wrath, with their shops, temples, and houses attacked by fundamentalists who seek to purge the country of its non-Muslim minorities, following her departure and installation of Yunus at the Centre. On Friday (22nd November), a frenzied Muslim mob attacked Hindus who were en route to the Mahiganj College ground in the Rangpur division of Bangladesh. The victims wanted to participate in a protest rally organised by the ‘Bangladesh Sammilit Sanatani Jagran Jot’, seeking the implementation of 8 demands by the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government. Similar attacks against Hindus have taken place in different parts of the country, underscoring threats faced by minorities in a country where Islamists appear to have established their stranglehold. While Hindus have been an existential threat in Bangladesh, the Muhammad Yunus government had gone into an overdrive to appease the Islamists back home, chiefly with the release of the chief of the Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist organisation Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) chief Mufti Jashimuddin Rahamani from jail, prioritising appeasement of extremist components over the safety of country’s minorities.

Jacob Webb, who posted a 3.09 ERA in 78 2/3 innings in two seasons with the Orioles, will become a free agent.Israel strikes Houthi rebels in Yemen's capital while the WHO chief says he was meters away JERUSALEM (AP) — A new round of Israeli airstrikes in Yemen has targeted the Houthi rebel-held capital of Sanaa and multiple ports. The World Health Organization’s director-general said Thursday's bombardment took place just “meters away” as he was about to board a flight in Sanaa. He says a crew member was hurt. The strikes followed several days of Houthi attacks and launches setting off sirens in Israel. Israel's military says it attacked infrastructure used by the Houthis at the airport in Sanaa, power stations and ports. The Israeli military later said it wasn’t aware that the WHO chief was at the location in Yemen. At least three people were reported killed and dozens injured in the Sanaa airport strike. An uneasy calm settles over Syrian city of Homs after outbreak of sectarian violence HOMS, Syria (AP) — Syria’s new security forces checked IDs and searched cars in the central city of Homs a day after protests by members of the Alawite minority erupted in gunfire and stirred fears that the country’s fragile peace could break down. A tense calm prevailed Thursday after checkpoints were set up throughout the country’s third-largest city, which has a mixed population of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites and Christians. The security forces are controlled by the former insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the charge that unseated former President Bashar Assad. The US says it pushed retraction of a famine warning for north Gaza. Aid groups express concern. WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials say they asked for — and got — the retraction of an independent monitor's warning of imminent famine in north Gaza. The internationally Famine Early Warning System Network issued the warning this week. The new report had warned that starvation deaths in north Gaza could reach famine levels as soon as next month. It cited what it called Israel's “near-total blockade” of food and water. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew, criticized the finding as inaccurate and irresponsible. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funds the famine-monitoring group, told the AP it had asked for and gotten the report's retraction. USAID officials tell The Associated Press that it had asked the group for greater review of discrepancies in some of the data. Powerful thunderstorms rumble across Texas, delaying holiday travel DALLAS (AP) — Severe thunderstorms are firing up in parts of Texas and could trigger high winds, hail and potential tornadoes. More than 100 flights were delayed and dozens more were canceled Thursday at airports in Dallas and Houston. The National Weather Service says the greatest weather risk stretched from just east of Dallas, and between Houston and portions of southern Arkansas and western Louisiana. The risk includes the possibility of tornadoes, wind gusts between 60 and 80 miles per hour and large hail. The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for several counties in southeast Texas, including the Houston area. Trump has pressed for voting changes. GOP majorities in Congress will try to make that happen ATLANTA (AP) — Republicans in Congress plan to move quickly in their effort to overhaul the nation’s voting procedures, seeing an opportunity with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. They want to push through long-sought changes such as voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements. They say the measures are needed to restore public confidence in elections. That's after an erosion of trust that Democrats note has been fueled by false claims from Donald Trump and his allies of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Democrats say they are willing to work with the GOP but want any changes to make it easier, not harder, to vote. Americans are exhausted by political news. TV ratings and a new AP-NORC poll show they're tuning out NEW YORK (AP) — A lot of Americans, after an intense presidential election campaign, are looking for a break in political news. That's evident in cable television news ratings and a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans saying they've found the need recently to cut down on their consumption of political and government news. That's particularly true among Democrats following President-elect Donald Trump's victory, although a significant number of Republicans and independents feel the same way. Cable networks MSNBC and CNN are really seeing a slump. That's also happened in years past for networks that particularly appeal to supporters of one candidate. Aviation experts say Russia's air defense fire likely caused Azerbaijan plane crash as nation mourns Aviation experts say that Russian air defense fire was likely responsible for the Azerbaijani plane crash the day before that killed 38 people and left all 29 survivors injured. Azerbaijan is observing a nationwide day of mourning on Thursday for the victims of the crash. Azerbaijan Airlines’ Embraer 190 was en route from Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku to the Russian city of Grozny in the North Caucasus on Wednesday when it was diverted for reasons yet unclear and crashed while making an attempt to land in Aktau in Kazakhstan. Cellphone footage circulating online appeared to show the aircraft making a steep descent before smashing into the ground in a fireball. Ukraine's military intelligence says North Korean troops are suffering heavy battlefield losses KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's military intelligence says North Korean troops are suffering heavy losses in Russia's Kursk region and face logistical difficulties as a result of Ukrainian attacks. The intelligence agency said Thursday that Ukrainian strikes near Novoivanovka inflicted heavy casualties on North Korean units. Ukraine's president said earlier this week that 3,000 North Korean troops have been killed and wounded in the fighting in the Kursk region. It marked the first significant estimate by Ukraine of North Korean casualties several weeks after Kyiv announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost 3-year war. Ex-Sen. Bob Menendez, citing 'emotional toll,' seeks sentencing delay in wake of wife's trial NEW YORK (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez is asking a federal judge to delay his end-of-January sentencing on bribery charges, saying his family would suffer a “tremendous emotional toll” if the New Jersey Democrat was sentenced during his wife's trial. His lawyers told Judge Sidney H. Stein in a letter that Nadine Menendez would face a jury that might find it impossible not to hear about her husband's sentencing if it occurred eight days into her trial. The 70-year-old Menendez was convicted in July of 16 charges, including bribery. His wife, whose trial was postponed when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, faces much of the same evidence as her husband. How the stock market defied expectations again this year, by the numbers NEW YORK (AP) — What a wonderful year 2024 has been for investors. U.S. stocks ripped higher and carried the S&P 500 to records as the economy kept growing and the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates. The benchmark index posted its first back-to-back annual gains of more than 20% since 1998. The year featured many familiar winners, such as Big Tech, which got even bigger as their stock prices kept growing. But it wasn’t just Apple, Nvidia and the like. Bitcoin and gold surged and “Roaring Kitty” reappeared to briefly reignite the meme stock craze.

Nissan’s insane merger call to save companySAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Northern California was under a rare and brief tsunami warning alert Thursday that tested local emergency notification systems after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook part of the state. The National Weather Service canceled its alert after roughly an hour and before the tsunami was expected to arrive. In that hour, some cities and counties ordered evacuations while others relied on social media and text messages to inform people of the warning. Some people headed for higher ground, while others drove to the beach to get a better view. People took to social media to figure out why a warning was issued and then canceled so quickly, and how the NWS determines when to send alerts. Here are answers to more questions. What exactly is a tsunami? The word for tsunami comes from the Japanese characters for harbor and wave. It's a series of extremely long waves set in motion when energy from an earthquake causes the ocean floor to suddenly rise or fall, according to the National Weather Service . How common are they in California? Since 1800, California's shores have been struck by more than 150 tsunamis, most of them minor, according to the California Geological Survey. Phones buzzed Thursday when the National Weather Service issued its warning just minutes after the quake struck west of Ferndale, a small city in coastal Humboldt County. It read in part: “You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now.” Why was there an alert if there wasn't a large tsunami? The National Weather Service Bay Area posted on the social platform X early Friday that the region doesn't get tsunami alerts often and “there are lot of questions, frustration, and even some anger” about Thursday's event. A warning alert is the most serious of four tsunami alerts, including a watch alert for a possible tsunami and an advisory alert telling people to stay out of the water and away from the shore. The last time California received a warning alert was 2011 when an earthquake in Japan caused about $100 million in damages along the California coast. Basically, a distant, offshore earthquake or other trigger event gives scientists more time to analyze data and confirm that a large tsunami was generated before sounding a warning. But Thursday’s earthquake was local and close to the coast, forcing a hasty high-level alert in order to give people the maximum time to prepare as tsunami waves can travel very fast, up to 500 mph (800 kph) in the deep ocean, the NWS wrote. “By the time we actually observe it, it may be too late, because it's right there in our back doors,” said Dalton Behringer, a meteorologist with NWS Bay Area, on Friday. Scientists used the time Thursday to monitor buoys and get more information on the earthquake itself, he said. They canceled the alert after seeing little sea-level change and determining the quake was a strike-slip type of temblor that shifts more horizontally and is less prone to cause tsunamis, he said. “These things happen so infrequently for us, I think it just caught a lot of people off-guard,” he said. How did Northern California respond? Authorities in Eureka, the biggest city in Humboldt County, sent texts and went door-to-door to order businesses in high-risk areas to evacuate, said City Manager Miles Slattery. He said only a small portion of the city was at risk, and Thursday's test run showed evacuees need to work on leaving by foot, rather than by car. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the commuter light-rail system known as BART stopped traffic in all directions through the underwater tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland, and the San Francisco Zoo’s visitors were evacuated. Responses varied as fire and police in Berkeley evacuated certain areas of the city while in San Francisco, officials sent alerts and messages on social media telling residents to stay away from water, beaches, harbors, marina docks, and piers. “Move at least one block inland,” said the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management. Emergency personnel in vehicles with public address systems also went to make sure no one was on beaches and other low-lying areas. But some critics said San Francisco should have sounded its loud emergency sirens, which have been off-line since 2019 for repairs. In San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco, officials considered but decided against sounding its tsunami warning sirens after receiving more comprehensive information from the NWS that any tsunami would affect coastlines north of the Golden Gate Bridge, said Michelle Durand, a spokesperson for the county. Fire and police cleared the beaches while emergency personnel gathered to monitor the situation, she said, which “prioritized both public safety and the prevention of unnecessary panic.” Janie Har, The Associated PressLive updates: Parkland vs. St. Joe’s Prep in PIAA 6A football playoffs"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum." Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC "Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?" 1914 translation by H. Rackham "But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?" 1914 translation by H. Rackham "But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?" Thanks for your interest in Kalkine Media's content! To continue reading, please log in to your account or create your free account with us.

The Commerce Department 's efforts to curb China 's and Russia's access to American-made advanced computer chips have been “inadequate” and will need more funding to stymie their ability to manufacture advanced weapons, according to a report published Wednesday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Biden administration imposed export controls to limit the ability of China and Russia ability to access U.S.-made chips after Russia's invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. The agency's Bureau of Industry and Security, according to the report, does not have the resources to enforce export controls and has been too reliant on U.S. chip makers voluntarily complying with the rules. But the push for bolstering Commerce's export control enforcement comes as the incoming Trump administration says it is looking to dramatically reduce the size and scope of federal government. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” to dismantle parts of the federal government. The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. BIS’s budget, about $191 million, has remained essentially flat since 2010 when adjusted for inflation. “While BIS’ budget has been stagnant for a decade, the bureau works diligently around the clock to meet its mission and safeguard U.S. national security,” Commerce Department spokesperson Charlie Andrews said in a statement in response to the report. Andrews added that with “necessary resources from Congress” the agency would be "better equipped to address the challenges that come with our evolving national security environment.” In a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, chair of the subcommittee, pointed to an audit of Texas Instruments that showed the Russian military continued to acquire components from Texas Instruments through front companies in Hong Kong to illustrate how the export controls are failing as an effective tool. The committee's findings, Blumenthal said, suggest that Texas Instruments “missed clear warning signs” that three companies in its distribution chain had been diverting products to Russia. Texas Instruments did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “While Congress must provide BIS more resources to undertake its critical mission, it is long past time for BIS to make full use of the enforcement powers Congress has conferred upon it and take aggressive steps to cut the flow of U.S. semiconductors into the Russian war machine,” Blumenthal wrote. It's not just Texas Instruments that's the issue. The subcommittee in September published a report that found aggregated exports from four major U.S. advanced chip manufacturers nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022 to Armenia and Georgia. Both of those countries are home to front companies known to assist Russia in acquiring advanced chips made in the U.S. despite export controls. China, meanwhile, has created “vast, barely disguised smuggling networks which enable it to continue to harness U.S. technology,” the subcommittee report asserts. Washington has been gradually expanding the number of companies affected by such export controls in China, as President Joe Biden’s administration has encouraged an expansion of investments in and manufacturing of chips in the U.S. But Chinese companies have found ways to evade export controls in part because of a lack of China subject matter experts and Chinese speakers assigned to Commerce's export control enforcement. The agency's current budget limits the number of international end-use checks, or physical verification overseas of distributors or companies receiving American-made chips that are the supposed end users of products. Currently, Commerce has only 11 export control officers spread around the globe to conduct such checks. The committee made several recommendations in its report, including Congress allocating more money for hiring additional personnel to enforce export controls, imposing larger fines on companies that violate controls and requiring periodic reviews of advanced chip companies’ export control plans by outside entities. ___ Boak reported from West Palm Beach, Florida.How Trump’s DOJ could severely curtail oversight of police

Earlier this year, we wrote a commentary on . In this commentary, we’ll take a deeper dive into the U.S. Navy. Understanding the $6 billion-plus budget for IT spending in the Navy is important for vendors, because the programs supported in this budget create an effective positioning framework for products and services sold into this branch the DoD. Overall this year, the budget for the Navy is expected to experience a modest increase of $1.3 billion on top of the $202.5 billion awarded to the service in fiscal 24. Much of this increase is dedicated to improving maintenance of existing ships and improving the health of the industrial supply chain necessary to support ship maintenance and procurement. As a subset of that overall budget, Navy IT budgeting accounts for more than $6 billion. Nearly $5.2 billion has been requested in steady state IT budgeting, with $875.5 million going toward development, modernization and enhancement. Funds for Navy IT are divided among information security initiatives, enterprise information system expansions and automated tool adoption. Let’s look at some key areas of investment. ( . This program is intended to modernize legacy cryptographic equipment, and it includes families of communications security (COMSEC) and transmission security (TRANSEC) devices, divided into crypto voice, crypto data, crypto products and associated ancillary devices. These devices provide modern cryptographic solutions to replace obsolete, legacy devices within the crypto categories to meet mandated National Security Agency (NSA) cease key dates for modernized encryption. This is the Navy's defensive cyberspace operations (DCO) analysis enclave and means to achieve cyberspace detection-in-depth for maritime forces afloat and ashore. SHARKCAGE is the mechanism by which units, groups and fleets will gain an attack sensing and warning (AS&W) capability. CND ashore provides capabilities to secure the cyber domain. The CND afloat operating system environment (OSE) includes host-based protection tools, system vulnerability tools, cyber remediation tools, supporting hardware and software for Department of Defense (DoD) mandated tools, enhanced data correlation tools, switches, ancillary devices and other related security tools. This initiative is a combination of Tier 1 key management infrastructure (KMI), Tier 2 security equipment and Tier 3 equipment and software (SW) for key distribution and loading into end cryptographic units (ECUs). KMI provides net-centric operations for COMSEC material management. It also provides the means for secure ordering, generation, production, distribution, management and auditing of secure key of cryptographic products. Funds here will go toward critical infrastructure, improving computing and storage capacity, reducing operation and management complexity while increasing security, availability and resiliency of the network. There will also be continued expansion of internet protocol version 6 (IPV6) and 5G, ONE-Net - NMCI Convergence, cloud SASE interface, data center consolidation, implementation of zero-trust capabilities and Naval Identity Services (NIS). This initiative supports NMCI and ONE-Net hardware and software compliance based technical refresh to support network performance until capability can be transformed or replaced. Funds will buy down technical debt, commence migration toward a unified shore and tactical edge afloat network, and implement a technical enterprise architecture to replace obsolete technologies associated with NMCI and ONE-Net platforms. Funds provided will continue engineering, integration, and implementation for replacement of Host Based Security System (HBSS) to the latest DISA approved version, existing McAfee sensors with Cisco Firepower for Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), and Assured Compliance Assessment Solution (ACAS) for infrastructure expansion. Funds provided will continue classified and unclassified video and voice over internet protocol (VVoIP) cryptographic login (CLO) infrastructure upgrades. Included are design, hardware and software procurement, and implementation of mandated CLO requirement for NMCI VVoIP infrastructure. This initiative focuses on procurement of command-and-control equipment for both shipboard and shore units, including Link 16 network program crypto modernization (CM) and frequency remapping (FR) upgraded terminals, Link 16 network program antennas, command and control processor (C2P) hardware and software, and link monitoring management tool (LMMT) hardware and software. Funding here supports the identification and validation of C4ISR/IT system requirements, supporting ancillary tools and provides platform architecture, integration and installation design planning efforts tailored to deliver specific required capability to information warfare (IW)shore platforms. There is also nearly $25 million directed toward Navy IT research and development — most notably some $14.5 million for a risk management software pilot project for safety program management capabilities. Overall, this spending snapshot will be useful to vendors and systems integrators targeting procurement by the Navy. Appropriate positioning here will greatly enhance your sales opportunities. To read more about defense, as well as federal civilian agency, and SLED spending visit our .ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 18, 2024-- Gilgal Medical Supplies, a leading provider of medical supplies in Florida with locations throughout the state, has announced a strategic change in its operations. Effective immediately, the company will no longer accept insurance for medical supplies. This decision comes after years of increasing challenges and systemic difficulties associated with insurance reimbursement processes. "Providing durable medical equipment and supplies for thousands of patients has always been at the core of our mission," said Thomas Chacko, Vice President at Gilgal Medical Supplies. "However, the constant denials, excessive documentation requests, unnecessary audits, and recoupment efforts by Medicare and insurance companies have made the process untenable." For years, insurance companies have imposed increasingly burdensome requirements, often prioritizing their bottom line over patient care. This has created significant hardships for durable medical equipment providers like Gilgal Medical Supplies, affecting their ability to serve patients effectively. The intense administrative demands and frequent audits have reached a point where continuing to accept insurance is no longer sustainable. Gilgal Medical Supplies has taken measures to ensure its current patients have ample time and support to transition to other providers. "We remain deeply committed to our patients and their well-being," said Thomas Chacko. "We are working diligently to provide them with the necessary resources and guidance during this transition." Moving forward, Gilgal Medical Supplies will focus on retail sales and wholesale distribution. This new direction will allow the company to continue providing high-quality medical supplies without the constraints and inefficiencies of the insurance reimbursement system. "We believe this shift will enable us to serve our customers more effectively and focus on delivering value directly to those who need it," added Thomas Chacko. Gilgal Medical Supplies operates from strategic locations across Florida and we serve thousands of customers a month on a monthly basis. For more information about Gilgal Medical Supplies’ services and offerings, visit www.gilgalmedical.com or call 407 891 2120. About Gilgal Medical Supplies Founded with a mission to serve the medical supply needs of Florida communities, Gilgal Medical Supplies has built a reputation for quality products and exceptional customer service. With a focus on integrity and care, Gilgal remains committed to enhancing lives through reliable and accessible solutions. View source version on businesswire.com : https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241218129761/en/ CONTACT: Media Contact: Gilgal Medical Supplies Phone: 407 484 0032 Email:tchacko@gilgalmedical.com KEYWORD: FLORIDA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: SURGERY CHILDREN BABY/MATERNITY OTHER HEALTH SOFTWARE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY HARDWARE ENERGY MEDICAL DEVICES INFECTIOUS DISEASES HOSPITALS TECHNOLOGY CARDIOLOGY WOMEN BIOTECHNOLOGY PRACTICE MANAGEMENT VETERINARY AIDS MANAGED CARE MEDICAL SUPPLIES HEALTH MEN FINANCE FAMILY PROFESSIONAL SERVICES CONSUMER SOURCE: Gilgal Medical Supplies Copyright Business Wire 2024. PUB: 12/18/2024 03:00 PM/DISC: 12/18/2024 03:00 PM http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241218129761/en