Haiti gang attack on journalists covering a hospital reopening leaves 2 dead, several woundedDrop in Boxing Day footfall ‘signals return to declining pre-pandemic levels’Emergency services are urging Australians to be safe over the Christmas break with hot, dry and gusty conditions triggering total fire bans in three states. or signup to continue reading A high pressure trough making its way across the nation will bring fire danger to parts of Western Australia and South Australia on Christmas Day, reaching Victoria on Boxing Day where a more-than 40,000-hectare inferno has burned out of control for days. Adelaide is set to record its hottest Christmas since 2016, with the mercury expected to reach 37C, and top 40C in other parts of the state. Total fire bans have been declared in the Mount Lofty Ranges and the west coast region, and also in Western Australia, from Perenjori down to Quairading, east of Perth. South Australia is in one of the driest periods on record, Country Fire Service chief officer Brett Loughlin said on Wednesday, warning fires could spread rapidly on Christmas Day. "All we need is heat and wind to combine to create conditions for total fire bans and high risk fire weather," Mr Loughlin said. "This is not something that we do lightly." The state's premier Peter Malinauskas has urged people to enjoy the festive season but to act sensibly and cautiously if they are in bushfire zones. Extreme fire risks will shift eastward and across the border on Boxing Day as a cool change sweeps in from the west. December 26 will bring Victoria's worst fire risk since 2019's Black Summer with extreme fire danger alerts in all but one region and a total fire ban across the state as temperatures push into the 40s. As a more-than 40,000-hectare inferno in the Grampians National Park continues to burn, high winds forecast for Boxing Day pose major challenges to firefighters and emergency services, Country Fire Authority Chief Officer Jason Heffernan said. "The fire at the Grampians National Park hasn't been contained and is likely to spread further under the forecast conditions on 26 December," Mr Heffernan said. With some residents evacuating areas to the north of the park ahead of Boxing Day, those remaining have been urged to monitor changing conditions and stay up-to-date with alerts. The State Control Centre's Luke Hegarty has urged Victorians to make sure all fires are out by midnight. "If you've been camping, if you've been out in the bush, or if you've been working at home ... Check any fires, make sure they're fully extinguished and help keep Victoria safe," Mr Hegarty said. Elevated risks of heat-related health issues are expected, including heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, Ambulance Victoria Emergency Management Director Dale Armstrong warned. Heat stroke is fatal in up to 80 per cent of cases. "Most at risk are elderly people, young children and those with medical conditions, however heat and heat-related illnesses can affect anybody," Mr Armstrong said. Victorians have been urged to prepare for outages with provider AusNet warning power faults could be triggered to prevent bushfires starting on Thursday. As a cool change washes over Victoria on Friday, the extreme fire dangers will push into parts of central northeastern NSW on Friday and Saturday. DAILY Today's top stories curated by our news team. WEEKDAYS Grab a quick bite of today's latest news from around the region and the nation. WEEKLY The latest news, results & expert analysis. WEEKDAYS Catch up on the news of the day and unwind with great reading for your evening. WEEKLY Get the editor's insights: what's happening & why it matters. WEEKLY Love footy? We've got all the action covered. WEEKLY Every Saturday and Tuesday, explore destinations deals, tips & travel writing to transport you around the globe. WEEKLY Going out or staying in? Find out what's on. WEEKDAYS Sharp. Close to the ground. Digging deep. Your weekday morning newsletter on national affairs, politics and more. TWICE WEEKLY Your essential national news digest: all the big issues on Wednesday and great reading every Saturday. WEEKLY Get news, reviews and expert insights every Thursday from CarExpert, ACM's exclusive motoring partner. TWICE WEEKLY Get real, Australia! Let the ACM network's editors and journalists bring you news and views from all over. AS IT HAPPENS Be the first to know when news breaks. DAILY Your digital replica of Today's Paper. Ready to read from 5am! DAILY Test your skills with interactive crosswords, sudoku & trivia. Fresh daily! Advertisement Advertisement
Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom. ••• In 1937, America struggled with the fierce and intractable global economic devastation known as the Great Depression. The nation’s unemployment rate averaged more than 14%, with Minnesota statewide unemployment topping out at 29% but reaching a staggering 70% on the Iron Range. In the spring of 1937, more than a thousand protesters descended on the St. Paul Capitol to support Gov. Elmer Benson as he tried to persuade the state legislature to pass a $17 million aid package for the unemployed. The protest fizzled overnight, as did Benson’s one term as governor. A pithy editorial written several months later for the Minneapolis Journal for Christmas attempted to mine silver linings amid the continuing hardship and fear that roiled Minnesota and the rest of the nation. It has long been a holiday tradition for newspapers all over America (although the number of papers has rapidly diminished) to publish a season’s greetings editorial from their archives. We are proud to continue the tradition. The extremely short and simply worded editorial that we share below was published under the headline “Benediction on Christmas Eve 1937.” It sought to strike a tone of compassion and community. These virtues have never been more needed. “Benediction” ran in the Journal, a paper that would eventually become the newspaper and digital platform rebranded in August 2024 as the Minnesota Star Tribune. Season’s greetings from our 2024 editorial staff and our former colleagues from 1937. ••• Benediction: “Silent Night, Holy Night.” We hear it at this time of year everywhere. It is man’s benediction to man. The song needs no words. The very melody suffices to soften a calloused heart; its simple, throbbing chords send a thrill down into the fingertips. It speaks the language of every civilized people — not alone Christians — and, taking no account of race, color, creed or other social conditions, bids every man be kind and humble. How can anyone, hearing that noble music as he must, contend himself to be cruel, greedy, mean or little — or even smug? We need Silent Night these days quite as much as ever; and if Christmas meant nothing more than its gentle whispering to the souls of men, it would be worth clinging to forever.AP Business SummaryBrief at 3:23 p.m. EST
LeBron James Wears Nike LeBron 22 “South Beach” PE On CourtIncreasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused intense hurricanes, wildfires, extreme heat, floods, droughts and more in recent years. Alongside efforts to reduce emissions of the gas from burning fossil fuels, some scientists are also looking for processes that could remove some of the carbon dioxide that’s already up there. “You have to take CO2 from the air—there’s no way around it,” Omar Yaghi , a chemist at UC Berkeley tells the Los Angeles Times ’ Karen Kaplan. “Even if we stop emitting CO2, we still need to take it out of the air. We don’t have any other options.” Now, Yaghi and his team have developed a new material that they say could be a game changer for this task and potentially be used in industrial facilities within the next few years. To the naked eye, it looks like a yellow powder. Under a microscope, it looks like tiny basketballs with billions of miniscule holes, per the L.A. Times . The powder has a hexagonal structure made of carbon and nitrogen, held together by covalent bonds—some of the strongest bonds in chemistry. The porous material, known as a covalent organic framework, is called COF-999. Within the framework are compounds called amines, which have a basic pH. When air flows through the material, most components pass freely through, but the amines snatch up acidic molecules of carbon dioxide. The team’s research into covalent organic frameworks has been ongoing for about 20 years. In results recently reported in the journal Nature , Yaghi and his team found that COF-999 performs remarkably well at absorbing carbon dioxide. In one experiment, they put a tube filled with the material outside and measured the carbon dioxide concentrations after air passed through. The exiting air was totally free of the greenhouse gas. “We were scrubbing the CO2 out of the air entirely,” Yaghi tells Scientific American ’s Alec Luhn. Study lead author Zihui Zhou , a materials chemist at UC Berkeley, says in a statement that a mere 200 grams of COF-999, or just under half a pound of material, can absorb up to 44 pounds of carbon dioxide in one year—the same as a large tree. “There’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance,” Yaghi adds in the statement. “It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem.” Especially promising is how COF-999 releases carbon dioxide after absorbing the molecules. Typically, after carbon capture technologies remove the gas from the atmosphere, engineers have to heat the material to get it to release the absorbed carbon dioxide. Then, the gas is often used in industrial applications or sequestered in geologic reservoirs deep in bedrock. This heating process is expensive and energy-intensive, since traditional carbon capture materials must be heated to high temperatures. But COF-999 releases its stores at just 140 degrees Fahrenheit—more than 100 degrees cooler than the materials currently in use, reports the L.A. Times . What’s more, it can go through more than 100 cycles of absorbing and releasing carbon dioxide without losing any effectiveness. Some experts caution that it’s too soon to regard COF-999 as a miracle savior for the planet, as it hasn’t yet been tested in real-life situations. Jennifer Wilcox , a chemical engineer at the University of Pennsylvania not involved with the work, tells Scientific American that many questions remain, like whether COF-999 might restrict airflow when applied to a filter and whether that would increase energy consumption, in turn. The answers, says Wilcox, “will ultimately dictate costs”—and determine the material’s usefulness. Regardless, chemists will continue to work on new carbon capture technologies. As Yaghi tells Chemical & Engineering News ’ Brianna Barbu, “carbon capture is the problem of our society today ... it’s also a fantastic chemistry problem.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. Rudy Molinek | READ MORE Rudy Molinek is Smithsonian magazine's 2024 AAAS Mass Media Fellow.4:30 p.m. | Autzen Stadium | Eugene, Oregon TV: NBC | Streaming: Peacock | Radio: SportsRadio 93.3-FM KJR Jump to: Live updates » | Comments »
Young men swung to the right for Trump after a campaign dominated by masculine appeals
Florence Pugh Reveals Why She Froze Her Eggs at 27Massachusetts ex-senator who seeks pardon from Trump wanted ‘post-trial contact with jurors’
Italy shares higher at close of trade; Investing.com Italy 40 up 0.61%AP Sports SummaryBrief at 12:46 p.m. ESTHornets point guard LaMelo Ball will miss at least 2 weeks with a left calf strain
Video: 'Dazzling' Notre Dame re-opens five years after fire
Ex-Kaduna Lawmaker Urges Tinubu To Probe Past Military Spendings, Says Ignoring Encourages CorruptionOver the holiday season, we're republishing some of the best articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our Best of 2024 series. Enjoy! While the Super Mario series can get quite weird with its lore, world design, and general concepts, nothing comes close to the sheer absurdity of the WarioWare franchise. How many games out there let you pick someone's nose, perform dental work, and have a back-scratching competition with Mario? While on paper these activities may sound like the last things you'd want to spend your coveted game time on, they're executed masterfully and delightful to play. For decades, we've been puzzled as to how the folks over at Intelligent Systems and Nintendo come up with the microgames that make up the WarioWare series. Where do these ideas come from? How many are left on the drawing board? Where does one even begin to develop so many different micro projects? To get some answers, we recently had the chance to chat with Goro Abe , who was not only the Chief Director on the latest game WarioWare: Move It! , but has been with the series almost exclusively as a programmer, designer, and director since the very beginning. Nintendo Life: WarioWare microgames are always so wild, wacky, and vastly different from the next. How does the team begin creating and conceptualizing these microgames? Goro Abe: We start by collecting ideas for microgames from employees across the company, all hailing from different roles and responsibilities. We had decided on the types of Forms (to a certain extent) at the beginning [of WarioWare: Move It!], but that was the only restriction we applied. Otherwise, we let people's imaginations run wild. I pick the best ideas, allowing for a variety of themes and play styles. WarioWare: Move It! has 223 types of microgames including the boss games, but at the initial idea stage, we collected over 1,000 ideas. Can you walk us through the process of a microgame from start to finish? We imagine the playtesting phase alone must be quite interesting! GA: Once we have the rough ideas for the games, the planner and director solidify the specifics. After that, an artist and programmer will be assigned to each microgame, and that pair create the gameplay. In general, we let the artist decide on the aesthetics of their game. Once the game is complete, we monitor people as they play it for the first time. If the rules are confusing, or if their input couldn't be detected from how the game was played, we think about how those issues could be resolved and make adjustments, then repeat the improvement process. In total, a team of around 80 people is involved in microgame production, with a different combination of team members working on each microgame. That's how we end up with such a rich variety of microgames. To you and the team, what are the core principles of a WarioWare microgame? GA: First of all, microgame controls and rules must be intuitive, where any player can instantly grasp how they work. For example, the balance we aim for is for players to be able to beat a game on the second or third try, even if they didn't get it at first. We also strive to make the themes behind each microgame unique and relatable to as wide a range of ages and backgrounds possible. In WarioWare: Smooth Moves on the Wii and now in WarioWare: Move It!, we also placed great importance on making sure the motion controls feel intuitive to the actual movements and that they look fun to the audience. With the latest entry in the series being a sort of spiritual successor to Smooth Moves on the Wii, are there any microgames that were left on the drawing board back then, but were now made possible with Switch hardware? GA: For each game in the series, we think of all new ideas for microgames, so there aren't any ideas that came over from Smooth Moves. However, thinking back on it, the Wii Remote (the controller used for Smooth Moves) only had an accelerometer, but the Switch Joy-Con has a gyroscope built in, which lets us detect more subtle movements. You could say that the additional sensor has allowed us to create even more creative microgames, like ones where we detect the player's leg and butt movements in the Squat Form. Also, Smooth Moves was designed to only use a single Wii Remote, whereas in Move It!, we made it so that a pair of Joy-Con controllers can be used, which helped us discover a new way to play: two-player cooperative microgames.As watchmakers celebrated anniversaries of iconic models, 2024 saw an array of limited editions and upgraded timepieces released throughout the year. Audemars Piguet Firstly, the Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet marked its fifth anniversary. Introduced in 2019, the initial collection included 13 references such as a tourbillon, a perpetual calendar, and a minute repeater supersonnerie. The enigmatic name "Code 11.59" stands for Challenge, Own, Dare, Evolve, while 11.59 symbolises one minute before midnight -- a moment of transition into a new day. Audemars Piguet's design team collaborated with guilloché craftsman Yann von Kaenel to reimagine the dial, which debuted on stainless steel models launched last year. The updated aesthetic now graces seven new watches in 18-carat pink gold, available in 38mm and 41mm diameters. Meticulously engraved by hand, the base dies feature concentric circles reminiscent of ripples on water. These circles are further adorned with hundreds of tiny holes, which interact beautifully with light. The dials are then coloured using a PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition) or galvanic process, preserving and accentuating the contours formed during stamping. The palette includes a captivating green, a luminous light blue, and "Bleu Nuit, Nuage 50". A black dial paired with a pink-gold and black-ceramic case lends the Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet Selfwinding Chronograph 41mm a bold, contemporary look. Louis Vuitton Louis Vuitton celebrated a decade of its Escale collection with a trilogy of métiers d'art timepieces and four new time-only watches, enriching a line traditionally known for its complications. The design draws inspiration from the maison's trunk-making heritage. The rose-gold three-hand models feature silvery or blue dials, whose textures evoke the finely-grained surface of the Louis Vuitton Monogram canvas. The 39mm case incorporates lugs resembling the angled, riveted brass brackets of Louis Vuitton trunks. At each quarter, angled and riveted gold markers secure the central dial and outer minuterie, whose gold studs mimic the nails along the trunks' lozine. An octagonal crown topped with a dome, resembling a trunk rivet, bears the Louis Vuitton Monogram. The platinum Escale model boasts a Gibeon meteorite dial, while a diamond-set variation features a black onyx dial. Each piece showcases the expertise at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton. The self-winding mechanical movement is certified by the Geneva Observatory as a high-precision Swiss chronometer. Patek Philippe Patek Philippe commemorated the 25th anniversary of its Twenty~4 collection with a striking new purple-dial edition. Designed as an elegant, all-day companion for active women, the Twenty~4 was Patek Philippe's first exclusively feminine line. The original quartz model from 1999 featured a rectangular, art-deco-inspired "manchette" or cuff design. In 2018, Patek Philippe introduced the Twenty~4 Automatic with a round case. For its silver jubilee, the cuff-style quartz model appears in a rose gold case adorned with brilliant-cut diamonds. The purple dial is crafted through a meticulous process: embossing a concentric wave pattern onto the plate, coating it with successive layers of translucent purple lacquer, and finishing with a clear lacquer. Once polished, the result is a dial with striking depth and subtle light effects. A. Lange & Söhne The 1990s revival of A. Lange & Söhne included the launch of the Lange 1 in 1994. To celebrate the model's 30th anniversary, the German brand unveiled limited editions of the Lange 1 and Little Lange 1, with diameters of 38.5mm and 36.8mm, respectively. The iconic design combines an off-centre dial layout with an outsize date inspired by the Five-Minute Clock at Dresden's Semper Opera House. The limited editions, available in pink gold or platinum, feature 925 silver dials in blue or faced with black onyx. On the left side, the time display is offset by the outsize date, power-reserve indicator, and subsidiary seconds dial on the right, arranged along an imaginary vertical axis. Their proportions adhere to the Golden Ratio, exemplifying harmonious design. The four models are powered by a manually wound calibre with a 72-hour power reserve. Longines Longines revisited 1954, when the Conquest became its first product line to secure intellectual property protection in Berne, Switzerland. Marking the collection's 70th anniversary, Longines introduced the Conquest Heritage Central Power Reserve, inspired by a model from 1959. The power reserve indicator is ingeniously positioned on a central uncoiling disc, pointing to the depletion level on an external coiling disc. The self-winding mechanical movement with a 72-hour power reserve delivers magnetic resistance 10 times greater than the ISO 764 standard. Rewinding is achieved by turning the crown or through wrist movement. Housed in a redesigned 38mm stainless steel case, the commemorative model is available in three dial colours: anthracite, black or champagne.None
CS Dulloo meets Kashmiri Migrants, assures about NFSA implementation benefitsAP News Summary at 2:33 p.m. EST
