okebet opisyal na website The scene was set on a sunny afternoon, with Zhao Liying gracefully pushing her son in a stroller, her radiant smile lighting up the surroundings. As they turned a corner, they unexpectedly ran into Lin Gengxin, who was casually walking down the street. The moment their eyes met, a spark of genuine surprise and joy flickered between the two stars, showcasing their warm friendship and mutual respect.

One of the main concerns raised by Tencent users is the impact of this rule on their daily lives and activities. Many users have expressed their frustration over the inconvenience of constantly logging in and out of their accounts on different devices, especially during situations when they need to switch devices frequently, such as when traveling or working remotely. Some users have also highlighted the potential security risks involved in continuously entering and re-entering their login credentials on different devices.In addition to the macroeconomic factors, Guotai Junan emphasizes the importance of investor sentiment in driving market trends. As optimism returns to the market and risk appetite increases, there is a notable shift towards a more bullish outlook among investors. This shift in sentiment is supported by improving economic indicators and corporate earnings reports, further bolstering the case for a transition to a bull market.

Beijing Exposed: Softest Center Revealed in Loss Against Liaoning

However, concerns remain about the future of Syria and the potential for unrest and power struggle in the wake of Assad's resignation. Many fear that without a clear plan for governance and reconciliation, the country could descend further into chaos and division.

Ron Roberts Founder and CEO of Roberts Retirement Group, Interviewed on the Influential Entrepreneur Podcast Discussing Social Security Planning for Retirement 12-03-2024 10:42 PM CET | Business, Economy, Finances, Banking & Insurance Press release from: Getnews / PR Agency: Authority Press Wire Image: https://authoritypresswire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Ron-removebg-preview.png Ron Roberts discusses social security planning for retirement Listen to the interview on the Business Innovators Radio Network: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-ron-roberts-founder-and-ceo-of-roberts-retirement-group-discussing-social-security-planning-for-retirement/ Ron Roberts, founder and CEO of Roberts Retirement Group, discusses the critical topic of social security planning for retirement. He explores the common misconceptions surrounding social security, emphasizing that it is just one piece of the retirement puzzle. Ron shares insights on how he begins conversations with clients about their retirement intentions, particularly focusing on those who plan to retire early at age 62. He highlights the implications of taking social security benefits at this age and the potential to work part-time while receiving benefits. Social Security planning is a vital component of retirement strategy that requires a comprehensive evaluation of various factors. In a recent podcast episode featuring Ron Roberts, founder and CEO of Roberts Retirement Group, several key considerations were discussed that individuals must take into account when planning for Social Security benefits. One of the primary factors influencing Social Security planning is the age at which an individual intends to retire. The options typically range from early retirement at age 62 to full retirement age, which is 66 or 67, depending on the year of birth. * Early Retirement: If a person chooses to retire at 62, they can begin receiving Social Security benefits, but this is considered early retirement. It is important to note that if they continue to work and earn above a certain threshold (approximately $20,000), their benefits will be reduced. Specifically, for every $2 earned over this limit, $1 is deducted from their Social Security benefits. * Full Retirement Age: For those who reach full retirement age, they can work without any reduction in benefits. This age varies based on birth year, with individuals born before 1960 typically reaching full retirement age at 66, while those born in 1960 or later reach it at 67. * Delaying Benefits : Individuals also have the option to delay their benefits until age 70, which can result in an 8% increase in their monthly benefits for each year they wait. This strategy can be particularly beneficial for those who do not need immediate income and have a longer life expectancy. Another critical aspect of Social Security planning is understanding one's income needs during retirement. Some individuals may require immediate income to cover living expenses, while others may have sufficient resources to delay claiming benefits. * Immediate Income: For those who need income right away, starting Social Security benefits as soon as possible may be the best option. * Deferring Benefits: Conversely, if individuals can afford to wait, deferring benefits can lead to a higher monthly income later, which can be advantageous for long-term financial stability. Ron also explained: " Family health history plays a significant role in determining the optimal strategy for claiming Social Security benefits. Individuals with a family history of longevity may choose to delay benefits to maximize their payouts, while those with a shorter life expectancy might opt to claim earlier." For example, if a client has a family history of living into their 80s or 90s, it may be wise to defer benefits to take advantage of the increased payouts. Additionally, personal health status and any existing medical conditions should be factored into the decision-making process. Individuals who are in poor health may prefer to claim benefits earlier to ensure they receive the funds while they are still able to enjoy them. Video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/AZNuddePawE?rel=0&modestbranding=0&rel=0&showinfo=1&controls=1&autohide=2&showinfo=0?ecver=2 Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/AZNuddePawE About Ron Roberts Ron was born in Burbank California and grew up in the Mojave Desert. Being the first of six children born to deaf parents, he learned responsibility at an early age. His commitment to family and faith is unwavering. It's the essence of who he is and the foundation of his business success. Living for a higher purpose and caring for others has always been Ron's focus. After high school, he joined the United States Coast Guard where he learned about hard work, discipline, and duty. He enjoyed serving his country and helping to keep people safe. He grew in experience through training, education, and travel. He developed a love for the sea and enjoys boating and sailing with friends and family. After completing his time with the Coast Guard, Ron served on a mission for the deaf in Chicago for his church. While there, he formed the first deaf scout troop in Chicago for the Boy Scouts of America. Returning from Chicago, Ron attended college in Stockton, California where he met his wife, Julie. They were married in the spring of 1984. In 1991, Ron and Julie moved to Amador County where they enjoyed raising their four daughters in a close knit community. Ron's hobbies include reading, boating, sports, and traveling with his family. Ron also volunteered at a private school where he taught history and American Sign Language. Family, faith, and community are the most important things that define Ron. Ron's chosen vocation as a Retirement Planning Professional allows him to use his experience, his gifts, and his love for family to help people in a very special way. Ron has been in the retirement planning industry since 1990. Founded in 2002, Roberts Retirement has grown over the years to serve families in northern California and around the country. Ron has served as President of the California Estate Planning Counsel and continues to mentor other retirement planning professionals all across the United States. He is constantly educating himself on the most up-to-date investment strategies and changes in the financial industry. Ron is recognized as a leader in the industry, is a sought-after speaker, and has been featured in Senior Market Advisor Magazine Learn more: https://www.robertsretirement.com/ Recent Interviews and News * Ron Roberts discusses highlights of longevity planning for retirement: Ron Roberts Founder & CEO of Roberts Retirement Group, Interviewed on the Influential Entrepreneur Podcast Discussing Longevity Planning for Retirement - Authority Press Wire [ https://authoritypresswire.com/ron-roberts-founder-ceo-of-roberts-retirement-group-interviewed-on-the-influential-entrepreneur-podcast-discussing-longevity-planning-for-retirement/ ] Media Contact Company Name: Marketing Huddle, LLC Contact Person: Mike Saunders, MBA Email: Send Email [ http://www.universalpressrelease.com/?pr=ron-roberts-founder-and-ceo-of-roberts-retirement-group-interviewed-on-the-influential-entrepreneur-podcast-discussing-social-security-planning-for-retirement ] Phone: 7202323112 Country: United States Website: https://www.AuthorityPositioningCoach.com This release was published on openPR.

While some may argue that one-on-one battles are merely for bragging rights and entertainment, they serve as a valuable training ground for Irving and his teammates. The intense battles push players to sharpen their skills, improve their decision-making, and develop their competitiveness. As Irving continues to reign supreme in these matchups, it sets a high standard for the team and motivates everyone to elevate their game.With a keen eye and a steady hand, the granddaughter foraged for edible plants, berries, and mushrooms, carefully selecting those that were safe for consumption. She brewed herbal teas and poultices to help alleviate her grandmother's symptoms of dehydration and exhaustion, all the while keeping a watchful eye on her condition.Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary post-presidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the oldest living U.S. president of all time. His son confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause. In a statement in February 2023, the Carter Center said the former president, after a series of hospital stays, would stop further medical treatment and spend his remaining time at home under hospice care. He had been treated in recent years for an aggressive form of melanoma skin cancer, with tumors that spread to his liver and brain. His wife, Rosalynn, died Nov. 19, 2023, at 96. The Carters, who were close partners in public life, had been married for more than 77 years, the longest presidential marriage in U.S. history. His final public appearance was at her funeral in Plains, where he sat in the front row in a wheelchair. Mr. Carter, a small-town peanut farmer, U.S. Navy veteran, and Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975, was the first president from the Deep South since 1837, and the only Democrat elected president between Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House. As the nation’s 39th president, he governed with strong Democratic majorities in Congress but in a country that was growing more conservative. Four years after taking office, Mr. Carter lost his bid for reelection, in a landslide, to one of the most conservative political figures of the era, Ronald Reagan. When Mr. Carter left Washington in January 1981, he was widely regarded as a mediocre president, if not an outright failure. The list of what had gone wrong during his presidency, not all of it his fault, was long. It was a time of economic distress, with a stagnant economy and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation. “Stagflation,” connoting both low growth and high inflation, was a description that critics used to attack Mr. Carter’s economic policies. In the summer of 1979, Americans waited in long lines at service stations as gasoline supplies dwindled and prices soared after revolution in Iran disrupted the global oil supply. Mr. Carter made energy his signature domestic policy initiative, and he had some success, but events outside his control intervened. In March 1979, a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pa., suffered a core meltdown. The accident was the worst ever for the U.S. nuclear-energy industry and a severe setback to hopes that nuclear power would provide a safe alternative to oil and other fossil fuels. Mr. Carter’s fortunes were no better overseas. In November 1979, an Iranian mob seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans as hostages. It was the beginning of a 444-day ordeal that played out daily on television and did not end until Jan. 20, 1981, the day Mr. Carter left office, when the hostages were released. In the midst of the crisis, in April 1980, Mr. Carter authorized a rescue attempt that ended disastrously in the Iranian desert when two U.S. aircraft collided on the ground, killing eight American servicemen. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the mission, resigned. “I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” Mr. Carter said in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post in Plains. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.” A month after the Iranian hostage crisis erupted, an emboldened Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Mr. Carter ordered an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union, angering American farmers, and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a step that was unpopular with many Americans and was widely seen as weak and ineffectual. As the years wore on, the judgment on Mr. Carter’s presidency gradually gave way to a more positive view. He lived long enough to see his record largely vindicated by history, with a widespread acknowledgment that his presidency had been far more than long lines at the gas station and U.S. hostages in Iran. Near the end of Mr. Carter’s life, two biographies argued forcefully that he had been a more consequential president than most people realized - “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history,” author Jonathan Alter wrote in his 2020 book, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.” Both books - the other was Kai Bird’s 2021 volume, “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter” - said Mr. Carter was often ahead of his time, especially with his early focus on reducing fossil fuel use and his efforts to mitigate the nation’s racial divide, including by expanding the number of people of color in federal judgeships. The biographies concluded that Mr. Carter’s reputation as a poor president was unfair and came largely from his stubborn insistence on doing what he thought was correct even when it cost him politically. “He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better,” Bird wrote. “And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.” Mr. Carter, noted for his mile-wide smile in public, was also tenacious and resolute, and those qualities were critical to achieving the Camp David Accords, a signature success of his presidency. He spent 13 days at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains in September 1978, shuttling between cabins that housed Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In a process that almost collapsed several times, Mr. Carter was instrumental in brokering a historic agreement between bitter rivals. The Camp David Accords led to the first significant Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in the Six-Day War of 1967 and a peace treaty that has endured between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor. In 1978, Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor conferred on Mr. Carter 24 years later for a lifetime of working for peace. Against fierce conservative opposition, Mr. Carter pushed through the Panama Canal treaties, which ultimately placed the economically and strategically critical waterway under Panamanian control, a major step toward better U.S. relations with Latin American neighbors. He signed a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, SALT II, with the Soviets, but he withdrew it from Senate consideration when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Taking advantage of the opening made by President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Carter granted full diplomatic recognition to China. He made human rights a central theme of U.S. foreign policy, a sharp departure from the approach of Nixon and his national security adviser and second secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger. Two Cabinet-level departments - Energy and Education - were created under Mr. Carter, as was the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act more than doubled the size of the national park and wildlife refuge system. Mr. Carter was ahead of his time on environmental issues. In June 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House, telling reporters that the point was to harness “the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986. His relations with Congress were often strained, even though it was controlled by his party, but he had more success than most modern presidents at winning passage of his legislative proposals. With the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, Mr. Carter set in motion a movement that picked up steam under Reagan and his conservative allies. The military buildup under Reagan was often credited with hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that buildup began under Mr. Carter. Inflation was a constant scourge to his administration, but it was Mr. Carter who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Volcker was later hailed as the man who broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, when Reagan was president. In the 2018 Post interview, Mr. Carter said he had “a lot of regrets” from his time in office, mainly over the Iran hostage crisis and his not having done more to unify the Democratic Party. He said he was most proud of the Camp David Accords, his work to normalize relations with China and his focus on human rights. “I kept our country at peace and championed human rights, and that’s a rare thing for post-World War II presidents to say,” he said, adding that he was also proud that he “always told the truth.” Mr. Carter was a former president for more than four decades - longer than anyone else in history - and he was only the second to live to 94, after George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018. He dedicated his post-presidential life to public service at home and supporting democracy and human rights abroad. It was a career that even some of his supporters said seemed better suited to him than being president. “Nothing about the White House so became Mr. Carter as his having left it,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency,” a 1998 account of Mr. Carter’s life after the presidency. Mr. Carter lived more modestly than any ex-president since Harry S. Truman, whom Mr. Carter called his favorite president. He and Rosalynn lived in Plains until the end in the ranch house that they built for themselves in 1961, and where Mr. Carter will be buried with her next to a shady willow tree near a pond that he helped dig. Mr. Carter declined the corporate board memberships and lucrative speaking engagements that have made other ex-presidents tens of millions of dollars. He said in the 2018 interview that he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.” “I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Mr. Carter said. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.” Instead, he wrote 33 books on topics ranging from war to woodworking, which gave him a comfortable retirement income. He also won three Grammy Awards for his recordings of audio versions of his books. For decades, the Carters spent a week a year building homes with Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based nonprofit organization that constructs housing for low-income people. Wearing their own tool belts, they helped build or renovate about 4,300 homes in 14 countries. In 1982, the Carters founded the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta. It became the base from which they traveled widely on peacemaking and other humanitarian missions. The Carter Center sponsors programs in education, agricultural development and health care and supports fair elections in countries around the world. Mr. Carter became an unofficial roving ambassador, monitoring elections, mediating disputes and promoting human rights and democracy. In 1994, at the request of President Clinton, he helped forge an agreement that removed a brutal military regime in Haiti and averted a possible U.S. invasion of that country. Mr. Carter’s missions required meeting with some of the world’s most notorious despots, including Kim Il Sung of North Korea and Moammar Gaddafi of Libya. Fledgling democracies trusted him, and he was asked to monitor elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Zambia, the West Bank and Gaza. The Carter Center has monitored 115 elections in 40 countries, according to its website. He was not always successful, but Mr. Carter never seemed discouraged about his efforts to resolve conflicts. He spent the days leading up to the 1994 Christmas holiday in the Balkans, engaging in negotiations that included a shouted conversation by shortwave radio with Serbian strongman Radovan Karadzic, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Mr. Carter’s efforts resulted in a four-month cease-fire in the bloody conflict. From Atlanta, the Carter Center coordinated dozens of initiatives, including a decades-long effort that helped to virtually eradicate Guinea worm disease, a painful and disabling condition that once afflicted millions of people in some of Africa's poorest countries. Mr. Carter’s freelance diplomacy, which at times included outspoken criticism of U.S. policies, could provoke outrage. He angered Clinton in 1994 by thrusting himself into a dispute over U.N. inspections of North Korea’s nuclear facilities. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” (2006), Mr. Carter set off a storm of criticism by seeming to equate Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories with the former apartheid regime in South Africa. Over the years, Mr. Carter was a constant source of irritation to conservative critics. In a book about Mr. Carter’s life after the White House - a book whose subtitle called him “Our Worst Ex-President” - conservative political commentator Steven F. Hayward accused him of engaging in “usually embarrassing and often disastrous peace missions around the world.” The far more common judgment was that Mr. Carter’s tireless pursuit of peace and human rights was admirable and set a new standard for ex-presidents. In awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Nobel committee lauded him “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” Introducing the 2002 Peace Prize laureate in Oslo, Gunnar Berge, a member of the Nobel committee, said: “Jimmy Carter will probably not go down in American history as the most effective president. But he is certainly the best ex-president the country ever had.” That Mr. Carter became president was something of a historical accident, one that followed an unprecedented chain of events. The progression began in 1973 with the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was caught in a web of corruption dating from his time as a Maryland politician. That led to the appointment of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford, a respected but relatively little-known U.S. House member from Michigan, as Agnew’s successor. And, finally, in 1974, there was the resignation of Nixon to avoid impeachment stemming from the Watergate scandal. Two years later, Mr. Carter narrowly defeated Ford, but the person he really campaigned against was Nixon. Mr. Carter was the peanut farmer from Georgia, the candidate who carried his own garment bag off the aircraft and promised to bring an open and honest style of leadership to the nation’s capital. It later became commonplace for presidential candidates, and most challengers to incumbents, to run “against Washington.” Mr. Carter was among the first of the modern era to do so. Mr. Carter signaled his disdain for the “imperial” trappings of the presidency on Inauguration Day in 1977, when he, Rosalynn and their daughter, Amy, stepped out of the presidential limousine on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked the parade route to the White House. “He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said in 2018. While that seemed refreshing to many people after the Nixon years, it ultimately grated on those who thought that Mr. Carter’s style - refusing, for example, to have “Hail to the Chief” played when he entered rooms - demeaned and diminished the presidency. Eizenstat said Mr. Carter’s order eliminating drivers for top staff members was meant to signal a more frugal approach to governing. Instead, he said, it meant that busy officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day. Two years later, in 1979, Americans were in a sour mood, and Mr. Carter’s response to events seemed to make matters worse. In July, he abruptly canceled a speech on energy and retreated to Camp David, where he held a series of intense discussions with a cross section of guests. When he emerged July 15, he delivered a nationally televised address that was soon dubbed the “malaise” speech, although Mr. Carter never used that word in his address. In the speech, Mr. Carter spoke of a “crisis of the American spirit” and, before setting out a series of energy policy proposals, warned that “we are at a turning point in our history.” “There are two paths to choose,” he continued. “One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.” The speech, initially well received, was soon turned against Mr. Carter, who was accused of blaming the American people for the failures of his administration. Mr. Carter did not help his cause when, two days later, he demanded the resignation of his entire Cabinet and fired five of the secretaries. Then came the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian student protesters. By the early 21st century, Mr. Carter’s warning about the fragmentation of American society leading to political paralysis appeared prescient to many. So, too, did his emphasis on concerns then only dimly perceived as threats - foremost among them, the spread of nuclear weapons to unfriendly and unstable regimes. But hindsight was of no benefit to him then. Mr. Carter’s dignity was ruthlessly assailed by reports in August 1979 of his encounter with a “killer rabbit” a few months before while fishing in Georgia. “President Attacked by Rabbit,” a front-page headline in The Post proclaimed. His use of a paddle to fend off a rabbit swimming toward his small boat was widely lampooned as a desperate struggle. The story, inconsequential in itself, reinforced an impression, cultivated by his political opponents, that Mr. Carter was a hapless bumbler unequal to his office. He also had been mocked for wearing a cardigan in February 1977 while sitting next to a fire to deliver his first speech on energy, in which he called the nation’s response to a growing energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” But his energy policies led to a reduction in U.S. consumption of foreign oil. Long after he left public office, there was a public outcry over congressional “earmarks” and other forms of pork-barrel spending because of the soaring federal budget deficit. One of Mr. Carter’s first acts as president was to veto a bill authorizing a number of federal water projects he considered wasteful, incurring the lasting enmity of some of the Democratic barons of Capitol Hill. “If you are president and you’re going to diagnose a problem, you better have a solution to it,” journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, who as a White House speechwriter worked on the “malaise” speech, later observed. “While he turned out to be a true prophet, he turned out not to be a savior.” To many who were sympathetic to Mr. Carter and considered his presidency underrated, his shortcomings stemmed largely from the way he defined the role more in moral than political terms, which reflected his deep religious faith. He craved political power to do good as he saw it, and he was adept at gaining power. But he was not a natural politician, and he was never at home in the messy world of politics and governing in an unruly democracy. He was always far more at home in Plains, the speck of a town in South Georgia that he never really left. Until late in their lives, he and Mrs. Carter frequently were seen walking hand in hand along Church Street on their way home from Saturday dinners at the home of their friend Jill Stuckey. Mr. Carter was a champion for the town, which is essentially a living museum of his life, with old-fashioned storefronts and shops selling everything from Carter Christmas ornaments to campaign memorabilia. He helped woo a Dollar General store to Plains, then shopped for his clothes there. In the 2018 interview, Mr. Carter said he and Mrs. Carter wanted to be buried in Plains partly because they knew their gravesite would draw tourists and provide a much-needed economic boost to their hometown. They celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021 with a party for more than 300 people at Plains High School, which they both had attended about eight decades earlier. The guests included country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, a married couple who had worked with the Carters for years building homes for Habitat for Humanity. (Brooks and Yearwood quietly presented the Carters with a 1946 Ford Super Deluxe convertible, in honor of the year they were married.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came to the party, as did billionaire and CNN founder Ted Turner, who was Mr. Carter’s longtime friend and fly-fishing buddy, and civil rights leader Andrew Young, whom President Carter appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and who later served as mayor of Atlanta. Also there was Mary Prince, an African American woman who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1970. She met the Carters when she was a prisoner assigned to work at the Georgia governor’s mansion. Rosalynn Carter was convinced of her innocence and hired her to be Amy Carter’s nanny. After he became president, Mr. Carter persuaded the parole board to let him be Prince’s parole officer. She moved into the White House and lived there for all of Mr. Carter’s presidency, looking after Amy. She later received a full pardon. She still lives in Plains and sometimes cares for the Carters’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Most notably, Bill and Hillary Clinton made the long trip to Plains. The Carters and the Clintons had tense relations for decades but seemed ready to set their differences aside in the twilight of Carter’s life. Onstage, Mr. Carter, who was then 96, spoke haltingly, showing the combined effects of his age and many health problems, including brain cancer that appeared to have been treated successfully in 2015. Seated next to his wife, Mr. Carter expressed “particular gratitude” to her for “being the right woman.” Then he flashed his trademark toothy grin, looked out at an auditorium jammed with family and friends, many of them choking up, and declared, “I love you all very much.” Friends said it felt like a goodbye. The next morning, an exhausted Mr. Carter was wheeled into the Baptist church where he had until recently taught Sunday school. He kissed Pelosi’s hand when she walked in. “I thought he was a great president because he was a president of values, and he acted upon the values,” Pelosi said later. She admired him for his vision, for his striving to help free the world of nuclear weapons, and for the way he inspired people by his good works in his post-presidency. “He went from the White House to building houses for poor people,” she said. “He glorified that work. Others wanted to do it because he did it. That’s powerful.” Despite the feeling of farewell in Plains that summer weekend, Mr. Carter did not fade completely from public view. Nearly five months later, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times decrying “unscrupulous politicians” who guided the mob and the “lie” that the 2020 election had been stolen. He called on Americans to reject political violence, polarization, disinformation and embrace “fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law.” “Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss,” Mr. Carter warned. “Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.” Survivors include their four children, John W. “Jack” Carter, James E. “Chip” Carter III, Donnel J. “Jeff” Carter and Amy Carter; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. James Earl L. “Buddy” Carter Jr., the eldest of four children, was born Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, a farming town about 150 miles south of Atlanta. The Carters lived on the family farm in Archery, Ga., about two miles west of Plains, in a house with no electricity or running water. But that was not uncommon in the rural South of the time, and the Carters, though not wealthy, were not poor. As they prospered, the Carters eventually moved to a larger and more modern, although still modest, home in Plains. Mr. Carter’s father, who was known as Earl, was ambitious, hard-working and shrewd. Over the years, he enlarged his farm holdings in the region and branched into other business ventures, including a peanut warehouse. Running for president, Jimmy Carter was often described, and described himself, as a peanut farmer, but that label did not capture the full extent of the family’s business interests. By the time he entered state politics in the early 1960s, Mr. Carter was an affluent agribusinessman, the head of a sizable and thriving commercial enterprise. It was his mother who probably had the most influence on the future president. A nurse by training, Lillian Gordy Carter was talkative, outgoing, at times irrepressible. In 1966, at the age of 68, “Miss Lillian,” as she came to be known, decided to join the Peace Corps, and she spent nearly two years serving in India. She slipped quietly out of town to begin her training because, she said later, the family thought her joining the Peace Corps might arouse conservative suspicions about her son’s campaign for governor. Mr. Carter grew up in the rigidly segregated South of the 1920s and ’30s. But unlike in much of the North, which was segregated in fact if not in law, contact between Black and White people was part of everyday life in much of the South. There was only one other White family in Archery, and many of Mr. Carter’s boyhood friends were Black. His mother turned the family home into a social center where Black and White people were welcome and where she dispensed medical treatment and advice to the sharecropper families who worked the Carter land. In his youth, Mr. Carter made no attempt to conceal his ambition. Perhaps influenced by an uncle, Tom Watson Gordy, a Navy enlisted man who sent messages to the family from exotic places, he declared at an early age that he intended to enter the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and eventually become chief of naval operations. He also told a friend that one day he would be governor of Georgia. Mr. Carter graduated from Plains High School in 1941. To qualify for the Naval Academy, he enrolled at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus, and he later spent a year studying at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In 1943, as World War II raged, he was admitted to the Naval Academy. He was a good student, a quick study who seemed to move through the academy’s rigorous academic schedule with ease. He was also popular with his classmates, viewed as a “nice guy,” but not necessarily destined to be a leader. He was officially a member of the Class of 1947, but under the Navy’s accelerated wartime schedule, he graduated in 1946, ranking 59th in a class of more than 800. Shortly after his graduation, Mr. Carter married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith of Plains, a close friend of his sister Ruth’s. The new Mrs. Carter, three years younger than her husband, was from a respectable Plains family and shared Mr. Carter’s values and outlook. After graduating from the Naval Academy, Mr. Carter spent two compulsory years on Navy surface ships and then applied for the submarine service. He was accepted and soon won entry to the Navy’s newest and most glamorous program, which was developing the nation’s first nuclear-powered submarines under the iron-fisted direction of a captain (later admiral) named Hyman G. Rickover. Rickover was a cold man who drove his subordinates relentlessly. He never praised his men; he signaled his approval by allowing them to remain in their jobs. Years later, Mr. Carter would say, “I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man.” The title of his 1975 presidential campaign autobiography, “Why Not the Best?” was based on his first encounter with Rickover, who asked him whether he had always done his best at the Naval Academy. The young lieutenant junior grade answered honestly that, no, he had not always done his best. After a long pause, Rickover asked icily, “Why not?” Rickover was not a man who cultivated friendships, and his influence on Mr. Carter might have reinforced the same tendency in the future president. Supremely self-confident, Mr. Carter, too, was a taskmaster, and he was not a favorite president among those who served on the permanent White House staff and saw chief executives come and go. When Mr. Carter came to Washington as the newly elected “outsider” president, he had few real friends in the capital, even among members of his own party. In four years, he did little to forge the bonds of friendship and loyalty that can help carry a president through times of turmoil. He alienated potential allies, and the engineer in him was given to micromanagement. Early in his term, Mr. Carter personally controlled access to the White House tennis court. “Although most considered Mr. Carter a kind, amiable man, he could turn nasty in an instant,” Brinkley wrote in “The Unfinished Presidency.” He added, “At times he was downright vicious; in fact, his trademark steely, laser-sharp stare usually preceded a hurtful put-down. Even in the most informal settings, Mr. Carter had to let everybody know he was in charge.” Mr. Carter, however, did develop deep friendships. One of them, surprisingly, was with Ford, the man he defeated in 1976. Out of office, the two men saw each other frequently and collaborated on various projects. Mr. Carter delivered a eulogy at Ford’s funeral in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2007. Mr. Carter never stopped taking positions on personally and politically difficult issues. He cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, citing its “increasingly rigid” views, especially on the role of women in society. “I’ve made this decision with a great deal of pain and reluctance,” Mr. Carter told the Associated Press at the time. “For me, being a Southern Baptist has always been like being an American. ... My father and his father were deacons and Sunday school teachers. It’s something that’s just like breathing for us.” But he added: “I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God. I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Jesus in the church.” By 1952, promoted to lieutenant and assigned as the engineering officer on the USS Sea Wolf, the fleet’s second nuclear submarine, Mr. Carter’s Navy career was off to a good start. But his father died in July 1953, leaving the farm and other family business interests in shaky financial condition. As the oldest of the Carter siblings, the young naval officer felt a duty to return to Georgia and take his place as head of the family. And his mother wanted him at home to hold things together through a challenging time. He resigned from the Navy on Oct. 9, 1953, and headed home. His return to Plains reunited him with his sisters, Gloria and Ruth, and his brother, Billy, who became a well-known figure during the Carter presidency. Always the family rebel, Billy Carter reveled in the role of Georgia good ol’ boy at the gas station he owned in Plains. He also marketed a beer - Billy Beer - under his own name. But he became an embarrassment to his brother when it was disclosed that he had accepted a $220,000 loan from Libya and registered as a foreign agent of the Libyan government. Mr. Carter’s siblings all died before him - all from pancreatic cancer. Mr. Carter’s Navy resignation was a difficult decision, especially for Rosalynn. She enjoyed the adventure and security of military life, and as a young girl, she had yearned to leave the confines of Plains for the wider world. Now, at 26, with three small children, she headed back to the small town amid the dusty farm fields of southwest Georgia and a life she thought she had escaped. But the Carters soon found their footing in their native region. They formed an effective business partnership, with Rosalynn handling the bookkeeping and other managerial duties at the warehouse and her husband immersing himself in the technical and scientific details of modern farming. They began to prosper. The Carters remained partners in all facets of life. At the White House, Rosalynn Carter was an unusually activist first lady, regularly attending Cabinet meetings and policy sessions and serving as a trusted adviser to the president. She placed special emphasis on mental health issues and served as the active honorary chairman of the President’s Commission on Mental Health. After the White House years, she accompanied her husband on his global missions. Like his father before him, Mr. Carter became an active member in community institutions - Plains Baptist Church, the Lions Club, the local school and library boards, and the county planning commission. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter had been elected to the Georgia legislature the year before his death, and in 1962, his elder son embarked on a political career. He ran for a state Senate seat representing Sumter and six other counties. Mr. Carter ran an energetic campaign for the Democratic primary, the only election that counted at that time in the Deep South, but he came up just short against the incumbent. On the day of the primary, however, his operatives in the small city of Quitman witnessed widespread voting irregularities, including ballot stuffing. It was the way things had been done in Quitman for years. Mr. Carter convinced John Pennington, a young investigative reporter for the Atlanta Journal, that there was a good story to be had in Quitman. Pennington’s subsequent stories exposed the extent of voter fraud in the county and brought Mr. Carter statewide attention. Through intermediaries, including Griffin Bell, who became attorney general in the Carter administration, Mr. Carter made contact with Charles Kirbo, a partner in a prestigious Atlanta law firm. Kirbo, who had never met the Georgia peanut farmer, agreed to represent him in a challenge to the primary election’s outcome. Kirbo remained a friend and trusted adviser. Mr. Carter prevailed, and in January 1963 he took his seat in the Georgia Senate. He served four years, his only legislative experience, generally keeping a low profile while achieving a reputation for diligence and hard work. He promised to read every bill introduced in the legislature, and when he had trouble keeping up, he took a speed-reading course. In 1966, Mr. Carter announced that he was running for the congressional seat held by Howard “Bo” Calloway, a wealthy Republican and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When Calloway unexpectedly dropped his reelection bid and entered the race for the Republican nomination for governor, Mr. Carter jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination. His primary opponents included Ellis Arnall, a former governor who was regarded as a progressive, and Lester Maddox, an Atlanta restaurant owner who dispensed ax handles to patrons as a symbol of his resistance to the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Mr. Carter finished third in the primary, which was won by Maddox. The 1966 defeat affected Mr. Carter profoundly. It was then, he later wrote, that he underwent a deep religious transformation, a “born-again” experience that guided him for the rest of his life. From then on, he pursued a moral as much as a political agenda and tended to define issues in terms of right and wrong. When he ran for president, he described himself as a “born-again Christian,” at the time a new and somewhat jarring term in the lexicon of presidential politics. He almost immediately began planning to run a second campaign for governor in 1970. His main rival in the Democratic primary was Carl Sanders, a well-regarded former governor with a moderate record on race. Mr. Carter had taken courageous stands on the issue of race, although he was never in the forefront of the civil rights movement, which was gathering momentum and tearing the South apart. In the 1950s, he withstood intense pressure from his neighbors and threats to the family business as one of the few White men in Plains who would not join the local chapter of the White Citizens Council, an organization whose thinly veiled purpose was the continued subjugation of Black people. In 1965, he and other members of his family stood virtually alone in opposing a resolution barring Black people from Plains Baptist Church. But in the 1970 campaign, Mr. Carter aggressively courted the state’s conservative, rural voters, kept his distance from the African American community and relentlessly attacked Sanders as the wealthy crony of the “bigwigs” of Atlanta’s business establishment. Sanders had refused to allow Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace (D), the most prominent segregationist politician in the country, to address the Georgia legislature. Mr. Carter promised repeatedly to invite Wallace to the state. Mr. Carter was endorsed by some of Georgia’s leading segregationists, but the 1970 campaign cost him the support of some old allies. Mr. Carter defeated Sanders in a primary runoff and easily won the general election. He then executed a stunning political pivot. On Jan. 12, 1971, Mr. Carter delivered his inaugural address in front of the Georgia Capitol, declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over. ... No poor, rural, weak or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.” The speech was probably the most important of his life, including those he delivered as president. It brought him national attention and soon landed him on the cover of Time magazine. Mr. Carter became a leading figure in a generation of young New South politicians who were seen as determined to move their region beyond the rancorous politics of race. As governor, Mr. Carter largely lived up to his lofty words. He appointed more women and minorities to state government positions than all of his predecessors combined. He also continued efforts, begun in the state Senate, to upgrade Georgia’s public schools, and he overhauled the prison system and judiciary. Mr. Carter was constitutionally limited to one term as governor (Georgia governors can now serve two consecutive terms), but his ambitions were not similarly constrained. He began to think of running for president, a goal that might seem wildly out of reach even for a bright young governor with a progressive reputation. As late as October 1975, a public-opinion poll on possible 1976 Democratic presidential contenders did not include his name. By the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Carter had acquired the services, and the fierce loyalty, of two young Georgians who would be at his side through his presidency. One was Hamilton Jordan, a political science student who volunteered to work for Mr. Carter in 1966 and became his closest political strategist and White House chief of staff. The other was Jody Powell, who began as Mr. Carter’s driver in the 1970 campaign and went on to be his chief spokesman and White House press secretary. Jordan died in 2008; Powell died in 2009. While still governor of Georgia, Mr. Carter quietly pursued the presidency with the same determination that marked all of his endeavors. He managed to get appointed to an important Democratic National Committee campaign post, providing a vehicle to meet Democratic politicians and activists around the county. Jordan, his executive assistant, left Atlanta for a job with the DNC in Washington, where he served as the unannounced candidate’s eyes and ears at national party headquarters. Jordan also wrote a long memo setting out the changing contours of the nomination process and a strategy that would lead to victory. Mr. Carter, with Powell at his side, crisscrossed the country tirelessly, impressing the people he met and gradually building a foundation of support. It all came together on a cold January night in Iowa. Mr. Carter did not win the Iowa caucuses in 1976 - the most votes were cast for uncommitted delegates - but he finished first among those who competed. That gave him a burst of publicity and momentum that carried him to victory in the New Hampshire primary and eventually to the nomination as his rivals dropped out of the race one by one. It was the 1976 Carter campaign that firmly established Iowa as the starting point of the road to the White House. After Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, it was a good year to be a Democrat. Mr. Carter chose Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, a Northern liberal with strong ties to organized labor, as his running mate, and they headed into the fall campaign with a 30-point lead in the polls over their Republican opponents. They almost lost. Ford ran a disciplined campaign that made maximum use of his status as the incumbent, and Mr. Carter’s lead in the polls steadily dwindled. Shortly before Election Day, Playboy magazine published a long interview with the Democratic nominee. As a final question, Mr. Carter was asked whether he thought that he had reassured people who were uneasy about his religious beliefs and fearful that he would be a rigid, unbending president. In the midst of a long, rambling response, Mr. Carter said: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.” Public doubts about the born-again peanut farmer and one-term governor deepened. Mr. Carter won the election by two percentage points. His steep slide during the 1976 campaign was an early warning signal of his political vulnerability. Four years later, Mr. Carter was the incumbent, but that was hardly an advantage. One July 1980 poll put his approval rating at 21 percent, one of the lowest ever recorded for a president. Mr. Carter was the first president to openly embrace rock-and-roll music, and he credits the Allman Brothers and other musicians with helping him win election in 1976. “I was practically a nonentity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers,” Mr. Carter said in a 2020 documentary, “Jimmy Carter: Rock-and-roll President.” “When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’” Mr. Carter was challenged for his party’s nomination by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a hero to Democratic liberals who had come to detest Mr. Carter for what they considered his conservative policies. The Kennedy campaign badly damaged Mr. Carter’s reelection chances, but it also exposed weaknesses in Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. Mr. Carter won the nomination, and the youngest of the Kennedy brothers never again sought the presidency. In the fall, Mr. Carter faced Reagan, the hero of a rising conservative movement. As he had in the 1970 campaign for governor of Georgia, Mr. Carter played to win. He mounted a negative assault that depicted Reagan as a right-wing ideologue who was too dangerous to entrust with the nation’s future. In the only nationally televised debate of the fall campaign, Reagan disarmed that portrayal. “There you go again,” he said in his avuncular, optimistic style, responding to Mr. Carter’s accusations. Reagan won by almost 10 percentage points, sweeping 44 of the 50 states. For years, people in Mr. Carter’s orbit believed that Reagan supporters had been in contact with Iranian officials and urged them to delay the release of the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 election. The purpose, allegedly, was to make sure that Mr. Carter didn’t pull off an “October surprise” that could swing the election in his favor. Investigations by the U.S. House and Senate concluded that there was no credible evidence of any such plot. In March 2023, while Mr. Carter was in hospice care, the New York Times reported allegations made by Ben Barnes, a longtime politician and operative from Texas, that supported those suspicions. Barnes said that he had accompanied his mentor, former Texas governor and former U.S. treasury secretary John B. Connally Jr., to several Middle East countries in the summer of 1980 and that Connally urged leaders there to pass a message to Iranian officials that they should wait until Reagan was president to release the hostages. Connally and most other key players had died, and Barnes’s allegations could not be independently confirmed. But the Times story felt like a vindication to Mr. Carter’s allies. Gerald Rafshoon, Mr. Carter’s White House communications director, told the Times that the allegations were “pretty damn outrageous.” After the Times story was published, grandson Jason Carter told The Post that he believed that Mr. Carter remained alert enough to know about the article and that the family was gratified by what it added to the historical record, but “my grandfather had moved on.” Jason Carter said he never once - despite all that had been written about dirty politics played at the expense of the hostages and Mr. Carter - heard his grandfather talk about it. “I think that tells you a lot,” Jason Carter said. “He believed there were other things more important than politics.” In his first act as a former president, performed at the request of the new president, Mr. Carter flew to a U.S. air base in Germany to greet the American hostages who were returning from Iran. He was 56 and could not know how much time he had left or how he would use it. But in a farewell address a week earlier, Mr. Carter suggested that although he had lost an election, he was not finished with what he saw as his life’s work. “In a few days,” he said, “I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of ‘citizen.’” Mary Jordan contributed to this report. Edward Walsh, who died in 2014, served as The Washington Post’s White House correspondent during the Carter administration.

GENEVA (AP) — World Cup sponsor Bank of America teamed with FIFA for a second time Tuesday, signing for the Club World Cup that still has no broadcast deals just over six months before games start. Bank of America became FIFA’s first global banking partner in August and sealed a separate deal for a second event also being played in the United States, two days before the group-stage draw in Miami for the revamped 32-team club event . It features recent European champions Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea. “FIFA is going to take America by storm and we’re going to be right at their side,” the bank’s head of marketing, David Tyrie, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. Bank of America joins 2026 World Cup sponsors Hisense and Budweiser brewer AB InBev in separately also backing the club event, and more deals are expected after Saudi Arabia is confirmed next week as the 2034 World Cup host. While games at the next World Cup, co-hosted with Canada and Mexico, will be watched by hundreds of millions globally mostly on free-to-air public networks, the Club World Cup broadcast picture is unclear. FIFA has promised hundreds of millions of dollars in prize money for the 32 clubs to share but is yet to announce any broadcast deals for the month-long tournament. It is expected to land on a streaming service. “You have to think about how you are going to connect with these fans,” Tyrie told the Associated Press from Boston. “TV is one, sure, social media is a big avenue. “The smart marketing capabilities are able to say ‘Hey, we need to tilt this one a little bit more away from TV-type marketing into social-type marketing.’ We have got a pretty decent strategy that we’re putting in place to do activation.” Engaging Bank of America’s customers and 250,000 employees are key to that strategy, Tyrie said. “It’s going to be for our clients, and entertainment, it’s going to be for our employees in creating excitement. All of the above.” The Club World Cup will be played in 12 stadiums across 11 cities, including Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C, and Lumen Field where the hometown Seattle Sounders play three group-stage games. European powers Madrid, Man City and Bayern Munich lead a 12-strong European challenge. Teams qualified by winning continental titles or posting consistently good results across four years of those competitions. The exception is Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, who FIFA gave the entry reserved for a host nation team in October based on regular season record without waiting for the MLS Cup final. LA Galaxy hosts New York Red Bulls playing for that national title Saturday. Messi’s team opens the FIFA tournament June 15 in the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium and will play its three group games in Florida. “The more brand players you bring in, the bigger the following you have got,” Tyrie acknowledged, though adding Messi being involved was “not a make or break for the event.” The Club World Cup final is July 13 at Met Life Stadium near New York, which also will host the World Cup final one year later. AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination.” The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports. Throughout his campaign, the Republican depicted schools as a political battleground to be won back from the left. Now that he’s won the White House, he plans to use federal money as leverage to advance his vision of education across the nation. Trump’s education plan pledges to cut funding for schools that defy him on a multitude of issues. On his first day in office, Trump has repeatedly said he will cut money to “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.” On the campaign trail, Trump said he would “not give one penny” to schools with vaccine or mask requirements. He said it would be done through executive action, though even some of his supporters say he lacks the authority to make such swift and sweeping changes. Trump’s opponents say his vision of America’s schools is warped by politics — that the type of liberal indoctrination he rails against is a fiction. They say his proposals will undermine public education and hurt the students who need schools’ services the most. “It’s fear-based, non-factual information, and I would call it propaganda,” said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president for Education Trust, a research and advocacy organization. “There is no evidence that students are being taught to question their sexuality in schools. There is no evidence that our American education system is full of maniacs.” Trump’s platform calls for “massive funding preferences” for states and schools that end teacher tenure, enact universal school choice programs and allow parents to elect school principals. Perhaps his most ambitious promise is to shut down the U.S. Education Department entirely, a goal of conservative politicians for decades, saying it has been infiltrated by “radicals.” America’s public K-12 schools get about 14% of their revenue from the federal government, mainly from programs targeting low-income students and special education. The vast majority of schools’ money comes from local taxes and state governments. Colleges rely more heavily on federal money, especially the grants and loans the government gives students to pay for tuition. Trump’s strongest tool to put schools’ money on the line is his authority to enforce civil rights — the Education Department has the power to cut federal funding to schools and colleges that fail to follow civil rights laws. The president can’t immediately revoke money from large numbers of districts, but if he targets a few through civil rights inquiries, others are likely to fall in line, said Bob Eitel, president of the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute and an education official during Trump’s first term. That authority could be used to go after schools and colleges that have diversity and inclusion offices or those accused of antisemitism, Eitel said. “This is not a Day One loss of funding,” Eitel said, referencing Trump’s campaign promise. “But at the end of the day, the president will get his way on this issue, because I do think that there are some real legal issues.” Trump also has hinted at potential legislation to deliver some of his promises, including fining universities over diversity initiatives. To get colleges to shutter diversity programs — which Trump says amount to discrimination — he said he “will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.” His platform also calls for a new, free online university called the American Academy, to be paid for by “taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments.” During his first term, Trump occasionally threatened to cut money from schools that defied him, including those slow to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic and colleges he accused of curbing free speech. Most of the threats came to nothing, though he succeeded in getting Congress to add a tax on wealthy university endowments, and his Education Department made sweeping changes to rules around campus sexual assault. Universities hope their relationship with the administration won’t be as antagonistic as Trump’s rhetoric suggests. “Education has been an easy target during the campaign season,” said Peter McDonough, general counsel for the American Council on Education, an association of university presidents. “But a partnership between higher education and the administration is going to be better for the country than an attack on education.” Trump’s threats of severe penalties seem to contradict another of his education pillars — the extraction of the federal government from schools. In closing the Education Department, Trump said he would return “all education work and needs back to the states.” “We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said on his website last year. In his platform, he pledged to ensure schools are “free from political meddling.” On Tuesday, Trump named billionaire professional wrestling mogul Linda McMahon to be secretary of the Education Department. McMahon led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term from 2017 to 2019 and twice ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut. McMahon served on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year starting in 2009 and has spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. She’s seen as a relative unknown in education circles, though she has expressed support for charter schools and school choice. Rather than letting states and schools decide their stance on polarizing issues, Trump is proposing blanket bans that align with his vision. Taking a neutral stance and letting states decide wouldn’t deliver Trump’s campaign promises, said Max Eden, a senior fellow at AEI, a conservative think tank. For example, Trump plans to rescind guidance from President Joe Biden’s administration that extended Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And Trump would go further, promising a nationwide ban on transgender women in women’s sports. “Trump ran on getting boys out of girls’ sports. He didn’t run on letting boys play in girls’ sports in blue states if they want to,” Eden said. Trump also wants a say in school curriculum, vowing to fight for “patriotic” education. He promised to reinstate his 1776 Commission, which he created in 2021 to promote patriotic education. The panel created a report that called progressivism a “challenge to American principles” alongside fascism. Adding to that effort, Trump is proposing a new credentialing body to certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values.” Few of his biggest education goals can be accomplished quickly, and many would require new action from Congress or federal processes that usually take months. Get local news delivered to your inbox!Computational biologists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have uncovered how RNA splicing—a crucial process for isoform expression and protein diversity—is regulated across different cell types in the peripheral blood. This important discovery helps explain how individuals' genetic differences contribute to their predisposition to complex diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and Graves' disease (GD). This project was conducted as part of the Asian Immune Diversity Atlas (AIDA) consortium, which uses population-scale single-cell gene expression profiling of over one million immune cells (PBMCs) from over 600 Asian donors in five countries to understand how genes and environment make us different from each other and influence our health. The study was a research collaboration with A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), Samsung Genome Institute, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, and Nanyang Technological University. This study was published as a cover article in the journal Nature Genetics on 3 December 2024. Alternative splicing (AS) is a fundamental regulatory mechanism in messenger RNA (mRNA) processing, and abnormal splicing is a major cause of genetic disorders. To understand the genetic regulation of splicing, previous efforts such as the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project have primarily focused on tissue-level measurements, and these efforts have shown that different tissues have distinct patterns of splicing regulation. However, this raised an intriguing question: does disease-relevant genetic regulation of splicing occur only in one or a few cell types? To answer this research question, the main bottleneck is the lack of a large population-scale cell-type-resolved dataset suitable for splicing analysis and corresponding analytical pipelines. Furthermore, Asian populations have been notably underrepresented in large-scale genetic studies. For instance, Asians account for only 1.3% of the GTEx dataset, while individuals of European descent make up 84.6%. A recent study showed that ancestry could be a main factor that affects the findings of genetic regulation, mostly due to differences in allele frequencies. This highlights an urgent need for genetic studies that better represent diverse ancestries. To address these research gaps, a research team led by Assistant Professor Liu Boxiang, with lead authors Tian Chi, Zhang Yuntian, and Tong Yihan, from the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the NUS Faculty of Science utilized the AIDA single-cell RNA-seq dataset to analyze cell-type-specific splicing. This work represents the first comprehensive analysis of splicing regulation in a population-scale and genetics-coupled single-cell dataset. Asst Prof Liu holds a joint appointment with the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Precision Medicine Translational Research Programme at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and is an Adjunct Principal Scientist at GIS. The Asian Immune Diversity Atlas (AIDA) single-cell RNA-seq dataset The AIDA Data Freeze v.1 includes up to 21 immune cell subtypes for context-dependent alternative splicing and splicing quantitative trait loci (sQTL) analysis. The blood samples in this dataset were collected from a cohort of 503 healthy donors of diverse Asian ancestries, spanning East, Southeast, and South Asian populations. This diversity allows the observation of Asian-specific genetic regulation of splicing. For example, an sQTL of the TCHP gene has been identified to possibly influence the risk of Graves' disease in East Asian populations. Owing to the high average sequencing depth and the "exon painting" effect (incomplete reverse transcription along with stochastic mRNA cleavage and recapping that creates multiple 5' ends) captured by 5' library preparation, the AIDA scRNA-seq data preserved a substantial portion of mRNA sequences, making it particularly well-suited for splicing analysis. Cell-type-specificity in splicing regulation This study uncovered widespread context-dependent splicing events that were often specific to a particular cell type. Notably, an ancestry-biased mRNA isoform of SPSB2, likely driven by cross-population allele frequency differences in rs11064437, was found to be unannotated in canonical gene annotation. This highlighted the lack of ancestral diversity in a widely used annotation database. Not only is splicing cell-type-specific, but its genetic regulation is also cell-type-specific. Terminologically, an sQTL is a genetic variant that influences the splicing of RNA transcript. This study revealed 11,577 independent cis-sQTLs and 607 trans-sQTLs across 19 PBMC subtypes, and many of these were cell-type-specific and disease-associated. Implication in diseases and experimental validation These findings provided a unique resource for identifying genetic variants and molecular mechanisms underlying complex traits and diseases. The researchers demonstrated that diseases could be linked to splicing by showing the significant contributions of cis-sQTL effects to autoimmune and inflammatory disease. They also identified 563 putative risk genes. For example, an Asian-specific sQTL was found to disrupt the 5' splice site of TCHP exon four to putatively modulate the risk of Graves' disease in East Asian populations. The sQTL effect has been validated using a minigene experiment in K562 cells. Asst Prof Liu said, "Our study established a roadmap for population-scale single-cell splicing regulation analysis and provided insights into the development of splice-modifying therapeutics." This cell-type-specific sQTL map is a milestone in human genetics and drug target discovery for complex diseases related to splicing. Meanwhile, the examples provided in the analysis strongly suggest the importance of ancestral diversity in human genetics research. To take the research further, the team plans to leverage single-cell technology to investigate more tissues such as muscle and adipose. The ongoing research holds great promise in revealing more detailed molecular mechanisms in complex diseases at single-cell resolution. More information: Chi Tian et al, Single-cell RNA sequencing of peripheral blood links cell-type-specific regulation of splicing to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, Nature Genetics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-024-02019-8

No. 24 Illinois cruises past Chicago State 117-64 behind Kylan Boswell's triple-doubleGENEVA (AP) — World Cup sponsor Bank of America teamed with FIFA for a second time Tuesday, signing for the Club World Cup that still has no broadcast deals just over six months before games start. Bank of America became FIFA’s first global banking partner in August and sealed a separate deal for a second event also being played in the United States, two days before the group-stage draw in Miami for the revamped 32-team club event . It features recent European champions Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea. “FIFA is going to take America by storm and we’re going to be right at their side,” the bank’s head of marketing, David Tyrie, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. Bank of America joins 2026 World Cup sponsors Hisense and Budweiser brewer AB InBev in separately also backing the club event, and more deals are expected after Saudi Arabia is confirmed next week as the 2034 World Cup host. While games at the next World Cup, co-hosted with Canada and Mexico, will be watched by hundreds of millions globally mostly on free-to-air public networks, the Club World Cup broadcast picture is unclear. FIFA has promised hundreds of millions of dollars in prize money for the 32 clubs to share but is yet to announce any broadcast deals for the month-long tournament. It is expected to land on a streaming service. “You have to think about how you are going to connect with these fans,” Tyrie told the Associated Press from Boston. “TV is one, sure, social media is a big avenue. “The smart marketing capabilities are able to say ‘Hey, we need to tilt this one a little bit more away from TV-type marketing into social-type marketing.’ We have got a pretty decent strategy that we’re putting in place to do activation.” Engaging Bank of America’s customers and 250,000 employees are key to that strategy, Tyrie said. “It’s going to be for our clients, and entertainment, it’s going to be for our employees in creating excitement. All of the above.” The Club World Cup will be played in 12 stadiums across 11 cities, including Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C, and Lumen Field where the hometown Seattle Sounders play three group-stage games. European powers Madrid, Man City and Bayern Munich lead a 12-strong European challenge. Teams qualified by winning continental titles or posting consistently good results across four years of those competitions. The exception is Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, who FIFA gave the entry reserved for a host nation team in October based on regular season record without waiting for the MLS Cup final. LA Galaxy hosts New York Red Bulls playing for that national title Saturday. Messi’s team opens the FIFA tournament June 15 in the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium and will play its three group games in Florida. “The more brand players you bring in, the bigger the following you have got,” Tyrie acknowledged, though adding Messi being involved was “not a make or break for the event.” The Club World Cup final is July 13 at Met Life Stadium near New York, which also will host the World Cup final one year later. AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Live streams of Taylor Swift’s sold-out Eras Tour concerts in Toronto give devoted fans a window into the spectacle of outfits, surprise songs and elaborate stages from one of the biggest cultural events in recent memory. As the massive tour inches toward its final three shows in Vancouver early next month, feeding Swifties’ insatiable appetite has become a nightly tradition for a handful of live stream hosts based all over the world. They act as ringleaders for tens of thousands of viewers witnessing Swift’s constantly evolving show through unofficial channels. “I never saw it being as big as it is,” said Tess Bohne, one of the personalities credited as a pioneer of the Swift live streams. “There is a big idea of community (and) being present without being there.” Broadcasting unauthorized concert live streams on social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, but it’s one that’s been amplified with Swift’s tour. As their popularity grows, the streams are sparking conversations about copyright law and the delicate balance between protecting intellectual property and allowing listeners to embrace their fandom. “We’ve gone beyond art being a one-way conversation from the artist to the audience,” said Jay Kerr-Wilson, an IP lawyer and co-leader of Fasken’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications Group in Ottawa. “Copyright owners, generally speaking, are being more flexible and they’re not necessarily (thinking) black-and-white.” Representatives for the singer did not respond to requests for comment. For fans, the lines are already blurred. Bohne got wrapped up in the Swift live-streaming phenomenon nearly two years ago after she attended the second night of the Eras Tour, in Glendale, Ariz., and found herself consumed by the experience for days afterward. “(Often) you go to a concert and you’re like, ‘That was great, let’s move on with my life,’” the 33-year-old explained in a video call from Salt Lake City. “But there was something different. It was like, ‘No, that wasn’t enough. I’m not done.’” Eager to relive the high she felt, Bohne chased down the TikTok profiles of fellow Swifties streaming other stops on the tour. With little technical experience, she began rebroadcasting their videos, with credit, on her own TikTok profile. She would place an iPad playing their feed in front of her phone’s camera, and then swap it out with her other iPad when she found a user with a better angle of the concert. The crude setup initially drew a few thousand viewers, she said, and with more effort put into the productionher audience has grown to 100,000 to 200,000 during peak moments. Since her initial broadcast, Bohne estimates she’s streamed more than 110 of Swift’s concerts in a split-screen format, streaming the concert in one corner and munching on snacks in the other while discussing all things Swift with a chat room of strangers. Some fans donate cash, and her social media status has helped attract influencer partnerships. But the stay-at-home mom of three children said this is primarily a labour of love. Bohne is credited by many of her contemporaries as the one who inspired them to take a shot at hosting their own Eras Tour with live commentary. “A lot of people say it’s like religion for them,” explained Lucas Chalub, a Twitch streamer and longtime Swiftie. Chalub first experimented with hosting streams in August 2023. Rumours swirled that the singer might announce the release date for one of her re-recorded albums on stage in Los Angeles, so many Swifties sought out live feeds, which included his impromptu setup that night. “A lot of people joined,” remembered the 27-year-old sports journalist from Argentina. “That’s the first night that I said, ‘Why not do this every night?’” Chalub said he usually draws on streams from 10 to 15 concertgoers who are often aware their recordings might get picked up by the streaming hosts. Many bring power banks to recharge their devices and sometimes a backup phone. “We are not the heroes that people think we are,” Chalub added of his fellow streamers, crediting fans on the ground who do their work pro bono. “The real heroes are the people in the venue spending — or wasting — their time trying to live stream for us instead of enjoying the show.” The legality around live streaming Swift’s concerts is murky. In the simplest terms, the rebroadcasting of copyrighted music without a licence isn’t allowed, and platforms such as YouTube and TikTok have sometimes shut down live feeds mid-stream at the behest of record labels. It happened to Ammir Shar, a 25-year-old streamer from Blackpool, U.K., who saw his YouTube feed for the fourth Toronto concert yanked down while the show was in progress. Hosts say they worry about racking up too many takedown notices, which can risk permanently shutting down their channels. Usually after a live stream ends, they delete the footage from platforms like YouTube. However, they say attempts to silence them won’t amount to much. When one streamer falls, sometimes two others turn up. Copyright owners are still grappling with that perspective, especially when unsanctioned live streams can impact other financial stakes, said Kerr-Wilson. In Swift’s case, she sold the streaming rights to her “The Eras Tour” film to Disney Plus for US$75 million. Arguably, the lawyer suggested, a company might take issue with similar options on the market, such as a live stream. But even that seems to be an evolving conversation. “People have realized that social media and user-generated content isn’t the enemy, and, in fact, can be a powerful way to engage with fans and to be part of the conversation,” he said. “I think the trend is going to continue.” While Swift hasn’t publicly said much about the streams, several streamers believe she is aware of them. They also argue the vast majority of people tuning into their feeds already have an investment in Swift’s success. Last November, a group of technologically savvy Swifties launched Swift Alert, a phone app that sends out alerts for the highlights of each Eras Tour show. Inside the app, the creators also launched a game called Mastermind — named after a Swift song, of course — where fans can win prizes by guessing which of Swift’s rotating selection of outfits she’ll wear for each “era” of her performance. Using Swift Alert in tandem with the live streams, many fans tune in for the standout moments of the three-hour concert. “A lot of people compare it to fantasy football,” Shah said. “This kind of stuff brings us closer together.” With the Eras Tour set to end in Vancouver on Dec. 8, many live streamers say they’re uncertain how the future looks. Recently, Bohne experimented with a live stream from pop singer Meghan Trainor’s concert to see if there’s similar interest. While it was enjoyable, she said the experience wasn’t quite the same. Others have started streaming Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour. They say her shows are closest to Swift’s because Carpenter is a natural at witty banter, performs nightly surprise songs and changes up her outfits. “I’ve considered doing a few other (musicians, but they) are more like normal concerts — the artist on the stage with a microphone in one outfit, just singing their songs,” said Shah. “It’s not something that people at home will be like, ‘What outfit is she going to wear?’” Some wonder how live streaming will look without the intrigue of Swift’s tour. Added Bohne: “No concert is like The Eras Tour.”So mark your calendars and get ready to ring in the New Year with a bang – the "Moonlight Bang!" is coming to a theater near you, and it promises to be a rollicking good time that will leave you laughing long after the credits roll. Get ready to laugh, cry, and cheer as Fei Xiang, Ma Dongxi, and Song Xiaobao take you on a wild and wacky adventure that is sure to be a comedic masterpiece.

Step into a world of ancient intrigue and thrilling martial arts with "Ming Dynasty: Wings of Abyss," a visually stunning and action-packed role-playing game set in the tumultuous period of the late Ming Dynasty. As the overseas launch of this highly anticipated game draws near, fans and newcomers alike are eagerly anticipating the opportunity to immerse themselves in this immersive and captivating gaming experience.Ruben Amorim impressed with Arsenal’s corners after first defeat as Man Utd boss

Smith's career-high 205 yards rushing carries San Diego past Morehead State 37-14NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Report with the AI impact on market trends - The global managed detection and response services market size is estimated to grow by USD 6.2 billion from 2024-2028, according to Technavio. The market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 23.58% during the forecast period. Focus on outsourcing business-related tasks beyond an organizations competencies is driving market growth, with a trend towards increasing application of user behavior analytics. However, possibilities of failures during the implementation poses a challenge. Key market players include Alphabet Inc., Arctic Wolf Networks Inc., Armor Defense Inc, Blackpoint Cyber, Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., Broadcom Inc., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc., CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., Cybereason Inc, Cynet security Ltd, Dell Technologies Inc., eSentire Inc., Fortinet Inc., International Business Machines Corp., Palo Alto Networks Inc., Rapid7 Inc., SENTINELONE INC., Sophos Ltd., Trend Micro Inc., and Trustwave Holdings Inc.. AI-Powered Market Evolution Insights. Our comprehensive market report ready with the latest trends, growth opportunities, and strategic analysis- View Free Sample Report PDF Key Market Trends Fueling Growth In today's digital world, organizations face increasing threats from cyberattacks such as ransomware and crypto -jacking incidents. With the shortage of cybersecurity skills, managing security alerts and incidents becomes a challenge. Government regulations and compliance requirements add to the complexity. MDR providers offer a solution by using detection algorithms, threat intelligence, and ML/AI to identify and respond to threats in real-time. IoT devices, networks, and cloud computing are key areas of focus. MDR systems provide expert investigation, 24/7 monitoring, and improved threat detection. Vulnerability management and EDR tools are essential for security implementation. MDR services offer flexibility, improved security, and reduced maintenance costs. Organizations can protect their assets from cybersecurity attacks, loss of business, and data security risks. Customization and deployment are crucial for businesses dealing with operational risks and business continuity. With the rapid digitization of IT & Telecom, Retail & E-commerce, and other industries, MDR services are a must-have for any organization looking to stay ahead of the curve. Protect your business from malware, phishing, SQL injection, DNS tunneling attacks, and more with the help of MDR providers and their team of security researchers and engineers. User behavior analytics is a valuable tool for enterprises seeking to enhance their network security. By analyzing the actions of users, this technology enables organizations to identify lateral movements, compromised credentials, and risky behaviors that may indicate a cyber threat. Managed detection and response service providers are integrating user behavior analytics with pre-built detections and intruder traps to provide more comprehensive security solutions. This combination allows security teams to respond quickly to threats that may evade traditional security measures, ensuring the protection of critical business assets. Insights on how AI is driving innovation, efficiency, and market growth- Request Sample! Market Challenges Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services have become essential for organizations to safeguard their assets from evolving cyber threats. With the rise of ransomware and crypto -jacking incidents, cybersecurity skills are in high demand to manage an increasing number of security alerts. Government regulations and compliance requirements add to the complexity. MDR providers use detection algorithms, threat intelligence, and ML/AI to identify and respond to cyberattacks on IT & Telecom networks, IoT devices, and digital transformation projects. However, challenges persist. Ransomware attacks can cause significant business loss, and the cost of maintaining in-house cybersecurity teams is high. MDR systems offer improved threat detection, expert investigation, and 24/7 monitoring. However, customization and operational risks can hinder deployment. Flexibility and reduced maintenance are key benefits. MDR providers employ security researchers and engineers to manage security cases, and their systems use ML and behavioral analytics to detect targeted cyberattacks. Vulnerability management and EDR tools are crucial for effective security implementation. Malware, phishing, SQL injection, and DNS tunneling attacks are common threats. Rapid digitization and the increasing use of cloud technology, mobile devices, web applications, and social media platforms add to the risk. MDR services help organizations stay ahead of these threats and ensure business continuity. The implementation of Managed Detection and Response Services (MDR) in an organization comes with potential challenges that may hinder market growth. One significant challenge is the risk of errors during implementation, which can make clients hesitant to adopt MDR and instead opt for traditional security solutions. The implementation process is intricate and involves multiple tasks such as project management, compliance, vulnerability management, content management, event monitoring, access control, and device management. Each of these tasks requires meticulous execution to ensure success. Furthermore, during the planning phase, MDR providers must carefully choose the required devices, determine their placement within the client's architecture, and configure them correctly. The complexity of these processes necessitates a high level of expertise and attention to detail. Insights into how AI is reshaping industries and driving growth- Download a Sample Report Segment Overview This managed detection and response services market report extensively covers market segmentation by 1.1 Large enterprises 1.2 Small and medium enterprises 2.1 Hosted 2.2 On-premises 3.1 North America 3.2 Europe 3.3 APAC 3.4 South America 3.5 Middle East and Africa 1.1 Large enterprises- Large enterprises, particularly those in the finance, healthcare, and technology sectors of the Fortune 500, dominate the global managed detection and response services market. These organizations prioritize threat detection and response capabilities due to their extensive networks and valuable data assets. Managed detection and response services offer advanced threat intelligence, real-time monitoring, and incident response, addressing the cybersecurity needs of large companies. Notable examples include a major global financial institution and a leading technology conglomerate, which have enhanced their security posture through managed detection and response solutions. As cyber threats continue to evolve, the demand for these services among large organizations is projected to rise significantly, fueling the expansion of the global managed detection and response services market. Download complimentary Sample Report to gain insights into AI's impact on market dynamics, emerging trends, and future opportunities- including forecast (2024-2028) and historic data (2018 - 2022) Research Analysis Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services have gained significant traction in today's threat landscape, where organizations face an increasing number of cybersecurity challenges, including ransomware attacks and crypto -jacking incidents. With the shortage of cybersecurity skills, MDR providers offer a solution by monitoring security alerts and responding to threats in real-time. Government regulations and compliance requirements add to the pressure, making it essential for businesses to protect their IT & Telecom assets from threats. MDR services leverage detection algorithms, threat intelligence, AI, and ML to identify and mitigate risks. IoT devices, retail & e-commerce, and other industries are prime targets for cybercriminals, making MDR services indispensable for securing critical data and infrastructure. Security researchers and engineers work together to analyze security cases and provide effective solutions to keep organizations safe. Market Research Overview The Managed Detection and Response (MDR) market is witnessing significant growth due to the increasing number of ransomware and crypto -jacking incidents. With the shortage of cybersecurity skills in the market, MDR providers offer organizations expert investigation and 24/7 monitoring to enhance threat detection and response. Government regulations and compliance requirements are driving the demand for MDR services, especially in IT & Telecom, Retail & E-commerce, and other industries. The integration of IoT devices, ML, AI, and behavioral analytics into MDR systems improves threat detection and incident response. MDR providers leverage threat intelligence and detection algorithms to protect networks and assets from cyberattacks. The flexibility of MDR services allows organizations to reduce operational risks and improve business continuity. However, the cost of maintenance and customization can be a concern for some businesses. The risk to businesses from cybersecurity attacks, loss of customer data, and the cost of maintaining in-house security teams are significant. MDR systems utilize EDR tools and ML to investigate security cases and improve security implementation. The deployment of MDR services in the cloud and the protection of web browsing, mobile devices, web applications, social media platforms, and other digital assets are essential in today's rapidly digitizing world. Malware, phishing, SQL injection, DNS tunneling attacks, and other cyber threats continue to pose a risk to businesses. MDR providers offer organizations the expertise and resources to mitigate these threats and ensure data security. Table of Contents: 1 Executive Summary 2 Market Landscape 3 Market Sizing 4 Historic Market Size 5 Five Forces Analysis 6 Market Segmentation End-user Large Enterprises Small And Medium Enterprises Deployment Hosted On-premises Geography North America Europe APAC South America Middle East And Africa 7 Customer Landscape 8 Geographic Landscape 9 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 10 Company Landscape 11 Company Analysis 12 Appendix About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contacts Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE TechnavioThis holiday season, Jesica Cadiam Standley, a Maui fire survivor, is grateful to have a place to call home for the holidays. This holiday season, Jesica Cadiam Standley, a Maui fire survivor, is grateful to have a place to call home for the holidays. Standley, a single mother of eight, earlier this month won the lottery for one of the units at Kaiaulu o Kuku‘ia, an affordable, 200-unit housing development in Lahaina. CVS, which operates Longs Drugs in Hawaii, contributed about $17.5 million in equity investments toward the project, in collaboration with Ikaika ‘Ohana, a local nonprofit, Urban Housing Communities and Hunt Capital Partners. (function(d,s,n){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];js=d.createElement(s);js.className=n;js.src="//player.ex.co/player/bdc806f4-0fc1-40a1-aff0-a3d5239c169c";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}(document,"script","exco-player")); The project was under construction prior to the Lahaina wildfire last August, and was able to resume as none of the buildings were seriously damaged. CVS says it is the first new permanent housing on the island since the fire. So far, families have moved into about 40 units, and 88 are expected to be moved in by the end of the month, according to CVS. The rent ranges from about $700 to $2,000 per month. After having lost her Lahaina home to the fire, Standley and her family have been moving from hotel room to hotel room, and more recently, renting a two- bedroom apartment for more than $3,000 outside of Lahaina, which resulted in challenges getting the kids to school on time. Now they have a place to call home in Lahaina, less than a mile where Standley was born and raised. “We’re so grateful and so happy,” said Standley. “It’s been a long road since the fire ... The kids are super excited, and just overjoyed.” The Christmas tree is decorated and stockings hung, and it finally feels like home. Last year, Standley said they were in a hotel room, and did not put up a Christmas tree. She still remembers Aug. 8, 2023, the day of the wildfire, as if it were yesterday. Standley lived in Kuhua Camp, where many residents perished after wildfire quickly engulfed the area. She has told the story dozens of times, and still remembers all the details. Early that morning, her grown daughter, who lived in a nearby apartment with a sibling, texted her to say she had a dream about a fire, with the wind blowing and a dog barking. Throughout the day, her daughter kept calling to say there was indeed a fire, and that she should watch out for it. As the fire closed in later that day, Standley remembers exactly where she was at 3 p.m. — sitting at the kitchen table — when she heard a neighbor across the street screaming. “As I open my lanai doors, I could feel the heat,” she said. “Then I started yelling, ‘Get in the car!’” She gathered her younger children, along with three from the neighborhood that were over playing that day, jumped in the car and drove away. She did not have time to gather any items, including her wedding ring inside the house. She remembers that there were two exits from her neighborhood, and that, “we went right.” That decision would perhaps make the difference between life and death, she said, due to the traffic that came to a standstill on the other side, blocking the way out. In her mind, Standley said, “I kept thinking to myself, we’re going to come back.” After all, the family had experienced a fire in 2018, and had been able to return to their home. She remembers as they drove, how a set of dark clouds settled over Lahaina. “It just eclipsed the sun,” she said. “It just got to this eerie, black darkness.” Standley would come to realize she would never be able to return, as her home burned down in the fire that day, taking more than 101 lives and destroying thousands of buildings, including historic Lahaina town. Standley, who lost her husband in 2021, has eight children ranging from ages 8 to 31, the eldest of whom lives in Honolulu. She is grateful all were accounted for and survived the fire. Having a permanent place to call home, alongside many fellow Lahaina survivors and close to schools and her work, has been a relief, she said, and feels like “somewhere where we belong.” “To have something that’s affordable, it’s just a weight off your shoulders,” she said. “It’s almost like you have your dignity back.” Still, she expects a long road ahead to recovery, for survivors as well as all of Lahaina. CVS, with the help of dozens of volunteers from the University of Hawaii Maui College, put together “welcome home” gift baskets for the new residents of Kaiaulu o Kuku‘ia last week with air filters, cookware, towels, children’s night lights and other household items. CVS Health also invested $17.3 million with The Kobayashi Group, The Ahe Group and CREA LLC to build 169 affordable housing units at Parkway Village in Kapolei, which is to bring over 400 affordable rentals to the community. CVS says equitable access to stable housing is one of the barriers to better health. Both affordable home projects are also expected to offer tuition-free preschools.

In conclusion, the incidents of "faintness" in the Zhengzhou bathhouses serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning and the importance of stringent safety measures in public spaces. By addressing the root causes of these incidents and implementing effective preventive measures, we can safeguard the health of individuals and prevent similar tragedies in the future.

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Elon Musk’s xAI Raises $6 Billion in FundingCOLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork said Thursday that he is "absolutely" confident that Ryan Day will be back as football coach in 2025. Calls to fire the sixth-year coach rose among Ohio State fans after the Buckeyes lost to Michigan for the fourth straight year. Bjork, in an interview on 97.1 The Fan, said Day is the man for the job, regardless of how the Buckeyes perform in the College Football Playoff. They host Tennessee in a first-round game Dec. 21. "Coach Day is awesome," said Bjork, who came from Texas A&M to replace the retiring Gene Smith last summer. "He's great to work with. He totally gets it. He loves being a Buckeye. So, we're going to support him at the highest level." The 13-10 loss to Michigan followed by an ugly melee between the teams put the coach in a precarious spot. He and his team were booed off the field by the home fans. Bjork ended up releasing a statement expressing his support for the coach. "The reason we had to say something after (the Michigan) game is, we're still breathing, we're still alive," Bjork said. "The season's not over. The book is not closed." Thanks to the playoff, Day has a chance to redeem himself with Ohio State's huge fanbase with a win against the Volunteers — and perhaps more in the 12-team tournament. Regardless of what happens, Day will be back next year, according to Bjork. "Coach Day and I just hit it off so well," Bjork said. "I've been really, really impressed. Every single time I talked to him, I learn something. He's innovative. He recruits at the highest level. He's got a great staff." Day wouldn't directly address his job status last weekend. "When you first come off those types of things, there's a lot of emotion," he said, referring to the Michigan loss. "And then as time goes on, you've got to get refocused because you know what you've done in the past does not affect what's going on moving forward. Everything is out in front of us." Failing to consistently beat Michigan is one of the few flaws in Day's coaching record. Hired as a member of coach Urban Meyer's staff in 2017, Day was the hand-picked successor when Meyer retired after the 2018 season. Compiling an overall 66-10 record, he is widely admired in the coaching community. "Great respect for what he's done in his coaching career, what he's done there at Ohio State and the success that they've had year-in and year-out," Tennessee coach Josh Heupel said. Day is in trouble now because losing The Game is considered an unforgiveable sin by Buckeyes fans. "What we have to do is this whole 'championship or bust' mentality, you want that as the goal, but it has to be about the process," Bjork said. "To me, we've got to maybe change some conversations a little bit. I think we need to maybe just approach things a little bit differently."Minister of Railways, Information & Broadcasting and Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, inaugurated the East Side Entry of Cuttack Railway Station this evening, marking a significant milestone in the Station’s Redevelopment under the Amrit Stations Scheme. This new entry, along with the East Side Station Building, is set to transform passenger travel, offering improved accessibility, safety, and convenience. The East Side Entry is designed to provide seamless movement for passengers arriving from the National Highway side, making the station more accessible and ensuring hassle-free access. This development is a part of an ambitious Rs 303 crore project aimed at redeveloping Cuttack Railway Station into a modern transportation hub with world-class amenities. Shri Vaishnaw, in his address at the inauguration, emphasized the importance of this development in improving passenger experience and enhancing the connectivity of the region. He highlighted that this project will also contribute to socio-economic growth by boosting trade and commerce, making Cuttack Railway Station a key hub in the region. Key Features of the East Side Station Building: The East Side Entry project, completed at a cost of Rs 14.63 Crores, addresses long-standing demands for better connectivity in the region. The new infrastructure is expected to streamline station operations and improve passenger flow, enhancing safety and travel efficiency. The station will serve passengers not only from Cuttack but also from surrounding districts such as Paradeep, Jagatsingpur, Kendrapara, Jajpur, Badamba, Narasinghpur, and Niali. With a focus on passenger comfort and safety, this development is poised to become a model for future railway station redevelopments across the country. Key Benefits:

Australia news LIVE: Dutton to announce Coalition’s nuclear policy; Early rates cut unlikely as unemployment dips

Lindsey Johnson Edwards/TikTok One woman's dedication to sharing her experience with a rare illness is educating and inspiring creators across TikTok. uses the platform to chronicle her journey with . The Mayo Clinic defines it as "a rare disorder found at birth involving problems in the development of certain blood vessels, soft tissues (such as skin and muscles), bones and sometimes the lymphatic system. The main features include a red birthmark, ranging in color from pink to reddish-purple, atypical vein or lymphatic development, and overgrowth of tissues and bones." "At the time I was diagnosed in the womb, it was called CLOVES syndrome, which was kind of an umbrella term for a lot of similar diseases," Edwards tells PEOPLE exclusively. (CLOVES stands for Congenital Lipomatous Overgrowth, Vascular Malformations, Epidermal Nevis, Spinal/Skeletal Anomalies/Scoliosis.) "They could tell on ultrasounds that I had significant overgrowth." Without much knowledge around the syndrome at the time, they were unsure of what to expect for their daughter. At times, they weren't certain she'd survive labor and delivery. "They weren't sure that my heart or my lungs would be able to take it," Edwards shared. "I ended up making out okay and then at that point, everyone sort of shrugged their shoulders and didn't really know what to do." Related: Edwards' parents had to get to work as her advocates and began the process of finding physicians who were familiar with the syndrome. For the first few months of her life, she saw countless doctors in her parents' search for answers. Someone was able to point her mom to a Boston specialist, so she sent him a letter, along with video and photos of Edwards to get his assessment. "A few weeks later, my mom got a call from his secretary saying he would be in Arizona to play golf in a few weeks and had a layover at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. If we could meet him there, he would see him and see what he could do," she recalls. The family took advantage of the opportunity, which started a journey of Edwards getting medical care in Boston. "Every probably six months or so, I would go through very long surgeries. He'd usually work on both arms and hands, or an arm and my chest or my back," she shares. "I'd usually spend about 18 hours in surgery. He'd try to do as much as he could before I would have to go back to Texas and that's how my mom learned what Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome was and what my life would look like." Edwards' parents met other families on the same journey. Into adulthood, she'd continue to get care in Boston, having to educate other physicians she met about Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, which got its own distinction when she was about 12. "There are five or six specific diseases, overgrowth syndromes, related to the Peak 3 CA gene mutation. Up until that point, my parents had been told my condition wasn't genetic," Edwards shares. "There was no genetic component but when they discovered the gene, they re-diagnosed me." Growing up with an illness that was still being figured out was difficult for Edwards. Between dealing with the medical complications themselves and navigating people who were unkind or cruel for their lack of understanding was "really difficult," she remembers. "I already am aware as a kid that I am an anomaly. I often felt like a little bit of a lab rat because I could tell that most physicians and surgeons aside from my doctors in Boston didn't really know what to do. They were kind of shooting in the dark most of the time, so I felt like I was this thing to study. I knew they were writing journal articles about me. Then I'd get back to my normal, everyday life and I would go out in public or to school and I was made fun of for looking different and doing things differently," she says. Edwards found refuge at home, where "my family never treated me like I was different." "My home was a very safe space. That's the place where I felt normal. Out in the world, I always felt very much abnormal and I used to try to hide my hands and my arms as much as I could. So I'd be in Walmart trying to hide my hands in my pockets and my older sister would constantly pull my arms out of my pockets and my sleeves because she wasn't embarrassed. She was never embarrassed by me," Edwards recalls. "She was proud to be with me, but had no clue what I was dealing with, as someone noticing all the kids staring. Kids would ask their parents what was wrong with me and parents didn't always handle that well. So there was a lot of layers of difficulty, not only looking different but also having anatomy that very much made me different." Edwards' parents were very committed to advocating for her and teaching her to advocate for herself as she got older. "When I was growing up and I was younger, we didn't really talk about hard things. We didn't talk about mental health, about how being made fun of was affecting me. That wasn't something we ever discussed ... But we very much were problem, solvers and so, we approach things like boots on the ground, never let them see you sweat. We're just gonna figure it out." That said, there were also many joyful moments. One incident she looks back at is her mom swearing off while bargaining in prayer for her daughter's safety the first time Edwards got a heart catheter at 18. "My mom prayed and told God that she'd quit watching her favorite soap opera, , if I didn't have pulmonary hypertension," Edwards recalls in a video. "It's been 10 years and she still hasn't watched ." Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome is progressive, though that was something Edwards didn't know herself until she started seeing changes in her body around the age of 22. "I started seeing really noticeable progress," she shares. "It's always been in my upper body. Now it's started to go further up into my neck and we have noticed some facial abnormalities now. It's also proceeding lower into my abdomen and pelvis. I'm starting to have more problems with organs in ways I never expected. But that's a newer thing even physicians didn't expect. For the longest time, they thought the disease was stagnant where it was." There are also the invisible symptoms, which present challenges that people unfamiliar with her condition don't always understand. "I have a handicap placard for my car and a handicap license plate because I can't walk distances, especially in heat. My lymphatic symptom is impacted and doesn't function like it should, and so if I get too warm or I do too much physical activity — and by too much physical activity, that can mean that I like am typing on my computer for 10 minutes — it causes my hands and arms to start dramatically swelling," she explains. "I am constantly worried, every time I actually use this placard and park in a , that other people are looking at me and judging me and thinking that I don't need it because I don't look like most people expect a disabled person to look. With handicap placards, people expect lower extremity mobility aids or wheelchairs. If my lymphatic system malfunctions and I start dramatically swelling, I'll lose feeling and the ability to use my limbs." Edwards has been applauded, both within her own life and by her community on TikTok, for being so knowledgeable about her illness, while also being able to make it easier for other people to recognize what she's dealing with. "I wish I didn't have to understand my disease this well and be able to articulate the disease and my symptoms and how it manifests in my body and what I'm dealing with. I wish I didn't have to have the ability to explain it so thoroughly but I do because oftentimes my body doesn't have health complications in ways that physicians expect," she admits. "It's really scary to have to be so well educated on my disease and health complications. It's really scary as a patient because I know that if they don't believe me, they don't listen to me. They're gonna send me home and I'm gonna get really sick really quickly because, back to the lymphatic system not functioning like it should, I get really quickly. So I know that if they don't believe me and they don't listen to me, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna get sepsis, and then I'm gonna have to fight for my life, and it's gonna be really tough to recover." It can be difficult to constantly be so concerned when health issues arise, but Edwards finds comfort in practical conversation about some of these issues, while also making space for her feelings about them. "A lot of what I'm trying to do on my TikTok, is really have those conversations that my family never had. Because I recognized that I really needed someone to validate that it was okay to be upset about the hard things and it was okay to grieve the losses," she shares. The bright side of turning to social media, and the motivator for Edwards, is to raise awareness so that the burden is lightened on those who come after her. In ways, it can also help her in her own struggles. "One of the the positive things about TikTok is that it's allowed me to explain CLOVES to health care providers that follow me — not just in my area, but across the country. It allows me to educate them on, not just CLOVES, but that health complications might present differently for rare patients in general." Edwards' TikTok journey began when she attempted to have a planned surgical procedure for a third time, only to have it cancelled while in the operating room because of complications from her illness. "They found the new vascular malformations in my neck and they were blocking the way. There was no way to get around it to do the nerve block, so we had to cancel the procedure in the OR. It was devastating for me," she recalls. Not only was Edwards upset for what it would mean for her quality of life to not have this pain management option, but she also had to face the news of her disease progressing. "For it to progress under my neck is pretty scary because we've got other complications to worry about as it goes into the neck and into my head. It was really devastating, and I kept thinking about how there's no playbook on how to wake up and continue your life the next day after something like that happens, after you get devastating news," she says. With that in mind, Edwards documented the day after her surgical letdown. She was barely on TikTok on that point, but considered sharing it with her Instagram following, whom she'd already shared some CLOVES advocacy content with. "I knew that if I shared this content that I had in my mind on Instagram, I was going to get a lot of questions from family and close friends and I was going to have to talk about it. And I wasn't in the right place mentally to talk with people about what had happened and what it meant for the disease and how it was progressing," she recalls. "So I decided to go to TikTok and that would be my first video, because we didn't have many people with CLOVES on TikTok. I knew no one on TikTok would really be able to like ask follow-up questions without me providing more details. So I went to this new avenue, thinking this would be a good outlet for me to share what the next day looks like, for me. But I wouldn't have to answer hard questions that I wasn't ready to answer." She continues, "My first video was documenting trying to go to work the next day even though I was devastated and still had blue marker on my neck from where the surgeon thought he was going to enter. I needed an outlet, but I wanted an outlet where people didn't know me." In a world full of disability content creators who sometimes lean into either positivity or despair, Edwards says that her reality is "in the middle of those two extremes." "There are a lot of really hard things that happen in my life. It's a tough life, but it's also a really good life and I get to do a lot of really cool things that I love and enjoy. I try to share both sides of things. I try to show myself grieving the losses and the hard things that happen, because I know that it's helpful for other people to see someone grieving the things that are also happening to them. In an interesting way, it feels like it gives you permission to grieve your losses when you see someone else's similar losses, so I try to show those hard things to help validate what other people are going through." She adds, "That's what I want my personal life to look like. I want my everyday life to be a balance. I can't get rid of the hard things. I can't ignore the hard things. But I can also pursue the good things and the joyful things and try to make sure there's a balance. Since I want that in my everyday life. I try to also make sure that's what my content looks like." Edwards is grateful for community but also recognizes the dangers of her videos being seen or misunderstood outside of the context of her larger history, both online and medically. "What I've learned is that it's actually a really bad thing if a video goes viral because as someone with embodied differences, when a video goes viral, people who haven't been following my story are now seeing my videos. That's when I usually get comments that are incredibly ableist and harmful and hurtful," she notes. "I feel a sense of responsibility for when that happens, because a lot of my following are people with disabilities or rare diseases or who have body differences. I really feel a sense of responsibility to make sure that those comments are handled and addressed." Edwards believes social media hasn't caught up to modern hate, saying that nasty comments regularly skirt by because they don't violate the terms of service by avoiding "particular slurs." "I end up having to block people because the platforms aren't dealing with the ableist comments and that's really disappointing," she says. "You shouldn't be afraid of a video doing well and going viral. But it's a scary thing because as someone with embody differences, I know what's going to happen in the comments when a video does well." Through her content, Edwards is also displaying the rich, full life she's still able to lead with CLOVES, not taking for granted any moment of her journey. She is part of the family advisory counsel for , a non-profit that helps the community fund research and come closer to solutions that improve the quality of life for those living with the rare illness. Edwards is also married, enjoying the support she gets from her husband and also the times they live in the moment, "demedicalizing" their day-to-day life. "He picks up medicines from the pharmacy for me. Usually weekly, I go to appointments. We're having a lot of conversations about what's happening at my appointments and things like that he's taking me to scans and imaging in the evenings and that's a lot of what our life looks like," she says. "But there are these pockets of our days and our weeks that we can try to de-medicalize and so that's what we're working on and trying to find more of, times where we can just enjoy the things that we enjoy." In addition to the many journeys she's facing, Edwards is also pursuing a PhD, hoping to turn her passion into changes for her community. "Academia is not always disability friendly. I've run into a lot of roadblocks in my pursuit of higher education, but this program has been so accommodating. It's made the PhD process even more enjoyable for me because I'm not having to hurt my body to meet the requirements." "They're helping me preserve my body function as much as possible and my dissertation is on quality of life, which is a topic that's really important to me as a patient and to the rare disease community overall. I really get to marry my academic interests with my life as a patient and desire to advocate for my community." Edwards is grateful for an audience showering her with support every step of the way. "I have developed a community of people that really do know me," she says. "That's been a real gift." Read the original article onOur computer model projects a win for the Los Angeles Chargers when they face the Atlanta Falcons at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sunday, Dec. 1 at 1 p.m. ET — for more information regarding the spread, over/under and final score, see below. Looking for NFL tickets? Head to StubHub today and see your team live. The Chargers are totaling 322.6 yards per game on offense this season (21st in NFL), and they are allowing 323.6 yards per game (12th) on defense. The Falcons rank 16th in the NFL with 22.2 points per contest on offense, and they rank 25th with 24.9 points surrendered per game on defense. BetMGM is one of the most trusted Sportsbooks in the nation. Start with as little as $1 and place your bets today . Ready to make your pick? Head to BetMGM using our link and start betting today. Watch this game on Fubo (Regional restrictions may apply) Rep your favorite NFL players with officially licensed gear. Head to Fanatics to find jerseys, shirts, hats, and much more. Catch every NFL touchdown with NFL RedZone on Fubo. Not all offers available in all states, please visit BetMGM for the latest promotions for your area. Must be 21+ to gamble, please wager responsibly. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, contact 1-800-GAMBLER .Financial Institutions, Inc. 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Racing Optics® Introduces Game-Changing Twilight Tearoff to Enhance Visibility in Low-Light Racing ConditionsLONDON, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Britain's Financial Conduct Authority is promising millions of people help with their pensions under new proposals that include offering access to free, targeted support to allow consumers to make more informed decisions about their retirement. Laying out the plans on Wednesday evening, the FCA said the proposals were part of a wider review with the government of the boundary between investment advice and guidance, adding that informed investment decisions ensured healthy capital markets. "We know people find pensions particularly difficult to understand, so we are deliberately starting with this to help consumers with their pension decisions," said Sarah Pritchard, the FCA's director of consumers, competition and international. More than 16 million people in Britain save for their retirement into defined contribution pension schemes, whose value depends on the performance of pension investments. The regulator said the vast majority of consumers were ill-equipped to manage complex pension decisions confidently and that some suffered from the "Ostrich effect", failing to ask questions because they feared discovering whether their pension pots were sufficient or not. Insurers say they would like to provide targeted advice for customers, which they see as a cheaper but useful alternative to full regulated advice. But the FCA on Wednesday suggested that targeted support should be provided by the industry for free. It pointed out that only 9% of adults had taken full regulated advice in the last 12 months, while its flagship 2024 Financial Lives , opens new tab survey showed that 75% of consumers aged over 45 do not have a clear plan for how to take money from their pension or do not know they have to make a choice. Under the proposals, firms could identify people drawing down on their pension unsustainably or help consumers who are uncertain about how to take a retirement income, offering bespoke suggestions to specific consumer groups who share the same characteristics. "This is a once-in-a-decade opportunity and it's critical everyone across the industry gets behind this theme for the benefit of savers," said Stephen Lowe, group communications director at retirement specialist Just Group. "Closing the advice gap by a meaningful amount is realistically likely to be a multi-year project. Targeted support could be a game changer and it’s the service that has generated most optimism." Sign up here. Reporting by Kirstin Ridley, additional reporting by Carolyn CohnEditing by Keith Weir Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab

Thousands of people took to the streets of the Slovakia capital Thursday to protest against Culture Minister Martina Simkovicova who has dismissed several heads of major cultural institutions and halted projects steered by LGBT+ associations under the pretext of promoting "Slovak culture". Simkovicova, a 53-year-old former television anchor, has been a controversial figure since taking office in October 2023. "I am frustrated and very angry about the way culture is being destroyed and organizations are falling apart," Svetlana Fialova, a 39-year-old visual artist and lecturer, told AFP. "What is happening in Slovakia is ... what is happening in Georgia, Hungary and other countries, where people who collaborate and play to Russian tunes are coming to power and trying to suppress democracy and culture," she said. "The culture of the Slovaks should be Slovak -- Slovak and none else," Simkovicova said in one early speech. Nominated by the nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS), she has also slammed "LGBT+ ideology" for causing Europe to "die out". Her views have appealed to Prime Minister Robert Fico from the centrist Smer party, whose objections to liberal values echo Viktor Orban, the prime minister of neighbouring Hungary. Simkovicova had worked notably for the Slovan TV channel, known for spreading conspiracy theories, xenophobia and pro-Russian views. Slovak National Gallery director Alexandra Kusa lost her job in August in what opponents said was part of Simkovicova's purge. "Culture ministry staff accompanied by a lawyer showed up in my office one day with a bunch of flowers and a notice," she told AFP. Kusa, who has been reduced to the post of exhibition curator, said the ministry had launched a derogatory campaign against her. She says she was punished for backing Matej Drlicka, the National Theatre director, who was sacked a day earlier. The head of the country's heritage institute was dismissed this week. "We are not compatible with the ministry. Their idea of culture is completely different from ours," Kusa said. She accuses the ministry of launching "an era of bullying and intimidation". "It's pure destruction and demonstration of power. It's terrible." The ministry did not respond to AFP's request to comment. Simkovicova also targets public media. In June, she pushed through a law reforming the state-run RTVS broadcaster into a new company, STVR, which is under her control. Analyst Pavol Hardos told AFP that wielding political influence over cultural institutions had a precedent in Slovakia. "This is something we experienced in the 1990s during the illiberal regime of Vladimir Meciar, when there were ideological tests and tests ... of who is a good nationalist, a good Slovak, and who isn't," he said. What is new is the government's "commitment to purge cultural institutions from anyone who is in any way perceived as potentially a political enemy", Hardos said. Open-minded and liberal people are "being targeted as a potential troublemaker, and people who are often enough real experts in their areas are being sidelined or thrown out," he added. Hardos said that while it was premature to talk about "an illiberal regime", Fico is walking in Orban's footsteps. The government is also targeting LGBT+ rights organisations. Early this year, Simkovicova said they would not get "a cent" from her ministry. She has recently curbed public subsidies for LGBT+ groups. "This concerns any project with links to LGBT+," said Martin Macko, head of the Iniciativa Inakost NGO. He said attacks on the minority were growing, as were the number of people being treated by the NGO's therapists. The situation has incited protests among artists, cultural institution staff and the public, who turn their backs on directors named by Simkovicova or read protest statements on theatre stages. Large rallies were held this year, mobilising tens of thousands of people. Two petitions written by artists have solicited 400,000 signatures in the EU member country of 5.4 million people. In the Slovak parliament, the opposition initiated a vote to dismiss Simkovicova, but the attempt fell through. "No culture ministry employee prevents anyone from being creative or expressing themselves," Simkovicova told the press. sc-anb-frj-kym/tw

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Paris: Togo's first senatorial elections have been pushed back by two weeks to February 15 "to allow political actors to better organise themselves", according to a presidential decree published Friday evening. Campaigning will officially start January 30. The vote is one of the last steps towards the implementation of a new constitution, which has been strongly criticised by the opposition and civil society. Several political parties had asked for the delay to allow them more time to register candidates. But some major opposition parties, such as the National Alliance for Change (ANC), have said they will boycott the election, which they consider to be part of a "constitutional coup d'etat". Officially created by a constitutional revision in 2002, the Senate has never been set up. It will be composed of 61 members, with 41 senators elected by regional and municipal councillors and the rest appointed by the president of the Council of Ministers. The new constitution, which replaces the direct election of the head of state by a parliamentary system, has been denounced as a way for President Faure Gnassingbe to hold on to power indefinitely. Gnassingbe is president of the majority party, UNIR, which won 108 of the 113 seats in the April 2024 legislative elections. He has led the West African country of 8.8 million people since 2005, when he took over from his father who had been in power for 38 years.

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The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for change in the judicial system, speeding up the adoption of remote court hearings. The Minnesota Judicial Branch has made significant investments in technology to facilitate these hearings, aiming to improve access to justice, enhance efficiency, and meet evolving needs, especially during and after the pandemic. We now have the ability to hold all hearings over Zoom. But just because we can, should we? ADVERTISEMENT In the 6th Judicial District — which includes Cook, Lake, St. Louis (Duluth, Hibbing, and Virginia), and Carlton counties — remote hearings offer several advantages. These include increased accessibility and cost reductions. Traveling to court in our region can be time-consuming and expensive, particularly for those who need transportation, time off from work, or child care. Remote hearings provide a lifeline to individuals with mobility issues, disabilities, or health concerns. The shift to remote hearings has helped create a more-accessible and inclusive system for individuals who rely on legal-aid organizations. This expanded access not only benefits individuals seeking legal help but also supports the continued work of legal-aid organizations and court-appointed attorneys in delivering crucial services to underserved communities. Safety has also improved, as remote hearings eliminate the need for in-person contact between parties, reducing the risk of physical confrontations, intimidation, or harassment. However, remote hearings present significant challenges as well. Fairness is the most prominent concern. Critics argue that remote hearings compromise the principle of "having your day in court." Many feel that something essential is lost when justice is dispensed through a cold screen. The emotional weight of proceedings can be harder to convey remotely, and, for some, the experience may feel diminished. Those unfamiliar with the court process may find remote hearings especially alienating or confusing. Another challenge is the digital divide. The promise of a digital courtroom falls flat for those in rural, underserved areas who lack reliable internet or cellphone service. Northeastern Minnesota, in particular, struggles with connectivity issues, creating a significant gap. Decorum is also affected. Remote hearings are often perceived as less formal, important, or personal, which can influence participants' behavior and erode respect for the judicial process. Much like how people act differently when behind a keyboard, some say or do things online they never would in person. To address these issues, Minnesota Judicial Council Policy 525, known as the "oneCourtMN Hearings Initiative Policy," aims to standardize decisions on whether court proceedings should be conducted remotely or in-person. Policy 525 can be found on the Minnesota Judicial Branch's website ( mncourts.gov) . This policy directs district-court judges to schedule and hold most hearings remotely, though certain types of hearings will remain in-person unless exceptions apply. This new framework takes effect Feb. 3. ADVERTISEMENT It’s important to note that judicial officers in your local courthouses retain the discretion to deviate from the default hearing format on a case-by-case basis. A request for an exception can be made by a party or initiated by the court by filing a Request for Remote or In-Person Appearance Form, also available at the Minnesota Judicial Branch site. As a judge, I understand that the justice system must evolve to meet the needs of changing times. The oneCourtMN Hearings Initiative Policy is a step in the right direction, designed to make our courts more efficient, accessible, and fair. Ultimately, whether a hearing is held remotely or in-person should be determined on a case-by-case basis, considering the unique circumstances and needs of all parties involved. Steve Hanke is a 6th Judicial District judge in the Lake County Courthouse in Two Harbors and in the Cook County Courthouse in Grand Marais. He is a former assistant Duluth city attorney.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A fight broke out at midfield after Michigan stunned No. 2 Ohio State 13-10 on Saturday as Wolverines players attempted to plant their flag and were met by Buckeyes who confronted them. Police had to use pepper spray to break up the players, who threw punches and shoves in the melee that overshadowed the rivalry game. Ohio State police said in a statement “multiple officers representing Ohio and Michigan deployed pepper spray.” Ohio State police will investigate the fight, according to the statement. After the Ohio State players confronted their bitter rivals at midfield, defensive end Jack Sawyer grabbed the top of the Wolverines' flag and ripped it off the pole as the brawl moved toward the Michigan bench. Eventually, police officers rushed into the ugly scene. Ohio State coach Ryan Day said he understood the actions of his players. “There are some prideful guys on our team who weren't going to sit back and let that happen,” Day said. The two Ohio State players made available after the game brushed off questions about it. Michigan running back Kalel Mullings, who rushed for 116 yards and a touchdown, didn't like how the Buckeyes players involved themselves in the Wolverines' postgame celebration. He called it “classless.” “For such a great game, you hate to see stuff like that after the game," he said in an on-field interview with Fox Sports. “It’s just bad for the sport, bad for college football. But at the end of the day, you know some people got to — they got to learn how to lose, man. ... We had 60 minutes, we had four quarters, to do all that fighting.” Michigan coach Sherrone Moore said everybody needs to do better. “So much emotions on both sides," he said. "Rivalry games get heated, especially this one. It’s the biggest one in the country, so we got to handle that better.” Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here . AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football

Ed Sheeran crashes Ruben Amorim interview in awkward exchangeSeibert misses an extra point late as the Commanders lose their 3rd in a row, 34-26 to the Cowboys

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SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Damari Monsanto's 22 points helped UTSA defeat Southwestern Adventist 117-58 on Thursday. Monsanto added six rebounds for the Roadrunners (6-5). Sky Wicks scored 20 points while shooting 8 for 12, including 4 for 7 from beyond the arc and added eight rebounds and three steals. Amir "Primo" Spears shot 5 of 10 from the field, including 1 for 5 from 3-point range, and went 5 for 6 from the line to finish with 16 points. Domonique Wilkins and Orlando Gooden each scored 19 points for Southwestern Adventist. Jason Garcia had 13 points, four assists and two steals. Monsanto led his team in scoring with 16 points in the first half to help put them up 61-24 at the break. UTSA extended its lead to 87-38 during the second half, fueled by a 13-3 scoring run. Wicks scored a team-high 10 points in the second half. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .Jimmy Carter Passes Away With One Final Parting Gift for Trump

Despite Mary Lou McDonald’s confidence around shaping a coalition without Fine Gael and Fianna Fail – the two parties that have dominated the landscape of Irish politics for a century – the pathway to government for Sinn Fein still appears challenging. With counting following Friday’s election still in the relatively early stages – after an exit poll that showed the main three parties effectively neck-and-neck – there is some way to go before the final picture emerges and the options for government formation crystalise. Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Simon Harris, has dismissed talk of a Sinn Fein surge and said he was “cautiously optimistic” about where his party will stand after all the votes are counted. Meanwhile, Ireland’s deputy premier and Fianna Fail leader, Micheal Martin, insisted his party has a “very clear route back to government” as he predicted seat gains. The counting process could last days because of Ireland’s complex system of proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV), where candidates are ranked by preference. The early indications have turned the focus to the tricky arithmetic of government formation, as the country’s several smaller parties and many independents potentially jockey for a place in government. Ms McDonald told reporters at the RDS count centre in Dublin that she would be “very, very actively pursuing” the potential to form a government with other parties on the left of the political spectrum. The smaller, left-leaning parties in Ireland include the Social Democrats, the Irish Labour Party, the Green Party and People Before Profit-Solidarity. Ms McDonald said her party had delivered an “incredible performance” in the election. “I think it’s fair to say that we have now confirmed that we have broken the political mould here in this state,” she said. “Two party politics is now gone. It’s consigned to the dustbin of history and that, in itself, is very significant.” She added: “I am looking to bring about a government of change, and I’m going to go and look at all formulations. “If you want my bottom line, the idea of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael for another five years, in our strong opinion, is not a good outcome for Irish society. “Obviously, I want to talk to other parties of the left and those that we share very significant policy objectives with. So I’m going to do that first and just hear their mind, hear their thinking. But be very clear, we will be very, very actively pursuing entrance into government.” In Friday night’s exit poll, Sinn Fein was predicted to take 21.1% of first-preference votes, narrowly ahead of outgoing coalition partners Fine Gael and Fianna Fail at 21% and 19.5% respectively. Prior to the election, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael both ruled out entering government with Sinn Fein. Fine Gael leader Mr Harris rejected suggestions Sinn Fein had broken new ground. He told reporters in his count centre in Greystones, Co Wicklow: “Certainly we haven’t seen a Sinn Fein surge or anything like it. “I mean, it looks likely, on the figures that we’ve seen now, fewer people, many fewer people would have voted Sinn Fein in this election than the last one. “In fact, I think they’re down by around 5% and actually the parties, particularly the two parties, the two larger parties in government, are likely to receive significant support from the electorate. So definitely, politics in Ireland has gotten much more fragmented.” He said it was too early to tell what the next government would look like. “I think anybody who makes any suggestion about who is going to be the largest party or the construct of the next government, they’re a braver person than I am,” he said. “Our electoral system dictates that there’ll be many, many transfers that will go on for hours, if not days, before we know the final computations at all. “But what I am very confident about is that my party will have a very significant role to play in the years ahead, and I’m cautiously optimistic and excited.” Fianna Fail’s Mr Martin told reporters at a count centre in Cork he was confident that the numbers exist to form a government with parties that shared his political viewpoint. Mr Martin said it “remains to be seen” whether he would return to the role of Taoiseach – a position he held between 2020 and 2022 – but he expressed confidence his party would outperform the exit poll prediction. “It’s a bit too early yet to call the exact type of government that will be formed or the composition of the next government,” he said. “But I think there are, there will be a sufficiency of seats, it seems to me, that aligns with the core principles that I articulated at the outset of this campaign and throughout the campaign, around the pro-enterprise economy, around a positively pro-European position, a government that will strongly push for home ownership and around parties that are transparently democratic in how they conduct their affairs.” Asked if it would be in a coalition with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Social Democrats, he said that would be “racing a bit too far ahead”. The final result may dictate that if Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are to return to government, they may need more than one junior partner, or potentially the buy-in of several independent TDs. Mr Martin said it was unclear how quickly a government can be formed, as he predicted his party would gain new seats. “It will be challenging. This is not easy,” he added. The junior partner in the outgoing government – the Green Party – looks set for a bruising set of results. Green leader Roderic O’Gorman is in a fight to hold onto his seat, as are a number of party colleagues, including Media Minister Catherine Martin. “It’s clear the Green Party has not had a good day,” he said. The early counting also suggested potential trouble for Fianna Fail in Wicklow, where the party’s only candidate in the constituency, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly, is considered to have a battle ahead, with the risk of losing his seat. Meanwhile, there is significant focus on independent candidate Gerard Hutch who, on Saturday evening, was sitting in fourth place in the four-seat constituency of Dublin Central. Last spring, Mr Hutch was found not guilty by the non-jury Special Criminal Court of the murder of David Byrne, in one of the first deadly attacks of the Hutch-Kinahan gangland feud. Mr Byrne, 33, died after being shot six times at a crowded boxing weigh-in event at the Regency Hotel in February 2016. A Special Criminal Court judge described Mr Hutch, 61, as the patriarchal figurehead of the Hutch criminal organisation and said he had engaged in “serious criminal conduct”. The constituency will be closely watched as other hopefuls wait to see if transfers from eliminated candidates may eventually rule him out of contention. In the constituency of Louth, the much-criticised selection of John McGahon appeared not to have paid off for Fine Gael. The party’s campaign was beset by questioning over footage entering the public domain of the candidate engaged in a fight outside a pub in 2018. The Social Democrats have a strong chance of emerging as the largest of the smaller parties. The party’s leader, Holly Cairns, was already celebrating before a single vote was counted however, having announced the birth of her baby girl on polling day.

NonePublished 04:45 IST, December 30th 2024 INS Tushil, India’s newest stealth missile frigate, which is a Russia-built warship, is set to reach India’s western coast by mid-February. New Delhi: INS Tushil, India’s newest stealth missile frigate, which was commissioned into the Indian Navy on December 9 at the Yantar Shipyard in Russia’s Kaliningrad, is set to reach India’s western coast by mid-February. According to the defence officials, the warship will be a part of the Mumbai-based Western Fleet. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, who attended the commissioning ceremony, hailed INS Tushil as a "proud testament" to India's growing maritime power. He also described the event as a "significant milestone" in strengthening the long-standing friendship between India and Russia. As part of efforts to strengthen naval cooperation and bilateral ties between India and Morocco, INS Tushil made a stop in Morocco’s Casablanca, on December 27, as it made its way to India. The warship will also conduct anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Guinea, located off the coast of West Africa before it reaches India. In October 2023, India and the European Union held their first naval exercise in the Gulf of Guinea aimed at boosting maritime security and fighting piracy. INS Sumedha, an offshore patrol vessel, joined forces with Italian, Spanish, and French warships during the exercise. INS Tushil is an upgraded Krivak III class frigate, part of Project 1135.6, and is one of six such vessels built for the Indian Navy. It is equipped with advanced weapons like BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, Shtil surface-to-air missiles, and an upgraded medium-range anti-air gun system. The warship is also designed for operations across air, surface, underwater, and electromagnetic domains. Notably, INS Tushil has around 26% indigenous content, which is double that of the previous Teg-class frigates. Contributions came from 33 Indian firms, including Bharat Electronics Limited, BrahMos Aerospace, and Nova Integrated Systems, a subsidiary of Tata Advanced Systems Limited. INS Tushil is part of a $2.5 billion deal with Russia for four more Krivak/Talwar class stealth frigates for the Indian Navy. Two of these ships are being built at the Yantar shipyard in Russia, while the remaining two will be constructed at Goa Shipyard Limited (GSL) with technology transfer from Russia. The second frigate, named Tamal, is expected to be commissioned into the Indian Navy in mid-2025. INS Tushil is specifically designed for blue-water operations, making it capable of handling the full spectrum of naval warfare. The ship is equipped with advanced technologies, including an electronic warfare and communication suite to enhance its operational capabilities. Updated 04:45 IST, December 30th 2024

Bob Casey concedes Pa. Senate race, congratulates Dave McCormick on winFor forty-five years, Tehran’s Shiite theocracy has heralded its political system as a model for all predominantly Muslim countries—and even beyond. “We should try hard to export our revolution,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared, in 1980, after ousting the last of several Iranian monarchies that had endured for two millennia. “We shall confront the world with our ideology.” It was the core of his government’s strategy to overtly and covertly build a network of allies—dubbed the Axis of Resistance—to serve as frontline buffers against Israel, its regional rival. In 2004, I interviewed King Abdullah II, the Sunni leader of Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty, who warned about an emerging “crescent” of Shiite powers that began in Iran and extended through Iraq, into Syria, and ended in Lebanon. The Middle East— dominated for centuries by Sunni monarchies, tribal sheikdoms, and autocracies—was being transformed by this Shiite arc, he told me. The rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites, who are a minority in the Muslim world, dates back to a dispute over political leadership after the Prophet Muhammad died, in the seventh century. It intensified after Iran’s Revolution. The international story of this year may be the collapse of Iran’s alliances. In Syria, the sadistic Assad dynasty, in power for more than a half century, has been ousted by Sunni rebels. (The Assads are members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of early Shiite Islam.) As the rebels advanced on Damascus, Tehran abruptly pulled out its Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitary forces, which had been deployed to prop up President Bashar al-Assad. “Some expect us to fight in place of the Syrian Army,” the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps told Iranian media. “Is it logical for the I.R.G.C. and Basij forces to take on full responsibility while Syria’s Army merely observes?” Several Iranian generals have been killed in Syria since 2014, the most recent one in November. Tehran also shuttered its Embassy and evacuated four thousand citizens on emergency flights. The Iranians “certainly weren’t willing or able to come to Assad’s rescue,” John Kirby, the White House national-security communications adviser, told me. “And in the aftermath of his departure, it’s clear to us that they are reëvaluating—I think is the best way to put it—their presence in Syria.” In Lebanon, the Shiite leader and military commanders of Hezbollah—the Iranian-backed party responsible for huge suicide bombings and the imprisonment of dozens of hostages spanning four decades—have been assassinated in Israeli air strikes. Hezbollah, too, withdrew its forces from Syria, and conceded that the rebel offensive there cut off routes to smuggle war matériel from Iran. In Gaza, Hamas, which has ruled the territory for eighteen years, has been decimated, and its leader killed. And in Yemen, the Houthi rebels, another Iranian ally, have been pounded in air strikes by a U.S.-led coalition in response to their attacks on ships in the Red Sea. (Houthis are Zaidi Muslims, another early Shiite offshoot, and have long been opposed by the Sunni monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.) At home, far fewer Iranians seem interested in rallying around the regime’s triumphalist imperative to “confront the world.” “The average citizen is not unhappy about what has happened in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza,” Nasser Hadian, a political scientist in Tehran, told me. “Hawks think the resistance should continue. But the average citizen thinks it is over and is happy about it. The power of the Axis of Resistance has been tremendously diminished. Reformists think it’s no longer an important source of our deterrence.” Many Iranians fear that the Syrian upheaval will generate chaos—at a potential cost to them if Tehran continues to aid and abet its allies. “We will be in a mess,” Hadian added. “We should leave it. Let the Americans, Europeans, and regional countries deal with it.” The Islamic Republic is increasingly consumed by domestic challenges. The oil-rich nation is suffering through chronic fuel and electricity shortages. Power cuts have led to repeated closures of schools, government offices, and banks. The country’s oil exports, crimped if not crippled by U.S. sanctions, have plummeted, falling twenty-five per cent short of Tehran’s official budgetary needs. After Assad left Syria, Iran’s currency sank to a record low; the exchange rate is almost eight hundred thousand rials to a dollar. (A month after the Revolution, in 1979, the rial traded at seventy-five to a dollar.) Since 2017, sporadic protests have challenged the theocracy over soaring prices of basic necessities, repression and imprisonment of dissidents, and women’s personal rights. The regime is weaker—on multiple fronts—than any time since Khomeini’s ambitious speech. At the same time, the loss of regional partners has made Iranians feel more vulnerable. Debate is now intense both within the government and in the public sphere about whether the country should escalate work on its controversial nuclear program. Tehran claims the program is for alternative energy, but it already has an amount of enriched uranium that goes beyond “any credible civilian justification,” Britain, France, and Germany charged recently. Iran could produce more than a dozen nuclear weapons, U.S. intelligence reported last month, although it will still need other sophisticated technology if it opts to do so. “I have had a hard time convincing students that the bomb will not enhance our security and will increase our vulnerability,” Hadian, who taught at the University of Tehran for decades, said. “They think we deserve it because we are a great global power—and a great power has nuclear weapons. That was true in the Shah’s time and will be the case in the future, too.” Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has noted that public statements from Iranian officials have changed in the past few months, amid strategic setbacks, and that this raises new questions about a shift in their official doctrine. “The thing about foreign policy and geopolitics is that, when good things happen, often bad things follow,” he said, this week, at the 92nd Street Y. “An adversary that has suffered blows that weaken it obviously presents—we could say, that’s a good-news story. But it also generates choices for that adversary that can be quite dangerous, and that’s something we have to remain extremely vigilant about as we go forward.” Across the Middle East, the strategic landscape has been transformed this year by physical destruction, death, political vacuums, and poverty. Uncertainty pervades. “Certainly, 2025 will be a problematic year,” Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister, who is now a vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Amman, told me. “Syria should teach the Arab world two things. First, the Arab Spring is not over and won’t be over until the problems of the region—economic prosperity and political inclusion—are properly addressed. Second, those who live by the sword die by the sword. Stability cannot be maintained by brute force.” Political dangers loom for Syria in the months ahead, and could affect its neighbors in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel. The rebel victory sounded the death knell for the Baath Party, which was founded in 1943, in Damascus, as a socialist movement meant to unify more than twenty Arab countries. Its slogan was “A single Arab nation with an eternal mission.” Branches reigned in Syria for sixty-one years and in Iraq for thirty-five, until Saddam Hussein was ousted, in 2003. The armies that propped up both Baathist regimes crumbled, in the end, with breathtaking speed. A recent study , conducted by political scientists from Georgetown, the University of Virginia, and Emory, analyzed governments created by successful rebellions between 1900 and 2020. The paper concluded that authoritarian regimes founded by fractured rebel groups were usually short-lived, as armed rivals defected and staged new rebellions. The regimes that survived were generally founded by a single rebel group. Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011, involved several militias. Five parties have claimed territory since Assad fled. “What is so critical in Syria is that we see a credible and inclusive political process that brings together all of Syria, all communities in Syria,” the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Geir O. Pedersen, has stressed. “We need to make sure that state institutions do not collapse.” The scale of destruction across the region this year has been horrific, and the death toll staggering. None of the local economies will be able to absorb the shocks anytime soon. According to World Bank estimates, seven out of ten people in Syria live in poverty. The economy has shrunk by eighty-five per cent during the civil war. Lebanon has incurred more than eight billion dollars in physical damages and economic losses. The economy in Gaza has contracted by ninety per cent; it will take until 2050 to get the G.D.P. back to prewar levels. The World Food Programme reported this month that the territory is headed toward famine. Governments in the region and beyond have been struggling over what to do, whether individually or with one another. Within a week of Assad’s ouster, many reversed their policies. On December 14th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the U.S. had been in touch with Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist militia that led the offensive, and which is still on the U.S. terrorism list. “Syria has changed more in less than a week than in any week this last half century,” Blinken told reporters. Turkey reopened its Embassy in Damascus, more than a decade after it severed diplomatic ties as the civil war escalated. In Aqaba, the Jordanian port city, a hastily convened conference of U.S., U.N., European, and Middle Eastern officials declared that Syria had the opportunity to end decades of isolation. They committed to “supporting and working with” the Syrian people during their “unprecedented transition”—notably without Iran. ♦ 2024 in Review The best movies . The best jokes . The best books . The best podcasts . Our most popular cartoons on Instagram. The animals that made it all worth it . Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

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11 states sue three largest institutional investors for anticompetitive trade practicesJimmy Carter, 39th US president, Nobel winner, dies at 100None

President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump have mourned the passing of former President Jimmy Carter . What Happened : On Sunday, Biden paid tribute to Carter in a statement on X. He touched on Carter’s extraordinary contributions to the world over six decades, referring to him as a dear friend of the nation and the world. Today, America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian. pic.twitter.com/Ki7Rhbent0 “Today, America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman, and humanitarian,” said the president. Biden acknowledged Carter’s compassion and moral clarity, which drove him to work tirelessly in various fields, including disease eradication, peacebuilding, civil rights advancement, promotion of free and fair elections, housing for the homeless, and advocacy for the underprivileged. His efforts brought about global change. See Also: Nikki Haley Blasts DOGE Co-Head Vivek Ramaswamy For His Take On ‘American Culture’ — ‘All You Have To Do Carter’s love for his wife Rosalynn was also highlighted, with their relationship being defined as the epitome of partnership. The statement expressed solace in knowing that the couple is reunited once again. “We will miss them both dearly, but take solace knowing they are reunited once again and will remain forever in our hearts,” said Biden. The Biden family expressed their gratitude to the Carter family and their staff for their service and assured that their legacy would continue. The statement ended with a call to the nation’s youth to learn from Carter’s life of purpose and humility. An official state funeral will be held in Washington D.C. to honor the late James Earl Carter, Jr., the 39th President of the United States, according to Biden’s statement. Separately, President-elect Trump said in a statement on Truth Social that while he “strongly disagreed” with Carter philosophically and politically he realized that Carter “loved and respected” the country and all it stands for. “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect. He was a truly good man and, of course, will be greatly missed,” said Trump. Trump acknowledged Carter as “very consequential” and said this was the case even after he left office. The incoming president also extended “warmest condolences” on behalf of Melania Trump in his statement. Why It Matters : Carter, born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, was the eldest son of Bessie Lillian Carter and James Earl Carter Sr. Before his political career, he was a peanut farmer and a U.S. Navy lieutenant. He was elected governor of Georgia in 1970 and U.S. president in 1976. Known as the nation’s oldest living president, Carter was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. His passing at the age of 100 marks the end of an era of dedicated public service and humanitarianism. Trump has been criticized in the past for taking digs at Carter, particularly for making comments about the funeral of former first lady Rosalynn Carter . On another occasion Trump had said Carter “wasn't a great president” but compared with Biden he was one of the “great presidents.” In September, Carter had turned 100 and received a message from Biden in which the sitting president said, “I admire you so darn much.” Photo Courtesy: Shutterstock Did You Know? Congress Is Making Huge Investments. Get Tips On What They Bought And Sold Ahead Of The 2024 Election With Our Easy-to-Use Tool This story was generated using Benzinga Neuro and edited by Shivdeep Dhaliwal © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.11 states sue three largest institutional investors for anticompetitive trade practices

Syrian President Bashar Assad has vowed to defeat the jihadists currently rampaging through the north of his country, “no matter how intense their terrorist attacks are.” Assad’s comments came as the Syrian Army geared up to defend the city of Hama from the attackers. In a phone call with Emirati President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed on Saturday, Assad stressed that “Syria continues to defend its stability and territorial integrity in the face of all terrorists,” according to a readout published by his office. Syria “is capable, with the help of its allies and friends, of defeating and eliminating them no matter how intense their terrorist attacks are,” Assad added, according to the statement. The Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group – formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra – and a collection of allied militias attacked government-controlled territory in northern Syria on Wednesday, breaking a fragile truce established by Russia and Türkiye in 2020. By Friday, HTS fighters had entered Aleppo, which had been under Syrian government control since 2016. In a statement on Saturday, the Syrian General Command said that the attack was “supported by thousands of foreign terrorists, heavy weapons, and a large number of drones,” and that dozens of Syrian Army personnel had been killed defending Aleppo. Syrian government forces succeeded in preventing the total loss of Aleppo, and have withdrawn from the city to prepare a counterattack, the general command said. According to unconfirmed reports on social media, Syrian forces have started arriving in the city of Hama – around 80km south of Aleppo – in preparation for this counteroffensive. Sporadic clashes have broken out on the outskirts of Hama as the jihadists advance on the city, Turkish media reported on Saturday. Iranian military advisers and volunteers have arrived in Hama to assist the Syrian military, according to both pro- and anti-Assad Telegram news groups. Sheikh Mohammed told Assad that the UAE “stands with the Syrian state and supports it in combating terrorism and extending its sovereignty, territorial integrity and stability,” according to Assad’s office. Iran has vowed to issue a “serious” response to HTS, after the group attacked its consulate in Aleppo and killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Kiyumars Pourhashemi earlier this week. Russia, which has maintained a military presence in Syria since 2015, has been carrying out airstrikes against the jihadists, killing at least 600 militants since Thursday, according to Colonel Oleg Ignasyuk, the deputy head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria.Only Murders In The Building Season 5: What We Know So Far

‘Living in a home that damages health the norm for far too many older people’

The West is mulling its response after the NATO-operated Ukrainian missile strikes into Russia’s western heartland has escalated the Eastern European war to a new, more dangerous level with Russia’s launch of its latest hypersonic ballistic missile on a key Ukrainian city. Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah Shia militia is hailing the vague ‘ceasefire’ hurriedly negotiated by Washington with the Lebanese Government as Israel’s acknowledgment of “defeat”. The ‘ceasefire’ deal agreed on by the Lebanese Government and Israel allows invading Israeli forces 60 days to withdraw from Lebanon and requires Hezbollah, the Israeli Defences Forces’ (IDF) primary target, to refrain from “operations” against the IDF during this period. But the agreement is full of un-addressed aspects of this new war launched by Israel into Lebanon after its major offensive in 2006. Observers in Lebanon and in the region are pointing out that the two-months ‘withdrawal’ window allowed for the IDF enables it to further dispossess the entire Lebanese population inhabiting the strip of Lebanese territory bordering northern Israel. Israel tried the same after the 2006 invasion. The Israeli–Lebanese conflict peaked during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s. This was largely provoked by covert Western and Israeli interferences in Lebanese politics in support of the Lebanese-Arab Christian community (about 45% of its population) to offset the slightly larger Lebanese Muslim population. That population includes the Druze and Assyrian minority religious communities alongside the dominant Shia and Sunni communities. As noted in these columns previously, Israeli is surrounded by over two million displaced Palestinians lodged in camps in the neighbouring Arab states for decades (since the 1948 forcible creation of the Zionist Jewish state). In response to refugee Palestinian militia attacks from Lebanon, Israel invaded the country in 1978 and again in 1982. It occupied a large strip of Southern Lebanon until 2000, while fighting the parallel Lebanese Shia paramilitaries born out of the Palestinian displacement with the founding of the Israeli State. Resistance Israel launched two cross-border offensive operations into Southern Lebanon during the 1990s: Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. But the unrelenting Lebanese militia resistance – essentially urban guerilla warfare – led to the embarrassing failure to eliminate this resistance. After Israel’s partial withdrawal from South Lebanon, Hezbollah and other militia continued attacks to dislodged the IDF from the remaining occupied Lebanese territory, which was arbitrarily held as a ‘buffer’ to distance the Arab populations from Israel proper. Israel used these attacks as the excuse to attempt to ‘pacify’ the many hostile Palestinian and Lebanese militia based in Lebanon. A new period of Israel-Lebanon conflict began in late 2023 along with the massive onslaught by the IDF besieging the Gaza Strip enclave surrounded by Israel. While the Hamas counter attack against the IDF siege lines was itself of a minor scale (relative to its enemy), it then triggered a cascade of military and political actions. The months long, unceasing, IDF offensive against the Gazan population has spurred anti-Israeli militias across West Asia to begin counter attacks in support of the weak Palestinian militias resisting the West-armed IDF’s genocidal might. Ukraine In Eastern Europe, NATO planners are flummoxed by Moscow’s bold response to the ‘crossing of the red line’ by Ukraine when Kyiv launched last week a series of medium calibre missiles actually operated by American and British personnel. Kyiv, unable to push back a slow, bloody, Russian advance all across Ukraine’s Eastern war front, has been pleading with the West to allow its medium range missile batteries be used to offset Moscow’s pressure on the ground. Western officials insisted that NATO personnel remained in control of these missile batteries in order to ensure the secrecy of the weapons systems, because Ukraine is not a NATO member and could not ensure that technology secrecy. As analysts said subsequently, Russia was obliged to counter this clear escalation of the war with the role of Western personnel in battle, indeed, in direct assault on Russian territory. And President Vladimir Putin himself announced Russia’s counter-escalation by acknowledging the use of a previously un-announced new heavy missile. In response to the NATO operated missile barrage, Moscow fired its new intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) hitherto unused in combat at a target close to Kyiv. The Russian President later publicly confirmed that Russia had “tested” an ‘Oreshnik’ hypersonic ballistic missile in an assault on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The target was a large industrial complex. Russia launched just one missile. But it is a hypersonic missile almost too fast to be detected and countered and, more importantly, it is an IRBM, just below the ICBM threshold of intercontinental warfare. A clear counter-escalation. Already, when NATO installed these cruise missile systems in Ukraine earlier this year, Moscow acted swiftly to adapt its nuclear doctrine – with much fanfare, to reassure its own troops and the general population. The new doctrine provides for alerting, arming and launch protocols that speeds up Russian defensive responses, including the anticipation of a nuclear strike. Arsenal Putin signed off on Russia’s new nuclear doctrine days after the UK and US authorised Kyiv to use the cruise missiles to attack Russia. Under the amendments, Russia has generally lowered the threshold for using its nuclear arsenal. Analysts say that Russia and its ally, neighbouring Belarus, can now consider a nuclear response if they are “conventionally attacked by a nonnuclear state, such as Ukraine, that is aided by a nuclear power”. NATO countries supporting Ukraine, the US and UK included, possess nuclear weapons or host nuclear missile batteries installed by nuclear-armed NATO allies. Russia’s new protocols had been drawn up by September, according news agencies. Analysts now argue that its formal authorisation during the recent missile exchange between Russia and Ukraine has raised the stakes in eastern Europe’s war. So now the West is confronted with a counter-escalation to which it cannot easily respond without endangering its own populations and territories. It looks like a hot festive season in the West (despite heavy snows) this December.

okbet 88 Influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul is giving boxing fans the chance to knock him out by joining the roster of Undisputed as a DLC fighter. Jake Paul has taken the combat sports world by storm, besting some UFC legends in the ring including Anderson Silva, Nate Diaz, Tyron Woodley and more. His most recent victory took place on November 15 when he secured a unanimous decision against Mike Tyson in a match that even caused Netflix’s streaming service to crash . While his next match hasn’t been announced yet, ‘The Problem Child’ is going to be playable in Steel City’s boxing video game, Undisputed , which means players will get the chance to KO him themselves. Jake Paul revealed as Undisputed DLC fighter On December 5, Undisputed revealed a trailer for the The Problem Child DLC Pack, featuring Jake Paul and three unique outfits. Steel City even conducted motion capture for Jake to showcase his style of boxing, footwork, and how he fights inside the ring. “I’ve been breaking barriers and making history in real life, so it’s only fitting that I bring the same energy to Undisputed. This isn’t just about being in a video game; it’s about inspiring a new generation of fans to step into the ring – virtually and in real life,” Jake said. “The Steel City team nailed every detail, from my moves to my swag, and I can’t wait for players to test their skills as ‘El Gallo de Dorado.’ Just like in the real ring, I’m here to take over.” Related: The pack also includes boxers Zhilei Zhang, James ‘Buster’ Douglas, Otto Wallin, Erik Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera, and Juan Manuel Marquez. All fighters will be coming with an alternate outfit. The Problem Child DLC Pack will be available December 12 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Surprisingly, this isn’t actually the first time Jake Paul has been playable in a video game. Last year, he entered the world of mobile tower defense games by becoming a playable hero in Rush Royale . Meanwhile, Jake’s brother Logan has been playable in WWE’s 2K series ever since 2K22, where he was a DLC character himself before being included in the base game in subsequent releases.

Stock market today: Wall Street drifts to a mixed close in thin trading following a holiday pause

Luke Richardson was fired as coach of the Chicago Blackhawks on Thursday, the NHL club announced, after the team stumbled to the league's worst record so far this season. Swede Anders Sorensen, coach of the Blackhawks' top developmental club, was named interim coach for the NHL squad. Richardson, a 55-year-old Canadian, went 57-118 with 15 overtime losses in three seasons with Chicago. The Blackhawks are 8-16 with two overtime losses this season for a league-low 18 points after going 19-54-9 last season, second-worst in the NHL, and 26-49-7 in 2022-23, third-worst in the league. "Today I made the difficult decision to move on from Luke as our head coach," Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson said. "As we have begun to take steps forward in our rebuilding process, we felt that the results did not match our expectations for a higher level of execution this season and ultimately came to the decision that a change was necessary." The Blackhawks are on a four-game losing streak and 3-9-1 in their past 13 starts with 2.42 goals a game this season, second worst in the NHL. They have reached the Stanley Cup playoffs only once over the past seven seasons. "I fully support Kyle's decision in making this change as he continues to do what is needed to move our team forward," Blackhawks chairman and chief executive Danny Wirtz said. "I have the utmost confidence in him and the rest of our hockey operations team as they begin their search for the next head coach of the Chicago Blackhawks." Richardson became the third NHL coach fired this season after Boston dumped Jim Montgomery last month. He was hired five days later by St. Louis after the Blues fired Drew Bannister. js/bbNoneIncredible PS5 Pro Black Friday sale cuts £300 from the price

‘It’s the target’: Guardiola lowers sights to Champions League playoffs after defeatResponding to a significant increase in potential threats to lawmakers and the public in recent years, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias’s office recently implemented new emergency rules requiring nearly anyone to pass through security screening upon entering the Statehouse or any building in the Illinois Capitol Complex. “Unfortunately, the world is not getting safer,” Amy Williams, senior legal adviser in the secretary of state’s office, told a legislative oversight committee Tuesday. One of the more serious threats, Williams said, occurred in March when security officials were notified of an active shooter threat, prompting a lockdown of the complex. The lockdown was lifted after investigators determined there was no credible threat, according to reports at the time. In April, police locked down the Capitol for about an hour as the building was cleared following a bomb threat. Illinois State Police arrested a suspect accused of making the threat the following month. So far in 2024, Williams told the committee, the Secretary of State Police Department has responded to 17 threats to the Capitol, nearly twice as many as any other year since 2018. There have also been threats directed at individual lawmakers. In September, a man was arrested for threatening to assassinate Rep. Jeff Keicher, R-Sycamore. And on Monday, Dec. 9, Rep. Barbara Hernandez, D-Aurora, reported an employee in her district office became ill after opening office mail, according to a social media post. The employee was transported to a local hospital, prompting police to evacuate the building and cordon off a portion of the street while emergency crews responded. In October, Williams said, the secretary of state’s office was advised by a security consultant to increase the number of people required to go through security screening to include everyone other than lawmakers, state government employees and other elected officials. That meant many people who had previously been given unrestricted access to the building — including lobbyists, vendors and members of the news media — now have to go through security screening as well. “Primarily that decision came about because members of the General Assembly, elected officials, are sensibly background checked by their constituents who choose them to go to the Capitol to do the people's work on their behalf,” she said. “And state government employees are background checked by their respective agencies. Lobbyists, vendors and members of the press are not subject to any background check.” To avoid congestion, Williams said the office has set up a “TSA Express-style” screening point at the east entrance of the building for those individuals who previously had unfettered access. The security changes near the tail end of a three-year, $224 million renovation project that will make permanent changes to the way the public enters and exits the Capitol. That project involves restoration and remodeling of the entire north wing of the Capitol. When it’s completed, sometime in 2025, all public access will be through a new entryway on the north side of the building where people will pass through security screening before entering the building itself. Until then, visitors will continue entering through either the east or west doors of the building where metal detectors and baggage x-ray machines are located just inside the building. Lawmakers are tentatively scheduled to return to the Statehouse Jan. 2 for the start of a brief lame duck session. The regular 2025 session begins Wednesday, Jan. 8.VANCOUVER, BC and BREDA, THE NETHERLANDS / ACCESSWIRE / November 27, 2024 / Organto Foods Inc. (TSXV:OGO)(OTCQB:OGOFF)(FSE:OGF) ("Organto" or "the Company"), a provider of branded, private label and bulk distributed healthy and organic fruit and vegetable products today announced its financial results for the three and nine-month periods ended September 30, 2024. All amounts are expressed in Canadian dollars and in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), except where specifically noted. "We are pleased with our financial results for the third quarter of 2024 which reflect the impact of our operational restructuring which has streamlined our product portfolio, shifted our marketing strategy and re-engineered our ongoing operating costs. We believe the results for the third quarter reflect the benefits of our repositioning efforts, including sales growth of 47% versus the prior year, gross profit dollar growth of 63% versus the prior year, and substantially improved bottom line results versus the prior year that are continuing to improve. Our work is not done, and we remain intently focused on leveraging the positive changes we have made as we drive continued business growth combined with operational improvements, all leading to long-term profitability and sustainability. We also continue to focus on the restructuring of our convertible debenture obligations, which is expected to result in reduced cash outlays and greater operating flexibility. We believe the impact of these initiatives will continue to be apparent as we report our results in the coming quarters." commented Steve Bromley, Chair and Chief Executive Officer. Bromley commented further, "Immediately following the filing of our Financial Statements and Management Discussion and Analysis for the second quarter of 2024, we submitted our application to have the current Cease Trade Order lifted. This process is ongoing, and we are hopeful it will be concluded in the near term. We believe we are now fully current with all financial related filings, and when combined with the performance of our restructured business, are looking forward to an exciting future. We truly appreciate the continued support we have received from our shareholders, debenture holders and key operating partners as we have worked through the restructuring of our business. We remain committed to building a world class foods company focused on serving growing global healthy foods markets with the goal of building long-term shareholder value." Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results Overview Year to Date 2024 Financial Results Overview Interested parties may access the Company's filings including Financial Statements and accompanying Management's Discussion and Analysis for the period ended September 30, 2024 at www.SEDARplus.ca or at the Company's website at www.organto.com under the Investors tab. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD, Steve Bromley Chair and Chief Executive Officer Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. For more information contact: Investor Relations info@organto.com John Rathwell, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations 647 629 0018 ABOUT ORGANTO Organto is an integrated provider of branded, private label, and distributed organic and non-GMO fruit and vegetable products using a strategic asset-light business model to serve a growing socially responsible and health-conscious consumer around the globe. Organto's business model is rooted in its commitment to sustainable business practices focused on environmental responsibility and a commitment to the communities where it operates, its people, and its shareholders. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release may include certain forward-looking information and statements, as defined by law including without limitation Canadian securities laws and the "safe harbor" provisions of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ("forward-looking statements"). In particular, and without limitation, this news release contains forward-looking statements respecting Organto's business model and markets; Organto's belief that the Company has made good progress in the restructuring of its business and is focused on a clear path to profitability; Organto's belief that its efforts to restructure its convertible debt portfolio is expected to result in reduced debt levels and greater operating flexibility; Organto's belief that as it is now current with its filing obligations and believe that its application to have the current Cease Trade Order revoked as per the terms of securities legislation of British Columbia will be concluded in the near term; Organto's belief that it remains focused on building a world class company focused on growing healthy foods markets with the goal of building long-term shareholder value; management's beliefs, assumptions and expectations; and general business and economic conditions. Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions that may prove to be incorrect, including without limitation assumptions about the following: the ability and time frame within which Organto's business model will be implemented and product supply will be increased; cost increases; dependence on suppliers, partners, and contractual counter-parties; changes in the business or prospects of Organto; unforeseen circumstances; risks associated with the organic produce business generally, including inclement weather, unfavorable growing conditions, low crop yields, variations in crop quality, spoilage, import and export laws, and similar risks; transportation costs and risks; general business and economic conditions; and ongoing relations with distributors, customers, employees, suppliers, consultants, contractors, and partners. The foregoing list is not exhaustive and Organto undertakes no obligation to update any of the foregoing except as required by law. SOURCE: Organto Foods, Inc. View the original on accesswire.com

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TEXAS, USA — When Nathan Hecht ran for the Texas Supreme Court in 1988, no Republican had ever been elected to the state’s highest civil court. His election foreshadowed a coming transformation of the court, civil legal procedure and Texas itself. Hecht is the longest tenured Supreme Court justice in Texas history. He won six reelections and led the court as chief justice for more than a decade. He heard more than 2,700 oral arguments, authored 7,000 pages of opinions, and retires now not because he’s had enough, but because state law requires him to. Late on a Friday afternoon, just two weeks before he hung up his robe, he was still in his office, his mind mired in the work that was left to be done. “This is always a really busy time for us, because the opinions are mounting up to be talked about,” he said. “It’ll be busy next week.” Hecht began as a dissenter on a divided court, his conservative positions on abortion, school finance and property rights putting him at odds with the Democratic majority and some moderate Republicans. But as Texas Republicans began dominating up and down the ballot, his minority voice became mainstream on one of the country’s most conservative high courts. In his administration of the court, Hecht has been a fierce advocate for the poor, pushing for more Legal Aid funding, bail reform and lowering the barriers to accessing the justice system. “If justice were food, too many would be starving,” Hecht told lawmakers in 2017. “If it were housing, too many would be homeless. If it were medicine, too many would be sick.” Hecht’s departure leaves a vacancy that Gov. Greg Abbott , a former justice himself, will get to fill. He may elevate a current justice or appoint someone new directly to the chief justice role. Whoever ends up in the top spot will have to run for reelection in 2026. In his typical understated manner, so at odds with the bombast of the other branches of government, Hecht told The Texas Tribune that serving on the court has been the honor of his life. “I have gotten to participate not only in a lot of decisions shaping the jurisprudence of the state, but also in trying to improve the administration of the court system so that it works better and fosters public trust and confidence,” he said. “So I feel good about the past,” he said. “And I feel good about the future.” A ‘sea change’ Born in Clovis, New Mexico, Hecht studied philosophy at Yale before getting his law degree from Southern Methodist University. He clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and returned to Texas, where his reputation preceded him. As a young lawyer, Tom Phillips, a former chief justice and now a partner at Baker Botts, reached out to a Dallas law firm that had promised to hire him the next chance they got. “I called them a few months later and said, ‘So I assume you never got a vacancy,’” Phillips recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, we did, but we had a chance to hire Nathan Hecht, so you’ll understand why we went ahead and did that.’” Hecht was appointed to the district court in 1981 and quickly made a name for himself, pushing the court to modernize their stenography practices and taking the unusual step of writing opinions as a trial judge. He was elected to the court of appeals in 1986, and ran for Texas Supreme Court two years later. This race came at a low point for Texas’ judiciary, after a string of scandals, ethics investigations, eyebrow-raising rulings and national news coverage made several sitting Supreme Court justices household names — and not in a good way. Seeing an opportunity, Hecht challenged one of the incumbents, a Democrat who’d been called out in a damning 60 Minutes segment for friendly relationships with lawyers who both funded his campaigns and argued before the court. Hecht teamed up with Phillips and Eugene Cook, two Republicans who had recently been appointed to the court, and asked voters to “Clean the Slate in ’88,” separating themselves from the Democrats by promising to only accept small donations. “Party politics were changing in the state at the same time, but the broader issue on our court at the time was to ensure that judges were following the law,” Hecht said. “That was a driving issue.” Since Phillips and Cook were incumbents, Hecht was the only one who had to take on a sitting Supreme Court justice. And he won. “It really was a sea change in Texas political history,” Phillips said. “He was the first person ever to do that in a down ballot race, to defeat a Democrat as a Republican.” Political changes Republican dominance swept through the Supreme Court as swiftly as it did Texas writ large. The last Democrat would be elected to the court in 1994, just six years after the first Republican. But even among Bush-era Republicans filling the bench, Hecht’s conservatism stood out. In 2000, he wrote a dissent disagreeing with the majority ruling that allowed teens in Texas to get abortions with a judge’s approval if their parents wouldn’t consent, and a few years earlier, ruled in favor of wealthy school districts that wanted to use local taxes to supplement state funds. His pro-business bent stood out next to the court’s history of approving high dollar payouts for plaintiffs. Alex Winslow, the executive director of Texas Watch, a consumer advocacy group, told the New York Times in 2005 that Hecht was “the godfather of the conservative judicial movement in Texas.” “Extremist would be an appropriate description,” Winslow said. “He’s the philosophical leader of the right-wing fringe.” The only other justice who regularly staked out such a conservative position, according to the New York Times, was Priscilla Owen, who President George W. Bush appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005. Hecht and Owen, who now goes by her maiden name, Richmond, wed in 2022 . Wallace Jefferson, Hecht’s predecessor as chief justice, said Hecht’s sharp intellect and philosophical approach to the law improved the court’s opinions, even when he ultimately didn’t side with the majority. “He was a formidable adversary,” said Jefferson, now a partner at Alexander Dubose & Jefferson. “You knew that you would have to bring your best approach and analysis to overcome Nathan’s approach and analysis ... You had to come prepared and Nathan set the standard for that.” Hecht briefly became a national figure in 2005 when he helped Bush’s efforts to confirm Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. As her longtime friend, Hecht gave more than 120 interviews to bolster Miers’ conservative credentials, jokingly calling himself the “PR office for the White House,” Texas Monthly reported at the time . This advocacy work raised ethical questions that Hecht fought for years, starting with a reprimand from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. Hecht got that overturned. The Texas Ethics Commission then fined him $29,000 for not reporting the discount he got on the legal fees he paid challenging the reprimand. He appealed that fine and the case stretched until 2016 , when he ultimately paid $1,000. Hecht has largely stayed out of the limelight in the decades since, letting his opinions speak for themselves and wading into the political fray mostly to advocate for court reforms. While Democrats have tried to pin unpopular COVID and abortion rulings on the justices in recent elections, Republicans continue to easily win these down-ballot races. Hecht is aware of the perception this one-party dominance creates, and has advocated for Texas to turn away from partisan judicial elections. In his 2023 state of the judiciary address , Hecht warned that growing political divisions were threatening the “judicial independence essential to the rule of law,” pointing to comments by both Democratic politicians and former President Donald Trump. But in an interview, Hecht stressed that most of the cases the Texas Supreme Court considers never make headlines, and are far from the politics that dominate Austin and Washington. “There’s no Republican side to an oil and gas case. There’s no Democrat side to a custody hearing,” he said. “That’s the bread and butter of what we do, and that’s not partisan.” Hecht’s reforms Unlike its federal counterpart, the Texas Supreme Court is often a temporary port of call on a judge’s journey. Many, like Abbott, Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett , leave for higher office. Others, like Owen and 5th Circuit Judge Don Willett, leave for higher courts. Most, like Phillips, leave for higher pay in private practice. But Hecht stayed. “I didn’t plan it like this,” Hecht said. “I just kept getting re-elected.” Hecht had been considering retirement in 2013, when Jefferson, the chief justice who replaced Phillips, announced he would be stepping down. “He wanted me to consider being his successor,” Hecht said. “So I did, and here I am. I didn’t say, ‘Let’s spend 43 years on the bench,’ but one thing led to another.” In 2013, Hecht was sworn in as chief justice by then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, another great dissenter whose views later became the majority. While the Texas Supreme Court’s political makeup has changed largely without Hecht’s input, the inner workings of the court have been under his purview. And that, many court watchers say, is where his greatest legacy lies. Hecht ushered in an era of modernization, both to the technology and the rules that govern justice in Texas. He led a push to simplify the appellate rules, removing many of the trapdoors and procedural quirks that led to important cases being decided on technicalities. The court scaled back how long cases could drag on by limiting discovery, including how long a deposition can go. And he ensured every case was decided before the term ended, like the U.S. Supreme Court. “I think people generally don’t understand the impact the rules can have on the equitable resolution of disputes, but they’re enormous,” Jefferson said. “Nathan recognized that at an early juncture in his career.” Hecht pushed Texas to adopt e-filing before many other states, which proved prescient when COVID hit. Hecht, who was then president of the national Conference of Chief Justices, was able to help advise other states as they took their systems online. Hecht also dedicated himself to improving poor Texan’s access to the justice system, pushing the Legislature to appropriate more funding for Legal Aid and reducing the barriers to getting meaningful legal resolutions. He helped usher through a rule change that would allow paraprofessionals to handle some legal matters like estate planning, uncontested divorces and consumer debt cases, without a lawyer’s supervision. “Some people call it the justice gap. I call it the justice chasm,” Hecht said. “Because it’s just a huge gulf between the people that need legal help and the ability to provide it.” Hecht said he’s glad this has been taken up as a bipartisan issue, and he’s hopeful that the same attention will be paid even after he leaves the court. “No judge wants to give his life’s energy to a work that mocks the justice that he’s trying to provide,” he said. “For the judiciary, this is an important issue, because when the promise of equal justice under law is denied because you’re too poor, there’s no such thing as equal justice under the law.” What comes next Despite the sudden departure of their longtime leader, the Texas Supreme Court will return in January to finish out its term, which ends in April. Among the typical parsing of medical malpractice provisions, oil and gas leases, divorce settlements and sovereign immunity protections, the high court has a number of more attention-grabbing cases on its docket this year. Earlier this year, the court heard oral arguments about the Department of Family and Protective Services’ oversight of immigration detention facilities, and in mid-January, they’ll consider Attorney General Ken Paxton’s efforts to subpoena Annunciation House, an El Paso nonprofit that serves migrants. They’ll also hear arguments over Southern Methodist University’s efforts to cut ties with the regional governing body of the United Methodist Church. Other cases will be added to the schedule before April. Phillips, who has argued numerous cases before the Texas Supreme Court since leaving the bench, said Hecht’s loss will be felt, but he expects the court to continue apace. “It’s not a situation like it might have been at some point in the past where if one justice left, nobody would know what to do next,” he said. “It’s an extremely qualified court.” As for Hecht, he’s tried to put off thinking too much about what comes next for him. He still has opinions to write and work to finish. He knows he wants to stay active in efforts to improve court administration nationally and in Texas, and he’s threatened his colleagues with writing a tell-all book, just to keep them on their toes. But beyond that, he’s waiting for the reality of retirement to sink in before he decides on his next steps. “We’ve got 3,200 judges in Texas, plus adjuncts and associate judges and others,” he said. “I really think it’s such a strong bench, and I am proud to have been a part of it. I look forward to helping where I can.” ___ This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s definition of home is shifting

This writer is going to take a victory lap. Back in August , she said Tim Walz was a terrible pick for VP. He was weighed down by his record on crime, COVID, his views on socialism, and is very in-your-face weirdness. And now the media are catching up to where she was almost four months ago: 🧵 1/ The election ended 3 weeks ago. Enough time has passed. We -- or I -- can now safely pronounce that the Tim Walz VP pick was a dud. Let me explain: pic.twitter.com/w2BOkokFAN Hahahahahahahahaha. These are the people who think they're our moral and intellectual superiors. Forgive us for laughing. 2/ Before I get into it, let me say two things. One: Tim Walz did not lose Harris the race (or even close to it) Two: Josh Shapiro would not have made Harris win -- or even win Pennsylvania. Mark your calendars, because this writer is going to say Chris is right here. 3/ That said, I just don't think the Walz pick made a ton of sense for Harris. I genuinely think Walz was the pick because he called Trump/Vance "weird" on MSNBC in late July and instantly went viral. Yeah, that turned out to be the pot calling the kettle black, didn't it? The more voters got to know J.D. Vance, the more they realized he's not only normal, but likable. He was the only candidate to end the campaign with net positive favorability . 4/ Remember that Harris had an incredibly compressed timeline to choose a VP. From the day Joe Biden dropped out to the day Harris picked Walz was 16(!) days. That's it. This is not an excuse. As POTUS, Kamala would've been expected to make very big decisions within very limited timeframes. It was a test of her leadership and policy-making skills. And she failed it. 5/ And Walz peaked at the exact right time. Just as Harris was looking around for a VP, Walz was the hottest thing in politics. He had cracked the code on how to attack Trump! He was plain spoken! He was a football coach! The theory that she picked Walz because he was going viral is an interesting one. This writer won't lie about that, and it fits with a campaign that ran on vibes and relying on social media to drag them across the finish line. 6/ To be clear: I think Harris genuinely liked Walz and felt a rapport with him. And that she and her strategists convinced themselves that Walz’s “big dad energy” might help her appeal to critical voters in the upper Midwest. Harris was clearly fed up with Walz in the waning days of the campaign. And the whole 'big dad energy' thing was a lie. 7/ But, without “weird,” Walz is never on her radar. Period. And, he never really found a 2nd act after "weird." Because Walz is weird . Seriously. There's something deeply, fundamentally off about that man. 8/ Yes, there was excitement about the ticket after the pick. But in retrospect that looks to me a LOT like excitement that Biden wasn't the nominee anymore. Like, if Harris had picked Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer would the energy have been less? I don't think so. And a lot of it was the media trying to gin up fake momentum and enthusiasm. 9/ Walz was mediocre (at best) in the VP debate. His tendency to exaggerate/misremember details about his past turned into a national story. And toward the end of the campaign, he was just a nonentity. He was a liar, Chris. You don't have to spin it as 'exaggerating' or 'misremembering' -- the dude straight up lied about his military record and a slew of other things. Why couldn’t you say it until now? It’s because you picked a side, isn’t it? He sure did pick a side. Why was it unsafe before now for you, Christopher? Please, tell us, Chris. Very enlightening thread about something everyone knew a month ago. https://t.co/Vcf1hRiz7x Or four months ago. Maybe if the media said this during the campaign it wouldn’t look like f**king liars and sycophants right now. WE pointed out he was a terrible choice, and the media tried to say we were wrong about his service lies. We were right. The media lied. Again, https://t.co/CEpJB3oxqG All the media do is lie.The holidays are a time for giving, celebrating, and spreading a little extra joy. This season, why not gift something that makes your loved ones feel their best? To help you find the perfect present, we asked our Haute Beauty experts to share their go-to recommendations for holiday gifting. Whether you’re shopping for a skincare enthusiast, a wellness lover, or someone who could use a little pampering, these expert-approved suggestions are guaranteed to charm everyone on your list. So, let the holiday shopping begin and make this season one to remember! Aesthetic Island NYC | Medical Spa | Brooklyn, NY SkinMedica by Allergan is my go-to recommendation for patients looking for holiday gift ideas. This medical-grade skincare line is known for delivering real results, making it a thoughtful and luxurious gift for anyone serious about their skin. At Aesthetic Island, we use SkinMedica products during our facial treatments because of their ability to enhance skin health and leave clients with a radiant glow. For the holiday season, we’ve curated the perfect gift set, which can be purchased directly from our office. It features three of SkinMedica’s most popular products: TNS Advanced+ Serum: A powerhouse anti-aging serum that smooths fine lines, firms skin, and improves texture. HA5 Rejuvenating Hydrator: Delivers intense hydration and helps the skin retain moisture for a soft, plump finish. Instant Bright Eye Cream: Targets dark circles, puffiness, and fine lines for a refreshed, well-rested look. Whether you’re shopping for a loved one or treating yourself, these products are a must-have. Stop by and grab the gift set just in time for the holidays! For more information, visit Aesthetic Island NYC' s website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Jason Bloom | Face | Philadelphia, PA This holiday season, Trufacial is the gift that keeps on giving! This revolutionary beauty device delivers visible, wow-worthy results in just minutes, making it a game-changer for anyone looking to elevate their skincare routine. Its fast, 3-step process transforms everyday self-care into a luxurious experience, giving the gift of smoother, brighter, more radiant skin. Whether you’re treating yourself or someone special, Trufacial is the ultimate way to feel pampered and party-ready this holiday season. Reasons to Gift Trufacial: Confidence Boost : Smooth, glowing skin anyone would love. Feel Pampered : Achieve professional-grade results at home in just 10 minutes. Now Available : Perfect for beauty lovers who crave the latest and greatest. Timeless Beauty : A gift that empowers loved ones to feel radiant all year long. This holiday, gift innovation, simplicity, and luxury with Trufacial—the beauty must-have of the season! “This is the first true professional grade device to deliver results at home.” For more information, visit Dr. Bloom's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Marianna Farber | Smile | Midtown NY For a thoughtful holiday gift with a dental twist, consider electric toothbrush bundles. These bundles often feature top-notch brands and provide an easy, practical way to maintain oral health. Plus, they’re incredibly convenient, with refill options readily available to keep smiles bright all year long! For more information, visit Dr. Marianna Farber' s website and Instagram ! Heather Merlo, Sei Tu Bella Aesthetics | Medical Spa | Tampa, FL At Sei Tu Bella Aesthetics, we believe in the spirit of giving—and that includes giving to yourself! During the holiday season, it’s easy to feel guilty about self-care, but with our exclusive promotions, you can give the gift of beauty and wellness to others and enjoy some pampering, too. Medical-grade skincare like ZO Skin Health is perfect for both preventing and reversing skin damage, making it a thoughtful, lasting gift. Consider the impact of gifting experiences or a gift that improves quality of life rather than just items. Treat a loved one to a rejuvenating medical-grade SaltFacial, a powerful Lumecca Peak IPL treatment to reduce sun damage, or the gift of vaginal. Rejuvenation with VTONE, FORMA V, or MORPHEUS 8V to a mother struggling with conditions post childbirth or a premature menopausal woman forced to face her new symptoms post-breast cancer. You could even introduce a teenage grandchild to their first skincare experience. These treatments do more than offer immediate results; they foster self-confidence and a sense of empowerment. After all, the best gifts go beyond the tangible—they uplift, restore, and are felt deeply from the heart. This holiday season, give a gift that inspires self-love and radiance. For more information, visit Sei Tu Bella Aesthetics' website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Sarah Khan, ARA Med Spa | Medical Spa | Los Angeles, CA The winter holidays are the perfect time to gift packages of rejuvenating skincare treatments to your friends and family and treat yourself also! I recommend two procedures that can be performed for your face, neck, and hands to achieve the perfect winter holiday glow. As there is downtime with these treatments, schedule them a few days before any upcoming holiday events. Chemical peels are a topical solution applied to your skin intended to remove the top skin layers. The deeper skin underneath is then revealed, which is plump and youthful and improves the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles to some degree. There are several types of peels, a superficial peel involves just the removal of the outer layer or epidermis, whereas a medium peel works deeper through the dermis. Microneedling is a skin rejuvenation procedure that activates the natural skin healing process and can improve the appearance of acne scars and wrinkles. Firstly, microneedles create microchannels in the skin, which increase blood flow and remove toxins. Secondly, microneedling stimulates the production of granulation tissue with collagen proteins, which maintain the integrity of the skin matrix with results lasting up to 4 weeks. For more information, visit ARA Med Spa' s website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Malik Medical Aesthetics | Medical Spa | New Jersey As the holiday season approaches, it’s the perfect time to consider giving the gift of beauty and self-care. Here are some top recommendations for health and beauty products and treatments that will leave your loved ones glowing: For more information, visit Malik Medical Aesthetics' s website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Licensed Medical Esthetician, Celina Requejo, Careaga Plastic Surgery | Body | Miami, FL For the holiday season, I recommend two standout skincare products that make thoughtful and effective gifts for anyone prioritizing health and beauty. SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic is a must-have antioxidant serum suitable for all skin types. This potent vitamin C formula not only combats aging but also enhances skin radiance, providing a natural glow. Its ability to protect against environmental stressors while promoting a brighter complexion makes it an ideal gift for skincare enthusiasts. For those focused on anti-aging, P-Tiox is an exceptional choice. This wrinkle-modulating peptide serum visibly reduces the appearance of all nine contraction lines, refining skin texture and boosting radiance. It’s a powerhouse product that delivers a smoother, rejuvenated complexion, making it perfect for anyone seeking advanced skincare solutions. Both products are elegant, results-driven gifts that cater to a wide range of skin concerns, ensuring your loved ones feel pampered and glowing throughout the holiday season. For more information, visit Careaga Plastic Surgery's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Victoria A. Cirillo-Hyland, MD, FAAD | Skin | Philadelphia, PA Be camera-ready this holiday season and gift a Hollywood Spectra Peel to yourself and your family and friends! It brightens uneven skin stones, gently exfoliates the skin, reduces sun damage, helps stimulate dermal collagen, reduces oil production, and softens skin tone and texture. This patented laser toning restores the natural glow and youthful appearance of your skin through gentle heating. The Hollywood Spectra Peel treatment takes approximately 20 minutes with minimal discomfort and no downtime. Foundation application after this treatment is smooth and effortless. Even Santa won’t know your secret! For more information, visit Dr. Cirillo-Hyland's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Anna Chacon | Skin | Miami, FL When gifting beauty products for the holiday season, it's important to choose options that are not skin type-specific. I recommend opting for hydrating products that provide a glowing, dewy look for the winter season that don’t address deeper, more complex skin issues. Masks are a good option since they offer a little self-care with quick benefits and results. For a younger audience, sheet masks would be a fun stocking stuffer, while sleep masks are a great way to go for anyone needing some quick TLC, such as all of the mothers on your list. Opt for clean and simple ingredients to avoid gifting something that could cause irritation and avoid fragrances, as many people are sensitive to stronger scents, and preferences can greatly vary. An alternate idea to gifting a mask is wrapping up a couple of your favorite travel-sized products. Check and see if your favorite products are offered in smaller, travel-sized packaging. A good recommendation for a friend is generally a welcomed one, and what better way to personalize a gift this season than with a glowing recommendation? For more information, visit Dr. Chacon's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Stephen T. Greenberg | Face | Long Island, NY A champion in the beauty space, Award Winning Celebrity Plastic Surgeon Stephen T. Greenberg, M.D., F.A.C.S., founder and medical director of Greenberg Cosmetic Surgery and Dermatology, has been at the forefront of cosmetic plastic surgery for over 30 years. As a leading cosmetic plastic surgeon, Dr. Stephen T. Greenberg has built his reputation by developing and using only the most sophisticated techniques. An icon in cosmetic enhancement and correction, he meets the needs of patients from today’s top stars to the soccer mom next door. He has performed thousands of procedures ranging from breast augmentation, breast reduction, and breast lifts to tummy tucks, liposuction, facelifts, eyelid lifts, neck lifts, full body lifts, thigh lifts, rhinoplasty, vaginal rejuvenation, earlobe surgery, and injectable treatments. Dr. Greenberg is a proponent of combining cutting-edge technology with surgical procedures to provide the most effective outcomes. His favorite holiday season treatment combination is Jeuveau, a Neurotoxin to soften fine lines and wrinkles, and HydraFacial to keep skin clear and glowing. These are his top holiday beauty treatments and products to help you look and feel your best during the festive season: Skincare Treatments: At-Home Skincare Products: Example: SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic Example: Cosmetic Surgeon in a JarTM AM Brightening and PM Retinol Eye Creams Example: SkinCeuticals Hyaluronic Acid Intensifier Example: SkinCeuticals Triple Lipid Restore Dr. Greenberg recommends investing in your skin; it’s going to represent you for a long time. For more information, visit Dr. Greenberg's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Brannon Claytor | Face | Philadelphia, PA The gift of beautiful skin is on everyone's list. This year, OmniluxTM Red Light facial contour therapy is the perfect gift for all. This FDA-approved device stimulates collagen and helps to boost the healing process after surgery or injectables. It reduces fine lines and wrinkles and promotes a healthy, glowing complexion. It also helps with pigmentation and psoriasis by reducing inflammation. LED red light therapy has the additional benefit of improving mood and reducing stress levels. Shannon O'Brien, the medical esthetician at Claytor Noone Plastic Surgery in Bryn Mawr, PA, says, "Omnilux TM boasts the highest light wavelength approved by the FDA, producing significantly improved results. On top of that, it is all-natural, has no side effects and no downtime, and can be used on all skin types. My patients love this device, and it helps keep their skin fresh and glowing between skin care treatments." For more information, visit Dr. Claytor's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Kian Karimi | Face | Los Angeles, CA As a double board-certified facial plastic surgeon and head & neck surgeon, I encourage my patients to embrace a holistic approach to health and wellness. That’s why I’m excited about HealMD’s Wellness Starter Pack — it’s a thoughtful, practical gift for anyone looking to stay on track with their health and wellness goals as they enter the new year. The holiday season, while joyful, can often be overwhelming, leaving many of us feeling drained as we approach January. The Wellness Starter Pack helps reset the mind and body, offering a natural alternative for those looking to enhance their skin health and manage pain and anxiety. This curated collection of medical-grade cannabidiol oils is designed to improve all areas of your well-being, with multiple products to support relaxation, reduce stress, and promote balance in the body, providing an excellent foundation for those with health-minded resolutions. Whether it’s a soothing CBD balm for post-workout recovery, tinctures to support restful sleep or supplements that enhance focus and clarity, this pack makes integrating wellness into daily routines seamless. The Wellness Starter Pack is more than a gift; it’s about showing you care for their well-being, and it’s an investment in health happiness, and it’s a reminder to prioritize self-care and start the year with a health-focused mindset. For more information, visit Dr. Karimi's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Kiran Gill, Naples Aesthetic Institute | Body | Naples, FL As a plastic surgeon, I often recommend microneedling as a thoughtful and results-driven gift for those passionate about skincare. Microneedling, a minimally invasive procedure, promotes collagen production to improve skin texture, minimize fine lines, and address concerns such as scarring and hyperpigmentation. It’s an excellent choice for individuals seeking to rejuvenate their skin with clinically proven results. When gifting a microneedling package, I suggest including a series of treatments (commonly 3–6 sessions for optimal outcomes) at a reputable medical spa equipped with FDA-approved devices. To enhance the experience, consider pairing the package with additional services, such as a hydrating facial or a nutrient-rich serum infusion, which complement the regenerative effects of microneedling. At Naples Aesthetic Institute, many of our patients purchase microneedling packages every year because they love the results they are achieving. Providing aftercare is also essential. Including products like a gentle, physician-recommended cleanser, a high-quality hyaluronic acid serum for hydration, and a broad-spectrum SPF can support healing and maximize results. This gift offers the perfect combination of luxury, care, and clinical efficacy—an ideal choice for the holiday season. For more information, visit the Naples Aesthetic Institute' s website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Sam Rizk | Face | Upper East Side In the skilled hands of NYC's renowned super-surgeon, the deep plane facelift is more than just surgery—it’s pure magic. Welcome to the world of luxury plastic surgery, a hidden gem on an unassuming stretch of Park Avenue, where Dr. Sam Rizk, a sculptor-turned-surgeon, reigns supreme. Here, newly lifted patients gaze at reflections they thought they’d lost, their youthful contours restored with the finesse of an artist and the precision of a surgeon. This is where scalpels become wands, time travel feels possible, and confidence—genuine confidence—becomes a power of its own. Dr. Rizk’s facelifts are meticulously tailored, honoring each patient’s unique cultural and anatomical nuances to deliver hypernatural results that rejuvenate without compromising facial harmony. To complete this bespoke experience, patients may recover in one of three luxury hotels—the Lowell, the Aman, or the Carlyle—ensuring complete pampering and privacy. In just two weeks, they’re ready to return to their lives, camera-ready and refreshed. An invitation into Rizk’s world is the ultimate gift of the season, a gateway to age-defying artistry and unparalleled refinement. For more information, visit Dr. Rizk's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Aya Ahram, Hudson Dermatology and Laser Surgery | Skin | New York, NY Here are some great holiday gift ideas: The Rhode Kit : A curated set of Rhode essentials designed to deliver hydrated, glowing skin all year round. Qure or Omnilux Red Light Mask : These high-tech masks stimulate collagen production, plump and rejuvenate the skin, and soothe redness and inflammation—perfect for a radiant, refreshed complexion. Alastin Gentle Cleanser and Ultra Nourishing Moisturizer : Start with the Gentle Cleanser to remove makeup and environmental impurities, then follow up with the peptide-rich Ultra Nourishing Moisturizer to boost elasticity, support healthier skin, and reveal a radiant glow. These thoughtful gifts combine luxury and care, making them perfect for the holiday season! For more information, visit Dr. Ahram's website and Instagram ! Dr. Husam Almunajed | Smile | New York, NY As a dentist, I know flossing isn’t everyone’s favorite part of oral care. Many of my patients share their frustration with traditional floss, and I completely understand—it can be tricky and uncomfortable. That’s why I’m excited to introduce you to a wonderful alternative: the water flosser. Over the years, water flossers have evolved into an incredibly effective and user-friendly tool for maintaining healthy gums and a fresh smile. Having tried a few myself, I can confidently say they’re an excellent addition to your oral care routine at home. A water flosser uses a gentle stream of water to remove food particles and plaque from between your teeth and along the gumline. It’s simple to use and especially helpful if you struggle with traditional flossing. What’s more, water flossers offer a soothing experience. Unlike string floss, which can be awkward or harsh, the gentle water flow feels refreshing and leaves your mouth clean and invigorated. With regular use, you’ll notice healthier gums, fresher breath, and a confident smile—perfect for social gatherings, family events, or just everyday life. If you’re looking to elevate your oral hygiene or want a thoughtful gift for loved ones, a water flosser is a fantastic choice everyone will appreciate! For more information, visit Dr. Almunajed's website , Instagram , or Facebook ! Dr. Jay Arora | Vision | Scottsdale, AZ The holidays are a great time for gifts and spoiling the ones you love. And nowadays, with an increased emphasis on overall health, what better way to show those you love how much you care for their well-being than with products that promote healthy habits? For those dealing with dry eyes or eye strain, preservative-free artificial tears or high-quality lubricating eye drops can offer much-needed relief. Warm compress eye masks, particularly those designed for dry eye therapy, are relaxing and effective. Blue light-blocking glasses can also be a valuable gift for individuals who spend long hours on digital devices, helping to reduce eye strain. For overall eye health, ophthalmologists may recommend omega-3 supplements, as they can support tear production and eye moisture. UV-blocking sunglasses are another stylish yet protective gift idea, shielding the eyes from harmful UV rays. Skincare products designed for the sensitive skin around the eyes, such as hypoallergenic creams or serums, can be appreciated by those interested in beauty and anti-aging. Lastly, humidifiers make excellent gifts for those with dry eyes, particularly during the winter months. These products not only promote eye comfort but also contribute to skin hydration and overall respiratory health, making them a versatile and thoughtful present. For more information, visit Dr. Arora's website , Instagram , or Facebook !

HOUSTON , Dec. 11, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Essency, a leading provider of innovative hot water solutions, has announced the continuing rollout of its revolutionary EXR water heater, which is now available in 18 states as well as the District of Columbia . The Essency EXR, the world's first high-capacity electric water heater, brings homeowners a new level of durability and simplicity. Its cutting-edge technology employs intelligent temperature management and quick recovery to deliver an 80-gallon First Hour Rating in a standard-size residential tank footprint. And, the innovative design of the EXR makes it the perfect choice for households of all sizes. Unlike traditional storage tank water heaters, which typically last only an average of eight years, the Essency EXR is built to serve fresh, clean, hot water for over 30 years, providing unmatched durability and performance. Following its success in Arizona , Colorado , Florida , Georgia , North Carolina , South Carolina , Tennessee , and Texas , the product's distribution has expanded to Alabama , Delaware , Kentucky , Louisiana , Maryland , Mississippi , Nevada , New Mexico , Virginia , West Virginia , and the District of Columbia . "With the positive reception from contractors who tell us that installing an EXR is practically 'plug and play,' we are excited to continue expanding our distribution of this product," says Scott Isaksen , National Sales Director for Essency. "Plumbers praise the ease of installation and customer satisfaction, thanks to the product's reliable performance and 20-year transferrable warranty. We're excited for more U.S. homeowners to experience the benefits of the EXR." Whether as a direct replacement for a standard tank water heater, for new-build installations or wherever a new residential water heater is required, the EXR seamlessly integrates into any setting. Its elegant cabinet-type shape sets it apart, making it the most functional and most beautiful home water heater on the market today. Plumbers also appreciate its light weight and built-in handles, which make it much easier to maneuver than a standard tank heater. New owners of the Essency EXR have noted how happy they were about the simplicity of installation without a lot of home reconstruction. They're finally able to have all the hot water their family needs throughout their home whenever they need it while also saving real dollars with features like "Water Saver" and "Vacation Mode." About Essency Founded in 2010, Essency is committed to reimagining the hot water industry. The Essency EXR is the winner of the prestigious 2023 Edison Award in the category of Consumer Solutions- Sustainable Design. For more information about Essency and the EXR, visit www.essencyhome.com . Essency water heaters are available for installation by professional, factory-trained plumbing contractors in 18 U.S. States and the District of Columbia . Ferguson is the exclusive U.S. distributor to the plumbing wholesale trade for Essency water heaters. View original content: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-worlds-first-high-capacity-electric-water-heater-the-essency-exr-now-available-in-eighteen-us-states-302329402.html SOURCE EssencyGuest Opinion: Separating science and the humanities is hurting us

Identity Verification Market: USD 11.55B in 2023 to USD 39.73B by 2031 11-25-2024 09:50 PM CET | IT, New Media & Software Press release from: SkyQuest Technology Group Identity Verification Market Market Scope: Key Insights : Identity Verification Market size was valued at USD 9.90 Billion in 2022 poised to grow from USD 11.55 Billion in 2023 to USD 39.73 Billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 16.7% in the forecast period (2024-2031). Discover Your Competitive Edge with a Free Sample Report : https://www.skyquestt.com/sample-request/identity-verification-market Access the full 2024 Market report for a comprehensive understanding @ https://www.skyquestt.com/report/identity-verification-market In-Depth Exploration of the global Identity Verification Market Market: This report offers a thorough exploration of the global Identity Verification Market market, presenting a wealth of data that has been meticulously researched and analyzed. It identifies and examines the crucial market drivers, including pricing strategies, competitive landscapes, market dynamics, and regional growth trends. By outlining how these factors impact overall market performance, the report provides invaluable insights for stakeholders looking to navigate this complex terrain. Additionally, it features comprehensive profiles of leading market players, detailing essential metrics such as production capabilities, revenue streams, market value, volume, market share, and anticipated growth rates. This report serves as a vital resource for businesses seeking to make informed decisions in a rapidly evolving market. Trends and Insights Leading to Growth Opportunities The best insights for investment decisions stem from understanding major market trends, which simplify the decision-making process for potential investors. The research strives to discover multiple growth opportunities that readers can evaluate and potentially capitalize on, armed with all relevant data. Through a comprehensive assessment of important growth factors, including pricing, production, profit margins, and the value chain, market growth can be more accurately forecast for the upcoming years. Top Firms Evaluated in the Global Identity Verification Market Market Research Report: Experian (Ireland) LexisNexis Risk Solutions (US) Equifax (US) Thales (France) GBG (UK) TransUnion (US) Mastercard (US) Onfido (UK) Trulioo (Canada) Idology (Georgia) Mitek Systems (US) IDEMIA (France) Jumio (US) HyperVerge (India) AU10TIX (Israel) Key Aspects of the Report: Market Summary: The report includes an overview of products/services, emphasizing the global Identity Verification Market market's overall size. It provides a summary of the segmentation analysis, focusing on product/service types, applications, and regional categories, along with revenue and sales forecasts. Competitive Analysis: This segment presents information on market trends and conditions, analyzing various manufacturers. It includes data regarding average prices, as well as revenue and sales distributions for individual players in the market. Business Profiles: This chapter provides a thorough examination of the financial and strategic data for leading players in the global Identity Verification Market market, covering product/service descriptions, portfolios, geographic reach, and revenue divisions. Sales Analysis by Region: This section provides data on market performance, detailing revenue, sales, and market share across regions. It also includes projections for sales growth rates and pricing strategies for each regional market, such as: North America: United States, Canada, and Mexico Europe: Germany, France, UK, Russia, and Italy Asia-Pacific: China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia South America: Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, etc. Middle East and Africa: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa This in-depth research study has the capability to tackle a range of significant questions that are pivotal for understanding the market dynamics, and it specifically aims to answer the following key inquiries: How big could the global Identity Verification Market market become by the end of the forecast period? Let's explore the exciting possibilities! Will the current market leader in the global Identity Verification Market segment continue to hold its ground, or is change on the horizon? Which regions are poised to experience the most explosive growth in the Identity Verification Market market? Discover where the future opportunities lie! Is there a particular player that stands out as the dominant force in the global Identity Verification Market market? Let's find out who's leading the charge! What are the key factors driving growth and the challenges holding back the global Identity Verification Market market? Join us as we uncover the forces at play! To establish the important thing traits, Ask Our Experts @ https://www.skyquestt.com/speak-with-analyst/identity-verification-market Table of Contents Chapter 1 Industry Overview 1.1 Definition 1.2 Assumptions 1.3 Research Scope 1.4 Market Analysis by Regions 1.5 Market Size Analysis from 2023 to 2030 11.6 COVID-19 Outbreak: Medical Computer Cart Industry Impact Chapter 2 Competition by Types, Applications, and Top Regions and Countries 2.1 Market (Volume and Value) by Type 2.3 Market (Volume and Value) by Regions Chapter 3 Production Market Analysis 3.1 Worldwide Production Market Analysis 3.2 Regional Production Market Analysis Chapter 4 Medical Computer Cart Sales, Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2023-2023) Chapter 5 North America Market Analysis Chapter 6 East Asia Market Analysis Chapter 7 Europe Market Analysis Chapter 8 South Asia Market Analysis Chapter 9 Southeast Asia Market Analysis Chapter 10 Middle East Market Analysis Chapter 11 Africa Market Analysis Chapter 12 Oceania Market Analysis Chapter 13 Latin America Market Analysis Chapter 14 Company Profiles and Key Figures in Medical Computer Cart Business Chapter 15 Market Forecast (2023-2030) Chapter 16 Conclusions Address: 1 Apache Way, Westford, Massachusetts 01886 Phone: USA (+1) 351-333-4748 Email: sales@skyquestt.com About Us: SkyQuest Technology is leading growth consulting firm providing market intelligence, commercialization and technology services. It has 450+ happy clients globally. This release was published on openPR.This recent untoward incident will never let you leave a loaded gun unsecured at home. Here's what happened

Injuries pile up, 49ers uncertain QB Brock Purdy can return SundayAP News Summary at 6:28 p.m. EST

The Lee Williams boys basketball team picked up its first win of the season in dominant fashion, traveling across town to Kingman for a 65-27 win over the Bulldogs. The Volunteers immediately jumped on Kingman with an 8-0 run to start the game, causing Kingman to call a timeout. Lee Williams led 17-6 by the end of the first quarter. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.

okbet promo code Ancient meets modern as a new subway in Greece showcases archaeological treasures THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, is opening a new subway system, blending ancient archaeological treasures with modern transit technology like driverless trains and platform screen doors. The project, which began in 2003, uncovered over 300,000 artifacts, including a Roman-era thoroughfare and Byzantine relics, many of which are now displayed in its 13 stations. Despite delays caused by preserving these findings, the inaugural line has been completed, with a second line set to open next year. Conor McGregor must pay $250K to woman who says he raped her, civil jury rules LONDON (AP) — A civil jury in Ireland has awarded more than $250,000 to a woman who says she was raped by mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor in a Dublin hotel penthouse after a night of heavy partying. The jury on Friday awarded Nikita Hand in her lawsuit that claimed McGregor “brutally raped and battered” her in 2018. The lawsuit says the assault left her heavily bruised and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. McGregor testified that he never forced her to do anything and that Hand fabricated her allegations after the two had consensual sex. McGregor says he will appeal the verdict. At least 19 people are sick in Minnesota from ground beef tied to E. coli recall U.S. health officials say at least 19 people in Minnesota have been sickened by E. coli poisoning tied to a national recall of more than 167,000 pounds of potentially tainted ground beef. Detroit-based Wolverine Packing Co. recalled the meat this week after Minnesota state agriculture officials reported multiple illnesses and found that a sample of the product tested positive for E. coli O157:H7, which can cause life-threatening infections. Symptoms of E. coli poisoning include fever, vomiting, diarrhea and signs of dehydration. Kendrick Lamar surprises with new album 'GNX' LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kendrick Lamar gave music listeners an early holiday present with a new album. The Grammy winner released his sixth studio album “GNX” on Friday. The 12-track project is the rapper’s first release since 2022’s “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.” Lamar’s new album comes just months after his rap battle with Drake. The rap megastar will headline February's Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show in New Orleans. The 37-year-old has experienced massive success since his debut album “good kid, m.A.A.d city” in 2012. Since then, he’s accumulated 17 Grammy wins and became the first non-classical, non-jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize. Actor Jonathan Majors’ ex-girlfriend drops assault and defamation lawsuit against once-rising star NEW YORK (AP) — Jonathan Majors’ ex-girlfriend has dropped her assault and defamation lawsuit against the once-rising Hollywood star after reaching a settlement. Lawyers for Majors and Grace Jabbari agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice Thursday. Jabbari is a British dancer who had accused Majors of subjecting her to escalating incidents of physical and verbal abuse during their relationship. Representatives for Majors didn’t respond to emails seeking comment Friday. Jabbari’s lawyer said the suit was “favorably settled” and her client is moving on with “her head held high.” Majors was convicted of misdemeanor assault and harassment last December and sentenced to a yearlong counseling program. Hyundai, Kia recall over 208,000 electric vehicles to fix problem that can cause loss of power DETROIT (AP) — Hyundai and Kia are recalling over 208,000 electric vehicles to fix a pesky problem that can cause loss of drive power, increasing the risk of a crash. The recalls cover more than 145,000 Hyundai and Genesis vehicles including the 2022 through 2024 Ioniq 5, the 2023 through 2025 Ioniq 6, GV60 and GV70, and the 2023 and 2024 G80. Also included are nearly 63,000 Kia EV 6 vehicles from 2022 through 2024. The affiliated Korean automakers say in government documents that a transistor in a charging control unit can be damaged and stop charging the 12-volt battery. Dealers will inspect and replace the control unit and a fuse if needed. They also will update software. Christmas TV movies are in their Taylor Swift era, with two Swift-inspired films airing this year Two of the new holiday movies coming to TV this season have a Taylor Swift connection that her fans would have no problem decoding. “Christmas in the Spotlight” debuts Saturday on Lifetime. It stars Jessica Lord as the world’s biggest pop star and Laith Wallschleger, playing a pro football player, who meet and fall in love, not unlike Swift and her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. On Nov. 30, Hallmark will air “Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.” Instead of a nod to Swift, it’s an ode to family traditions and bonding, like rooting for a sports team. Hallmark’s headquarters is also in Kansas City. Top football recruit Bryce Underwood changes commitment to Michigan instead of LSU, AP source says ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Top football recruit Bryce Underwood has flipped to Michigan after pledging to play at LSU. That's according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share the recruit’s plans to join the Wolverines. Underwood pinned a post on his Instagram account, showing a post in which On3.com reported that he has committed to Michigan. The 6-foot-3 quarterback played at Belleville High School about 15 miles east of Michigan's campus, and told LSU nearly a year ago he intended to enroll there. Emperor penguin released at sea 20 days after waddling onto Australian beach MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The only emperor penguin known to have swum from Antarctica to Australia has been released at sea 20 days after he waddled ashore on a popular tourist beach. The adult male was found on Nov. 1 on sand dunes in temperate southwest Australia about 2,200 miles north of the Antarctic coast. He was released Wednesday from a boat that traveled several hours from Western Australia state's most southerly city of Albany. His caregiver Carol Biddulph wasn't sure at first if the penguin would live. She said a mirror was important to his rehabilitation because they provide a sense of company. Biddulph said: “They’re social birds and he stands next to the mirror most of the time.” Shohei Ohtani wins third MVP award, first in NL. Aaron Judge earns second AL honor in 3 seasons NEW YORK (AP) — Shohei Ohtani won his third Most Valuable Player Award and first in the National League, and Aaron Judge earned his second American League honor on Thursday. Ohtani was a unanimous MVP for the third time, receiving all 30 first-place votes and 420 points in voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor was second with 263 points and Arizona second baseman Ketel Marte third with 229. Judge was a unanimous pick for the first time. Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. got all 30 second-place votes for 270 points, and Yankees outfielder Juan Soto was third with 21 third-place votes and 229 points.DuPont de Nemours's DD short percent of float has risen 3.03% since its last report. The company recently reported that it has 3.76 million shares sold short , which is 1.02% of all regular shares that are available for trading. Based on its trading volume, it would take traders 2.73 days to cover their short positions on average. Why Short Interest Matters Short interest is the number of shares that have been sold short but have not yet been covered or closed out. Short selling is when a trader sells shares of a company they do not own, with the hope that the price will fall. Traders make money from short selling if the price of the stock falls and they lose if it rises. Short interest is important to track because it can act as an indicator of market sentiment towards a particular stock. An increase in short interest can signal that investors have become more bearish, while a decrease in short interest can signal they have become more bullish. See Also: List of the most shorted stocks DuPont de Nemours Short Interest Graph (3 Months) As you can see from the chart above the percentage of shares that are sold short for DuPont de Nemours has grown since its last report. This does not mean that the stock is going to fall in the near-term but traders should be aware that more shares are being shorted. Comparing DuPont de Nemours's Short Interest Against Its Peers Peer comparison is a popular technique amongst analysts and investors for gauging how well a company is performing. A company's peer is another company that has similar characteristics to it, such as industry, size, age, and financial structure. You can find a company's peer group by reading its 10-K, proxy filing, or by doing your own similarity analysis. According to Benzinga Pro , DuPont de Nemours's peer group average for short interest as a percentage of float is 3.19%, which means the company has less short interest than most of its peers. Did you know that increasing short interest can actually be bullish for a stock? This post by Benzinga Money explains how you can profit from it. This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and was reviewed by an editor. © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.Bjork is 'absolutely' confident that Day will return next year at Ohio State

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 9, 2024-- Thunderbird Entertainment Group Inc. (TSXV: TBRD, OTCQX: THBRF) (“Thunderbird” or the “Company”) wishes to provide an update to shareholders on the impact of the strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers on the Company’s ability to comply with its obligations to deliver to shareholders its financial statements and related disclosure and proxy-related materials in respect of the Company’s annual general and special meeting of shareholders scheduled to be held virtually on December 12, 2024 at 9:00 am PST (the “Meeting”). As a result of the strike, and pursuant to CSA Coordinated Blanket Order 51-931 Temporary Exemption from requirements in National Instrument 51-102 Continuous Disclosure Requirements and National Instrument 54-101 Communication with Beneficial Owners of Securities of a Reporting Issuer to send certain proxy-related materials during a postal strike (the “Blanket Order”), the Company is advising shareholders that: For information on Thunderbird and to subscribe to the Company’s investor list for news updates, go to www.thunderbird.tv . ABOUT THUNDERBIRD ENTERTAINMENT GROUP Thunderbird Entertainment Group is a global award-winning, full-service multiplatform production, distribution and rights management company, headquartered in Vancouver, with additional offices in Los Angeles and Ottawa. Thunderbird creates award-winning scripted, unscripted, and animated programming for the world’s leading digital platforms, as well as Canadian and international broadcasters. The Company develops, produces, and distributes animated, factual, and scripted content through its various content arms, including Thunderbird Kids and Family (Atomic Cartoons), Thunderbird Unscripted (Great Pacific Media) and Thunderbird Scripted. Productions under the Thunderbird umbrella include Mermicorno: Starfall, Super Team Canada, Molly of Denali, Highway Thru Hell, Kim’s Convenience, Boot Camp, and Sidelined: The QB and Me . Thunderbird Distribution and Thunderbird Brands manage global media and consumer products rights, respectively, for the Company and select third parties. Thunderbird is on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @tbirdent. For more information, visit: www.thunderbird.tv . Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information Thunderbird’s public communications may include written, or oral “forward-looking statements” and “forward-looking information” as defined under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements or information may be identified by words such as “anticipate”, “continue”, “estimate”, “expect”, “forecast”, “may”, “will”, “plan”, “project”, “should”, “believe”, “intend”, or similar expressions concerning matters that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the ongoing Canada Post strike, the upcoming annual general and special meeting of shareholders of the Company, items to be voted upon by the shareholders attending such meeting, and delivery of materials to shareholders following resumption of regular postal service. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic and social uncertainties; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; product capability and acceptance; and other factors set out in the “Risk and Uncertainty” section of the Company’s MD&A dated June 30, 2024. The foregoing is not an exhaustive list. Additional risks and uncertainties not presently known to Thunderbird or that management believes to be less significant may also adversely affect the Company. The forward-looking statements or information contained in this document represent the Company’s views as of the date hereof, and therefore such information should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this document. The Company’s actual results, performance or achievement could differ materially from those ‎expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements and, accordingly, no assurance can be ‎given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if ‎any of them do so, what benefits the Company will derive therefrom. Readers are therefore cautioned ‎that the foregoing lists of important factors are not exhaustive, and they should not unduly rely on the ‎forward-looking statements included in this news release. All forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly ‎qualified by this cautionary statement. Thunderbird has no intention, and undertakes no obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. View source version on businesswire.com : https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241209645003/en/ CONTACT: Investor Relations Contacts: Glen Akselrod, Bristol Capital +1 905 326 1888 ext 1 glen@bristolir.comMedia Relations Contact: Lana Castleman, Director, Marketing & Communications 416-219-3769 lcastleman@thunderbird.tvCorporate Communications Julia Smith, Finch Media Julia@finchmedia.net KEYWORD: NORTH AMERICA CANADA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: LICENSING (ENTERTAINMENT) COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT TV AND RADIO SOURCE: Thunderbird Entertainment Group Inc. Copyright Business Wire 2024. PUB: 12/09/2024 05:00 PM/DISC: 12/09/2024 05:03 PM http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241209645003/en

AMGEN ANNOUNCES 2025 FIRST QUARTER DIVIDEND

WASHINGTON — 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 new report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Biden administration imposed export controls to limit the ability of China and Russia 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 released this week, 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 to hire 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. Get local news delivered to your inbox!Share Tweet Share Share Email The lawsuit that Arm Holdings filed against Qualcomm resulted in a mistrial on Friday. TakeAway Points: Arm Holdings’ lawsuit against Qualcomm ended in a mistrial on Friday, with a jury delivering a mixed verdict that found for Qualcomm on a crucial issue, saying Qualcomm had properly licensed its central processor chips. Arm’s shares were down 1.8% in extended trading after the news, and Qualcomm’s shares were up 1.8%. Democratic Senator Ed Markey and Republican Senator Rand Paul urged President Joe Biden to extend by 90 days a Jan. 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. assets of its short-video app TikTok or face a ban. Arm lawsuit ends in mistrial with Qualcomm securing key win The jury returned a mixed decision in favour of Qualcomm on a key point, finding that the company had legally licenced its central processor chips. Arm’s shares were down 1.8% in extended trading after the news, and Qualcomm’s shares were up 1.8%. The outcome means the case could be tried again in the future. Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided over the case in U.S. federal court in Delaware, encouraged Arm and Qualcomm to mediate their dispute. “I don’t think either side had a clear victory or would have had a clear victory if this case is tried again,” Noreika told the parties. After more than nine hours of deliberations over two days, the eight-person jury in U.S. federal court could not reach a unanimous verdict on the question of whether Nuvia, a startup that Qualcomm purchased for $1.4 billion in 2021, breached the terms of its license with Arm. But the jury found that Qualcomm did not breach Nuvia’s license with Arm. The jury also found that Qualcomm’s chips created using Nuvia technology, which have been central to Qualcomm’s push into the personal computer market, are properly licensed under its own agreement with Arm, clearing the way for Qualcomm to continue selling them. “The jury has vindicated Qualcomm’s right to innovate and affirmed that all the Qualcomm products at issue in the case are protected by Qualcomm’s contract with Arm,” Qualcomm said in a statement. “My biggest worry was what happens to the future roadmap if they no longer have access to Nuvia (computing) cores,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said. “At this point, that risk is a lot closer to being off the table.” Senators urge Biden to grant ByteDance 90-day reprieve from law requiring sale Democratic Senator Ed Markey and Republican Senator Rand Paul on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to extend by 90 days a Jan. 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. assets of its short-video app TikTok or face a ban. The Supreme Court said on Wednesday it will consider the legal challenge of TikTok and ByteDance, seeking an injunction to halt the looming ban or sale and will hold arguments on the matter on Jan. 10. “Given the law’s uncertain future and its consequences for free expression, we urge you to trigger the 90-day extension before January 19,” the senators wrote Biden. The contention The challengers are appealing a lower court’s ruling that upheld the law. TikTok is used by about 170 million Americans. Congress passed the measure in April and Biden, a Democrat, signed it into law. The Justice Department had said that as a Chinese company, TikTok poses “a national-security threat of immense depth and scale” because of its access to vast amounts of data on American users, from locations to private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate content that Americans view on the app. TikTok has said it poses no imminent threat to U.S. security. TikTok and ByteDance say the law violates free speech protections under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court, urged the court to reject any delay, comparing TikTok to a hardened criminal. Other senators like Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Richard Blumenthal say ByteDance must follow the law. Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok during his first term in the White House in 2020, has reversed his stance and promised during the presidential race this year that he would try to save TikTok. Trump said this week he has “a warm spot in my heart for TikTok” and that he would “take a look” at the matter. Trump takes office on Jan. 20, the day after the TikTok deadline under the law. Related Items: Arm Holdings , ByteDance , Qualcomm Share Tweet Share Share Email Recommended for you Apple Intends To Launch Its Modems In Three Years To Rival Qualcomm Qualcomm Anticipates $4 billion In PC Chip Sales By 2029 ByteDance Hits $300 billion Valuation Comments

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Amazon's heated car seat cover shoppers say 'warms up fast' and 'wish I bought sooner'And single people are more likely to use mobility tools compared to those who are married, according to researchers from University College London (UCL) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Researchers looked at information from a group of more than 12,000 adults in England aged 50 to 89 who were tracked over a 13-year period. At the start of the study, 8,225 adults had no mobility difficulty and did not use mobility assistive products (MAPs). Some 2,480 were deemed to have “unmet need” and 1,375 were using mobility aids. During the follow-up period, there were 2,313 “transitions” where people went from having no mobility issues to needing some help with getting around. And 1,274 people started to use mobility aids. Compared with men, women were 49% more likely to transition from not needing mobility aids to needing to use them, according to the study which has been published in The Lancet Public Health. But were 21% less likely to go on to use mobility aids when they needed them. The authors said their study showed “barriers to access” for women. For both men and women, with every year that passed during the study period the need for mobility aids increased. People who were older, less educated, less wealthy or reported being disabled were more likely to “transition from no need to unmet need, and from unmet need to use”, the authors said, with this indicating a “higher prevalence of mobility limitations and MAP need overall among these groups”. They added: “Finally, marital or partnership status was not associated with transitioning to unmet need; however, single people were more likely to transition from unmet need to use compared with married or partnered people.” Jamie Danemayer, first author of the study from UCL Computer Science and UCL’s Global Disability Innovation Hub, said: “Our analysis suggests that there is a clear gender gap in access to mobility aids. “Though our data didn’t ascertain the reason why participants weren’t using mobility aids, other research tells us that women are often more likely than men to face obstacles such as cost barriers as a result of well-documented income disparities between genders. “Many mobility aids are designed for men rather than women, which we think may be a factor. “Using mobility aids can also make a disability visible, which can impact the safety and stigma experienced by women, in particular. “There’s a critical need for further research to identify and break down the barriers preventing women from accessing mobility aids that would improve their quality of life.” Professor Cathy Holloway, also from UCL, added: “Not having access to mobility aids when a person needs one can have a big impact on their independence, well-being and quality of life. “Our analysis suggests that women, in particular, regardless of other factors such as education and employment status, are not getting the support that they need.” Professor Shereen Hussein, senior author of the study and lead of the social care group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “The research provides compelling evidence of gender disparities in accessing assistive technology, suggesting that cost, design bias, and social stigma are likely to disproportionally affect women. “This underscores the need for inclusive, gender-sensitive approaches in the design, production and inclusivity of assistive technologies.”WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — If last month’s election wasn’t painful enough for Florida Democrats, they’re losing another state House seat after one of their members announced Monday that she’s switching parties. State Rep. Susan Valdés, a former school board member who was reelected as a Democrat last month, said on X that she is “tired of being the party of protesting.” Valdés ran to be chairperson for her local county’s Democratic executive committee earlier this month. She won her current term by nearly 5 percentage points but can’t run for reelection again because of term limits. Republicans have controlled the governor’s office and both branches of the Legislature since 1999. Valdés is serving her final two years before leaving office due to term limits. Republicans now have an 86-34 majority in the House. “I got into politics to be part of the party of progress,” Valdés wrote. “I know that I won’t agree with my fellow Republican House members on every issue, but I know that in their caucus, I will be welcomed and treated with respect.” House Speaker Daniel Perez reposted Valdés’ statement and welcomed her into the House, where Republicans have a supermajority of 86-34. House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said she was surprised and disappointed by Valdés’ announcement. “It is sad that she has elevated her own aspirations above the needs of her district,” Driskell wrote in a statement on X.Risk And Reward Perfectly Aligned For Micron Technology Inc. (MU)

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WASHINGTON — The Senate is pushing toward a vote on legislation that would provide full Social Security benefits to millions of people, setting up potential passage in the final days of the lame-duck Congress. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Thursday he would begin the process for a final vote on the bill, known as the Social Security Fairness Act, which would eliminate policies that currently limit Social Security payouts for roughly 2.8 million people. Schumer said the bill would “ensure Americans are not erroneously denied their well-earned Social Security benefits simply because they chose at some point to work in their careers in public service.” The legislation passed the House on a bipartisan vote, and a Senate version of the bill introduced last year gained 62 cosponsors. But the bill still needs support from at least 60 senators to pass Congress. It would then head to President Biden. At least one GOP senator who signed onto similar legislation last year, Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, said he was still “weighing” whether to vote for the bill next week. “Nothing ever gets paid for, so if it’s further indebtedness, I don’t know,” he said. Decades in the making, the bill would repeal two federal policies — the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset — that broadly reduce payments to two groups of Social Security recipients: people who also receive a pension from a job that is not covered by Social Security and surviving spouses of Social Security recipients who receive a government pension of their own. The bill would add more strain on the Social Security Trust funds, which were already estimated to be unable to pay out full benefits beginning in 2035. It would add an estimated $195 billion to federal deficits over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget also estimates that if passed, the policy would hasten the Social Security program’s insolvency date by about half a year as well as reduce lifetime Social Security benefits by an additional $25,000 for a typical dual-income couple retiring in 2033. Sen. John Thune, the no. 2 Republican in leadership, acknowledged that the policy has strong bipartisan support, but said some Republicans also want to see it “fixed in the context of a broader Social Security reform effort.” Conservatives have opposed the bill, decrying its cost. “Even for something that people consider to be a good cause, it shows a lack of concern for the future of the country, so I think it would be a big mistake,” said Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky. Still, other Republicans have pushed Schumer to bring it up for a vote. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said last month that the current federal limitations “penalize families across the country who worked a public service job for part of their career with a separate pension. We’re talking about police officers, firefighters, teachers, and other public employees who are punished for serving their communities.” He predicted the bill would pass.Inflammation detection improved with shaking sensor

okebet cc locale en Tech Titans Warm Up To Donald Trump, Who Says 'Everybody Wants To Be My Friend,' Claims Bill Gates Asked To Come To Mar-a-LagoS. Korea Investigators Seek Arrest Warrant For President Yoon Over Martial LawWASHINGTON – Deaths from starvation will likely pass famine levels in northern Gaza as soon as next month owing to Israel's “near-total blockade” of food and other aid, the U.S.-created global food-crisis monitor said on Tuesday. The finding by the Famine Early Warning System Network appeared to expose a rift within the Biden administration over the extent of starvation in northern Gaza, with the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew, disputing part of the data used in reaching the conclusion and calling the stepped-up famine warning “irresponsible." Recommended Videos Northern Gaza has been one of the areas hardest-hit by fighting and Israel's restrictions on aid throughout its 14-month war with Hamas militants. Israel at one point increased the number of aid deliveries it permitted into northern Gaza under pressure from President Joe Biden. But the U.N. and aid groups say Israel recently has blocked almost all aid again. Only nine U.N. trucks have been able to bring in food and water over the past 2 1/2 months, Oxfam says. Israel says it has been operating in recent months against Hamas militants still active in northern Gaza. It says the vast majority of the area’s residents have fled and relocated to Gaza City, where most aid destined for the north is delivered. But some critics, including a former defense minister, have accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza’s far north, near the Israeli border. FEWS Net said unless Israel changes its policy, it expects the number of people dying of starvation and related ailments in northern Gaza to reach between two and 15 per day sometime between next month and March. The internationally recognized mortality threshold for famine is two or more deaths a day per 10,000 people. Cindy McCain, the American head of the U.N. World Food Program, in a Dec. 15 appearance on CBS' “Face the Nation” called for political pressure to get food flowing to Palestinians trapped in north Gaza. “We need unfettered access. We need a ceasefire and we need it now,” she said. “We can't ... sit by and just allow these people to starve to death.” FEWS Net was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development in the mid-1980s to warn of global food crises. The United States, Israel's main backer, provided a record amount of military support in the first year of the war. At the same time, the Biden administration repeatedly urged Israel to allow more access to aid deliveries in Gaza overall, and warned that failing to do so could trigger U.S. restrictions on military support. The administration recently said Israel was making improvements and declined to carry out its threat of restrictions. Military support for Israel's war in Gaza is politically charged in the United States. Republicans and some Democrats have staunchly opposed any effort to limit U.S. support over the suffering of Palestinian civilians trapped in the conflict. The Biden administration's reluctance to do more to press Israel for improved treatment of civilians undercut support for Democrats in last month's elections. Lew, the U.S. ambassador, challenged the famine warning in a posting on social media, saying it was based on “outdated and inaccurate” data. He pointed to uncertainty over how many of the 65,000 people remaining in northern Gaza had fled in recent weeks, saying that skewed the findings. FEWS said its famine assessment holds even if as few as 10,000 remain there. “We work day and night with the U.N. and our Israeli partners to meet humanitarian needs — which are great — and relying on inaccurate data is irresponsible.,” Lew wrote. ___ AP writers Matthew Lee in Washington and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

“The real estate sector’s GDP growth rates in 2024 were relatively subdued, recording 0.84 per cent in Q1, 0.75 per cent in Q2, and 0.68 per cent in Q3. These figures lagged behind the national GDP growth rate for each quarter, underscoring the sector’s challenges,” a report by BuyLetLive read. According to the report, despite this slow growth, the real estate service GDP contribution growth rate remained robust, standing at 5.20 per cent in Q1, 5.17 per cent in Q2, and 5.43 per cent in Q3. It stated, “This consistency highlights the sector’s indispensable role in supporting broader economic activity. Real estate remains a significant contributor to urbanisation, employment generation, and wealth creation, even amid its slower growth. “In comparison, the construction sector showed a more dynamic growth trajectory. After contracting by 2.14 per cent in Q1, the sector rebounded with growth rates of 1.05 per cent in Q2 and 2.91 per cent in Q3. This rebound can be attributed to increased public spending on infrastructure, private sector investments, and heightened demand for both residential and commercial properties. “The construction sector’s GDP contribution growth rate followed a similar path, reflecting the symbiotic relationship between construction and real estate. As construction expands, it creates opportunities for real estate development, while strong demand in real estate stimulates construction activities.” On challenges holding back real estate growth, the report noted that several factors contributed to the real estate sector’s relatively slower growth. It further read, “One of the most significant issues is the economy’s slow recovery from inflationary pressures, which has affected purchasing power and reduced demand for residential and commercial properties. High-interest rates have compounded this problem by making borrowing for real estate projects more expensive. Regulatory hurdles, such as delays in land titling and high transaction costs, also remain significant challenges for the sector. Additionally, the absence of a unified housing policy has created inefficiencies, further stifling growth. Related News LASG calls for innovation in real estate sector US-based real estate firm unveils platform for Nigerian investors High inflation, demolitions hinder $2.4tn real estate value – Operators “Another critical issue is the persistent demand-supply mismatch. Rapid urbanisation continues to drive demand for affordable housing, but supply has not kept pace due to high construction costs, limited access to land, and insufficient financing options. The lack of affordable mortgage systems has further constrained residential real estate growth, leaving a gap that needs urgent attention from policymakers and industry stakeholders. “The implications of these dynamics are significant for various stakeholders in the real estate industry. For policymakers, there is an urgent need to streamline housing regulations, simplify land titling processes, and invest in infrastructure that supports real estate activities. Developers must focus on cost optimisation, innovative construction methods, and exploring emerging markets to overcome rising costs and limited demand. Investors can benefit from leveraging data-driven insights to identify high-potential areas for growth while diversifying their portfolios across residential, commercial, and industrial segments. For consumers, the growing adoption of green building technologies and affordable housing initiatives offers promising opportunities. However, advocacy for transparent pricing and financing options remains crucial to making real estate more accessible to the broader population.” It further stated that despite these challenges, opportunities still abound in the real estate sector. “The construction sector’s growth presents direct opportunities for real estate development, particularly in urban centres like Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt. Public-private partnerships aimed at addressing affordable housing deficits could also unlock significant potential in the residential market. The rise of technology and innovation in the industry offers another avenue for growth. Proptech solutions, such as digital platforms for property transactions, smart home technologies, and data-driven market insights, are creating efficiencies and boosting investor confidence. “Furthermore, the growing focus on sustainability is reshaping real estate development in Nigeria. Green building practices and sustainable real estate solutions are gaining traction as awareness of environmental issues grows. These trends not only enhance the appeal of new developments but also position the industry for long-term relevance in a rapidly changing global market. “Nevertheless, the real estate industry faces persistent challenges that need to be addressed to unlock its full potential. Economic volatility remains a major concern, despite the improving GDP growth rate. Rising costs of building materials, labour, and logistics are straining developers and pushing up property prices, which limits affordability. Additionally, inadequate infrastructure development in rural and peri-urban areas restricts opportunities for real estate expansion, despite the pressing need for housing in these regions. Inconsistent government policies and unclear tax regimes also create uncertainties that deter both local and foreign investors.”

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The Toronto Maple Leafs placed forward Matthew Knies on injured reserve Friday due to an upper-body injury sustained during Wednesday’s game against the Vegas Golden Knights . The move is retroactive to Nov. 20, leaving Knies sidelined for at least a week. Head coach Craig Berube previously reported that Knies was improving, but he will not be available for Sunday’s game against Utah. The Impact on the Maple Leafs Knies’ absence creates a significant gap in Toronto’s forward group. The 22-year-old winger has been a key contributor this season, scoring eight goals and 12 points in 20 games. His physical play and scoring touch have been integral to the team’s secondary scoring. The Maple Leafs are already grappling with a lengthy injury list, including Max Domi, Calle Jarnkrok , and Auston Matthews. Young players like Bobby McMann, Nicholas Robertson, and Pontus Holmberg have stepped into expanded roles to compensate. Two youngsters have immediately impacted the team with some success, with Fraser Minten and Nikita Grebenkin appearing in the lineup. Maple Leafs Call Up Alexander Nylander After Knies Injury In a roster adjustment following Knies’ placement on injured reserve, the Maple Leafs signed Alexander Nylander to a one-year, $775,000 NHL contract on Friday. Nylander, 26 years of age, has been impressive in the American Hockey League (AHL) with the Toronto Marlies. He has scored eight goals and four assists in 14 games with the Marlies. Drafted initially eighth overall by the Buffalo Sabres in 2016, Nylander has struggled to find consistent NHL footing. Now he has a chance to contribute to a depleted Maple Leafs lineup. His call-up could provide needed depth during Knies’ recovery. Perhaps he’ll even share a shift or two with his brother William Nylander. Why the Maple Leafs Will Miss Knies Knies’ ability to create offensive opportunities and his growing presence in the top six have made him a crucial part of the Maple Leafs’ lineup. His absence will pressure Toronto’s depleted roster to step up even more. With the team struggling to maintain consistency amid injuries, getting Knies back will be critical for their success in the coming weeks. When will the Maple Leafs’ lineup finally get healthy enough to compete at full strength? This article first appeared on The Hockey Writers and was syndicated with permission.

LONDON — Olivia Hussey, the actor who starred as a teenage Juliet in the 1968 film "Romeo and Juliet," died, her family said on social media Saturday. She was 73. Hussey died Friday "peacefully at home surrounded by her loved ones," a statement posted to her Instagram account said. Hussey was 15 when director Franco Zeffirelli cast her in his adaptation of the William Shakespeare tragedy after spotting her onstage in the play "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," which also starred Vanessa Redgrave. "Romeo and Juliet" won two Oscars and Hussey won a Golden Globe for best new actress for her part as Juliet, opposite British actor Leonard Whiting, who was 16 at the time. "Romeo and Juliet" movie director Franco Zeffirelli, left, and actors Olivia Hussey, center, and Leonard Whiting are seen Sept. 25, 1968, in Paris after the Parisian premiere of the film. Decades later Hussey and Whiting brought a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures alleging sexual abuse, sexual harassment and fraud over nude scenes in the film. They alleged they were initially told they would wear flesh-colored undergarments in a bedroom scene, but on the day of the shoot Zeffirelli told the pair they would wear only body makeup and the camera would be positioned in a way that would not show nudity. They alleged they were filmed in the nude without their knowledge. The case was dismissed by a Los Angeles County judge in 2023, who found their depiction could not be considered child pornography and the pair filed their claim too late. Leonard Whiting, left, and Olivia Hussey arrive April 26, 2018, at the screening of "The Producers" at the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival Opening Night at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. Whiting was among those who paid tribute to Hussey on Saturday. "Rest now my beautiful Juliet no injustices can hurt you now," he wrote. "And the world will remember your beauty inside and out forever." Hussey was born April 17, 1951, in Bueno Aires, Argentina, and moved to London as a child. She studied at the Italia Conti Academy drama school. She also starred as Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the 1977 television series "Jesus of Nazareth," as well as the 1978 adaptation of Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" and horror movies "Black Christmas" and "Psycho IV: The Beginning." She is survived by her husband, David Glen Eisley, her three children and a grandson. Germany players celebrate after Andreas Brehme, left on ground, scores the winning goal in the World Cup soccer final match against Argentina, in the Olympic Stadium, in Rome, July 8, 1990. Andreas Brehme, who scored the only goal as West Germany beat Argentina to win the 1990 World Cup final, died Feb. 20, 2024. He was 63. Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Canada, listens during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Canada-U.S.-Mexico relationship, Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Mulroney died at the age of 84 on Feb. 29, 2024. The Rev. James Lawson Jr. speaks Sept. 17, 2015, in Murfreesboro, Tenn. Lawson Jr., an apostle of nonviolent protest who schooled activists to withstand brutal reactions from white authorities as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction, has died, his family said Monday. He was 95. His family said Lawson died on Sunday after a short illness in Los Angeles, where he spent decades working as a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor. Lawson was a close adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” Lawson met King in 1957, after spending three years in India soaking up knowledge about Mohandas K. Gandhi’s independence movement. King would travel to India himself two years later, but at the time, he had only read about Gandhi in books. Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Jerry West, representing the 1960 USA Olympic Team, is seen Aug. 13, 2010, during the enshrinement news conference at the Hall of Fame Museum in Springfield, Mass. Jerry West, who was selected to the Basketball Hall of Fame three times in a storied career as a player and executive, and whose silhouette is considered to be the basis of the NBA logo, died June 12, the Los Angeles Clippers announced. He was 86. West, nicknamed “Mr. Clutch” for his late-game exploits as a player, was an NBA champion who went into the Hall of Fame as a player in 1980 and again as a member of the gold medal-winning 1960 U.S. Olympic Team in 2010. He will be enshrined for a third time later this year as a contributor, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called West “one of the greatest executives in sports history.” Actor and director Ron Simons, seen Jan. 23, 2011, during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, died June 12. Simons turned into a formidable screen and stage producer, winning four Tony Awards and having several films selected at the Sundance Film Festival. He won Tonys for producing “Porgy and Bess,” “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” and “Jitney.” He also co-produced “Hughie,” with Forest Whitaker, “The Gin Game,” starring Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones, “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations,” an all-Black production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the revival of "for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf" and the original work “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” He was in the films “27 Dresses” and “Mystery Team,” as well as on the small screen in “The Resident,” “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: SVU.” Bob Schul of West Milton, Ohio, hits the tape Oct. 18, 1964, to win the 5,000 meter run at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Schul, the only American distance runner to win the 5,000 meters at the Olympics, died June 16. He was 86. His death was announced by Miami University in Ohio , where Schul shined on the track and was inducted into the school’s hall of fame in 1973. Schul predicted gold leading into the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and followed through with his promise. On a rainy day in Japan, he finished the final lap in a blistering 54.8 seconds to sprint to the win. His white shorts were covered in mud at the finish. He was inducted into the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1991. He also helped write a book called “In the Long Run.” San Francisco Giants superstar Willie Mays poses for a photo during baseball spring training in 1972. Mays, the electrifying “Say Hey Kid” whose singular combination of talent, drive and exuberance made him one of baseball’s greatest and most beloved players, died June 18. He was 93. The center fielder, who began his professional career in the Negro Leagues in 1948, had been baseball’s oldest living Hall of Famer. He was voted into the Hall in 1979, his first year of eligibility, and in 1999 followed only Babe Ruth on The Sporting News’ list of the game’s top stars. The Giants retired his uniform number, 24, and set their AT&T Park in San Francisco on Willie Mays Plaza. Mays died two days before a game between the Giants and St. Louis Cardinals to honor the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field in Birmingham , Alabama. Over 23 major league seasons, virtually all with the New York/San Francisco Giants but also including one in the Negro Leagues, Mays batted .301, hit 660 home runs, totaled 3,293 hits, scored more than 2,000 runs and won 12 Gold Gloves. He was Rookie of the Year in 1951, twice was named the Most Valuable Player and finished in the top 10 for the MVP 10 other times. His lightning sprint and over-the-shoulder grab of an apparent extra base hit in the 1954 World Series remains the most celebrated defensive play in baseball history. For millions in the 1950s and ’60s and after, the smiling ballplayer with the friendly, high-pitched voice was a signature athlete and showman during an era when baseball was still the signature pastime. Awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015, Mays left his fans with countless memories. But a single feat served to capture his magic — one so untoppable it was simply called “The Catch.” Actor Donald Sutherland appears Oct. 13, 2017, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, Calif. Sutherland, the Canadian actor whose wry, arrestingly off-kilter screen presence spanned more than half a century of films from “M.A.S.H.” to “The Hunger Games,” died June 20. He was 88. Kiefer Sutherland said on X he believed his father was one of the most important actors in the history of film: “Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that.” The tall and gaunt Sutherland, who flashed a grin that could be sweet or diabolical, was known for offbeat characters like Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's "M.A.S.H.," the hippie tank commander in "Kelly's Heroes" and the stoned professor in "Animal House." Before transitioning into a long career as a respected character actor, Sutherland epitomized the unpredictable, antiestablishment cinema of the 1970s. He never stopped working, appearing in nearly 200 films and series. Over the decades, Sutherland showed his range in more buttoned-down — but still eccentric — roles in Robert Redford's "Ordinary People" and Oliver Stone's "JFK." More, recently, he starred in the “Hunger Games” films. A memoir, “Made Up, But Still True,” is due out in November. Actor Bill Cobbs, a cast member in "Get Low," arrives July 27, 2010, at the premiere of the film in Beverly Hills, Calif. Cobbs, the veteran character actor who became a ubiquitous and sage screen presence as an older man, died June 25. He was 90. A Cleveland native, Cobbs acted in such films as “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Bodyguard” and “Night at the Museum.” He made his first big-screen appearance in a fleeting role in 1974's “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." He became a lifelong actor with some 200 film and TV credits. The lion share of those came in his 50s, 60s, and 70s, as filmmakers and TV producers turned to him again and again to imbue small but pivotal parts with a wizened and worn soulfulness. Cobbs appeared on television shows including “The Sopranos," “The West Wing,” “Sesame Street” and “Good Times.” He was Whitney Houston's manager in “The Bodyguard” (1992), the mystical clock man of the Coen brothers' “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and the doctor of John Sayles' “Sunshine State” (2002). He played the coach in “Air Bud” (1997), the security guard in “Night at the Museum” (2006) and the father on “The Gregory Hines Show." Cobbs rarely got the kinds of major parts that stand out and win awards. Instead, Cobbs was a familiar and memorable everyman who left an impression on audiences, regardless of screen time. He won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding limited performance in a daytime program for the series “Dino Dana” in 2020. Independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman speaks with the media Nov. 7, 2009, at his campaign headquarters in Austin, Texas. The singer, songwriter, satirist and novelist, who led the alt-country band Texas Jewboys, toured with Bob Dylan, sang with Willie Nelson, and dabbled in politics with campaigns for Texas governor and other statewide offices, died June 27. He was 79 and had suffered from Parkinson's disease. Often called “The Kinkster" and sporting sideburns, a thick mustache and cowboy hat, Friedman earned a cult following and reputation as a provocateur throughout his career across musical and literary genres. In the 1970s, his satirical country band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys wrote songs with titles such as “They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed.” Friedman joined part of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976. By the 1980s, Friedman was writing crime novels that often included a version of himself, and he wrote a column for Texas Monthly magazine in the 2000s. Friedman's run at politics brought his brand of irreverence to the serious world of public policy. In 2006, Friedman ran for governor as an independent in a five-way race that included incumbent Republican Rick Perry. Friedman launched his campaign against the backdrop of the Alamo. Martin Mull participates in "The Cool Kids" panel during the Fox Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour on Aug. 2, 2018, at The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mull, whose droll, esoteric comedy and acting made him a hip sensation in the 1970s and later a beloved guest star on sitcoms including “Roseanne” and “Arrested Development,” died June 28. He was 80. Mull, who was also a guitarist and painter, came to national fame with a recurring role on the Norman Lear-created satirical soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and the starring role in its spinoff, “Fernwood Tonight." His first foray into show business was as a songwriter, penning the 1970 semi-hit “A Girl Named Johnny Cash” for singer Jane Morgan. He would combine music and comedy in an act that he brought to hip Hollywood clubs in the 1970s. Mull often played slightly sleazy, somewhat slimy and often smarmy characters as he did as Teri Garr's boss and Michael Keaton's foe in 1983's “Mr. Mom.” He played Colonel Mustard in the 1985 movie adaptation of the board game “Clue,” which, like many things Mull appeared in, has become a cult classic. The 1980s also brought what many thought was his best work, “A History of White People in America,” a mockumentary that first aired on Cinemax. Mull co-created the show and starred as a “60 Minutes” style investigative reporter investigating all things milquetoast and mundane. Willard was again a co-star. In the 1990s he was best known for his recurring role on several seasons on “Roseanne,” in which he played a warmer, less sleazy boss to the title character, an openly gay man whose partner was played by Willard, who died in 2020 . Mull would later play private eye Gene Parmesan on “Arrested Development,” a cult-classic character on a cult-classic show, and would be nominated for an Emmy, his first, in 2016 for a guest run on “Veep.” Screenwriter Robert Towne poses at The Regency Hotel, March 7, 2006, in New York. Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of "Shampoo," "The Last Detail" and other acclaimed films whose work on "Chinatown" became a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles, died Monday, July 1, 2024, surrounded by family at his home in Los Angeles, said publicist Carri McClure. She declined to comment on any cause of death. Vic Seixas of the United States backhands a volley from Denmark's Jurgen Ulrich in the first round of men's singles match at Wimbledon, England, June 27, 1967. Vic Seixas, a Wimbledon winner and tennis Hall of Famer who was the oldest living Grand Slam champion, has died July 5 at the age of 100. The International Tennis Hall of Fame announced Seixas’ death on Saturday July 6, 2024, based on confirmation from his daughter Tori. In this June 30, 2020, file photo, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., speaks to reporters following a GOP policy meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington. Former Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma died July 9. He was 89. The family says in a statement that the Republican had a stroke during the July Fourth holiday and died Tuesday morning. Inhofe was a powerful fixture in state politics for decades. He doubted that climate change was caused by human activity, calling the theory “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” As Oklahoma’s senior U.S. senator, he was a staunch supporter of the state’s military installations. He was elected to a fifth Senate term in 2020 and stepped down in early 2023. The Oak Ridge Boys, from left, Joe Bonsall, Richard Sterban, Duane Allen and William Lee Golden hold their awards for Top Vocal Group and Best Album of the Year for "Ya'll Come Back Saloon", during the 14th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Los Angeles, Calif., May 3, 1979. Bonsall died on July 9, 2024, from complications of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in Hendersonville, Tenn. He was 76. A Philadelphia native and resident of Hendersonville, Tennessee, Bonsall joined the Oak Ridge Boys in 1973, which originally formed in the 1940s. He saw the band through its golden period in the '80s and beyond, which included their signature 1981 song “Elvira.” The hit marked a massive crossover moment for the group, reaching No. 1 on the country chart and No. 5 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100. The group is also known for such hits as 1982’s “Bobbie Sue." Shelley Duvall poses for photographers at the 30th Cannes Film Festival in France, May 27, 1977. Duvall, whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who co-starred in Stanley Kubrick's “The Shining,” died July 11. She was 75. Dr. Ruth Westheimer holds a copy of her book "Sex for Dummies" at the International Frankfurt Book Fair 'Frankfurter Buchmesse' in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007. Westheimer, the sex therapist who became a pop icon, media star and best-selling author through her frank talk about once-taboo bedroom topics, died on July 12, 2024. She was 96. Richard Simmons sits for a portrait in Los Angeles, June 23, 1982. Simmons, a fitness guru who urged the overweight to exercise and eat better, died July 13 at the age of 76. Simmons was a court jester of physical fitness who built a mini-empire in his trademark tank tops and short shorts by urging the overweight to exercise and eat better. Simmons was a former 268-pound teen who shared his hard-won weight loss tips as the host of the Emmy-winning daytime “Richard Simmons Show" and the “Sweatin' to the Oldies” line of exercise videos, which became a cultural phenomenon. Former NFL receiver Jacoby Jones died July 14 at age 40. Jones' 108-yard kickoff return in 2013 remains the longest touchdown in Super Bowl history. The Houston Texans were Jones’ team for the first five seasons of his career. They announced his death on Sunday. In a statement released by the NFL Players Association, his family said he died at his home in New Orleans. A cause of death was not given. Jones played from 2007-15 for the Texans, Baltimore Ravens, San Diego Chargers and Pittsburgh Steelers. He made several huge plays for the Ravens during their most recent Super Bowl title season, including that kick return. The "Beverly Hills, 90210" star whose life and career were roiled by tabloid stories, Shannen Doherty died July 13 at 53. Doherty's publicist said the actor died Saturday following years with breast cancer. Catapulted to fame as Brenda in “Beverly Hills, 90210,” she worked in big-screen films including "Mallrats" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" and in TV movies including "A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story," in which she played the "Gone with the Wind" author. Doherty co-starred with Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano in the series “Charmed” from 1998-2001; appeared in the “90210” sequel series seven years later and competed on “Dancing with the Stars” in 2010. Actor James Sikking poses for a photograph at the Los Angeles gala celebrating the 20th anniversary of the National Organization for Women, Dec. 1, 1986. Sikking, who starred as a hardened police lieutenant on “Hill Street Blues” and as the titular character's kindhearted dad on “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” died July 13 of complications from dementia, his publicist Cynthia Snyder said in a statement. He was 90. Pat Williams chats with media before the 2004 NBA draft in Orlando, Fla. Williams, a co-founder of the Orlando Magic and someone who spent more than a half-century working within the NBA, died July 17 from complications related to viral pneumonia. The team announced the death Wednesday. Williams was 84. He started his NBA career as business manager of the Philadelphia 76ers in 1968, then had stints as general manager of the Chicago Bulls, the Atlanta Hawks and the 76ers — helping that franchise win a title in 1983. Williams was later involved in starting the process of bringing an NBA team to Orlando. The league’s board of governors granted an expansion franchise in 1987, and the team began play in 1989. Lou Dobbs speaks Feb. 24, 2017, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md. Dobbs, the conservative political pundit and veteran cable TV host who was a founding anchor for CNN and later was a nightly presence on Fox Business Network for more than a decade, died July 18. He was 78. His death was announced in a post on his official X account, which called him a “fighter till the very end – fighting for what mattered to him the most, God, his family and the country.” He hosted “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Fox from 2011 to 2021, following two separate stints at CNN. No cause of death was given. Bob Newhart, center, poses with members of the cast and crew of the "Bob Newhart Show," from top left, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily, Jack Riley, and, Suzanne Pleshette, foreground left, and Dick Martin at TV Land's 35th anniversary tribute to "The Bob Newhart Show" on Sept. 5, 2007, in Beverly Hills, Calif. Newhart has died at age 94. Jerry Digney, Newhart’s publicist, says the actor died July 18 in Los Angeles after a series of short illnesses. The accountant-turned-comedian gained fame with a smash album and became one of the most popular TV stars of his time. Newhart was a Chicago psychologist in “The Bob Newhart Show” in the 1970s and a Vermont innkeeper on “Newhart” in the 1980s. Both shows featured a low-key Newhart surrounded by eccentric characters. The second had a twist ending in its final show — the whole series was revealed to have been a dream by the psychologist he played in the other show. Cheng Pei-pei, a Chinese-born martial arts film actor who starred in Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” died July 17 at age 78. Her family says Cheng, who had been diagnosed with a rare illness with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, passed away Wednesday at home surrounded by her loved ones. The Shanghai-born film star became a household name in Hong Kong, once dubbed the Hollywood of the Far East, for her performances in martial arts movies in the 1960s. She played Jade Fox, who uses poisoned needles, in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which was released in 2000, grossed $128 million in North America and won four Oscars. Abdul “Duke” Fakir holds his life time achievement award backstage at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 8, 2009, in Los Angeles. The last surviving original member of the Four Tops died July 22. Abdul “Duke” Fakir was 88. He was a charter member of the Motown group along with lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie" Benson and Lawrence Payton. Between 1964 and 1967, the Tops had 11 top 20 hits and two No. 1′s: “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” and the operatic classic “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” Other songs, often stories of romantic pain and longing, included “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette” and “Just Ask the Lonely.” Sculptress Elizabeth Catlett, left, then-Washington D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon, center, and then-curator, division of community life, Smithsonian institution Bernice Johnson Reagon chat during the reception at the Candace awards on June 25, 1991 in New York. Reagon, a musician and scholar who used her rich, powerful contralto voice in the service of the American Civil Rights Movement and human rights struggles around the world, died on July 16, 2024, according to her daughter's social media post. She was 81. John Mayall, the British blues musician whose influential band the Bluesbreakers was a training ground for Eric Clapton, Mick Fleetwood and many other superstars, died July 22. He was 90. He is credited with helping develop the English take on urban, Chicago-style rhythm and blues that played an important role in the blues revival of the late 1960s. A statement on Mayall's official Instagram page says he died Monday at his home in California. Though Mayall never approached the fame of some of his illustrious alumni, he was still performing in his late 80s, pounding out his version of Chicago blues. Erica Ash, an actor and comedian skilled in sketch comedy who starred in the parody series “Mad TV” and “Real Husbands of Hollywood,” has died. She was 46. Her publicist and a statement by her mother, Diann, says Ash died July 28 in Los Angeles of cancer. Ash impersonated Michelle Obama and Condoleeza Rice on “Mad TV,” a Fox sketch series, and was a key performer on the Rosie O’Donnell-created series “The Big Gay Sketch Show.” Her other credits included “Scary Movie V,” “Uncle Drew” and the LeBron James-produced basketball dramedy “Survivor’s Remorse.” On the BET series “Real Husbands of Hollywood,” Ash played the ex-wife of Kevin Hart’s character. Jack Russell, the lead singer of the bluesy '80s metal band Great White whose hits included “Once Bitten Twice Shy” and “Rock Me” and was fronting his band the night 100 people died in a 2003 nightclub fire in Rhode Island, died Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. He was 63. Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez, a Hall of Fame golfer whose antics on the greens and inspiring life story made him among the sport’s most popular players during a long professional career, died Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024. Susan Wojcicki, the former YouTube chief executive officer and longtime Google executive, died Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, after suffering with non small cell lung cancer for the past two years. She was 56. Frank Selvy, an All-America guard at Furman who scored an NCAA Division I-record 100 points in a game and later played nine NBA seasons, died Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024. He was 91. Wallace “Wally” Amos, the creator of the cookie empire that took his name and made it famous and who went on to become a children’s literacy advocate, died Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024, from complications with dementia. He was 88. Gena Rowlands, hailed as one of the greatest actors to ever practice the craft and a guiding light in independent cinema as a star in groundbreaking movies by her director husband, John Cassavetes, and who later charmed audiences in her son's tear-jerker “The Notebook,” died Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. She was 94. Peter Marshall, the actor and singer turned game show host who played straight man to the stars for 16 years on “The Hollywood Squares,” died. Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024 He was 98. Alain Delon, the internationally acclaimed French actor who embodied both the bad guy and the policeman and made hearts throb around the world, died Sunday, Aug. 18, 2024. He was 88. Phil Donahue, whose pioneering daytime talk show launched an indelible television genre that brought success to Oprah Winfrey, Montel Williams, Ellen DeGeneres and many others, died Sunday, Aug. 18, 2024, after a long illness. He was 88. Al Attles, a Hall of Famer who coached the 1975 NBA champion Warriors and spent more than six decades with the organization as a player, general manager and most recently team ambassador, died Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024. He was 87. John Amos, who starred as the family patriarch on the hit 1970s sitcom “Good Times” and earned an Emmy nomination for his role in the seminal 1977 miniseries “Roots,” died Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024. He was 84. James Darren, a teen idol who helped ignite the 1960s surfing craze as a charismatic beach boy paired off with Sandra Dee in the hit film “Gidget,” died Monday, Sept. 2, 2024. He was 88. James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen has died. He was 93. His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Sept. 9 at home. Jones was a pioneering actor who eventually lent his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader. Working deep into his 80s, he won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors and was given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor. Frankie Beverly, who with his band Maze inspired generations of fans with his smooth, soulful voice and lasting anthems including “Before I Let Go,” has died. He was 77. His family said in a post on the band’s website and social media accounts that Beverly died Sept. 10. In the post, which asked for privacy, the family said “he lived his life with a pure soul, as one would say, and for us, no one did it better.” The post did not say his cause of death or where he died. Beverly, whose songs include “Joy and Pain,” “Love is the Key,” and “Southern Girl,” finished his farewell “I Wanna Thank You Tour” in his hometown of Philadelphia in July. Joe Schmidt, the Hall of Fame linebacker who helped the Detroit Lions win NFL championships in 1953 and 1957 and later coached the team, has died. He was 92. The Lions said family informed the team Schmidt died Sept. 11. A cause of death was not provided. One of pro football’s first great middle linebackers, Schmidt played his entire NFL career with the Lions from 1953-65. An eight-time All-Pro, he was enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1973 and the college football version in 2000. Born in Pittsburgh, Schmidt played college football in his hometown at Pitt. Chad McQueen, an actor known for his performances in the “Karate Kid” movies and the son of the late actor and racer Steve McQueen, died Sep. 11. His lawyer confirmed his death at age 63. McQueen's family shared a statement on social media saying he lived a life “filled with love and dedication.” McQueen was a professional race car driver, like his father, and competed in the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans and the 24 Hours of Daytona races. He is survived by his wife Jeanie and three children, Chase, Madison and Steven, who is an actor best known for “The Vampire Diaries.” Tito Jackson, one of the brothers who made up the beloved pop group the Jackson 5, died at age 70 on Sept. 15. Jackson was the third of nine children, including global superstars Michael and Janet. The Jackson 5 included brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael. They signed with Berry Gordy’s Motown empire in the 1960s. The group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 and produced several No. 1 hits in the 1970s, including “ABC,” “I Want You Back” and “I’ll Be There.” John David “JD” Souther has died. He was a prolific songwriter and musician whose collaborations with the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt helped shape the country-rock sound that took root in Southern California in the 1970s. Souther joined in on some of the Eagles’ biggest hits, such as “Best of My Love,” “New Kid in Town,” and “Heartache Tonight." The Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee also collaborated with James Taylor, Bob Seger, Bonnie Raitt and many more. His biggest hit as a solo artist was “You’re Only Lonely.” He was about to tour with Karla Bonoff. Souther died Sept. 17 at his home in New Mexico, at 78. In this photo, JD Souther and Alison Krauss attend the Songwriters Hall of Fame 44th annual induction and awards gala on Thursday, June 13, 2013 in New York. Sen. Dan Evans stands with his three sons, from left, Mark, Bruce and Dan Jr., after he won the election for Washington's senate seat in Seattle, Nov. 8, 1983. Evans, a former Washington state governor and a U.S. Senator, died Sept. 20. The popular Republican was 98. He served as governor from 1965 to 1977, and he was the keynote speaker at the 1968 National Republican Convention. In 1983, Evans was appointed to served out the term of Democratic Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson after he died in office. Evans opted not to stand for election in 1988, citing the “tediousness" of the Senate. He later served as a regent at the University of Washington, where the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance bears his name. Eugene “Mercury” Morris, who starred for the unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins as part of a star-studded backfield and helped the team win two Super Bowl titles, died Sept. 21. He was 77. The team on Sunday confirmed the death of Morris, a three-time Pro Bowl selection. In a statement, his family said his “talent and passion left an indelible mark on the sport.” Morris was the starting halfback and one of three go-to runners that Dolphins coach Don Shula utilized in Miami’s back-to-back title seasons of 1972 and 1973, alongside Pro Football Hall of Famer Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick. Morris led the Dolphins in rushing touchdowns in both of those seasons. John Ashton, the veteran character actor who memorably played the gruff but lovable police detective John Taggart in the “Beverly Hills Cop” films, died Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. He was 76. Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and won new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Sept. 27 at 89. Smith's publicist announced the news Friday. She was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. “Jean Brodie” brought her the Academy Award for best actress in 1969. Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978. Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and an A-list Hollywood actor, died Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024. He was 88. Drake Hogestyn, the “Days of Our Lives” star who appeared on the show for 38 years, died Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024. He was 70. Ron Ely, the tall, musclebound actor who played the title character in the 1960s NBC series “Tarzan,” died Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024, at age 86. Dikembe Mutombo, a Basketball Hall of Famer who was one of the best defensive players in NBA history and a longtime global ambassador for the game, died Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, from brain cancer, the league announced. He was 58. Frank Fritz, left, part of a two-man team who drove around the U.S. looking for antiques and collectibles to buy and resell on the reality show “American Pickers,” died Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. He was 60. He's shown here with co-host Mike Wolfe at the A+E Networks 2015 Upfront in New York on April 30, 2015. Pete Rose, baseball’s career hits leader and fallen idol who undermined his historic achievements and Hall of Fame dreams by gambling on the game he loved and once embodied, died Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. He was 83. Cissy Houston, the mother of Whitney Houston and a two-time Grammy winner who performed alongside superstar musicians like Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, died Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in her New Jersey home. She was 91. Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who raised their 11 children after he was assassinated and remained dedicated to social causes and the family’s legacy for decades thereafter, died on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, her family said. She was 96. Former One Direction singer Liam Payne, 31, whose chart-topping British boy band generated a global following of swooning fans, was found dead Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, local officials said. He was 31. Mitzi Gaynor, among the last survivors of the so-called golden age of the Hollywood musical, died of natural causes in Los Angeles on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. She was 93. Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican-born phenom for the Los Angeles Dodgers who inspired “Fernandomania” while winning the NL Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year in 1981, died Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024. He was 63. Jack Jones, a Grammy-winning crooner known for “The Love Boat” television show theme song, died, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. He was 86. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, died Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, at age 84. Teri Garr, the quirky comedy actor who rose from background dancer in Elvis Presley movies to co-star of such favorites as "Young Frankenstein" and "Tootsie," died Tuesday, Oct 29, 2024. She was 79. Quincy Jones, the multitalented music titan whose vast legacy ranged from producing Michael Jackson’s historic “Thriller” album to writing prize-winning film and television scores and collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other recording artists, died Sunday, Nov 3, 2024. He was 91 Bobby Allison, founder of racing’s “Alabama Gang” and a NASCAR Hall of Famer, died Saturday, Nov. 9, 2024. He was 86. Song Jae-lim, a South Korean actor known for his roles in K-dramas “Moon Embracing the Sun” and “Queen Woo,” was found dead at his home in capital Seoul, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024. He was 39. British actor Timothy West, who played the classic Shakespeare roles of King Lear and Macbeth and who in recent years along with his wife, Prunella Scales, enchanted millions of people with their boating exploits on Britain's waterways, died Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024. He was 90. Bela Karolyi, the charismatic if polarizing gymnastics coach who turned young women into champions and the United States into an international power in the sport, died Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. He was 82. Arthur Frommer, whose "Europe on 5 Dollars a Day" guidebooks revolutionized leisure travel by convincing average Americans to take budget vacations abroad, died Monday, Nov. 18, 2024. He was 95. Former Chicago Bulls forward Bob Love, a three-time All-Star who spent 11 years in the NBA, died Monday, Nov. 18, 2024. He was 81. Chuck Woolery, the affable, smooth-talking game show host of “Wheel of Fortune,” “Love Connection” and “Scrabble” who later became a right-wing podcaster, skewering liberals and accusing the government of lying about COVID-19, died Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024. He was 83. Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British journalist who became a publishing sensation in her 40s with the saga "A Woman of Substance" and wrote more than a dozen other novels that sold tens of millions of copies, died Sunday, Nov. 24, 2024. She was 91. Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson, the brash speedster who shattered stolen base records and redefined baseball's leadoff position, died Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. He was 65. Greg Gumbel, left, watches as then-Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun talks to Butler head coach Brad Stevens, right, prior to taping a television interview April 3, 2011, for that year's men's NCAA Final Four college basketball championship game in Houston. Gumbel's family announced Dec. 27 that the longtime CBS sportscaster died from cancer at the age of 78. Sign up to get the most recent local obituaries delivered to your inbox.( MENAFN - AzerNews) By Alimat Aliyeva China is actively expanding its Nuwa satellite system, which iscurrently the largest national orbital system of commercial Earthremote sensing radar satellites, Azernews reports. The system includes 12 PIESAT spacecraft, with plans to increasethe number to 114. All of these satellites have been successfullycalibrated and are transmitting high-resolution data and imagesback to Earth. By 2025, over 20 satellites are expected to beoperational as part of the system. The Nuwa system already offers global coverage, including remotepolar regions and the equator, making it capable of monitoring theentire Earth's surface. The satellites can capture images with aresolution of up to 1 meter, even through clouds and in all weatherconditions, including precipitation. One of the most significant features of Nuwa is its ability toperform high-precision monitoring of Earth's surface. Usingadvanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the system cananalyze satellite images with millimeter accuracy. This enablesreal-time monitoring of critical infrastructure, such as dams andlandslides, providing invaluable data for disaster prevention andrisk management. The combination of radar imaging and AI technology makes theNuwa system a groundbreaking tool for a variety of applications,including environmental monitoring, urban planning, agriculture,and national security. In the long term, China plans to leverage the Nuwa satellitenetwork to enhance its space economy, promote global data-sharinginitiatives, and assert itself as a leader in the global remotesensing market. The system could also play a key role in disasterrelief by providing real-time data for faster response to naturaldisasters like earthquakes, floods, and wildfires. As the system continues to grow, it could revolutionize globalsurveillance and data analytics capabilities, providing newopportunities for governments and businesses to make more informeddecisions in fields like climate change monitoring, urbandevelopment, and resource management. MENAFN24122024000195011045ID1109028294 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.Shoppers bemused as Easter eggs hit shop shelves before New Year’s Eve'Epic mess' at TGI Fridays examined by Wall Street Journal

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FORESTVILLE, Calif. (AP) — A major storm moving through Northern California on Thursday toppled trees and dropped heavy snow and record rain after damaging homes, killing two people and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands in the Pacific Northwest. Forecasters warned that the risk of flash flooding and rockslides would continue, and scores of flights were canceled at San Francisco's airport. In Washington, more than 320,000 people — most of them in the Seattle area — were still without power as crews worked to clear streets of electrical lines, fallen branches and debris. Utility officials said the outages could last into Saturday. Meanwhile on the East Coast, where rare wildfires have raged, New York and New Jersey welcomed much-needed rain that could ease the fire danger for the rest of the year. The National Weather Service extended a flood watch into Saturday for areas north of San Francisco as the region was inundated by the strongest atmospheric river — a long plume of moisture that forms over an ocean and flows through the sky over land — this season. The system roared ashore Tuesday as a “bomb cyclone,” unleashing fierce winds . Communities in Washington opened warming centers offering free internet and device charging. A number of medical clinics closed, forcing appointments to be rescheduled. “I’ve been here since the mid-’80s. I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Trish Bloor, who serves on the city of Issaquah’s Human Resources Commission, as she surveyed damaged homes. Up to 16 inches (about 41 centimeters) of rain was forecast in southwestern Oregon and California's northern counties through Friday. The Sonoma County Airport, in the wine country north of San Francisco, received 6.92 inches (17.5 centimeters) Wednesday, breaking a record dating to 1998. In nearby Forestville, one person was hurt when a tree fell on a house. Small landslides were reported across the North Bay region, including one on State Route 281 on Wednesday that caused a car crash, according to Marc Chenard, a weather service meteorologist. Rain slowed somewhat, but “persistent heavy rain will enter the picture again by Friday morning,” the weather service's San Francisco office said on the social platform X. “We are not done!” Dangerous flash flooding, rockslides and debris flows were possible, especially where hillsides were loosened by recent wildfires, officials warned. Scott Rowe, a hydrologist with the weather service in Sacramento, said that so far the ground has been able to absorb the rain in Butte and Tehama counties, where the Park Fire burned over the summer. “It’s not necessarily how much rain falls; it’s how fast the rain falls,” Rowe said. Northern Mendocino and southern Humboldt counties received between 4 and 8 inches (10 and 20 centimeters) of rain in the last 48 hours, and similar amounts were expected over the next 48 hours, forecasters said. Wind gusts could top 50 mph (80 kph). The storm system, which first hit the Pacific Northwest on Tuesday, reached the status of “ bomb cyclone ,” which occurs when a cyclone intensifies rapidly. A winter storm watch was in place for the northern Sierra Nevada above 3,500 feet (1,066 meters), with 15 inches (38 centimeters) of snow possible over two days. Wind gusts could top 75 mph (121 kph) in mountain areas, forecasters said. Sugar Bowl Resort, north of Lake Tahoe near Donner Summit, picked up a foot (30 centimeters) of snow overnight, marketing manager Maggie Eshbaugh said Thursday. She said the resort will welcome skiers and boarders on Friday, the earliest opening date in 20 years. “And then we’re going to get another whopping of another foot or so on Saturday, so this is fantastic,” she said. Another popular resort, Palisades Tahoe, is also opening Friday, five days ahead of schedule, according to its website. The storm already dumped more than a foot of snow along the Cascades in Oregon by Wednesday night, according to the weather service. Forecasters warned of blizzard and whiteout conditions and nearly impossible travel at pass level. Falling trees struck homes and littered roads across western Washington, killing at least two people. A woman in Lynnwood was killed when a large tree fell on a homeless encampment, and another in Bellevue died when a tree fell on a home. More than a dozen schools closed in the Seattle area Wednesday, and some opted to extend the closures through Thursday. In Enumclaw, east of Seattle, residents were cleaning up after their town clocked the highest winds in the state Tuesday night: 74 mph (119 kph). Resident Sophie Keene said the powerful gusts caused transformers to blow out around town. “Things were exploding, like, everywhere,” Keene told the Seattle Times. “Like the transformers over by the park. One blew big, it looked like fireworks just going off.” Ben Gibbard, lead singer of the indie rock bands Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service, drove from his Seattle neighborhood Thursday morning to the woods of Tiger Mountain for his regular weekday run, but there were too many trees blocking the trail. “We didn’t get hit that hard in the city,” he said. “I just didn’t assume it would be this kind of situation out here. Obviously you feel the most for people who had their homes partially destroyed by this.” In California, there were reports of more than 20,000 power outages on Thursday. Only 50 vehicles per hour were allowed through part of northbound Interstate 5 from 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Redding to 21 miles (34 kilometers) south of Yreka due to snow, according to California's Department of Transportation. Transportation officials also shut down a two-mile (3.2 kilometer) stretch of the famed Avenue of the Giants, a scenic drive named for its towering coast redwoods, due to flooding. About 150 flights were delayed and another two dozen were canceled early Thursday at San Francisco International Airport after hundreds of delays and dozens of cancelations the previous day, according to tracking service FlightAware. Parched areas of the Northeast got a much-needed shot of precipitation Thursday, providing a bit of respite in a region plagued by wildfires and dwindling water supplies. More than 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain was expected by Saturday morning in areas north of New York City, with snow mixed in at higher elevations. “Any rainfall is going to be significant at this point,” said Brian Ciemnecki, a weather service meteorologist in New York City, where the first drought warning in 22 years was issued this week. “Is it going to break the drought? No, we’re going to need more rain than that.” Har reported from San Francisco, and Weber from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Hallie Golden and Gene Johnson in Seattle; Martha Bellisle in Issaquah, Washington; Sarah Brumfield in Washington, D.C.; and Michael Hill in Albany, New York, contributed. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Get local news delivered to your inbox!

WASHINGTON (AP) — A machinists strike. Another safety problem involving its troubled top-selling airliner. A plunging stock price. 2024 was already a dispiriting year for Boeing, the American aviation giant. But when one of the company's jets crash-landed in South Korea on Sunday, killing all but two of the 181 people on board, it brought to a close an especially unfortunate year for Boeing. The cause of the crash remains under investigation, and aviation experts were quick to distinguish Sunday's incident from the company’s earlier safety problems. Alan Price, a former chief pilot at Delta Air Lines who is now a consultant, said it would be inappropriate to link the incident Sunday to two fatal crashes involving Boeing’s troubled 737 Max jetliner in 2018 and 2019. In January this year, a door plug blew off a 737 Max while it was in flight, raising more questions about the plane. The Boeing 737-800 that crash-landed in Korea, Price noted, is “a very proven airplane. "It’s different from the Max ...It’s a very safe airplane.’’ For decades, Boeing has maintained a role as one of the giants of American manufacturing. But the the past year's repeated troubles have been damaging. The company's stock price is down more than 30% in 2024. The company's reputation for safety was especially tarnished by the 737 Max crashes, which occurred off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019 and left a combined 346 people dead. In the five years since then, Boeing has lost more than $23 billion. And it has fallen behind its European rival, Airbus, in selling and delivering new planes. Last fall, 33,000 Boeing machinists went on strike, crippling the production of the 737 Max, the company's bestseller, the 777 airliner and 767 cargo plane. The walkout lasted seven weeks, until members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers agreed to an offer that included 38% pay raises over four years. In January, a door plug blew off a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight. Federal regulators responded by imposing limits on Boeing aircraft production that they said would remain in place until they felt confident about manufacturing safety at the company. In July, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud for deceiving the Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved the 737 Max. Acting on Boeing’s incomplete disclosures, the FAA approved minimal, computer-based training instead of more intensive training in flight simulators. Simulator training would have increased the cost for airlines to operate the Max and might have pushed some to buy planes from Airbus instead. (Prosecutors said they lacked evidence to argue that Boeing’s deception had played a role in the crashes.) But the plea deal was rejected this month by a federal judge in Texas, Reed O’Connor, who decided that diversity, inclusion and equity or DEI policies in the government and at Boeing could result in race being a factor in choosing an official to oversee Boeing’s compliance with the agreement. Boeing has sought to change its culture. Under intense pressure over safety issues, David Calhoun departed as CEO in August. Since January, 70,000 Boeing employees have participated in meetings to discuss ways to improve safety. Paul Wiseman, The Associated Press

Apple has "healthier" plans for its AirPods. While the tech major has already made clear that they are not just an audio device (the second-generation AirPods can be used as hearing aids), it is planning to integrate more health features into them. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the third-generation device —rumoured to be called AirPods Pro 3 — could be used for heart rate monitoring, as a temperature sensor, and tracking various physiological aspects. While still in "early development," Gurman acknowledged that heart rate monitoring may be included in AirPods Pro 3. They are anticipated to arrive in 2025, so the health features may get a reveal sometime soon. While the ability for the AirPods to track a user's heart rate is one of Apple's challenges, the other presumably would be how another health tracking gadget will add to the company's repertoire of health devices. The iPhone and Apple Watch already have health monitoring features, and Gurman mentioned that users who wish to track heart rate may not have to look at the Apple Watch. How Apple integrates the AirPods into its health tech ecosystem while sustaining the relevance of all devices remains to be seen. AirPods Pro 3 might also be the first audio product from the company’s stable to use Apple Intelligence. The future AirPods could have built-in cameras that could “be used to capture data that would be processed by AI and assist people in their daily routines.” The cameras will allow Apple Intelligence to visually comprehend the surroundings, similar to Apple’s recently unveiled Visual Intelligence feature in the iPhone 16 series. Apple may install a new H3 chip in the AirPods Pro 3 to power Apple Intelligence. This could allow for other capabilities, including health-related ones. Along with hearing assistance capabilities of the AirPods Pro 2, the updated device could include a new temperature sensor for more precise body temperature readings and other health sensors. The company is also anticipated to make the current audio capabilities of the AirPods, including adaptive transparency and noise reduction, even better. AirPods Pro 3 might also be the first audio product from the company's stable to use Apple Intelligence. The future AirPods could have built-in cameras that could "be used to capture data that would be processed by AI and assist people in their daily routines". The cameras will allow Apple Intelligence to visually comprehend the surroundings, similar to Apple's recently unveiled Visual Intelligence feature in the iPhone 16 series. Apple may install a new H3 chip in the AirPods Pro 3 to power Apple Intelligence. This could allow for other capabilities, including health-related ones. Along with hearing assistance capabilities of the AirPods Pro 2, the updated device could include a new temperature sensor for more precise body temperature readings and other health sensors. The company is also anticipated to make the current audio capabilities of the AirPods, including adaptive transparency and noise reduction, even better.AP News Summary at 10:56 a.m. EST

Georgia QB Carson Beck declares for 2025 NFL DraftSundry Photography Introduction I feel quite good about CrowdStrike ( NASDAQ: CRWD ), not only because the stock gained 25% since my previous recommendation , but also due to consistently improving fundamentals. The company has everything necessary to build sustainable value for Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of CRWD either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

There are sharks in the Red Sea but encounters with them are relatively rare.A shark attack off Egypt's Red Sea coast has left one tourist dead and another injured, authorities said on Sunday. Also Read | Stocks To Buy or Sell Today, December 30: HDFC Bank, Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra Among Shares That May Remain in Focus on Thursday, Know Which Stocks to Buy or Sell on December 30. "Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other," the country's environment ministry said in a statement. Also Read | South Korea Plane Crash: EAM Jaishankar, US President Joe Biden, Japanese PM Ishiba Shigeru and Others Extend Condolences After Tragic Accident in Muan Claims Over 170 Lives. According to Italian media, both men were Italian nationals. What we know about the shark attack The attack occurred in deep water outside the designated swimming zone near the jetties in the popular resort town of Marsa Alam, Egypt's environment ministry added. A 48-year-old man from Rome was killed while diving, Italian news agency ANSA reported. He had been spending Christmas in Egypt with his family and had celebrated his birthday on December 21st. A 69-year-old injured man was taken to a hospital in Port Ghalib. Meanwhile, authorities have closed the area to swimmers for two days following the incident. The Red Sea's marine life makes it popular with divers. Shark encounters in the Red Sea are relatively rare. dvv/lo (AFP, dpa, Reuters) (The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Dec 30, 2024 08:30 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com ).Syria’s embassy in Lebanon suspends services as Lebanon hands over former Syrian army officers(The Center Square) – Bob Casey Jr. is finally ready to say goodbye. Seventeen days after the polls closed, the two-term Democratic senator called Republican challenger Dave McCormick to congratulate him on his win. “As the first count of ballots is completed, Pennsylvanians can move forward with the knowledge that their voices were heard, whether their vote was the first to be counted or the last,” he said in a video posted on X . The concession comes after 16 of 67 counties finished recounting ballots cast, with results showing Casey falling even further behind. Of 702,000 ballots tallied again, McCormick, who declared victory three days after the election, increased his lead by seven votes. During my time in office, I have been guided by an inscription on the Finance Building in Harrisburg: “All public service is a trust, given in faith and accepted in honor.” Thank you for your trust in me for all these years, Pennsylvania. It has been the honor of my lifetime. pic.twitter.com/RSXEFwdge8 The close margin – less than 17,000 ballots or 0.2% – triggered an automatic recount last week, to which Casey could have objected. Counties have until Tuesday to finish the job. Elizabeth Gregory, spokeswoman for McCormick, said in a release “there’s only five more days until the obvious happens.” “Another day closer to this waste of time and money being over,” she said. “We all know how this will end. We’ll be there in five days.” The campaign had maintained there were not enough votes left in the state to overcome the gap . Chief strategist Mark Harris said Casey’s decision to opt for the recount, estimated to cost $1 million, won’t change things. The Associated Press, reached the same conclusion on Nov. 7 when declaring the former hedge fund CEO turned Republican nominee the winner . The flip padded the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to 53-47 and ended the Casey family’s six-decade presence in state and national political office. “During my time in office, I have been guided by an inscription on the Finance Building in Harrisburg: ‘All public service is a trust, given in faith and accepted in honor,’” Casey said. “Thank you for your trust in me for all these years, Pennsylvania. It has been the honor of my lifetime.” Get any of our free email newsletters — news headlines, sports, arts & entertainment, state legislature, CFD news, and more.

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WARMINGTON: 'We are already the 51st state,' says Trudeau's half-brotherSTOCKHOLM (AP) — Two-time defending champion Barcelona clinched the last quarterfinal spot in the Women’s Champions League by beating Hammarby 3-0 in Stockholm on Thursday. Ewa Pajor fired Barcelona ahead with two first-half goals from close range and Aitana Bonmatí finished it off 10 minutes before the final whistle. Following a 2-0 loss to Manchester City in the opening group stage game, Barcelona scored 23 goals in the following four games and conceded one. Man City defeated St. Pölten 2-0 to keep a perfect record and lead Group D with 15 points. Barcelona is three points behind and will host City next Wednesday in the final group game. In Group C, Alessia Russo scored twice and Arsenal beat last-place Vålerenga 3-1 to keep pressure on group leader Bayern Munich. Arsenal produced another dominant display under interim coach Renée Slegers. Frida Maanum also scored for Arsenal and set up Russo's opener. Vålerenga, which retained its domestic league title and just claimed the Norwegian Cup to complete a double, got a consolation goal from substitute Tilde Lindwall. Bayern routed Juventus 4-0 to lead the group with 13 points, one ahead of Arsenal. The two will clash over the top spot in London next week. AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Seattle (7-5) at Arizona (6-6) Sunday, 4:05 p.m. EST, CBS BetMGM NFL Odds: Cardinals by 2 1/2. Series record: Seahawks lead 28-22-1. Against the spread: Seahawks 5-6-1, Cardinals 8-4. Last meeting: Seahawks beat Cardinals 16-6 on Nov. 24, 2024, in Seattle. Last week: Seahawks beat Chargers, 26-21; Cardinals lost to Vikings, 23-22. Seahawks offense: overall (16), rush (28), pass (2), scoring (15). Seahawks defense: overall (18), rush (21), pass (12), scoring (12). Cardinals offense: overall (11), rush (6), pass (22), scoring (17). Cardinals defense: overall (17), rush (13), pass (18), scoring (11). Turnover differential: Seahawks minus-6, Cardinals minus-1. DT Leonard Williams has been one of the most dominant players in the league over the past two weeks. Williams had 2 1/2 sacks, four tackles for loss and three quarterback hits two weeks ago against the Cardinals. Williams sacked Aaron Rodgers twice and scored his first career touchdown on a 92-yard pick-6. QB Kyler Murray has had some good moments over the past two games and completed 31 of 45 passes for 260 yards and a touchdown against the Vikings. But he also threw two interceptions in the fourth quarter which proved costly. QB Geno Smith vs. Arizona's defense. Smith has had another solid season and now he'll face an Arizona defense that's been vastly improved over the past 1 1/2 months. The Cardinals have been much more productive in the pass rush with 23 sacks over the past six games. That ranks third in the NFL over that span. Coach Mike Macdonald said he is optimistic that P Michael Dickson (back spasms) will be able to play this weekend, but bringing in another punter this week is “on the table.”.. LB Uchenna Nwosu has a chance to play this week. Nwosu missed the first four games of the season with a knee injury, then injured his thigh in his first game back in Week 5, and has been on injured reserve since. ... The Cardinals are relatively healthy. DLs Darius Robinson (calf) and Dante Stills (back) have been limited in practice this week. The Seahawks have won six straight games in the series going back to 2022. The Cardinals last won 23-13 on Nov. 21, 2021. The Cardinals haven't won at home against the Seahawks since 2020. The Seahawks' next win will be the 400th in franchise history. ... Since Week 9, Seattle’s defense ranks fifth in the NFL with 17.5 points allowed per game, 299 yards allowed per game, and 84.3 rushing yards allowed per game, while ranking sixth in the league with 18.8 first downs allowed. ... The Seahawks have two pick-6s in the past two games, the first time the team has done so since 2012. ... The Seahawks have held three straight opponents to under 300 yards, and fewer than 100 rushing yards. ... Seattle has outscored its opponents by 37 points in the final two minutes of halves this season, the best in the NFL. .. WR DK Metcalf needs one receiving TD to pass Steve Largent for the most in a player’s first six seasons in franchise history with 47. ... Smith needs one 300-yard game to tie Russell Wilson for the most 300-yard games in a single season in franchise history with five. ... WR Jaxon Smith-Njigba Needs 171 yards for his first 1,000-yard season, and to become the 10th player in franchise history to reach that mark. ... Arizona has won three straight games at home. The Cardinals outscored those opponents 77-30 while scoring nine touchdowns and allowing none. ... TE Trey McBride has caught 12 passes in two straight games, which is the first time a tight end has had at least 12 receptions in two straight games in NFL history. ... Arizona's six losses have come to teams with a combined 55-18 record this season entering Week 14. ... S Budda Baker has 114 tackles this season, which ranks sixth in the league. ... McBride's caught 73 passes this season. He needs just nine more catches over the next five games to break his franchise record for a tight end. ... WR Marvin Harrison Jr. has caught seven TD passes this season, which leads all NFL rookies. ... The Cardinals have been flagged for 61 penalties this season, which is the fewest in the NFL. But the team was flagged 10 times in last week's loss to the Vikings. Arizona's defense is a strong play at home. The Cardinals are giving up just 17 points per game at State Farm Stadium, which is second in the league behind Pittsburgh. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nflUpdate: 2 people detained after man with gun reported at SUNY Morrisville dorm

The Q3 earnings report for Petco Health and Wellness WOOF was released on Thursday, December 5, 2024 at 04:02 PM. Here's what investors need to know about the latest announcement. Earnings Petco Health and Wellness beat estimated earnings by 50.0%, reporting an EPS of $-0.02 versus an estimate of $-0.04. Revenue was up $17.00 million from the same period last year. Past Earnings Performance The company missed on EPS by $0.0 in the previous quarter, leading to a 33.0% increase share price change the next day. Here's a look at Petco Health and Wellness's past performance: Quarter Q2 2024 Q1 2024 Q4 2023 Q3 2023 EPS Estimate -0.02 -0.07 0.02 0.02 EPS Actual -0.02 -0.04 0.02 -0.05 Revenue Estimate 1.52B 1.51B 1.62B 1.51B Revenue Actual 1.52B 1.53B 1.67B 1.49B New investors should note that it is sometimes not an earnings beat or miss that most affects the price of a stock, but the guidance (or forecast). Guidance Petco Health and Wellness management provided guidance for Q4 2024, expecting earnings between $0.0 and $0.02 per share. To track all earnings releases for Petco Health and Wellness visit their earnings calendar here. This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and reviewed by an editor. © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

LINCOLN — What was once a major event of the college football season has, in the first week of December, just become one of the subplots. Early signing day is here for Nebraska and every other program, many of which, including NU, have their attention split several ways. Conference title games haven’t even been played yet. The transfer portal — not officially open until Dec. 9 — has nevertheless been whirling with at least seven Husker departures since Monday. NU has lost one coordinator, locked another up for two years, and set its sights on Kentucky assistant Daikiel Shorts to coach receivers. Matt Rhule’s early afternoon press conference may focus just as much — perhaps more — on topics as the 2025 recruiting class, which stood Tuesday evening at 19 members. By the time Rhule talks about the class, it could grow by a few or in theory shrink, were commits inclined to balk at the departure of Nebraska defensive coordinator Tony White. That hasn’t been the case so far, as some of the highest-rated prospects in the class — four-star linebackers Dawson Merritt and Christian Jones — had reaffirmed their commitment to Nebraska through social media statements. Nebraska awaits final answers from at least three prospects, though Dalkiel’s imminent hiring could, in theory, bring more options into play. »San Antonio Alamo Heights High School five-star athlete Michael Terry, a prospect of few interviews who has narrowed his list to home-state Texas, Nebraska and Oregon, the 6-foot-3, 215-pounder’s top three schools for months. He’ll announce a choice at his 8:15 a.m. signing ceremony on Wednesday. At NU, Terry projects to wideout. »Homestead (Florida) High School four-star receiver Cortez Mills has long been committed to Oklahoma, but recruiting site reporters have him trending to flip to Nebraska. The 6-foot-1, 175-pound Mills caught 79 passes for 1,640 yards and 18 touchdowns last season, breaking Miami-Dade County single-season marks. Mills’ signing ceremony takes place between 8:05-9:30 a.m. in the school’s auditorium. »Kahuka (Hawaii) High School three-star safety Aidan Manutai remains a Husker target, though he’s currently committed to California. The 6-foot, 170-pound Manutai would be part of a defensive backs group that could vie for early playing time. »Another potential prospect to watch is Kentucky receiver commit Dejerrian Miller, who verbally pledged to Shorts and the Wildcats last week and plays prep football at St. Louis Cardinal Ritter, the same school as Husker running back commit Jamarion Parker. Miller did not previously have Nebraska among his top group of suitors and may stick in the SEC. In total, NU plans to sign six in-state commitments — headlined by Jones, an Omaha Westside linebacker — to financial aid papers, as the NCAA in October eliminated the national letter of intent, which binds prospects to school. The group of six — Jones, Omaha North defensive tackle Tyson Terry, Millard North athletes Pierce Mooberry and Caden VerMaas, Wahoo Neumann running back Conor Booth and Lincoln Southwest receiver Jackson Carpenter — are part of one of the strongest corps of in-state recruits in years. Fifteen prospects are poised to sign with FBS programs, with 12 of those headed to power conferences. Unless Terry or Mills flips to NU, Merritt, out of Overland Park (Kansas) Blue Valley High School, is NU’s highest-ranked player in the 2025 class. Thirteen of the 19 prospects in the class have a four-star according to at least one of the four major recruiting services — 247 Sports, ESPN, On3 and Rivals. And all but 247 Sports, as of Tuesday evening ranked NU’s class as No. 20 in the nation. 247 Sports had the Huskers 22nd. Get local news delivered to your inbox!

Canada Post strike: Key issues in the dispute that’s holding up mail deliveryRalph Dangelmaier Annual Scholarship for Fintech Innovators Announces Opportunity for Aspiring Financial Technology Leaders 12-12-2024 09:20 PM CET | Business, Economy, Finances, Banking & Insurance Press release from: Getnews / PR Agency: Talley Digital Media Image: https://www.getnews.info/uploads/1734023638.jpeg Ralph Dangelmaier WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS - The Ralph Dangelmaier [ https://ralphdangelmaier.com/ ] Annual Scholarship for Fintech Innovators is proud to announce its initiative to support and inspire the next generation of leaders in the financial technology (fintech) industry. This annual scholarship, valued at $1,000, will be awarded to an undergraduate student who demonstrates a deep passion for fintech, a strong understanding of emerging technologies, and a forward-thinking mindset. Along with this, the winner will also be awarded business consultation by Ralph and Payments Advisory Team. The scholarship is now open for applications, with a submission deadline of August 15, 2025. The winner will be announced on September 15, 2025. The Ralph Dangelmaier [ https://ralphdangelmaierscholarship.com/ ] Annual Scholarship is founded and administered by Ralph Dangelmaier, a visionary leader in the fintech sector with over three decades of experience driving innovation in financial technology. As the CEO and Board Member of BlueSnap, Inc., Ralph Dangelmaier has been instrumental in expanding the company's global reach. Under his leadership, BlueSnap emerged as one of the first payment facilitators to provide a seamless way for B2B and B2C merchants to accept payments anywhere in the world. BlueSnap's Payment Orchestration Platform Trademark supports access to hundreds of global payment types and currencies across more than 200 countries, solidifying its reputation as a trusted global brand in over 40 countries for payments. Throughout his illustrious career, Ralph Dangelmaier [ https://twitter.com/rdangelmaier ] has been a driving force in fintech innovation. He pioneered internet banking during his tenure at P&H Solutions and played a pivotal role in scaling ACI Worldwide, growing the company's revenue from $300 million to $1 billion. Recognized as one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs, he has also been a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year. Additionally, Ralph Dangelmaier was honored as the Boston Business Journal's Innovator of the Year, underscoring his leadership and contributions to financial technology. With a deep commitment to mentoring the next generation, he continues to inspire aspiring fintech professionals worldwide. The Ralph Dangelmaier [ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphdangelmaier/ ] Annual Scholarship for Fintech Innovators aims to support undergraduate students who share Ralph Dangelmaier's dedication to innovation in fintech. To qualify, applicants must be enrolled as undergraduate students at an accredited institution and demonstrate a keen interest in pursuing a career in financial technology. Ideal candidates will exhibit originality and an understanding of emerging fintech trends such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and decentralized finance. To apply, students must submit an essay in response to the following prompt: "How can emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, or decentralized finance shape the future of the financial industry? Describe an innovative fintech solution you would create to solve a pressing financial challenge." This prompt invites students to explore the transformative potential of fintech technologies, a field Ralph Dangelmaier has profoundly influenced. By encouraging applicants to envision groundbreaking solutions to real-world financial challenges, the scholarship fosters creativity and innovation aligned with Ralph Dangelmaier's career values. The Ralph Dangelmaier [ https://www.instagram.com/rdangelmaier/?hl=en ] Annual Scholarship is open to undergraduate students worldwide, reflecting the global nature of the fintech industry. With a strong focus on identifying creative thinkers ready to make significant contributions to the evolving world of financial technology, the scholarship offers a unique opportunity for students aspiring to shape the future of the industry. Ralph Dangelmaier is committed to nurturing future leaders who will drive fintech forward, just as he has throughout his remarkable career. By offering this scholarship, he hopes to provide deserving students with the support they need to achieve their educational and professional goals in this dynamic and rapidly expanding field. This annual scholarship underscores Ralph Dangelmaier's dedication to mentoring young talent and giving back to the fintech community that has fueled his success. His belief in the power of innovation, mentorship, and collaboration is at the heart of this initiative, which aims to ensure that the future of fintech is bright and full of opportunity. To learn more about the Ralph Dangelmaier Annual Scholarship for Fintech Innovators and to apply, please visit https://ralphdangelmaierscholarship.com/ About Ralph Dangelmaier Ralph Dangelmaier is a distinguished leader in the financial technology industry, with over 30 years of experience scaling organizations, driving innovation, and transforming global payment systems. As the CEO and Board Member of BlueSnap, Inc., he has expanded the company's presence to more than 40 countries, delivering unparalleled payment solutions to businesses worldwide. His visionary leadership has earned him numerous accolades, including recognition as one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs and a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year. Ralph Dangelmaier remains a passionate advocate for aspiring fintech professionals, mentoring the next generation of innovators in the field. Media Contact Company Name: Ralph Dangelmaier Scholarship Contact Person: Ralph Dangelmaier Email: Send Email [ http://www.universalpressrelease.com/?pr=ralph-dangelmaier-annual-scholarship-for-fintech-innovators-announces-opportunity-for-aspiring-financial-technology-leaders ] City: Waltham State: Massachusetts Country: United States Website: https://ralphdangelmaierscholarship.com This release was published on openPR.

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Russell Wilson Achieves Rare Mark for Steelers (Again)KIRKLAND LAKE - A snowy December night delivered an unforgettable experience for a Northern family and paramedics. On Dec. 7, Kirkland Lake’s Bella Batisse, who was 38 weeks pregnant, went to the hospital with contractions. She was checked over by a doctor, who decided to transfer her by ambulance to the Temiskaming Hospital in New Liskeard. En route, paramedics Brandi Ouellette and Natasha Albert of the District of Timiskaming Social Services Administration Board (DTSSAB) realized that the baby would arrive before arriving in New Liskeard. “The call came in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. We were travelling down Highway 11 with lights and sirens blazing, it was a Code 4 emergency,” Ouellette said in a joint statement to TimminsToday with Albert. A Code 4 is defined as a life-threatening situation which requires paramedics to drive with lights and sirens on to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. “It quickly became clear that the little one wasn’t going to wait for the hospital. We made the decision to pull over on the side of the highway, keeping our lights on for safety,” the paramedics said. “Thanks to the skilled support of nurse Ana, who happened to be travelling with us, we were able to safely deliver a healthy baby boy right there on the roadside.” Weighing in at five pounds six ounces, the yet-to-be-named baby boy arrived in the world at 12:36 a.m. on Dec. 8 near Aidie Creek Falls, about halfway to New Liskeard from Kirkland Lake. “As paramedics, we are trained to handle emergencies and prepare for everything that could go wrong. Often, we’re faced with severe injuries, illnesses, and loss. But this past weekend, everything went right,” the paramedics said. “It’s a rare experience to assist in the birth of a baby, and this was a first for both Natasha and me.” It was a rollercoaster of emotions for the paramedics. “Everyone came together seamlessly. Most importantly, mom did an incredible job, and we were fortunate to have such a positive outcome,” they said. Mary-Ann Toppi, the great aunt of the newborn, shared that Batisse and her baby are doing well and expressed the family’s immense gratitude. “We are forever grateful for Ana and the paramedics,” she said. “We’re just all so relieved that although everything unfolded so eventfully, everyone is safe and healthy.” The DTSSAB shared Batisse’s birth story in a Facebook post on Tuesday (Dec. 10), which has been getting a lot of attention. Kirkland Lake’s Bella Batisse delivered her son during a snowstorm on the way to the New Liskeard hospital. Supplied photo Toppi said the positive feedback on the post has been heartwarming. “I am happy to see the positive feedback for our first responders on the social media post. They do hero work on a daily basis. They deserve the recognition and appreciation,” she said. “Our family is forever grateful for them and the service they provide for our community.” Ouellette and Albert said this experience serves as a reminder for drivers to slow down when you see the lights of a first responder. “You never know what critical situation might be unfolding inside that vehicle,” they said. Toppi said Batisse and her baby boy, whose name has yet to be decided, are now home in Kirkland Lake adjusting to life as a family of four.The earnings results for Tilly's TLYS for Q3 were made public on Thursday, December 5, 2024 at 04:05 PM. Here's a comprehensive overview of the announcement. Earnings Tilly's missed estimated earnings by -34.0%, reporting an EPS of $-0.43 versus an estimate of $-0.32. Revenue was down $23.03 million from the same period last year. Historical Earnings Summary Last quarter the company beat on EPS by $0.09 which was followed by a 4.0% drop in the share price the next day. Here's a look at Tilly's's past performance: Quarter Q2 2024 Q1 2024 Q4 2023 Q3 2023 EPS Estimate -0.09 -0.47 -0.22 -0.07 EPS Actual 0 -0.48 -0.17 -0.03 Revenue Estimate 163.81M 115.16M 171.65M 167.98M Revenue Actual 162.87M 115.86M 173.02M 166.47M New investors should note that it is sometimes not an earnings beat or miss that most affects the price of a stock, but the guidance (or forecast). Guidance Tilly's management provided guidance for Q4 2024, expecting earnings between $-0.43 and $-0.32 per share. To track all earnings releases for Tilly's visit their earnings calendar here. This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and reviewed by an editor. © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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NEW YORK — The brooding waltz was carefully composed on a sheet of music roughly the size of an index card. The brief, moody number also bore an intriguing name, written at the top in cursive: “Chopin.” A previously unknown work of music penned by the European master Frederic Chopin appears to have been found at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan. The untitled and unsigned piece is on display this month at the opulently appointed institution, which had once been the private library of financier J.P. Morgan. A previously unknown musical manuscript, possibly by Frederic Chopin, is held in a display case after it was discovered at The Morgan Library & Museum on Nov. 13 in New York. Robinson McClellan, the museum curator who uncovered the manuscript, said it's the first new work associated with the Romantic era composer to be discovered in nearly a century. But McClellan concedes that it may never be known whether it is an original Chopin work or merely one written in his hand. The piece, set in the key of A minor, stands out for its “very stormy, brooding opening section” before transitioning to a melancholy melody more characteristic of Chopin, McClellan explained. “This is his style. This is his essence,” he said during a recent visit to the museum. “It really feels like him.” McClellan said he came across the work in May as he was going through a collection from the late Arthur Satz, a former president of the New York School of Interior Design. Satz acquired it from A. Sherrill Whiton Jr., an avid autograph collector who had been director of the school. McClellan then worked with experts to verify its authenticity. The paper was found to be consistent with what Chopin favored for manuscripts, and the ink matched a kind typical in the early 19th century when Chopin lived, according to the museum. But a handwriting analysis determined the name “Chopin” written at the top of the sheet was penned by someone else. Born in Poland, Chopin was considered a musical genius from an early age. He lived in Warsaw and Vienna before settling in Paris, where he died in 1849 at the age of 39, likely of tuberculosis. A previously unknown musical manuscript, possibly by Frederic Chopin, is seen in a display case after it was discovered at The Morgan Library & Museum, Nov. 13 in New York. He’s buried among a pantheon of artists at the city’s famed Père Lachaise Cemetery, but his heart, pickled in a jar of alcohol, is housed in a church in Warsaw, in keeping with his deathbed wish for the organ to return to his homeland. Artur Szklener, director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, the Polish capital city where the composer grew up, agreed that the document is consistent with the kinds of ink and paper Chopin used during his early years in Paris. Musically, the piece evokes the “brilliant style” that made Chopin a luminary in his time, but it also has features unusual for his compositions, Szklener said. “First of all, it is not a complete work, but rather a certain musical gesture, a theme laced with rather simple piano tricks alluding to a virtuoso style," Szklener explained in a lengthy statement released after the document was revealed last month. He and other experts conjecture the piece could have been a work in progress. It may have also been a copy of another's work, or even co-written with someone else, perhaps a student for a musical exercise. Jeffrey Kallberg, a University of Pennsylvania music professor and Chopin expert who helped authenticate the document, called the piece a “little gem” that Chopin likely intended as a gift for a friend or wealthy acquaintance. “Many of the pieces that he gave as gifts were short – kind of like ‘appetizers’ to a full-blown work,” Kallberg said in an email. “And we don’t know for sure whether he intended the piece to see the light of day because he often wrote out the same waltz more than once as a gift.” David Ludwig, dean of music at The Juilliard School, a performing arts conservatory in Manhattan, agreed the piece has many of the hallmarks of the composer’s style. “It has the Chopin character of something very lyrical and it has a little bit of darkness as well,” said Ludwig, who was not involved in authenticating the document. But Ludwig noted that, if it's authentic, the tightly composed score would be one of Chopin’s shortest known pieces. The waltz clocks in at under a minute long when played on piano, as many of Chopin’s works were intended. “In terms of the authenticity of it, in a way it doesn’t matter because it sparks our imaginations,” Ludwig said. “A discovery like this highlights the fact that classical music is very much a living art form.” The Chopin reveal comes after the Leipzig Municipal Libraries in Germany announced in September that it uncovered a previously unknown piece likely composed by a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in its collections. Christmas music has a long and storied history beginning centuries ago with pagan rituals. Those traditions evolved with St. Francis of Assisi’s Nativity plays in the 13th century, and survived Puritan rule when many Christmas traditions and celebrations were banned during part of the 17th century. Traveling minstrels spread original songs before the invention of the printing press in 1440 ushered in an era of texts that served as the foundation for some of the most beloved Christmas songs. These tunes would be shared in the form of poetry and hymns printed on broadsides . Today, Christmas music runs the gamut from silly to revolutionary. Songs range from grandmothers getting trampled by reindeer to those based on the work of a Romantic-period poet. Who knew that the catchy tune of Wenceslas, the king with the funny name, is a reverent song about the patron saint of the Czech Republic? Or perhaps it would surprise readers to discover that “Silent Night” was designated as an item of Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. These songs we know by heart and hear so often have rich histories rooted in things like war, religion, social reform, and slavery. Stacker compiled a list of Christmas songs released before 1920 and explored the origins of these pieces. This list includes Christmas carols, famous instrumentals, popular hymns, and spirituals from countries around the world. Many of these songs were created out of a chance collaboration between artists spanning time and space; a clergyman pens a hymn, and years later, a composer resurrects those words and sets them to a melody. It may come as no surprise, then, that what people consider to be Christmas classics are among the most-covered Christmas songs of all time . “Silent Night,” for example, had 137,315 recordings according to a 2017 Billboard report. Read on to learn about the rich histories of some of the most beloved Christmas songs that are more than a century old. You may also like: 71 years of Emmy history Written by James Lord Pierpont in 1857 and originally titled “One Horse Open Sleigh,” “Jingle Bells” is one of the most beloved and ubiquitous Christmas carols in existence. In 1965, astronauts Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford made “Jingle Bells,” the first song heard from space as they orbited Earth aboard the Gemini 6. It may be surprising that this Christmas classic was written as a Thanksgiving song. This traditional English Christmas carol refers to the practice of wassailing, the definition of which has evolved over the years . In the song, wassailing is the practice of traveling door-to-door, wishing good health, and asking for a bit of hospitality and Christmas tidings in return, including a drink from a communal bowl filled with mulled cider or ale called wassail. Other familiar variants of the song include “Here We Come A-Caroling,” and “Here We Come A Christmasing.” Published by hymn writer John Mason Neale in 1853, this carol was based on the life of the virtuous ruler Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia . Wenceslaus I was revered for his piety, morality, and virtue. After his assassination, he was posthumously conferred as a king by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, which is why people don’t sing of good Duke Wenceslaus. Wenceslaus was elevated to sainthood immediately after his death, and he's considered the patron saint of the Czech Republic. The version of “O Tannenbaum” most of us are familiar with today was written in 1824 by Ernst Anschütz, a well-known organist and composer from Leipzig, Germany. Anschütz’s version was one of many based on a 16th-century German folk song that pays homage to the steadfast nature of the "Tannenbaum," the German word for a fir tree. The song’s association with Christmas began with Anschütz even though no explicit mention of Christmas was made in his original lyrics. Furthermore, most Christmas trees are spruce, not fir. Readers may be more familiar with the song’s English title, “O Christmas Tree.” If you’ve ever wondered what “God rest you merry” means, you’re not alone. This carol’s title is often misinterpreted, mispunctuated, and widely debated. The phrase “rest you merry” is used in the same way we use “rest assured.” It is not an address to merry gentlemen but rather an imperative statement to all gentlemen to be happy, citing the birth of Christ. It’s even referenced in Charles Dickens' classic “A Christmas Carol.” The earliest known print edition of the carol dates back to 1760, but its author is unknown. You may also like: 30 celebrities you might not know are LGBTQ Originally titled “Three Kings of Orient,” this carol was written by journalist-turned-clergyman John Henry Hopkins in 1857 for a Christmas pageant and published six years later. The carol chronicles the Christian gospel of Matthew in which three biblical magi, commonly known as the three wise men, bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to honor the birth of Jesus. Edmund Sears—a Unitarian pastor in Wayland, Mass.—wrote a five-stanza poem titled “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in 1849. It was adapted by American composer Richard Storrs Willis in 1850 and set to a melody called “Carol.” The words of this poem-turned-carol are regarded as an account of the issues at the time. Topics referred to in the song include the end of the Mexican-American war and a call for peace among men. Proudly rejoicing the nativity of Jesus, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” was an African-American spiritual dating back to 1865. John Wesley Work Jr. was a composer and ethnomusicologist who compiled hundreds of spirituals and even composed a few, including “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” in his work: “American Negro Songs and Spirituals; A Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular.” Written by William Chatterton Dix in 1865 and published in 1871, this carol explores what the shepherds present at the birth of Jesus must have been thinking when they encountered him. In gospel, hymns, and art, shepherds are central characters in the Nativity of Jesus. The song is set to the familiar melody of “Greensleeves,” a 16th-century English folk song. The exact origins of this popular carol are unknown, but it is most often credited to John Francis Wade. Originally written and printed in Latin as “Adeste Fideles,” it first appeared in Wade’s 1751 collection “Cantus Diversi.” You may also like: Exploring minority representation in the biggest box office winners ever What began in 1818 as a modest performance outside of St. Nicholas parish in Oberndorf, Austria, has become one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. Translated into over 300 languages, “Stille Nacht” was written by a priest named Joseph Mohr and composed by Franz Xaver Gruber in 1818. The song became popular among traveling folk singers, and before long, it could be heard around the world. The English version we know today called “Silent Night” was not written until 1863. “Stille Nacht” was named an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2011 . “Carol of the Bells” is no doubt familiar to you, if not by name, then by melody. The carol was based on an Ukranian folk chant called "Shchedryk,” which was traditionally sung on New Year’s Eve as it spoke of good fortune for the upcoming year. American composer Peter J. Wilhousky adapted the lyrics "Shchedryk” into a Christmas song in 1919 using the original musical arrangement by Ukranian composer Mykola Leontovych. Many artists have covered the carol over the last century, and one of its more popular variants is “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. “In the Bleak Midwinter” was based on a poem of the same name written by English poet Christina Georgina Rossetti in 1872. English composer Gustav Holst first set the poem to music in 1906. This particular carol was published by Cecil Sharp, a famous conservator of English folk tradition, in 1911. The song is packed with symbolism that dates back to pagan rituals. Holly, representing males, and ivy, representing females, used to be burned together during the pagan festival of Beltane to encourage a fruitful spring. In Christianity, holly is symbolic of the crown of thorns Jesus wore during his crucifixion. With this rich history, evergreens like holly and ivy are viewed as symbols of rebirth and renewal, which are common themes celebrated at Christmas time. This carol was based on the poem "Christmas Bells," written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Christmas Day in 1863. With an injured wife and a son who joined the union army against his father’s wishes, Longfellow lamented hearing bells on Christmas Day during the American Civil War. The lyrics convey a sense of hopelessness when goodwill and peace on Earth seemed impossible. The poem was set to music in 1872 by English composer John Baptiste Calkin. You may also like: Mistakes from the 50 best movies of all time “O Holy Night” is based on a French poem titled "Minuit, Chrétiens," written by Placide Cappeau at the behest of a parish priest. Composer Adolphe Adam set the poem to music that same year, and it quickly gained popularity throughout France. When Cappeau denounced the Catholic Church to join the socialist movement, the church responded by denouncing his beloved carol. The song made a resurgence after it was translated into English and introduced in America by John Sullivan Dwight. After visiting Bethlehem in the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem , Phillips Brooks was inspired to write about his experiences. Brooks, an Episcopal priest, shared the poem he had written with Lewis Redner, his church’s organist, and asked him to create a melody for it so they could perform it at an upcoming Sunday school service. In a single evening, Redner composed the tune that we know today. Reflecting on the success of the carol, Redner stated : “Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.” Mistakenly attributed, for many years, to Martin Luther—the seminal figure of Europe’s Protestant Reformation in the 16th century—and even titling early versions of this piece “Luther’s Cradle Song,” “Away in a Manger” is a relatively simple carol with unknown origins. The first record of the text being set to music with the title “Away in a Manger” is found in the 1885 publication “Little Children's Book for Schools and Families.” The carol we know as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was originally titled "Hymn for Christmas-Day,” published in 1739 by Charles Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement and brother to John Wesley, the movement’s founder. But it was George Whitefield who adapted the text in 1753 to give us that familiar opener “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” The melody was composed by Felix Mendelssohn and later adapted by William H. Cummings in 1855 to create the song that's popular today. This numeric carol was originally published in England in 1780 in a children’s book called “Mirth Without Mischief.” It is believed to be a type of children's memory-and-forfeit game in which the singer must remember every verse or forfeit something if they make a mistake. You may also like: Best and worst Al Pacino movies Citing the gospel of Luke, this English carol is based on a French song called “Les Anges dans nos campagnes.” The lyrics were written by James Chadwick, a bishop in 1862. His words were set to the tune "Gloria," which was arranged by Edward Shippen Barnes. This Christmas ballad is believed to date back to the 15th century. Unlike many other carols that reference the gospels of Luke or Matthew, this story takes place sometime in between as Mary and Joseph journey to Bethlehem. It is one of the few depictions of Joseph struggling to accept Mary’s pregnancy, evidenced through lyrics such as “O then bespoke Joseph/ With words so unkind,/ Let him pluck thee a cherry/That brought thee with child.” The song was made popular again by Joan Baez’s rendition in 1961. The exact origins of this carol are unknown, but it is believed to be one of the oldest carols still sung today. Dating back to the 12th century, “The Friendly Beasts” is a traditional French carol about the animals present at the birth of Jesus and the gifts they bestowed on him. “Joy to the World” was originally written as a hymn by Isaac Watts. Watt’s adaptation of Psalm 98 interprets Christ as the king of the church and as the king of the world. “Joy to the World” is one of the most recorded Christmas songs of all time . Perhaps the darkest song on this list, “Coventry Carol,” depicts the biblical event “The Massacre of the Innocents” in which King Herod ordered the killing of all male babies under the age of two in Bethlehem. The song takes the form of a lullaby recited to the persecuted children. In Christianity, “The Massacre of the Innocents” is an important part of the broader Nativity story and thus a relevant story in the Christmas narrative. “Coventry Carol” was originally part of a medieval mystery play performed in England called “The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors.” You may also like: Best Grateful Dead albums of all time Receive the latest in local entertainment news in your inbox weekly!Bargain hunters are racing to snap up Aldi’s huge £12.99 Grinch teddy for Christmas – it is the perfect stocking fillerEDWARDSVILLE, Ill. (AP) — Ray'Sean Taylor had 27 points, Ring Malith scored 24 with 10 rebounds and SIU Edwardsville beat Ball State 82-69 on Sunday. Taylor went 9 of 22 from the field (7 for 15 from 3-point range) for the Cougars (6-4). Malith hit 7 of 13 shots and 9 of 10 at the free-throw line. Brian Taylor II shot 5 of 8 from the field and 2 for 4 from the line to finish with 13 points. Juan Sebastian Gorosito led the way for the Cardinals (3-6) with 17 points. Ball State also got 13 points and six rebounds from Ben Hendriks. Malith scored 10 points in the first half and SIU-Edwardsville went into the break trailing 41-39. Ray'Sean Taylor scored the last seven points for SIU-Edwardsville to finish off the 13-point victory. The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar .

NEW YORK, Dec. 08, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WHY: New York, N.Y., December 8, 2024. Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of ordinary shares of ASML Holding N.V. ASML between January 24, 2024 and October 15, 2024, both dates inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important January 13, 2025 lead plaintiff deadline. SO WHAT: If you purchased ASML ordinary shares during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the ASML class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=31159 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. at 866-767-3653 or email case@rosenlegal.com for more information. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than January 13, 2025. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually litigate securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company at the time. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, during the Class Period, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) the issuers being faced by suppliers, like ASML, in the semiconductor industry were much more severe than defendants had indicated to investors; (2) the pace of recovery of sales in the semiconductor industry was much slower than defendants had publicly acknowledged; (3) defendants had created the false impression that they possessed reliable information pertaining to customer demand and anticipated growth, while also downplaying risk from macroeconomic and industry fluctuations, as well as stronger regulations restricting the export of semiconductor technology, including the products that ASML sells; and (4) as a result, defendants' statements about ASML's business, operations, and prospects lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. To join the ASML class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=31159 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email case@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm , on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/ . Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. ------------------------------- Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 case@rosenlegal.com www.rosenlegal.com © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.