Category: World

US President Donald Trump says he has asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to “consider” releasing Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon who was earlier this week found guilty under the city’s controversial national security law.

“I feel so badly,” Trump told reporters. “I spoke to President Xi about it and I asked to consider his release.”

The UK similarly called for the 78-year-old to be “immediately released”, with UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper condemning the ruling, calling it a “politically motivated persecution”.

Lai, who is a British citizen, has been in jail since December 2020 and is due to be sentenced early next year. He faces a maximum term of life in prison.

Trump made the brief comment to reporters at the White House on Monday – but did not specify when he had brought Lai’s case up to Xi.

“He’s an older man and he’s not well. So I did put that request out. We’ll see what happens, okay?,” he said.

His comments come after a Hong Kong court on Monday found Lai guilty of colluding with foreign forces.

The verdict was welcomed by Hong Kong’s chief executive John Lee, who said that Lai’s actions had “damaged the country’s interests and the welfare of Hong Kongers”, but rights groups called it “a cruel judicial farce”.

“He has been targeted by the Chinese and Hong Kong governments for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression,” UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper had told Parliament on Monday, calling for Lai’s “immediate release”.

She added that the Foreign Office has summoned the Chinese Ambassador to “underline our position in the strongest terms”, adding that it was “heartbreaking that such a violation of a British man’s rights could occur in Hong Kong”.

China’s foreign ministry had earlier on Monday dismissed criticisms of Lai’s trial, describing them as “brazen defamation and smearing of the judicial system in Hong Kong”.

Lai was on Monday convicted under the city’s controversial national security law – which rights groups say is used to crush dissent, but which Beijing defends as essential for the city’s stability.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr1z48rvxro

“Battlefield” maker Electronic Arts forecast fiscal 2026 net bookings below analysts’ estimates on Monday, as soft consumer spending and elevated console prices weigh on demand during a fiercely competitive holiday season.

The Redwood City, California-based company expects net bookings of about $7.85 billion for the year, compared with the analysts’ average estimate of $8.06 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. EA also projected annual adjusted EBITDA of $2.76 billion, below the $2.93 billion consensus.

The forecast underscores some of the challenges the video game industry faces as players tighten entertainment budgets and stick to familiar franchises rather than splurge on new titles. High console prices and a crowded release calendar have amplified pressure on publishers during the year-end period, traditionally a peak sales window.

EA, known for blockbuster series such as “FIFA/EA SPORTS FC,” “Madden NFL” and “Battlefield,” is leaning on its core sports and action portfolio to offset the slowdown.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/battlefield-maker-ea-forecasts-softer-2026-bookings-amid-slow-spending-crowded-holiday-slate-5593286

Japan will revise rules to require foreigners buying domestic property, including for residential purposes, to file a report to the government, Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said on Tuesday.

Under current rules, the government only requires foreigners buying property for investment purposes to file a report.

The government will expand the requirement to include property purchased for residential purposes, and aim to introduce the new rules in April next year, Katayama told a news conference.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/japan-expand-rules-foreigners-property-purchases-finance-minister-says-5593356

THE emotional last words of the brave shopkeeper who disarmed one of the Bondi Beach terrorists have been revealed – along with pictures of the hero recovering in hospital.

Ahmed Al Ahmed, 43, told his cousin, Jozay Alkanj, he was going to die before valiantly wrestling the rifle out of the hands of one of the gunmen in the attack that killed 15.

The Syrian Muslim migrant – made an Australian citizen in 2022 – could lose his arm after being shot five times in the horror, it was revealed yesterday.

He is said to be in agony following surgery to remove bullets that were sprayed up his left shoulder during the extraordinary feat of bravery.

A GoFundMe page set up in honour of Ahmed’s superhuman actions has already surpassed $1million in donations, with US billionaire Bill Ackman forking out $100k to thank the fruit shop owner.

Alkanj revealed to The Sydney Herald that his cousin said “I’m going to die, please see my family and tell them that I went down to save people’s lives,” before barrelling towards the gunman.

The pair had been offered food by members of the targeted Hannukah event before the shots began ringing out around the beach.

Alkanj said: “It was very crazy, we went behind the cars, we were seeing that people were shooting very near to us.”

Dramatic footage, which has over 20million social media views, shows Ahmed sneak up behind the gunman, undetected behind parked cars.

The terrorist, 50-year-old Sajid Akram, can be seen picking off victims before Ahmed swiftly disarms and knocks him to the ground.

As Akram scrambles backwards, the shopkeeper briefly turns the gun towards him but doesn’t pull the trigger.

Akram then stumbles off as Ahmed calmly places the weapon against a tree.

The hero was then wounded after coming under fire from the other gunman, 24-year-old Naveed Akram, on a nearby bridge and suffered wounds to his hand and shoulder.

Sam Issa, Ahmed’s migration lawyer, said after visiting him that he would do it again.

He said: “He doesn’t regret what he did. He said he’d do it again but the pain has started to take a toll on him.

“He’s not well at all. He’s riddled with bullets. Our hero is struggling at the moment.”

US President Donald Trump has also praised Ahmed’s heroics.

“In Australia, as you’ve probably read, there’s been a very, very brave person who went and attacked one of the shooters.

“He saved a lot of lives, a very brave person who is right now in the hospital, pretty seriously wounded.

“I have great respect for the man who did that.”

Mr Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Fateh al Ahmed, told ABC Australia his son has an “impulse to protect people”, having previously served with the police.

Speaking through a translator, he told the broadcaster: “My son is a hero, he served with the police and in the central security forces, and he has the impulse to protect people.

“When he saw people laying on the ground, and the blood everywhere, immediately his conscience and his soul compelled him to pounce on one of the terrorists and to rid him of his weapon.

“I feel pride and honour, because my son is a hero of Australia.”

Mr Ahmed is in hospital with bullet wounds to his arm and hand, but was in “good spirits”, his family previously said.

His mother, Malakeh Hasan al Ahmed, said she was proud of her son, describing him as a “do-gooder”.

She told ABC Australia through a translator: “I’m proud that my son was helping people. He saved lives, souls. God would not harm him because he was a do-gooder.

“He saw they were dying and people were losing their lives, and when that guy ran out of ammo, he took it from him, but he was hit.

“We pray that God saves him.”

Another relative of the brave shopkeeper told Channel Seven Al Ahmed had no experience with guns, adding: “He’s a hero, he’s 100 per cent a hero.”

Chris Minns, Premier of New South Wales, has paid tribute to the selfless act of bravery, which forced the attackers to retreat.

He said: “It’s the most unbelievable scene I’ve ever seen. A man walking up to a gunman who had fired on the community and single-handedly disarming him, putting his own life at risk to save the lives of countless other people.

“That man is a genuine hero, and I’ve got no doubt that there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.”

Cops confirmed 16 people including one 10-year-old girl died after two gunmen opened fire on a group of people in Archer Park at Bondi Beach.

Bondi resident Morgan Gabriel, 27, said she had been heading to a nearby cinema when she heard what she thought were fireworks, before people started running up her street.

“Their phones had been left down the beach, and everyone was just trying to get away,” she said, adding that two of the six or seven she sheltered turned out to be close friends.

“It’s a very sad time this morning,” she said, with the beach bare of the usual throng of swimmers, surfers and runners.

“So this is very, very quiet. And there’s definitely a solemn sort of vibe.”

A Holocaust survivor was also shot dead while trying to protect his wife during the terrifying shooting.

Alex Kleytman was killed while shielding his wife Larisa from bullets, saving her from death in his selfless final act.

French citizen Dan Elkayam was also killed in the shooting, according to France’s president Emmanuel Macron.

Reuven Morrison and Rabbi Yaakov Levitan were also named among those killed in the attack, according to Chabad.

The horror attack took place as a Hanukkah event was in full swing.

Mourners paid respects and laid flowers at a makeshift memorial at the Bondi pavilion draped in Israeli and Australian flags as police and private Jewish security guards patrolled.

A Hannukah menorah was also projected onto the sails of the iconic Sydney Opera House to honour the victims.

“What we saw yesterday was an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters after laying flowers at Bondi Beach.

“The Jewish community are hurting today,” he added.

“Today, all Australians wrap our arms around them and say, we stand with you. We will do whatever is necessary to stamp out antisemitism. It is a scourge, and we will eradicate it together.”

Thousands of Aussies have turned out in just one day to donate blood following the horrific massacre.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15641219/bondi-massacre-hero-recovers-hospital-last-words-revealed/

SURPRISING details have resurfaced about the complicated relationship between Rob Reiner and his son Nick, who is accused of murdering the filmmaker and his wife, Michele.

The youngest son of the A-list Hollywood couple reportedly battled a 15-year-long addiction to drugs and was even homeless for a period of time.

On Sunday, Rob, 78, and Michele, 68, were found stabbed to death with their throats slit after having allegedly gotten into an altercation with a family member, according to police.

The couple was allegedly discovered by their daughter, Romy, who lived across the street from them in Los Angeles, California.

Romy called the police and said that her brother, Nick, 32, was “dangerous” and should be a person of interest, according to TMZ.

Nick was nowhere to be found when police arrived around 3:30 pm on Sunday, the outlet reported.

He was later arrested Sunday evening in connection with the gruesome deaths and is being held on a $4 million bond.

While the death of the Oscar-nominated director and his wife shocked the world, Reiner’s neighbors weren’t surprised by the son’s suspected involvement.

“This is not the first time their son has been violent,’’ a longtime neighbor of the victims told The New York Post.

“I know of another incident a few years back with Nick, but I won’t say more than that,’’ added the anonymous neighbor. “I just never thought it would ever get to this point.”

Nick previously admitted to being a heroin addict and began using drugs at the age of 15.

“I know they wanted him to get help, go to rehab, but he wanted to get help while at home — he did not want to get treatment at a facility,’’ the neighbor said.

“And I know they have argued about that for years. Nick has had demons for the longest.”

During a 2018 episode of the Dopey podcast, the son admitted to having previously “totally spun out on uppers” and destroyed his parents’ guest house in 2017.

“It’s not much of a story. I got totally spun out on uppers — I think it was coke and something else — and I was up for days on end,” Nick recalled.

“I started punching out different things in my guest house.”

Nick said that there was no “logic” to his freakout, but he did recall that just before the incident, his parents told him he “had to go.”

The suspected murderer had been in and out of rehab 17 times since he began using, and even experienced homelessness, he told People magazine in 2016.

“I was homeless in Maine. I was homeless in New Jersey. I was homeless in Texas,” Nick said.

“I spent nights on the street. I spent weeks on the street. It was not fun.”

‘BEING CHARLIE’

In 2015, Nick even co-wrote a movie called Being Charlie that his dad directed, inspired by his and his father’s relationship during his addiction.

Being Charlie initially started as a pilot script Nick intended to pitch for television, but it eventually morphed into a bonding project between the father and son, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The film follows Charlie, played by Nick Robinson, a privileged child who becomes addicted to drugs, and David Mills, played by Cary Elwes, a successful actor with political aspirations.

Being Charlie follows the strained relationship between the father and son, as the father begs for Charlie to get help.

Throughout the movie, Charlie tries and fails at different rehabilitation programs set up by his father.

During a Q&A that followed the 2015 premiere of the movie, the “When Harry Met Sally” director admitted that the movie brought up raw feelings between him and his son.

“It was very, very hard going through it the first time, with these painful and difficult highs and lows,” Rob Reiner said.

“And then making the movie dredged it all up again.”

The father-son duo said parts of the film were lifted directly from their personal lives.

In one scene, during an intense push for Charlie to seek help, the father character told his son, “I’d rather you hate me, and you be alive.”

Rob said he’s told his own son that verbatim.

Even lead actor Cary Elwes, who previously worked with Rob on The Princess Bride, said the film “doesn’t get more personal than this.”

“There were times when I would want to tone it down and Rob would just tell me, ‘No, turn it up,’” Elwes said in 2015.

“He would tell me he didn’t handle it well and we had to show that. He would describe the stages of grief and how addiction is like a slow suicide, then say, ‘Let’s explore all of that.’”

Rob and his wife both said they chose to listen to doctors who pushed rehab programs rather than listening to their son.

“We were so influenced by these people,” Nick’s mother, Michele, said at the time.

They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/15645915/rob-reiner-son-nick-reiner-rehab-before-killing-parents/

Germany’s car industry has hit a rough patch, having its worst quarter since after the financial crisis in 2009. Meanwhile, in Berlin, EU, US and Ukrainian representatives are discussing a US peace plan.

Sudden and heavy rainfall in Safi, Morocco, led to deadly flash-floods on Sunday. Forecasters are predicting more rain in the country.

What do we know about the flooding in Morocco?

An hour of heavy rain on Sunday triggered a deluge of muddy water which inundated dozens of homes and shops, swept away cars and severed access to many roads in the Atlantic coastal city, located around 300 kilometres (186 miles) south of the capital Rabat.

Authorities reported that some 32 people were injured in the floods, most of whom have been discharged from the hospital.

At least 70 homes and businesses in the Safi old city were flooded.

The water levels decreased by Sunday evening as rescue personnel continued a search for other possible casualties.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/morocco-flash-floods-leave-37-dead/a-75155314

US health agencies under Robert F Kennedy Jr. and American medical groups are in conflict over childhood vaccination policy. At the heart of the clash is a long debunked, persistent myth about vaccine safety.

Family doctors are probably the best place to obtain trusted, first-point information about vaccines and other medicines, say experts, amid a growing and public conflict between the Trump Administration’s health agencies and professional, independent medical groups.

Forty-four such groups, including the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Academy of Pediatrics, co-signed a statement protesting a new recommendation by the US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a high-level government advisory panel on vaccine safety and effectiveness.

The ACIP voted that the hepatitis B vaccine, typically administered to all newborns in the US within the first hours of birth, be optional for all but those at highest risk of the infection. Hepatitis B is a vaccine-preventable viral infection that causes liver disorders, including often fatal cirrhosis and cancer.

In September, the ACIP also recommended the MMRV vaccine that combines doses for measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox-causing varicella, be split.

The changes come despite a lack of evidence that vaccines cause harm and years of data optimizing vaccine dosage schedules.

“The overwhelming concern that those of us watching these recommendations have, is how it is sowing distrust about our vaccines and our vaccine schedule and about the data that we have,” Jodie Guest, a specialist in infectious disease based at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told DW.

“It’s messy, it’s confusing.”

Controversy stems from Kennedy’s remaking of health structures

Usually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America’s federal public health agency, enact recommendations from its ACIP as guidance for US states, which have ultimate responsibility for health policy within their borders.

CDC guidance is usually supported by peak medical groups and followed by health insurers to decide policy coverage.

But the ACIP and CDC have been overhauled this year by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a noted anti-vaccine campaigner — with new appointees.

This “new group of people [is] quite skeptical, if not outright hostile to vaccines,” said Josh Sharfstein, a public health expert based at Johns Hopkins University.

A former Maryland state health secretary, appointed under a Democrat governor, Sharfstein told DW the ACIP’s core decision-making processes have been abandoned under Kennedy’s new panel.

“The decision making on vaccines has lost integrity,” Sharfstein said. “The scientists aren’t making presentations to the advisors, there are advocates who, have had all kinds of challenges with the accuracies of [their own] statements in the past, who are the ones briefing the advisors.

“It’s more than just a different conclusion, it’s an entirely different process,” Sharfstein said.. “It’s a process that’s gone off the rails.”

In the background is Kennedy’s long-stated view that some vaccines cause autism. He recently directed an update to the CDC’s “Autism and Vaccines” safety information page, which now says key research into a purported autism-vaccine link has been “ignored by health authorities” and that “the statement ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.”

However there have been multiple studies reviewing millions of births that find no connection between vaccines — usually the MMR vaccine — and autism. An expert committee from the World Health Organization reaffirmed this in December 2025. Medical professionals have said claims of increased rates of autism in the US are due to expanded definitions of the condition and improved diagnostic methods, not vaccination. Many pages on the CDC website still say vaccines, including the MMR vaccine, are safe.

“That doesn’t mean that there are not important things to study in vaccine safety,” said Sharfstein. “The goal should always be for vaccines to be safer and for risk to be better understood. You can believe that the benefits far outweigh the risks of vaccines and still want to make vaccines as safe as possible.

“What’s going on now is, I don’t think, driven by a specific kind of study. I think it relates to a very general hostility towards vaccines.”

Family doctors now the safe voice

As Kennedy has remade key federal health structures, resignations of long-serving science staff within his health agencies have followed.

Independent medical groups, academies and experts are concerned that information from federal health agencies is no longer reliable and have begun publishing their own advice to the public.

James Campbell, the vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ infectious diseases committee, called the ACIP meetings a “brazen attempt to sow fear and distrust in vaccinations that have saved countless lives.”

In the aftermath of the recommendations, around a dozen states — all led by Democrats — said they would reject any changes to the vaccine schedule. Health insurers have said they would continue to offer coverage for at-birth hepatitis B vaccination, despite the change from ACIP.

A new survey commissioned by the Annenberg Public Policy Center also found that American adults, by a 2-1 margin, would now be more likely to take advice from the AMA than the CDC.

Jason Schwartz, a vaccines and vaccination policy researcher at Yale University, US, told DW the pushback by America’s medical community now taking place was “an attempt to try and mitigate what the overwhelming majority of the mainstream public health and medical community sees as inappropriate shifts in our recommendations regarding vaccines from the federal level.”

But he and the other experts DW spoke to say the conflict in messaging between the federal government, states and peak medical groups could be confusing.

“I do think that the standing of the professional associations, the doctors, the nurses, have a lot more credibility right now with the American people,” said Sharfstein.

Schwartz pointed to relationships with family health care providers as being the “back stop” amid the conflict between high level doctors groups and Kennedy’s health department.

“That relationship with a health care provider who a family knows, can talk with, can listen to their questions and concerns, can help clarify the confusion or uncertainty that they are no doubt feeling to some degree in this moment,” Schwartz said.

Wider impacts for the US and the world?

The traditional role of the US as a global health leader is also on the decline.

Many countries have based their own long-standing public health agencies, vaccine advisory committees and scientific review structures, on the US.

Some also look to agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for drug approvals in the US, as a valuable reference for their own medicine approvals.

“I don’t know that other countries should currently be looking to the United States for leadership on these decisions, and that is so unfortunate,” said infectious disease specialist Guest.

The change in procedure across US federal health agencies, and the increase in language that muddies long-established scientific research on vaccine safety, might also impact public perceptions of immunization and medicine outside of the US.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/medical-experts-are-pushing-back-on-new-us-vaccine-policy/a-75161898

BNSF Railway, one of the crown jewels of Warren Buffett’s sprawling Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, calls itself an environmental leader in the U.S. rail industry with the cleanest locomotive fleet in North America.
“When you see our orange locomotives’ and freight cars’ steel wheels moving on steel rails, think green,” BNSF says in its latest sustainability overview.

But the company is the largest player in an industry that has a pollution problem: U.S. freight railroads are a major source of pollution, chuffing out more nitrogen oxide, the primary component of smog, than all the nation’s coal-fired power plants combined, according to a Reuters calculation using government data.

U.S. railroads together produced about 485,000 tons of nitrogen oxide in 2024, compared to 452,000 tons emitted by U.S. coal-fired power plants, according to a Reuters calculation of reported annual fuel consumption multiplied by the EPA’s 2023 weighted-average emission rates.
BNSF, the nation’s largest freight railroad, accounts for about a third of that total, producing 161,500 tons of smog-causing nitrogen oxide in 2024, according to the data. “We don’t dispute your number. BNSF is the biggest Class I railroad by volume,” BNSF said in an email.
BNSF’s position as largest in the rail industry, as well as its profitability, will be challenged if regulators approve the planned $85 billion merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, which would create the first U.S. coast-to-coast freight rail operator, Morningstar railroad analyst Greggory Warren said.

Reuters shared its calculations with four industry experts and all agreed it was a fair methodology. About 80% of the industry’s NOx tons are produced by Class I railroads, the industry term for the six major railroads with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Details on the rail industry’s recent NOx emissions performance, BNSF’s share of those emissions, and the factors driving the ongoing high levels of pollution have not previously been reported.
Railroad locomotive pollution causes an estimated $48 billion in healthcare costs and 3,100 premature deaths annually in the United States, according to the EPA’s Co-Benefits Risk Assessment tool.
“Americans don’t realize how much harmful pollution comes from old diesel locomotives,” said Bill Magavern, policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air, a California group that advocates for public health. “EPA should require the railroad companies to modernize their fleets,” he said.

The EPA declined to comment specifically on rail pollution for this story, but said: “The Trump EPA is committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water, and land for all Americans.”

Seventeen people were killed and 20 were injured after a bus carrying school children fell off a cliff in a rural area in northern Colombia, the local governor said on Sunday night.
In a post on X earlier in the day, the governor of Antioquia, Andres Julian, said the bus was traveling from the Caribbean town of Tolu to Medellin after a school trip and was carrying students from the Antioqueño High School.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/over-10-dead-after-school-bus-accident-colombia-2025-12-14/

A bystander who tackled and disarmed one of the gunmen during the Sydney’s Bondi Beach shooting is being hailed as a hero for his actions. He has now undergone surgery for bullet wounds and is currently recovering, said the latest update on Monday.

A video went viral showing 43-year-old fruit shop owner Ahmed al Ahmed tackling the gunmen, armed with a rifle firing on civilians, from behind.

The video shows the Ahmed overpowering the attacker, snatching the gun from the attacker’s hand and pointing the weapon at the attacker. Then the man in a dark shirt is seen backing away towards a bridge where another shooter is positioned, while the bystander places the gun down.

According to a local outlet 7News, the fruit seller also suffered two gunshot wounds during the firing as Jewish people had gathered to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on Sunday evening.

The one-minute video quickly went viral on social media and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hailed him and others as “heroes”.

Chris Minns, the premier of New South Wales state, also hailed him as “a genuine hero” and said the video was “the most unbelievable scene I’ve ever seen”, Reuters reported.

“There are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery,” Minns added.

Ahmed al Ahmed in hospital

According to Mustapha, Ahmed’s cousin, the fruit seller is in hospital, and he hoped that he would be fine.

“He’s in hospital and we don’t know exactly what’s going on inside. We do hope he will be fine. He’s a hero 100 percent,” Mustapha told 7News.

The Australians authorities called the incident, in which 11 people and dozen others were injured, as a “terrorist” attack targeting the Jewish community.

One of the suspects has been identified as Naveed Akram, though it is not clear if Akram is the one who was shot dead or the one critically injured, according to Australia’s ABC news.

Source : https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/bystander-ahmed-al-ahmed-who-tackled-gunman-at-sydney-bondi-beach-shooting-hailed-as-hero-101765728608815.html

Egypt on Sunday revealed the revamp of two colossal statues of a prominent pharaoh in the southern city of Luxor, the latest in the government’s archaeological events that aim at drawing more tourists to the country.

The giant alabaster statues, known as the Colossi of Memnon, were reassembled in a renovation project that lasted about two decades. They represent Amenhotep III, who ruled ancient Egypt about 3,400 years ago.

“Today we are celebrating, actually, the finishing and the erecting of these two colossal statues,” Mohamed Ismail, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told The Associated Press ahead of the ceremony.

Attempts to revive a prestigious temple

Ismail said the colossi are of great significance to Luxor, a city known for its ancient temples and other antiquities. They’re also an attempt to “revive how this funerary temple of king Amenhotep III looked like a long time ago,” Ismail said.

Amenhotep III, one of the most prominent pharaohs, ruled during the 500 years of the New Kingdom, which was the most prosperous time for ancient Egypt. The pharaoh, whose mummy is showcased at a Cairo museum, ruled between 1390–1353 BC, a peaceful period known for its prosperity and great construction, including his mortuary temple, where the Colossi of Memnon are located, and another temple, Soleb, in Nubia.

The colossi were toppled by a strong earthquake in about 1200 BC that also destroyed Amenhotep III’s funerary temple, said Mohamed Ismail, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

They were fragmented and partly quarried away, with their pedestals dispersed. Some of their blocks were reused in the Karnak temple, but archaeologists brought them back to rebuild the colossi, according to the Antiquities Ministry.

In late 1990s, an Egyptian German mission, chaired by German Egyptologist Hourig Sourouzian, began working in the temple area, including the assembly and renovation of the colossi.

“This project has in mind … to save the last remains of a once-prestigious temple,” she said.

A Pharoah facing the rising sun

The statues show Amenhotep III seated with hands resting on his thighs, with their faces looking eastward toward the Nile and the rising sun. They wear the nemes headdress surmounted by the double crowns and the pleated royal kilt, which symbolizes the pharaoh’s divine rule.

Two other small statues on the pharaoh’s feet depict his wife, Tiye.

The colossi — 14.5 meters (48 feet) and 13.6 meters (45 feet) respectively — preside over the entrance of the king’s temple on the western bank of the Nile. The 35-hectare (86-acre) complex is believed to be the largest and richest temple in Egypt and is usually compared to the temple of Karnak, also in Luxor.

The colossi were hewn in Egyptian alabaster from the quarries of Hatnub, in Middle Egypt. They were fixed on large pedestals with inscriptions showing the name of the temple, as well as the quarry.

Unlike other monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt, the colossi were partly compiled with pieces sculpted separately, which were fixed into each statue’s main monolithic alabaster core, the ministry said.

Eye on tourism

Sunday’s unveiling in Luxor came just six weeks after the inauguration of the long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, the centerpiece of the government’s bid to boost the country’s tourism industry and bring cash into the troubled economy. The mega project is located near the famed Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx.

The tourism sector, which depends heavily on Egypt’s rich pharaonic artifacts, has suffered during years of political turmoil and violence following the 2011 uprising. In recent years, the sector has started to recover after the coronavirus pandemic and amid Russia’s war on Ukraine — both countries are major sources of tourists visiting Egypt.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/egypt-antiquities-pharoah-tourism-6f8337f96ab084b7854ca9ed13c214de

“Zootopia 2” regained the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office with $26.3 million in its third weekend of release, according to studio estimates Sunday, as The Walt Disney Co. animated sequel became the year’s second film to gross $1 billion worldwide.

With “Avatar: Fire and Ash” arriving Friday, it was a relatively quiet weekend in theaters. There were no major new releases, leaving holdovers “Zootopia 2” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” to duke it out for the top spot.

The edge went to “Zootopia 2,” which has quickly amassed $1.14 billion in global ticket sales thanks significantly to its enormous success in China. There, it’s grossed $502.4 million, making “Zootopia 2” the biggest Hollywood hit in the country in years.

The only other 2025 Hollywood title to surpass $1 billion worldwide was Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” ($1.04 billion). The highest grossing movie of the year, though, is the Chinese blockbuster “Ne Zha 2,” which collected nearly $2 billion just in China.

In its second weekend of release, the Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions sequel “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” collected $15.4 million, a brutal drop of 70% from its above-expectations debut. Still, with a domestic total of $95.5 million, the $36 million production is a big win for Blumhouse, adding another horror franchise to its portfolio.

The weekend’s most notable new release was James L. Brook’s “Ella McCay,” his first directed film in 15 years. “Ella McCay” earned a scant $2.1 million from 2,500 locations, making it one of the year’s worst wide releases.

But box-office expectations weren’t high coming in from “Ella McCay,” a comic drama about a 34-year-old woman (newcomer Emma Mackey) who becomes governor of her home state. Reviews (22% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes) were poor, and the kind of award-winning comic dramas movies that Brooks (“Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News”) has long specialized in today seldom find large audiences in theaters. “Ella McCay,” featuring a supporting cast including Jamie Lee Curtis, Ayo Edebiri and Woody Harrelson, cost $35 million to make.

With overall ticket sales on the year running close to even with last year’s disappointing grosses, according to Comscore data, Hollywood will be hoping the coming holiday corridor, traditionally the busiest moviegoing period of the year, ends 2025 on a high note. Movies on tap include “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” “Marty Supreme,” “Anaconda” and “Song Sung Blue.”

Source : https://apnews.com/article/zootopia-five-nights-at-freddys-box-office-818d9c425cbfad519ec92ac76f7a88e9

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday voiced readiness to drop his country’s bid to join NATO in exchange for Western security guarantees, but rejected the U.S. push for ceding territory to Russia as he held talks with U.S. envoys on ending the war.

Zelenskyy sat down with U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Ukrainian leader posted pictures of the negotiating table with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz sitting next to him facing the U.S. delegation.

Responding to journalists’ questions in audio clips on a WhatsApp group chat before the talks, Zelenskyy said that since the U.S. and some European nations had rejected Ukraine’s push to join NATO, Kyiv expects the West to offer a set of guarantees similar to those offered to the alliance members.

“These security guarantees are an opportunity to prevent another wave of Russian aggression,” he said. “And this is already a compromise on our part.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast Ukraine’s bid to join NATO as a major threat to Moscow’s security and a reason for launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine renounce the bid for the alliance membership as part of any prospective peace settlement.

Zelenskyy emphasized that any security assurances would need to be legally binding and supported by the U.S. Congress, adding that he expected an update from his team following a meeting between Ukrainian and U.S. military officials in Stuttgart, Germany.

The U.S. government said in a social media post on Witkoff’s account after the five-hour meeting that “a lot of progress was made.”

Washington has tried for months to navigate the demands of each side as Trump presses for a swift end to Russia’s war and grows increasingly exasperated by delays. The search for possible compromises has run into major obstacles, including control of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which is mostly occupied by Russian forces.

Tough obstacles remain

Putin wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the part of the Donetsk region still under its control among the key conditions for peace, a demand rejected by Kyiv.

Zelenskyy said that the U.S. had floated an idea for Ukraine to withdraw from the Donetsk and create a demilitarized free economic zone there, a proposal he rejected as unworkable.

“I do not consider this fair, because who will manage this economic zone?” he said. “If we are talking about some buffer zone along the line of contact, if we are talking about some economic zone and we believe that only a police mission should be there and troops should withdraw, then the question is very simple. If Ukrainian troops withdraw 5–10 kilometers, for example, then why do Russian troops not withdraw deeper into the occupied territories by the same distance?”

Zelenskyy described the issue as “very sensitive” and insisted on a freeze along the line of contact, saying that “today a fair possible option is we stand where we stand.”

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov told the business daily Kommersant that Russian police and national guard would stay in parts of the Donetsk region even if they become a demilitarized zone under a prospective peace plan.

Ushakov warned that a search for compromise could take a long time, noting that the U.S. proposals that took into account Russian demands had been “worsened” by alterations proposed by Ukraine and its European allies.

Speaking to Russian state TV in remarks broadcast Sunday, Ushakov said that “the contribution of Ukrainians and Europeans to these documents is unlikely to be constructive,” warning that Moscow will “have very strong objections.”

Ushakov added that the territorial issue was actively discussed in Moscow when Witkoff and Kushner met with Putin earlier this month. “The Americans know and understand our position,” he said.

Zelenskyy said he spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday just before the talks with Trump’s envoys, thanking him on X for his support and adding that “we are coordinating closely and working together for the sake of our shared security.”

Macron vowed on X that “France is, and will remain, at Ukraine’s side to build a robust and lasting peace — one that can guarantee Ukraine’s security and sovereignty, and that of Europe, over the long term.”

Merz, who has spearheaded European efforts to support Ukraine alongside Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said Saturday that “the decades of the ‘Pax Americana’ are largely over for us in Europe and for us in Germany as well.”

He warned that Putin’s aim is “a fundamental change to the borders in Europe, the restoration of the old Soviet Union within its borders.”

“If Ukraine falls, he won’t stop,” Merz warned on Saturday during a party conference in Munich.

Putin has denied plans to restore the Soviet Union or attack any European allies.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-berlin-talks-zelenskyy-05c363add7a4a3583f3beada7b1fb775

THE two gunmen behind the horrifying Bondi Beach attack were a father and son duo, police have revealed.

The 50-year-old dad was shot dead by cops during the terrifying Hanukkah assault while his 24-year-old son was left in critical condition.

The brazen attack in Sydney, Australia, left 16 people dead including a 10-year-old girl.

At least 40 wounded people are still in hospital – with five fighting for their lives, police confirmed.

Police said the older shooter had six firearms registered to him, and that six were recovered from the scene.

Cops said: “As part of the investigation, we conducted two search warrants last night, one at Bonnyrigg and a second at Campsie.

“The 50-year-old male is a licensed firearms holder, he has six firearms licensed to him.”

Two “rudimentary” bombs were also found at the scene and taken away to be deactivated.

Authorities said they were probing the motives behind the horror gun rampage but ruled out searching for a third suspect.

There was also “no indication to indicate that either of the men involved in yesterday’s attack was planning the attack that happened yesterday,” police said.

New South Wales police commissioner Mal Lanyon said on Sunday: “There was very little knowledge of these two men.

“The older man had a licence for around 10 years, without any reported incidents.”

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese called the attack an “act of pure evil” and one which “deliberately targeted” the Jewish community.

He said: “An act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism on our shores in an iconic Australian location, Bondi Beach.

“Yesterday was indeed a dark day in our nation’s history. But we as a nation are stronger than the cowards who did this.”

At least 15 people, not including the deceased gunman, were killed during Saturday’s attack targeting a Jewish event celebrating Hanukkah.

A ten-year-old girl, a London-born Rabbi, an Israeli man and a French citizen are among the dead – while three children have been left injured.

A Holocaust survivor was also shot dead while trying to protect his wife during the terrifying shooting.

Alex Kleytman was killed while shielding his wife Larisa from bullets, saving her from death in his selfless final act.

French citizen Dan Elkayam was also killed in the shooting, according to France’s president Emmanuel Macron.

Reuven Morrison and Rabbi Yaakov Levitan were also named among those killed in the attack, according to Chabad.

Other victims of the tragedy are yet to be formally identified, but police believe their ages range between 10 and 87.

Witnesses said two men stepped out of a vehicle on Campbell Parade, near the Bondi Pavilion, and opened fire about 6.45pm.

At least 200 people had gathered at Bondi Beach on Sunday night for a festival celebrating the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

Shocking footage shows cops shooting the two terrorists after they opened fire on one of the most popular Australian beaches.

After exchanging several rounds of fire, the police marksmen successfully neutralised one of the shooters – understood to be the dad of the injured suspect.

Unbelievable footage capturing a moment of raw courage showed a bystander tackling one of the gunmen, wrenching away his rifle and attempting to turn it back on him.

Another video showed hundreds of beachgoers fleeing in panic as gunshots rang out.

World leaders have paid respects to the victims of the terror attack and condemned the ruthless assault.

Donald Trump slammed the attacks, branding them “terrible” and “antisemitic”.

The US president said: “That was an antisemitic attack, obviously, and I want to pay my respects to everybody.”

He also praised the brave bystander who tackled one of the shooters and wrestled a firearm out of his hands.

Trump said he was a “very, very brave person who went and attacked frontally one of the shooters and saved a lot of lives”.

“Great respect to that man who did that,” he added.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15640359/bondi-beach-gunmen-kill-jewish-festival-father-son/

AT least 15 people including a 10-year-old girl are now confirmed dead in the brazen terror attack on Australia’s famous Bondi Beach.

Cops confirmed at least another 40 people – including more children – were injured in the attack carried out by a father and son duo targeting people celebrating a Hanukkah event.

New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park said the death toll had risen from 12 to 15 overnight, including the 10-year-old child.

One victim has been identified as Alex Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor who was killed while protecting his wife from bullets.

British-born Rabbi Eli Schlangerabbi, Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, Reuven Morrison and French citizen Dan Elkayam were also among the dead.

Other victims of the tragedy are yet to be formally identified, but police believe their ages range between 10 and 87.

Five people remain in critical condition, with the others remaining in serious and stable conditions, authorities revealed.

The two shooters were a 50-year-old dad who was shot by police and died on the scene, and his 24-year-old son who suffered “critical injuries,” the New South Wales police said in a statement.

The death toll does not include the dead shooter.

Authorities said he had six firearms registered to him, and that all six were recovered from the scene.

Cops said: “As part of the investigation, we conducted two search warrants last night, one at Bonnyrigg and a second at Campsie.

“The 50-year-old male is a licensed firearms holder; he has six firearms licensed to him.”

Two improvised explosive devices were also found at the scene that were “active”, New South Wales police commissioner Mal Lanyon told a press conference.

Although officials described the shooting as a terrorist attack, Lanyon declined to comment on the shooters’ ideology.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the attack an “act of pure evil” and one which “deliberately targeted” the Jewish community.

Footage shows cops shooting the two terrorists after they fired shots at a Hanukkah celebration on one of the most popular Australian beaches.

Officers were seen taking cover behind a vehicle, attempting to take down the attackers from their vantage point on a nearby bridge.

After exchanging several rounds of fire, the police marksmen successfully neutralised one of the shooters – believed to be the dad.

The second gunman was also shot and taken into custody in a critical condition.

A large crowd swarmed the bridge, trying to hit and kick the gunman while he was subdued. They were dispersed quickly by the cops.

At least 1,000 people had gathered at Bondi on Sunday night for a festival celebrating the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

The event, called Chanukah by the Sea, had been advertised as a night of family fun – before it descended into scenes of horror.

Separate footage captured by a drone later shows the gunmen’s final moments on the bridge behind Bondi Park.

One man, wearing a black shirt, is seen taking cover behind a fence while the other lies motionless on the ground.

The standing gunman appears to fire toward a man sheltering behind a white van before he is shot himself, collapsing onto the bridge.

Both shooters appeared to be wearing ammunition belts – with reports indicating as many as 50 bullets were fired.

The guns appeared to be semiautomatic, with magazines scattered across the floor.

Another clip captured a moment of raw courage, showing a bystander tackling one of the gunmen.

Chris Minns, Premier of New South Wales, said the attack “was designed to target Sydney‘s Jewish community”.

He said: “What should have been night of joy and peace… has been shattered by this horrifying evil attack.”

A mum told NewsWire that panic erupted while her two daughters were with friends, enjoying what was meant to be a carefree night swim.

Emergency services rushed to the scene, with at least 30 ambulance crews and helicopter paramedics swarming Campbell Parade.

A witness told 9News people had to be carried away on surfboards as there were not enough stretchers.

British expat Ruby O’Sullivan, 25, was heading out for an evening run with her boyfriend when they heard a string of gunshots from the beach.

The executive assistant, who moved to Sydney from Essex in March, told The Sun: “We were about to go for a run. We do that every evening.

“We could hear the gunshots – only three or four – but we didn’t think they were gunshots, maybe fireworks or something.

“My boyfriend was sent a message saying there had been a shooting.

“If we had gone out for a run five or ten minutes before, we might have been caught up in it.

“As soon as we knew what was going on, we turned around and went home because we didn’t want to be in it.

“We just couldn’t believe it. It is unheard of. We go to that beach every single day. Even the thought of going down there tomorrow is now scary.”

In the aftermath of the attack, detectives carried out a raid on a home in Sydney’s southwest – part of an urgent push to piece together how the attack unfolded.

The street was cordoned off as the home is said to be where the alleged shooters live.

Police were searching the area for live bombs after receiving a report that one had been planted beneath a footbridge.

Questions also remain as to how the men managed to get hold of guns, as mass shootings have become extremely rare due to Australia‘s strict gun laws.

‘An act of evil antisemitism’

Australian officials and members of the Jewish community have been reacting to the terror attack.

Prime Minister Albanese said at a Canberra press conference: “An act of evil antisemitism, terrorism that has struck the heart of our nation.”

“The evil that was unleashed at Bondi Beach today is beyond comprehension, and the trauma and loss that families are dealing with tonight is beyond anyone’s worst nightmare.

“We have seen Australians today run towards danger in order to help others. These Australians are heroes and their bravery has saved lives.”

Australia’s opposition leader Sussan Ley added: “The loss of life from this attack is significant and I join with the prime minister in urging all Australians to follow official advice from police and relevant authorities.

“My heart is with Australia’s Jewish community tonight, particularly those in the eastern suburbs of Sydney – people I know well.”

British PM Sir Keir Starmer reacted to the “deeply distressing” news, saying: “The United Kingdom sends our thoughts and condolences to everyone affected by the appalling attack in Bondi Beach.”

King Charles also condemned the “dreadful” attack, writing: “My wife and I are appalled and saddened by the most dreadful antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish people attending the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach.

“Our hearts go out to everyone who has been affected so dreadfully, including the police officers who were injured while protecting members of their community. We commend the police, emergency services and members of the public whose heroic actions no doubt prevented even greater horror and tragedy.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15637837/gunman-opens-fire-bondi-beach-cops-urge-shelter/

PATRICK Mahomes broke his silence over his brutal leg injury as the worst news has been confirmed for the Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback.

Mahomes injured his left leg late in the Chiefs’ 16-13 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday.

Mahomes suffered the knee injury after he was tackled from behind by Chargers defensive end Da’Shawn Hand.

The three-time Super Bowl champion was seen reaching for his left knee, and he stayed down on the sideline as he got treatment from Kansas City’s medical staff.

Mahomes was taken to the blue medical tent for more treatment before needing assistance to the locker room.

He didn’t return as the Chiefs went on to lose, and the 6-8 team was eliminated from the playoffs for the first time since 2014.

After the game, the Chiefs announced that Mahomes underwent an MRI, which confirmed that he has torn his ACL in his left knee.

Mahomes opened up about his feelings regarding the horrific news on X.

“Don’t know why this had to happen. And not going to lie it’s hurts,” he wrote.

“But all we can do now is Trust in God and attack every single day over and over again.

“Thank you Chiefs kingdom for always supporting me and for everyone who has reached out and sent prayers.

“I Will be back stronger than ever.”

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/sport/15640750/patrick-mahomes-knee-injury-chiefs-loss-chargers/

The dancer, Michael Dameski, had slipped off the rain-soaked surface.

Lady Gaga paused a concert after her dancer fell off stage. The Abracadabra hitmaker was performing at the Accor Stadium in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday (Dec 13) when dancer Michael Dameski slipped on the rain-soaked surface, falling off the edge.

However, after she checked on him and confirmed he was “okay”, the performance continued.

In footage from the concert circulating online, Gaga could be seen signalling for the music to stop while she checked on Dameski.

She said: “Just one second. We just had an accident on the stage. Everything’s okay. Just, everyone wait a second, please.”

The 39-year-old star also took the time to ensure the dancers’ footwear was all suitable for the wet conditions.

According to a fan account posted on X, “the show stopped for a second time during Garden of Eden after a dancer fell off stage and was injured because of the persistent rain”. Gaga then asked for a few minutes so she could get some proper grooves on the dancers’ shoes.

Dameski later took to his Instagram Story to let fans know he was okay and “was able to finish the last show of the year”.

Source : https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/entertainment/lady-gaga-concert-dancer-falls-stage-548326

South Korean police launched a raid on Monday (Dec 15) to search the offices and compounds of the Unification Church in and near Seoul, including an imposing palace northeast of the capital that serves as its international headquarters, police said.

The search is being done at 10 locations of the church, police said in a text message sent to reporters. Police officials could not be reached for further details.

The search is related to allegations of illegal payments by the church to some cabinet members and current and former lawmakers that involved the leader of the religious group, Han Hak-ja, the Yonhap News Agency reported.

The oceans and fisheries minister stepped down last week to focus on disproving the allegations, which he said were false, and to avoid the affair from tainting the work of President Lee Jae Myung’s government.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/south-korean-police-raid-offices-unification-church-han-hak-ja-5582101

Hamas’ chief negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya said on Sunday (Dec 14) that a targeted assassination by Israel on Saturday of one of the group’s senior commanders threatens the “viability of the truce” in the enclave.

In a televised address, Hayya, who is the most senior exiled Hamas chief, confirmed the killing of the group’s senior commander Raed Saed in an Israeli strike in Gaza a day earlier.

It was the highest-profile assassination of a senior Hamas figure since a US-backed Gaza ceasefire deal came into effect in October.

“The continued Israeli violations to the ceasefire agreement…and latest assassinations that targeted Saed and others threaten the viability of the agreement,” he said in an address.

“We call on mediators, and especially the main guarantor, the US administration and President Donald Trump, to work on obliging Israel to respect the ceasefire and commit to it.”

Hamas sources have described Saed as the second-in-command of the group’s armed wing, after Izz eldeen Al-Hadad. Israel says Saed was one of the key architects of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that triggered the war.

Hayya also spoke about the proposed UN-authorised International Stabilization Force (ISF).

“The role of the international forces should be limited to maintaining the ceasefire and separating the two sides along Gaza borders…without any role inside the strip or intervention in its domestic affairs,” he said.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/hamas-chief-negotiator-says-israels-killing-senior-commander-threatens-ceasefire-5581386

Two’s company, three’s a crowd?

Ben Affleck was spotted in an awkward triangle with both of his ex-wives, Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Garner, on Friday night, as Affleck and Garner’s child Seraphina and Lopez’s child Emme starred in a play together.

In photos obtained by Page Six, Affleck and the “13 Going on 30” star can be seen walking into a Los Angeles playhouse with their son Samuel, 13, while the singer appeared to arrive separately.

The “Waiting for Tonight” hitmaker, 56, was accompanied by her manager Benny Medina and her mother, Guadalupe, and was pictured chatting with other parents and kids.

She seemingly did not interact with her ex or Garner — at least not outside.

At one point, Lopez and Affleck, 53, were in eyeshot of each other, but the latter’s back was to her as they were talking to separate groups.

Samuel did take time to talk to the “Hustlers” actress though, as the pair were seen smiling and laughing outside the playhouse.

Affleck and Garner, 53, wed in 2005 and called it quits in 2015. Even after their split, the “Juno” actress continued to support her ex through his addiction battles and maintain a close co-parent relationship.

Following the “Gone Girl” star’s divorce, he reconnected with Lopez in 2021, who he was previously engaged to in 2002.

By July 2022, they were married and successfully blended their families. Lopez shares 17-year-old twins, Emme and Max, with ex-husband Marc Anthony.

In May 2024, news surfaced that they had been living separately and divorce rumors started to run rampant. Lopez officially filed to divorce Affleck on Aug. 20, 2024, after two years of marriage.

Back in March, Page Six exclusively reported that Lopez was “furious” over cozy photos of Affleck and Garner. A source told us that the dancer was “not happy with constantly seeing photos” of the two and they have been a “salt in the wound.”

Source : https://pagesix.com/2025/12/14/parents/ben-affleck-awkwardly-reunites-with-exes-jennifer-lopez-and-jennifer-garner-at-kids-school-play/

Amid the mass rescheduling of H-1B visa interviews in India, many US-based temporary work visa holders have reportedly received emails informing them that their visas have been “prudentially revoked”. An immigration expert says many previously cleared issues are being re-reviewed.

In view of the postponement of H-1B visa interviews in India, H-1B and H-4 visa holders in the US reportedly received emails from the consulate informing them that temporary working visas had been “prudentially revoked”. The development comes even as the US announced plans to enhance social-media scrutiny of applicants, which was earlier applied to international students.

A prudential visa revocation is a temporary, precautionary action taken out of prudence, and not a permanent denial of the visa.

According to immigration attorney Emily Neumann, prudential visa revocations for H-1B and H-4 holders are on the rise even in cases where applicants have had past interactions with law enforcement but no convictions.

While a prudential revocation does not affect an individual’s lawful status in the US, it does mean that the matter will be re-examined at the applicant’s next visa appointment.

“Many of these incidents were already disclosed and cleared in earlier visa stamps. A revocation does not affect lawful stay in the United States, but it means the issue will be re-examined at the next visa appointment,” the attorney said in a post on X.

“Hard to see how this is an efficient use of government resources when the incident was already previously vetted,” the Houston-based attorney added.

Neumann also shared an old social media post from the US State Department in which it said that visa screening was a continuous process.

The development comes days after the State Department announced that it would begin social media screening of H-1B applicants and family members on dependent visas, expanding review of online profiles that initially began with student visa holders earlier this year.

WHAT IS PRUDENTIAL VISA REVOCATION?

“A prudential visa revocation is a temporary, precautionary cancellation of a visa by the Department of State (DOS). It is done “prudentially”, meaning for prudence or caution, especially in cases where the government suspects there may be an issue with the visa holder’s eligibility but that issue is not yet fully determined,” Reddy Neumann Brown PC, a Houston-based immigration law firm, reported.

Being in the US at the time of a prudential visa revocation does not affect lawful stay; the individual can remain until the visa naturally expires.

Source : https://www.indiatoday.in/world/us-news/story/h1b-h4-v-isa-holders-receive-prudential-revocations-mails-social-media-vetting-expands-us-state-department-techies-2835016-2025-12-14

Prosecutors must return evidence seized from a key figure in the dismissed criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey, but the U.S. Department of Justice can seek a new warrant for the information, a federal judge has ruled.
The ruling is at least a temporary setback for prosecutors mulling another attempt to charge Comey, one of President Donald Trump’s critics whom the DOJ has sought to prosecute.

A lawyer for Richman declined to comment on Saturday.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington ruled that while prosecutors must return files seized from Daniel Richman, a law professor and former attorney for Comey, a copy can be deposited with the court for safekeeping in the event that prosecutors seek a new warrant.
Richman sued last month seeking to bar prosecutors from using material he alleged had been improperly seized from him during a probe in 2019 and 2020. The probe ended in 2021 with no charges.
Kollar-Kotelly, whose ruling was released Friday night, wrote that it was an unreasonable seizure of Richman’s property to keep a copy of Richman’s files without safeguarding them against being searched without a warrant in a new investigation.

However, the judge declined to block the Justice Department from using or relying on the materials in the future, saying prosecutors should be free to pursue leads based on what they learned from the files and pursue a warrant to obtain them again.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/prosecutors-need-warrant-access-files-dismissed-comey-case-judge-rules-2025-12-13/

The windowless newsroom of The Phoenix, the Loyola University Chicago newspaper, hums like an old refrigerator. A coffee pot burbles in the corner as juniors Julia Pentasuglio and Ella Daugherty lean over a glowing laptop, updating a Google map.
Each red pin marks a sighting of federal immigration agents near campus and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Nearby, editor-in-chief Lilli Malone scrolls through reports from Rogers Park, a neighborhood along Chicago’s lakefront where 80 languages mix. There were new pins from seven sightings that day alone – reports of vans barreling down side streets, masked immigration officers drawing guns, students watching from on-campus dorm windows as neighbors were taken away.

The young student journalists normally cover dorm-room Thanksgiving recipes and local Christmas tree lightings, but find themselves with a new role under Donald Trump’s presidency: documenting immigration raids. Their goal: counter online rumor with facts and give locals a map of frequently targeted areas as panic spread in recent months over who might be picked up by immigration agents next.
Student and veteran journalists say that college newsrooms, independent media and legacy outlets across Chicago are now working together in ways that upend decades of cutthroat competition, building tools to track enforcement and collaborating on information.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has ordered aggressive immigration sweeps in cities with large foreign-born communities, including Chicago, to make good on a campaign promise to deport people living in the U.S. illegally.

TRANSLATING RUMOR INTO FACT

Weeks after Loyola students began classes this fall, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched its Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago in early September, deploying Border Patrol agents armed with high-powered weapons and tear gas.
Local officials objected, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker called the blitz “unlawful and unwarranted”, and a new state law now allows Illinois residents to sue federal immigration agents if they believe their civil rights have been violated.
DHS said it is targeting violent criminals putting Americans at risk, and that it has arrested more than 4,300 people as part of the operation.

“Our efforts remain ongoing, we aren’t leaving Chicago,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement.
Fear had already been building on campus before the operation started. A man from the U.S. Census Bureau walked into a dorm months earlier, Malone and Pentasuglio said, prompting false rumors that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrived. Students flooded The Phoenix staff with questions about whether the rumors were true.
Some had reason to be worried. Loyola has long welcomed immigrants without legal status in the U.S., including Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals students who came to the U.S. as children, particularly in its medical school — a point of pride at a Jesuit university built on a mission of social justice.
“People were scared, and they needed someone to verify what was real,” Malone said.

Loyola University officials did not respond to requests for comment.
So in early October, Malone and Pentasuglio, The Phoenix’s managing editor, opened a blank Google Map, and began dropping pins — each confirmed through photos, timestamped videos or multiple witnesses, they said.
The pins gave students and nearby residents a place to check rumor against fact — to see which sightings had been verified, and to understand where agents had clustered in recent days so they could better gauge which areas might carry risk.
Notes are attached to each pin – October 12: Multiple armed agents were spotted at the 1200 block of West North Shore Avenue midday. October 21: An arrest was reported at the North Lincoln Avenue Home Depot at 9:58 a.m.
A DHS spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that U.S. Border Patrol conducted enforcement operations and made arrests at these locations on those dates.
At the University of Chicago, deputy editor-in-chief Elena Eisenstadt says the college newspaper, The Maroon, built its Datawrapper tracker after reports lit up on social media outlets like Sidechat, a student app where users can chat anonymously.
“It felt like a wave,” she said. “When everyone is talking about something like that, you have to do something.”
At DePaul University, the managing editor of the DePaulia campus newspaper, Jake Cox, and other staff leaned on the social media accounts of students and others for tips when ICE’s presence near its Lincoln Park campus spiked.
At the Block Club Chicago nonprofit news group where he interns, Cox built an ICE WhatsApp channel — a platform widely used by immigrant Chicagoans – where nearly 3,200 followers receive a steady stream of immigration stories, agent sightings and “Know Your Rights” links.

SOME JOURNALISTS PRIORITIZE COLLABORATION

The students are joining a broader wave of local mobilization against ICE across Chicago that has included cyclists trailing unmarked vans through alleys, parents forming checkpoints outside elementary schools and Pilates students shouting at agents pulling people into SUVs while neighbors film.
For months, local reporters covering immigration enforcement in Chicago have also been sharing story leads, safety tips and source contacts with competitors through encrypted communication systems, said Maira Khwaja, public impact strategy director at the Invisible Institute, an independent, local journalism nonprofit.
The story has become too big, she said, and there are simply too few journalists to cover it. “More of us is better.”
At The Phoenix, when staff get a tip outside their coverage area, they said they help get the information to other papers.
At the city’s biggest newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, senior editor Erika Slife says she grew up in the old scoop culture but that the current journalistic landscape has sometimes led to collaboration across outlets.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pins-map-how-chicago-students-are-tracking-ice-raids-2025-12-13/

California and 19 other U.S. states filed a lawsuit on Friday seeking to block President Donald Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers.
The lawsuit in federal court in Boston is at least the third to challenge the fee announced by Trump in September, which dramatically raises the cost of obtaining H-1B visas. Currently, employers typically pay between $2,000 and $5,000 in fees.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said in a release that Trump lacks the power to impose the fee, and that it violates federal law, which allows immigration authorities to collect only fees necessary to cover the cost of administering visa programs.
The H-1B program allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty fields. The tech industry, with many companies headquartered in California, is particularly reliant on workers who receive the visas.
Bonta, a Democrat, said the $100,000 fee would create unnecessary financial burdens for providers of vital services such as education and healthcare, exacerbating labor shortages and threatening to cut services.

The states joining California in the lawsuit include New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey and Washington.
The White House, in response to other lawsuits, has said the new fee, is a lawful exercise of Trump’s powers and will discourage employers from abusing the H-1B program.
Critics of H-1B visas and other work visas say they are often used to replace American workers with foreign employees who will work for less. But business groups and major companies have maintained that workers on H-1B visas are a critical means to address a shortage of qualified American workers.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby, and a coalition of unions, employers and religious groups have filed separate lawsuits challenging the fee. A judge in Washington, D.C., is set to hold a hearing in the Chamber’s lawsuit next week.

Trump’s order bars new H-1B recipients from entering the United States unless the employer sponsoring their visa has made the $100,000 payment. The administration has said the order does not apply to existing H-1B holders or those who applied before September 21.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trumps-100000-h-1b-visa-fee-draws-legal-challenge-california-other-states-2025-12-12/

China held a low-key memorial ceremony on Saturday for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with President Xi Jinping not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan.
Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last month that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Chinese-claimed Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan.

China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital.

A post-World War Two Allied tribunal put the death toll in the eastern city of Nanjing at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars have denied a massacre took place at all.

MEMORIAL CEREMONY

At Saturday’s ceremony being held at the national memorial centre in Nanjing, Shi Taifeng, head of the ruling Communist Party’s powerful organisation department, referenced Xi’s speech at a military parade in Beijing in September marking 80 years since the end of World War Two.
But Shi’s remarks were far less combative than recent rhetoric from Chinese government officials.
“History has fully demonstrated that the Chinese nation is a great nation that fears no power and stands on its own feet,” he said.

He did not mention Takaichi but alluded to China’s previous claims that she seeks to revive Japan’s history of militarism.
“History has proven and will continue to prove that any attempt to revive militarism, challenge the postwar international order, or undermine world peace and stability will never be tolerated by all peace-loving and justice-seeking peoples around the world and is doomed to fail.”
Doves flew over the site after the ceremony, which was completed in less than half an hour, in front of an audience that included police officers and school children.

XI LAST ATTENDED EVENT IN 2017

China marked its first national memorial day for the massacre in 2014, where Xi spoke and called on China and Japan to set aside hatred and not allow the minority who led Japan to war to affect relations now.
Xi last attended the event in person in 2017 but did not deliver public remarks.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-holds-low-key-nanjing-massacre-memorial-despite-japan-tensions-2025-12-13/

SpaceX is preparing to go public next year and has opened a secondary share sale that would value the company at $800 billion, according to a letter to shareholders sent by the company’s CFO Bret Johnsen and reviewed by Reuters.
The Elon Musk-led company’s move towards a public listing, which could rank among the largest global initial public offerings, has been largely driven by the rapid expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet business, including plans for direct-to-mobile service and progress in its Starship rocket program for missions to the moon and Mars.

In the letter dated December 12, Johnsen said SpaceX has approved an arrangement where new and existing investors and the company will buy up to $2.56 billion of shares from eligible shareholders at $421 a share.
“We are preparing the company for a possible IPO in 2026. Whether it actually happens, when it happens, and at what valuation are still highly uncertain, but the thinking is that if we execute brilliantly and the markets cooperate, a public offering could raise a significant amount of capital,” Johnsen said.
SpaceX aims to use the capital to ramp Starship’s flight rate, deploy artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in space, build Moonbase Alpha and send uncrewed and crewed missions to Mars, Johnsen said.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bloomberg News and The New York Times reported the share sale on Friday.
Musk hinted at a possible SpaceX IPO in a post on social media platform X earlier this week.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/spacex-sets-800-billion-valuation-bloomberg-news-reports-2025-12-13/

Belarus has freed 123 prisoners, including prominent opposition activist Maria Kolesnikova, after the US agreed to lift sanctions on the country.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski is also among those who have been released following talks in Minsk with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Belarus, John Coale.

The US has agreed to lift sanctions on potash, a key ingredient in fertiliser and an important export for Belarus, which is a close ally of Russia.

Coale said: “As relations between the two countries normalise, more and more sanctions will be lifted.”

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is not recognised as president by the EU.

Kolesnikova has been in prison since 2020, much of the time in isolation. Speaking after her release, she described “a feeling of unbelievable happiness” at being able to see and hug people “dear to me”.

She said: “It’s a huge happiness to see the first sunset of my freedom, such amazing beauty.

“But also we think of those who are not yet free. I wait for the moment when we can all hug each other, when all are free.”

Kolesnikova was handed over to Ukraine along with 113 other prisoners, according to Kyiv’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

In a statement on Telegram, Ukraine said that after receiving the necessary medical assistance, the prisoners will be transported to Poland and Lithuania.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the exiled Belarusian opposition leader who was waiting outside the US embassy in Vilnius, told the BBC the decision to send them to Ukraine was unexpected and had been made by Lukashenko.

A small number, including Bialiatski, were transported to the Lithuanian capital.

After embracing Tikhanovskaya, Bialiatski said: “Thousands of people have been and continue to be imprisoned…so our struggle continues.”

Tatsiana Khomich, Kolesnikova’s sister, said the first thing Kolesnikova said when they spoke was “thank you to the US administration, President Trump [and] to the Belarus government as well for leading and talking and having these negotiations”.

The deal is a major achievement for Lukashenko. The authoritarian leader will also welcome how the Americans have ended his international isolation.

As well as the EU, the US did not recognise Lukashenko as president following unfair elections five years ago which led to mass street protests that were brutally suppressed by police.

Hundreds of people were arrested then – including Kolesnikova – and the intense political repression has continued.

Western sanctions were tightened following Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when troops entered via Belarus and missiles were launched from its territory.

Coale was quoted by Belarusian state media saying that the sanctions on potash would be lifted immediately.

The US envoy also said he spoke to Lukashenko about Ukraine and what help Minsk could offer in talks with Putin.

The attempt to engage with Minsk is part of a major shift in US policy, which leaves it very much at odds with Europe where the approach is to sanction and isolate.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gpwlkklyxo

Erika Kirk addressed political violence and rising antisemitism during an emotional town hall discussion on CBS with host Bari Weiss on Saturday night.

The tearful widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was questioned by Bob Milgrim, whose daughter Sarah, was fatally shot outside the Washington, DC Jewish Museum alongside her boyfriend Yaron Lischinsky.

He asked Kirk if she would speak out against antisemitism on the right, including Holocaust denial.

“Yes, sir, first of all, I’m so sorry,” Kirk said, breaking down into tears. “You and I are a part of a very small club. Painful. It sucks, doesn’t it?”

She added that her late husband, who was shot dead earlier this year during a college talk, “always would say very clearly, Jew hate is brain rot.”

“The only way to combat evil, just like Charlie did, is with dialogue and not being afraid to do it.”

She was later introduced to Hunter Kozak, a Utah Valley University student who was the last person to speak with the conservative influencer before he was shot and killed at an outdoor public speaking engagement by alleged gunman Tyler Robinson.

Kozak praised Erika Kirk’s calls for unity but pressed her on political rhetoric, asking her whether she would “condemn” statements by Donald Trump calling for Democratic politicians to be hanged.

“I will never agree with political violence,” Kirk responded. “My husband is a victim of it. I’m a victim of it.”

The tearful widow and Turning Point USA CEO urged “parents to step up,” and limit their children’s screen time to shield them from harmful rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

“Do you want your kid to be a thought leader, or an assassin?” she posed to viewers.

Kirk earlier blasted anyone who justified her husband’s murder as “sick” and defended him from claims that he ever incited political violence.

“He’s a human being. You think he deserved that? Tell that to my 3-year-old daughter,” an emotional Kirk said of Charlie’s murder.

“You want to watch in high-res the video of my husband being murdered, and laugh, and say he deserves it? There’s something very sick in your soul, and I’m praying that God saves you,” she added.

Charlie Kirk, a conservative influencer known for hosting events on college campuses where he dared students to open-air debates, should not “be deteriorated” to out-of-context clips, Erika added.

Weiss, who is CBS News’ new Editor-in-Chief, confronted the widow with quotes from her late husband, such as where Kirk said that some gun deaths are “worth it” to protect the Second Amendment.

Erika encouraged people to listen to the whole statement, which she said had a very different context than the one implied by many people who repeat that partial quote.

“My husband is not to be deteriorated to two sentences … He’s not. He is a thought leader, and he was brilliant of a man. So that’s fine if you want to take words out of his mouth or out of context without the whole thing in perspective, but that’s the problem,” she said.

Source : https://nypost.com/2025/12/13/media/erika-kirk-speaks-out-against-antisemitism-political-violence-during-cbs-town-hall-with-bari-weiss/

Comedy icon Dick Van Dyke celebrated his 100th birthday on Saturday, hitting the century mark some six decades after he sang and danced with Julie Andrews in “Mary Poppins” and starred in his self-titled sitcom.

“The funniest thing is, it’s not enough,” Van Dyke said in an interview with ABC News at his Malibu, California home. “A hundred years is not enough. You want to live more, which I plan to.”

As part of the celebration of Van Dyke’s birthday this weekend, theaters around the country are showing a new documentary about his life, “Dick Van Dyke: 100th Celebration.”

Van Dyke became one of the biggest actors of his era with “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which ran from 1961-66 on CBS; appeared with Andrews as a chimney sweep with a Cockney accent in the 1964 Disney classic “Mary Poppins” and, in his 70s, played a physician-sleuth on “Diagnosis: Murder.”

Also a Broadway star, Van Dyke won a Tony Award for “Bye Bye Birdie” to go with a Grammy and four Primetime Emmys. In 1963, he starred in the film version of “Bye Bye Birdie.”

Just last year, he became the oldest winner of a Daytime Emmy, for a guest role on the soap “Days of Our Lives.”

In the 1970s, he found sobriety after battling alcoholism, and spoke out about it at a time when that was uncommon to do.

Now that he has hit triple digits, Van Dyke said he’s gotten some perspective on how he used to play older characters.

“You know, I played old men a lot, and I always played them as angry and cantankerous,” he told ABC News. “It’s not really that way. I don’t know any other 100-year-olds, but I can speak for myself.”

Source : https://apnews.com/article/dick-van-dyke-100th-birthday-3b6a09bc3c95d9ab079fa360c339dc21

Belarus freed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, key opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova and dozens of other political prisoners on Saturday, capping two days of talks with Washington aimed at improving ties and getting crippling U.S. sanctions lifted on a key Belarusian agricultural export.

President Alexander Lukashenko pardoned 123 prisoners, Belarus’ state news agency, Belta, reported. In exchange, the U.S. said it was lifting sanctions on the Eastern European country’s potash sector.

A close ally of Russia, Minsk has faced Western isolation and sanctions for years. Lukashenko has ruled the nation of 9.5 million with an iron fist for more than three decades, and the country has been repeatedly sanctioned by the West for its crackdown on human rights and for allowing Moscow to use its territory during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

John Coale, the U.S. special envoy for Belarus who met with Lukashenko in Minsk on Friday and Saturday, described the talks to reporters as “very productive” and said normalizing relations between the two countries was “our goal,” Belta reported.

“We’re lifting sanctions, releasing prisoners. We’re constantly talking to each other,” Coale said, adding that the relationship between the U.S. and Belarus was moving from “baby steps to more confident steps” as they increased dialogue, the Belarusian news agency reported.

Belarus has released hundreds of prisoners since July 2024. Among the 123 freed Saturday were a U.S. citizen, six citizens of U.S. allied countries, and five Ukrainian citizens, a U.S. official told The Associated Press in an email. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic negotiations, described the release as “a significant milestone in U.S.-Belarus engagement” and “yet another diplomatic victory” for U.S. President Donald Trump.

The official said Trump’s engagement so far “has led to the release of over 200 political prisoners in Belarus, including six unjustly detained U.S. citizens and over 60 citizens of U.S. Allies and partners.”

Who are some of the more prominent freed prisoners?

Pavel Sapelka, an advocate with the Viasna rights group, confirmed to the AP that Bialiatski and Kolesnikova were among those released.

Bialiatski, a human rights advocate who founded Viasna, was in jail when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 along with the prominent Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties. He was later convicted of smuggling and financing actions that violated public order — charges that were widely denounced as politically motivated — and sentenced to 10 years in 2023.

Bialiatski told the AP by phone Saturday that his release after 1,613 days behind bars came as a surprise — in the morning, he was still in an overcrowded prison cell.

“It feels like I jumped out of icy water into a normal, warm room, so I have to adapt. After isolation, I need to get information about what’s going on,” said Bialiatski, who seemed energetic but pale and emaciated in post-release videos and photos.

He vowed to continue his work, stressing that “more than a thousand political prisoners in Belarus remain behind bars simply because they chose freedom. And, of course, I am their voice.”

Kolesnikova, meanwhile, was a key figure in the mass protests that rocked Belarus in 2020 and is a close ally of an opposition leader in exile, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Known for her close-cropped hair and trademark gesture of forming a heart with her hands, Kolesnikova became an even greater symbol of resistance when Belarusian authorities tried to deport her in September 2020. Driven to the Ukrainian border, she briefly broke away from security forces at the frontier, tore up her passport and walked back into Belarus.

The 43-year-old professional flutist was convicted in 2021 on charges including conspiracy to seize power and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Others who were freed

Among the others who were released, according to Viasna, was Viktar Babaryka — an opposition figure who had sought to challenge Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential election, widely seen as rigged, before being convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges he rejected as political.

Viasna reported that the group’s imprisoned advocates, Valiantsin Stefanovic and Uladzimir Labkovich, and prominent opposition figure Maxim Znak were also freed. But it later said it was clarifying its report about Stefanovic’s release, and Bialiatski told the AP that Stefanovic had not been freed, though he hopes he will be soon.

Most of the freed prisoners were sent to Ukraine, Franak Viachorka, Tsikhanouskaya’s senior adviser, told the AP. Eight or nine others, including Bialiatski, were being sent to Lithuania on Saturday, and more prisoners will be taken to the Baltic country in the next few days, Viachorka said.

Ukrainian authorities confirmed that Belarus had handed over 114 civilians, including five Ukrainian nationals. Freed Belarusian nationals “at their request” and “after being given necessary medical treatment” will be taken to Poland and Lithuania, they said.

Lukashenko’s press secretary, Natalya Eismont, said those released were sent to Ukraine because Kyiv was to free several imprisoned Belarusian and Russian nationals as part of the deal, although Ukrainian officials haven’t confirmed the claim yet.

Lukashenko wants rapprochement with the West

When U.S. officials last met with Lukashenko in September, Washington eased some of the sanctions on Belarus while Minsk released more than 50 political prisoners.

“The freeing of political prisoners means that Lukashenko understands the pain of Western sanctions and is seeking to ease them,” Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition leader in exile, told the AP on Saturday.

She added: “But let’s not be naive: Lukashenko hasn’t changed his policies, his crackdown continues and he keeps on supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine. That’s why we need to be extremely cautious with any talk of sanctions relief, so that we don’t reinforce Russia’s war machine and encourage continued repressions.”

Sanctions have hit the key export hard

Belarus, which previously accounted for about 20% of global potash fertilizer exports, has been forced to sharply cut them after Western sanctions targeted state producer Belaruskali and cut off transit through Lithuania’s port in Klaipeda, the country’s main export route.

“Sanctions by the U.S., EU and their allies have significantly weakened Belarus’s potash industry, depriving the country of a key source of foreign exchange earnings and access to key markets,” Anastasiya Luzgina, an analyst at the Belarusian Economic Research Center BEROC, told the AP, noting that Minsk likely hopes this paves the way for easing the more painful European sanctions.

The latest round of U.S.-Belarus talks also touched on Venezuela, as well as Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Belta reported.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/belarus-us-sanctions-39a85ae9a4303974c8c4a23be6d6b858

Two US soldiers and an American civilian were killed, and several others wounded in an ISIS ambush near Palmyra, Syria. President Trump vowed “serious retaliation” against the attackers.

Two US soldiers and an American civilian were killed, and three others wounded in an ambush by the Islamic State (IS) group in central Syria on Saturday, the US Central Command said.

The attack marked the first assault on US troops in Syria to result in casualties since the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad a year ago, according to defence officials.

In a post on social media, Central Command said the identities of the deceased service members would be withheld for 24 hours, in line with Department of War policy, to allow notification of next of kin.

No further details were immediately released about the circumstances of the ambush or the condition of those wounded, news agency AP reported.

Syrian state media reported that shots were fired during a visit by US troops to a historic town in central Syria, leaving several people injured. The state-run SANA news agency said the shooting occurred near Palmyra and that two members of Syria’s security forces and several US service members were wounded.

Local reports said that the attacker was killed, without providing additional details.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least three Syrian security personnel and several Americans were wounded, adding that the attacker was a member of the Syrian security forces.

TRUMP VOWS RETALIATION

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that “there will be very serious retaliation” against the Islamic State (IS) group responsible for the attack.

“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Trump said in a social media post.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, the president added that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa was “devastated by what happened” and emphasised that Syria was cooperating with US forces in the region. Trump noted that al-Sharaa was “extremely angry and disturbed by this attack.”

Source : https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/two-us-soldiers-civilian-killed-in-isis-ambush-in-syria-says-american-defence-officials-2835599-2025-12-13

PANICKED 911 dispatch calls from the UPS plane crash in Kentucky last month reveal the horror scenes from the ground as 14 people died.

Over a thousand horrified onlookers called the emergency services as the massive cargo plane crashed on takeoff and erupted into a giant fireball at Louisville International Airport on November 4.

Now, just over a month later, some of the 911 calls to MetroSafe from the night of the crash have been released.

“Oh my god there’s so many people who just probably died,” a stunned witness told dispatch in one audio shared with WLKY News.

In the background of the call, a man can be heard saying to the woman, “look at it” as the plane erupted in a fiery blaze and collided with two businesses including a petroleum recycling plant.

“God I don’t want to look at it. Oh my god. Oh please just get away from me,” she said.

Earlier in the call she could be heard shouting “it’s going up. Oil catches on fire. Get away.”

In another call shared with WDRB News, said: “Oh my god an airplane, a UPS airplane just crashed! I’m freaking out.

“So many people are probably hurt,” the caller frantically told 911.

Over a month after the horrific crash, clean up crews are still working on the decimated area.

A three-year-old girl, a mom of two, and three pilots were among the 14 killed in the devastating crash.

Twenty-three people also suffered injuries from the fireball explosion caused in part by the more than 38,000 gallons of fuel inside the aircraft at the time.

An initial report published by the National Transportation Safety Board after the incident revealed that the left pylon of one of the plane’s engines had “fatigue cracks” and suffered an “overstress failure”.

Bone-chilling surveillance images captured the left engine and pylon separating from the wing as the plane lifted from the ground.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15636815/emergency-dispatch-calls-ups-plane-crash-kentucky/

A POPULAR budget airline is rumored to ‘collapse’ this week, with competitors believing it will cease all operations.

Competitors are preparing to help rescue the thousands of passengers who would be left stranded should the rumored demise actually occur.

Spirit Airlines is at an “imminent risk” of shutting down, according to a report by The Air Current.

The airline had already filed for bankruptcy a second time in August, less than one year after filing in November 2024.

By the time of its first bankruptcy filing in 2024, the airline had lost $2.5 billion since 2020.

Spirit Airlines now carries $2.5 billion in long-term debt, the majority of which is due in five years.

When filing for bankruptcy, the airline stated that all flight operations would remain the same as it worked on restructuring the company, according to NPR.

In March, Spirit Airlines CEO Dave Davis said, “It has become clear that there is much more work to be done and many more tools are available to best position Spirit for the future.”

A new report from The Air Current states that the airline needs $100 million in financing to stay afloat.

If Spirit is unable to secure financing by December 13, it may be forced to end all operations abruptly.

Should all operations shutdown, it will affect the thousand of flights booked through December 20.

Air Current reported that Spirit’s competitors are bracing to assist stranded passengers amid cancelations.

“At least two major U.S. airlines are planning for a possible demise of the struggling low-cost carrier as early as Saturday,” according to The Air Current.

The airlines reportedly already have a rescue plan for stranded flyers.

“Each is accelerating plans to provide a schedule to backfill what would be Spirit’s cancelled flights, along with rescue fares for Spirit customers who would be stranded by an abrupt end to its flying heading into one of the busiest travel periods of the year.”

Despite the report, Spirit Airlines said that it’s just a “rumor.”

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/travel/15637215/spirit-airlines-flight-cancelations-bankruptcy/

TAYLOR Swift’s Eras Tour crew were left in shock and nearly “passed out” after she gave giving them $197M in bonuses.

The The Fate of Ophelia hitmaker, 36, is known for her generosity and has previously surprised her team with big bonuses after her tours.

On her new Disney+ The End of An Era six-part documentary series, Taylor once again stunned her crew with a very kind gesture.

She gathered them around her and one-by-one handed out an envelope – with the bonus amount written inside.

Taylor said: “Everyone has the same message on their card, I was hoping you would open it.”

And judging by their surprised reactions, the amounts inside were no joke.

Taylor is said to have handed out $197 million in bonuses across the entire crew, including six-figure checks for the truck drivers who kept the tour moving.
⁠
Her handwritten letter said:⁠ “We’ve traveled the world like we set out to do. We’ve dazzled the crowds, but we’ve missed family too.

“My full gratitude doesn’t come from a bank, but here’s [bonus check amount] dollars just to say thanks. Love, Taylor.”⁠

One professional dancer who worked closely on Taylor’s Eras tour nearly passed out when he opened his letter.

During episode two, Taylor prepared for something she calls “bonus day”.

At he end of each leg of the tour, Taylor prepares bonuses for every dancer, musician, and crew member.

Seen handwriting cards, she explained: “Bonus day is so important because setting a precedent with The Eras Tour is really important to me.

“Because people who work on the road, if the tour grosses more, they get more of a bonus, and these people just work so hard and they are the best at what they do.

“So, every single person on the crew, I’ve handwritten them a note. It took me a couple weeks, but it’s fun to write the notes.”

Professional dancer Kameron Saunders, 33, was one of the team members who received an envelope.

Reading Taylor’s message, he said: “Dearest Kam, we’ve travelled the world like we set out to do.

“We’ve dazzled the crowds, but we’ve missed family, too. My full gratitude doesn’t come from a bank, but here are XX dollars just to say thanks. Love, Taylor.”

The exact amount was bleeped out but it has been reported to People that the singer handed out a total of $197 million among her crew.

While assistant crew member Max was left visibly shaken as he read his letter and almost fell to his knees.

A person off camera asked “What’s wrong, Max? Are you alright?”

Clearly overwhelmed, he replied: “I’m gonna pass out.”

The documentary also featured an emotional Taylor breaking down in tears as she opened up about the horrific Southport attack.

TAYLOR IN TEARS

The star appeared shaken while she talked about the tragic events on her new Eras documentary.

Three schoolgirls were murdered by Axel Rudakubana at the Taylor Swift-themed class in Southport, Merseyside, last year.

The evil knifeman, 18, who killed Alice, Bebe and Elsie, was jailed for a minimum of 52 years in January.

Taylor revealed that she met the families of the victims ahead of returning to Wembley stadium last summer. She vowed to put on a brave face as she wanted to be in a happy place for them and not show her pain.

Speaking through tears from a hotel in London Taylor said: “I am going to meet some of these families tonight and put on a pop concert, you know.

“I’m going to meet some of these families tonight.

“It’s going to be fine as I am not going to be doing this. I am going to be smiling so any of this gets out of the way before you go on stage.”

Taylor said since the shocking stabbings she has “felt like she is on thin ice” despite her love for being on tour.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/15635382/taylor-swift-eras-tour-crew-tears-197-million-bonuses/

AT least two people have been killed and eight others are critically injured after a mass shooting at a top Ivy League school.

Cops are responding to the active situation at Brown University in Rhode Island – with the suspect still understood to be at large.

The mayor of Providence – where Brown University is situated – has confirmed that two individuals have been killed in the tragic shooting.

Another eight people are in the hospital in a critical but stable condition, said Mayor Brett Smiley. He added that these numbers could change.

University officials initially told students and staff that a suspect was in custody, before later saying that was not the case and that police were still searching for a suspect or suspects.

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social saying he was briefed about the shooting and that the FBI are at the scene investigating.

The president also claimed that a suspect was taken into custody, but changed his statement shortly.

Brown University is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the US with about 7,300 undergraduates and just over 3,000 graduate students.

Saturday was the second day of final exams for the fall semester.

The Providence police department issued a shelter-in-place order and stated that an active investigation was underway.

It said: “Multiple shot in the area of Brown University. This is an active investigation.

“Please shelter in place or avoid the area until further notice.”

Officials said that there have been multiple shooting victims, but they did not say how many or their conditions.

“The situation is ongoing, and all members of the community should continue to shelter in place,” Brown University said on its website.

It added: “We are very sorry to share that we have confirmed reports of multiple shooting victims, but we do not yet have information about their condition that we are in a position to share.

“They have been transported to local hospitals.”

Kristy DosReis, chief public information officer for the city, said authorities were still gathering information from the active scene.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15637374/multiple-people-shot-us-university-cops-search-shooter/

Henna nights, bold fashion and zero family drama: Pakistan’s fake weddings give young people the excuse to have stylish, stress-free parties devoid of social pressure.

The wedding stage looks inconspicuous at first glance: marigold-laden, with bright, cheery yellow tones adorning where the bride and groom sit.

It seems like a typical Pakistani mehndi — part of the country’s traditional three-day wedding festivities — yet a closer look reveals something unusual: the groom is a woman. This isn’t a same-sex marriage but a “fake wedding,” an organized event giving people the chance to get together and enjoy a spectacular night out free from social pressure.

Pakistan’s fake wedding trend, which has been gaining traction since 2023, replicates the aesthetics and festivities of a “real” wedding, but without the lifelong commitment or family pressures that usually define Pakistani marriages.

This type of event increased in popularity after a fake wedding organized by the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2023 gained considerable national and global attention on traditional and social media.

Viral fake wedding triggers backlash

The media coverage caused a significant backlash and criticism alongside its increasing popularity among young people and influencers.

Sairam H. Miran, a former president of the LUMS Student Council, told DW that students at the university faced considerable “online abuse” after footage from the event went viral.

“There is a tendency that people and media focus more on LUMS as an elite university which is out of touch with reality that gets far more traction than any positive news about the same students,” said Miran.

“Just like in the rest of the world, it is possible for university students in Pakistan to have fun and excel at their core jobs at the same time.”

LUMS, like many other Pakistani universities, organizes weekly social events for students and believed that fake weddings provided a more traditional and socially-sanctioned space for celebration and fun.

However, following the backlash, the student council and university took several precautions to ensure students’ safety and privacy, such as not allowing influencers post on public pages.

“There were consequences for the admin who are answerable to donors and parents, and we students who did not consent to becoming viral faced problems with our families as well,” Zara*, a LUMS student who graduated in 2023, told DW.

“The groom didn’t face problems with his family but the bride’s family were very angry,” she added.

Zara asked DW not to use her real name due to negative consequences after footage from the fake wedding went viral.

Fake weddings as gendered safe spaces

Enjoying wedding festivities without societal pressure or the watchful eyes of family is exactly why these fake wedding events are so attractive — especially to women.

Rida Imran, founder of Hunar Creative Market, organized a collaborative women-only fake wedding with other artisans, artists, content creators and event managers in November.

Imran told DW that the mehndi event of a traditional Pakistani wedding, usually the first-day event of a typically three-day wedding, especially brings women together to apply henna, sing, dance and celebrate.

However, for most families, women are still under social pressure to behave in a non-boisterous way at weddings.

“Even though wedding celebrations are such an integral part of our culture and tradition, women still face a lot of scrutiny in how they act, look and celebrate,” said Imran.

“Having this women-only mehndi gave women the opportunity to enjoy the wedding without any social pressure or family scrutiny.”

Authenticity outshines Western wedding templates

Punjrush, a standup comedian and content creator who played the role of “bride,” shared that, as a single woman, she never imagined experiencing such a “drama-free wedding.” She usually feels there is tension between family members or pressures to follow social norms.

She added that the event felt like a “decolonizing moment,” since brand promotions and exhibitions follow a Westernized template, whereas Pakistan’s shaadi (wedding) culture is authentically South Asian.

In addition to authenticity, the sense of safety women feel at fake weddings stands in sharp contrast to other events in the country, such as raves and parties, which are often shadowed by uncertainty and safety concerns.

For example, in October 2024, police raided a Halloween party in Karachi, the capital of Pakistan’s Sindh province, an event widely circulated through news reports and social media and labeled as a “vulgar activity.” Many female attendees had their photos and videos leaked online, breaching their privacy.

According to Shifa Leghari, a journalist and social commentator, Pakistan’s fake weddings provide a much safer space for women without attracting suspicion from authorities or family members as it is a socially acceptable form of celebration.

“These events are also often ticketed or curated so they have controlled entry points and are very culturally appropriate, so people especially women are free to enjoy and men know to act respectfully as well as it is part of the culture of the wedding,” said Leghari.

A growing market for celebration

Within the industrial complex of Pakistani weddings, fake weddings have carved out a considerable niche, yet there is speculation about whether this trend fuels the ever-expanding lavish wedding industry or provides an alternative market outside the mainstream.

Pakistan’s wedding ecosystem — including venues, catering, designer fashion, jewelry, photography and makeup artists — is estimated to be worth at least 900 billion Pakistani rupees (€2.7 billion/$3.2 billion) annually.

Some organizers of fake weddings argue that rather than toeing the line, they provide alternative standards, ideas, vendors and services as they are based on creativity rather than a “copy-paste style” of most traditional weddings.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/fake-weddings-in-pakistan-signal-a-cultural-shift/a-75130128

Over a million households have been left without power after Russia’s overnight drone and missile attacks. The strikes come on the eve of US-Ukraine talks in Berlin.

Several people were reported shot at the Rhode Island-based university.

US police confirmed on Saturday that “multiple” people had been shot after reports of an active shooting situation on Brown University’s campus in Providence.

“Multiple shot in the area of Brown University. This is an active investigation. Please shelter in place or avoid the area until further notice,” Providence Police wrote on X.

There were no immediate details about the victims’ conditions or the circumstances of the shooting.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, US President Donald Trump said “the FBI is on the scene” and that “the suspect is in custody,” only to later reverse the latter statement.

Earlier, officials said a suspect was in custody, but the school emergency alert system later said “police do not have a suspect in custody and continue to search for suspect(s).”

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/brown-university-shooting-police-say-multiple-people-shot/a-75148185

Swifties can now watch the emotional moment Taylor Swift brought her Eras Tour crew to tears with her generous gift of $197 million in bonuses.

In a scene from her new docuseries “The End of an Era,” the “Lover” hitmaker could be seen passing out handwritten notes to each of her crew members as they gathered around the pop star.

“Everybody has the same message on their cards so I was hoping you could open it together,” Swift, 36, told the crowd in a clip shared on X Friday.

“Before you open yours I just want to say you guys this leg of the tour has been harder than anything I’ve ever done in a live setting and you guys have taken this on with such excitement, such curiosity and the endurance you’ve shown. The spirit you’ve shown.”

“How much you’ve given to these crowds, that gives to me every single night. The tour has done really well thanks to all of our hard work. So if you could kindly read the message.”

Then, one of the crew members named Cam read his message aloud.

“Dearest Cam, we’ve travelled the world like we set out to do. We’ve dazzled the crowds but we’ve missed family too,” he read.

“My full gratitude doesn’t come from a bank but here’s a [redacted] dollars just to say thanks. Love Taylor,” he continued. The exact amount of money Swift gave to the dancers was censored in the clip.

Almost immediately, the scene skipped to show a sea of crew members wiping away their tears at the thoughtful gesture.

In another moment, one of Swift’s production assistants, Max Holmes, was seen getting a hug from one of his co-workers after he said he was “gonna pass out.”

The Grammy winner then hugged several crew members and exchanged “I love yous” with the elated room.

Elsewhere in the scene, Swift explained that giving out bonuses to her tour crew is significant to her “because setting a precedent with the Eras Tour is really important to me.”

“People who work on the road — if the tour grosses more, they get more of a bonus. And these people just work so hard. And they are the best at what they do,” she said in a different clip shared online.

Source : https://pagesix.com/2025/12/13/entertainment/watch-taylor-swifts-eras-tour-crew-nearly-faint-as-singer-gifts-them-197m-in-bonuses/

Mayhem strikes again at Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball Tour.

Lady Gaga briefly paused her final Mayhem Ball Tour concert in Sydney on Friday after one of her dancers fell off the stage during heavy rainfall at Accor Stadium.

Video circulating on social media showed the Grammy winner, 39, performing her song, “Garden of Eden” when her dancers marched to the front of the rain-soaked stage’s runway.

The move resulted in Michael Dameski sliding all the way off of the slippery platform.

The band of dancers were quick to respond as Gaga appeared to quickly run to the rescue.

Another concertgoers’ POV showed the pop star waving her arms as she told the rest of her crew to “stop” and halted the performance to check on her fallen friend.

“Just one second,” she said on the microphone, before climbing off the stage to ask Dameski, “Are you okay?”

She then briefly paused the show to allow the dancers to find more appropriate shoes for the unwieldy weather.

The show later resumed with business as usual as an uninjured Dameski took the stage once again.

A rep for Gaga did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.

The dancer later took to his Instagram Stories to thank the many fans who reached out to check on his well-being and confirm that he’s “ok.”

“Happy I was able to finish the last show of the year,” he captioned the video of himself dancing to another of Gaga’s hits.

Source : https://pagesix.com/2025/12/13/entertainment/lady-gaga-halts-sydney-concert-after-dancer-falls-off-stage/

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, the North’s KCNA news agency reported on Saturday.
In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment.

Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials gathered to welcome the troops.
KCNA said the unit had been dispatched in early August and carried out combat and engineering tasks in the Kursk region of Russia during Moscow’s war with Ukraine.
Last month, Russia’s Defence Ministry said North Korean troops who helped Russia repel a major Ukrainian incursion into its western Kursk region are now playing an important role in clearing the area of mines.
Under a mutual defence pact between the two countries, North Korea last year sent some 14,000 soldiers to fight alongside Russia in Kursk, and more than 6,000 were killed, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and Western sources.

Kim said nine soldiers were killed during the mission, describing their deaths as a “heartrending loss,” and announced that the regiment would be awarded the Order of Freedom and Independence. The nine fallen soldiers were awarded the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, along with other state honours, KCNA said.
The welcoming ceremony was held on Friday in Pyongyang and was attended by senior military officials, ruling party leaders, families of the soldiers and large crowds, according to the report.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korean-leader-kim-hails-troops-returning-russia-mission-state-media-says-2025-12-12/

The European Union agreed on Friday to indefinitely freeze Russian central bank assets held in Europe, removing a big obstacle to using the cash to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia.
The EU wants to keep Ukraine financed and fighting as it sees Russia’s invasion as a threat to its own security. To do so, EU states aim to put to work some of the Russian sovereign assets they immobilised after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

A first big step, which EU governments agreed on Friday, is to immobilise 210 billion euros ($246 billion) worth of Russian sovereign assets for as long as needed instead of voting every six months on extending the asset freeze.
This removes the risk that Hungary and Slovakia, which have better relations with Moscow than other EU states, could refuse to roll over the freeze at some point, forcing the EU to return the money to Russia.

PLANNED LOAN TO UKRAINE

The indefinite asset freeze is meant to help convince Belgium to support the EU’s plan to use the frozen Russian cash to extend a loan of up to 165 billion euros to Ukraine to cover its military and civilian budget needs in 2026 and 2027.

The loan would be paid back by Ukraine only when Russia pays Kyiv war damages, making the loan effectively a grant that advances future Russian reparations payments.
EU leaders – the European Council – are to meet on December 18 to finalise details of the reparations loan and resolve remaining problems, which include guarantees from all EU governments for Belgium that it would not be left alone to foot the bill should a potential Moscow lawsuit prove successful.
Before that, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will visit Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Monday, with further European, EU and NATO leaders joining them later, the German government said.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, writing on X social platform in English, praised the decision as a “landmark step toward justice and accountability”.

“This decision strengthens the foundation for the reparations loan mechanism and brings us closer to a future in which Russia pays for its crimes and destruction caused,” she wrote.
Germany sees no alternative to the reparations loan and would provide 50 billion euros in guarantees, European diplomatic sources said.
Danish Finance Minister Stephanie Lose, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters “some worries” still needed to be addressed but “hopefully we’ll be able to pave the way towards a decision at the European Council next week.”
European Commissioner for Economy Valdis Dombrovskis said solid guarantees were being put together for Belgium.

RUSSIAN CENTRAL BANK SAYS IT’S SUING EUROCLEAR

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Facebook he believed the EU move to freeze Russian assets indefinitely via a qualified majority vote – requiring the support of 15 of the 27 member states representing 65% of the EU population – would cause irreparable damage to the bloc.

Hungary would do all it could to “restore a lawful state of affairs,” he said.
Russia’s central bank said the EU plans to use its assets were illegal and reserved the right to use all available means to protect its interests, remarks shrugged off by Dombrovskis.
The bank also said it was suing the Brussels-based central securities depository Euroclear – which holds 185 billion euros of the total assets frozen in Europe – in a Moscow court over what it said were damaging actions, affecting its ability to dispose of its funds and securities.
Euroclear has been subject to Russian lawsuits in Moscow courts since the EU froze the assets in 2022.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-set-indefinitely-freeze-russian-assets-removing-obstacle-ukraine-loan-2025-12-12/

Nvidia (NVDA.O), has told Chinese clients it is evaluating adding production capacity for its powerful H200 AI chips after orders exceeded its current output level, according to two sources briefed on the matter.
The move comes after U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to export H200 processors, its second-fastest AI chips, to China and collect a 25% fee on such sales.

Demand for the chip from Chinese companies is so strong that Nvidia is leaning toward adding new capacity, one of the sources said. They declined to be named as the discussions are private.
“We are managing our supply chain to ensure that licensed sales of the H200 to authorized customers in China will have no impact on our ability to supply customers in the United States,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters after the story was published.
Major Chinese companies including Alibaba (9988.HK), and ByteDance have already reached out to Nvidia this week about purchasing the H200 and are keen to place large orders, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

However, uncertainties remain, as the Chinese government has yet to greenlight any purchase of the H200. Chinese officials convened emergency meetings on Wednesday to discuss the matter and will decide whether to allow it to be shipped into China, said one of the two sources and a third source.
Very limited quantities of H200 chips are currently in production, Reuters reported on Wednesday, as the U.S. AI chip leader is focused on producing its most advanced Blackwell and upcoming Rubin lines.

CHINA PROMOTING OWN AI INDUSTRY

Supply of H200 chips has been a major concern for Chinese clients and they have reached out to Nvidia seeking clarity on this, sources said.

As part of the briefing provided by Nvidia, the company has also given them guidance on current supply levels, said one of the first two people, without providing a specific number.

The H200 went into mass deployment last year and is the fastest AI chip in Nvidia’s previous Hopper generation. The chip is manufactured by TSMC (2330.TW), using the Taiwanese firm’s 4nm manufacturing process technology.
TSMC and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Chinese companies’ strong demand for the H200 stems from the fact that it is easily the most powerful chip they can currently access.
It is about six times more powerful than the H20, a downgraded chip from Nvidia tailored for the Chinese market that was released in late 2023.
Trump’s decision on the H200 comes at a time when China is pushing to promote its own domestic AI chip industry. As domestic chip companies have yet to produce products that match the H200, there have been concerns that allowing the H200 into China could stymie the industry.
“Its (H200) compute performance is approximately 2-3 times that of the most advanced domestically produced accelerators,” said Nori Chiou, investment director at White Oak Capital Partners.
“I’m already observing many CSPs (Cloud Service Providers) and enterprise customers aggressively placing large orders and lobbying the government to relax restrictions on a conditional basis,” he said, adding Chinese AI demand exceeds the capacity of local production.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-considers-increasing-h200-chip-output-due-robust-china-demand-sources-say-2025-12-12/

China held a low-key memorial ceremony on Saturday for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with President Xi Jinping not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan.
Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said last month that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Chinese-claimed Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan.

China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital.

A post-World War Two Allied tribunal put the death toll in the eastern city of Nanjing at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars have denied a massacre took place at all.

MEMORIAL CEREMONY

At Saturday’s ceremony being held at the national memorial centre in Nanjing, Shi Taifeng, head of the ruling Communist Party’s powerful organisation department, referenced Xi’s speech at a military parade in Beijing in September marking 80 years since the end of World War Two.
But Shi’s remarks were far less combative than recent rhetoric from Chinese government officials.
“History has fully demonstrated that the Chinese nation is a great nation that fears no power and stands on its own feet,” he said.

He did not mention Takaichi but alluded to China’s previous claims that she seeks to revive Japan’s history of militarism.
“History has proven and will continue to prove that any attempt to revive militarism, challenge the postwar international order, or undermine world peace and stability will never be tolerated by all peace-loving and justice-seeking peoples around the world and is doomed to fail.”
Doves flew over the site after the ceremony, which was completed in less than half an hour, in front of an audience that included police officers and school children.

XI LAST ATTENDED EVENT IN 2017

China marked its first national memorial day for the massacre in 2014, where Xi spoke and called on China and Japan to set aside hatred and not allow the minority who led Japan to war to affect relations now.
Xi last attended the event in person in 2017 but did not deliver public remarks.

China’s State Council Information Office, which handles questions from foreign media to the central government, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Xi’s absence.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-holds-low-key-nanjing-massacre-memorial-despite-japan-tensions-2025-12-13/

The unhinged homeless woman accused of stabbing a tourist changing her baby at Macy’s Herald Square was released from a psychiatric hospital hours before the attack — and bought the knife she used at the store after hearing “voices” in her head telling her to “kill,” prosecutors revealed.

Kerri Aherne, 43, had been let out of the Manhattan Psychiatric Center following a year of treatment when she strolled into the iconic Midtown store, purchased the blade and carried out the savage attack against a 38-year-old California mother Thursday afternoon, prosecutors said at her arraignment Friday night.

“She had purchased a knife at Macy’s and looked for someone to kill because voices in her head told her that she had to kill someone or else she would be killed,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Paul Barker told the court.

Aherne was wearing a ragged white sweater and a face mask when she was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on attempted murder, assault, child endangerment and weapons possession charges.

Barker noted that while the alleged knife-wielding fiend had no priors in the Big Apple, she was arrested in her native Massachusetts in 2018 for making online posts threatening to kill Sen. Elizabeth Warren and “getting a gun” to shoot someone at a “local police station.”

The troubled suspect first arrived in New York City via Uber from Massachusetts while on leave from a hospital there, he added.

It’s unclear why she then began receiving treatment at a separate hospital in Manhattan.

Aherne launched her vicious attack after seeing the victim enter the seventh-floor bathroom of the crowded flagship store with her 10-month-old daughter around 3:10 p.m., according to prosecutors and sources.

The victim, who had been holiday shopping at Macy’s with her husband and children, was repeatedly hacked in the back, shoulder, and arm with the knife.

“In the course of the assault, the baby fell from the table to the floor, but the mother was able to subdue the assailant,” Barker added.

The slashed mom, who works as a civilian for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where her husband is a deputy, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition, while her attacker was arrested.

While the victim’s back and arm were riddled with stab wounds, she was miraculously discharged from the hospital Friday.

“She is better,” her husband told The Post, declining to comment further.

Court records show Aherne has long struggled with mental illness.

The Tewksbury native was deemed an incapacitated person in 2019, with her mother and sister appointed as her guardians, records show.

She was placed on a court-ordered treatment plan to keep her taking Prolixin, an antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia, according to the records.

She last posted on her Facebook — which features anti-Trump comments, movie clips and incoherent rants — in 2018.

“Going a little insane,” one of her last posts prophetically states, along with a still from a Michael Jackson video.

Source : https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/us-news/homeless-woman-accused-of-stabbing-tourist-inside-nyc-macys-bathroom-was-released-from-psych-hospital-morning-of-attack/

A creepy naked snap of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein lounging in a bubble bath was among 70 new photos Democrats of the House Oversight Committee released Friday night.

The vile image shows Epstein reclining in a bathtub, with a curtain exposing just the upper half of his bare body as he stares into the camera with a smug smirk.

Another photo in the latest batch shows the disgraced financier – fully clothed – in a selfie-style shot with what looks like a noticeably swollen upper lip.

“In the interest of transparency, we will continue to release photos from the Epstein estate,” House Democrats said in a statement following the latest photo dump.

Lawmakers signaled there will be “more to come.”

Early Friday, the committee received 95,000 images from Epstein’s estate, but only released 19, showing celebrities, royalty, political heavyweights, and dark glimpses of Epstein’s twisted kinks.

Many photos featured film director Woody Allen, former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, Duke of York.

President Trump and former President Bill Clinton were also seen in what appear to be pictures taken of earlier photographs.

In one image, Clinton poses with Epstein and his accomplice, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, along with another couple.

A black-and-white photo shows Trump posing with six women whose faces were obscured.

In another picture, apparently taken on a private jet, Trump is seen with his tie loosened and sitting next to a blonde woman. The woman’s face is also blacked out.

One image shows a display of “Trump condoms” — a popular novelty item during the 2016 presidential campaign — featuring a cartoon of the 45th and 47th president and the message “I’m huuuuge!”

While the latest round of images didn’t include the president, one photo shows a pumpkin carved with a face, topped with a blonde wig and a sign reading “TRUMPKIN” and “Make Halloween Great Again.”

Source : https://nypost.com/2025/12/12/us-news/creepy-jeffrey-epstein-bubble-bath-photo-surfaces-in-new-trove-released-by-house-oversight-committee/

The suspects have been identified as Manjot Bhatti, Navjot Bhatti, and Amanjot Bhatti, while the fourth suspect, still at large, remains unnamed.

Three Indian-origin truck drivers have been arrested in connection with a shootout between two rival tow-truck groups in Canada. The search is still on for a fourth suspect, said Peel Regional Police, sharing a video of the shootout in Brampton.

The incident occurred around 10:45 pm (local time) on October 7 in a parking lot in the McVean Drive and Castlemore Road area. Two separate groups engaged in an altercation during which gunshots were fired. One person was hurt, but the injuries were not serious, said a senior police officer.

“Following a lengthy investigation, investigators identified three individuals associated with one of the involved groups. On November 20, police executed a search warrant at a residence in Caledon. As a result, investigators located and arrested the suspects,” read a police statement.

The suspects have been identified as Manjot Bhatti, Navjot Bhatti, and Amanjot Bhatti, while the fourth suspect, still at large, remains unnamed.

Manjot has been charged with the intentional reckless discharge of a firearm, possession of a loaded prohibited firearm, careless storage of a firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, knowledge of unauthorized possession of a firearm, and being an occupant of a vehicle despite knowing there was a firearm.

His bail hearing is pending at the Ontario Court of Justice in Brampton, and he has since been released on bail, the police said.

Source : https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/canada-shooting-brampton-shooting-truckers-rivalry-3-indian-origin-men-arrested-9801902?pfrom=home-ndtv_topscroll

Democratic US lawmakers have released two new batches of photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, revealing details of the convicted paedophile’s home and ties to the rich and powerful.

US President Donald Trump, former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon are among the high-profile figures featured in the photos. The images, many of which have been seen before, do not imply wrongdoing.

The nearly 100 photos released by members of the House Oversight Committee on Friday are some of more than 95,000 images obtained via subpoena, the Democrats said.

The justice department is separately approaching a deadline next week to publish all Epstein-related documents.

In the first batch of photos released on Friday by lawmakers, Epstein is seen with multiple high-profile figures, none of whom have yet commented. Many of them have previously denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.

Trump appeared in three of the images released on Friday. One image showed him standing next to a woman whose face has been redacted.

Another showed Trump standing next to Epstein while talking to model Ingrid Seynhaeve at a 1997 Victoria’s Secret party in New York – an image that was already publicly available.

A third photo showed Trump smiling with several women, whose faces have also been redacted, flanked on either side of him.

An additional photo showed an illustrated likeness of the president on red packets next to a sign that reads: “Trump Condom”.

The White House called the release a “Democrat hoax” against Trump that has been “repeatedly debunked”. Trump had for months argued the Epstein saga was a distraction orchestrated by his critics to take attention away from his administration’s accomplishments.

Friday’s files also include private images of Epstein, including one of him in a bathtub and another that appears to show sexual toys. They also show him with several other prominent people including former President Bill Clinton and tech billionaire Bill Gates.

One photo featuring Clinton shows him standing next to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for her role in facilitating the disgraced financier’s abuse.

Two other people the BBC has yet to identify are also in the image, which appeared to have been signed by Clinton.

Clinton has denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein. In 2019, a spokesperson said he “knows nothing about the terrible crimes” Epstein pleaded guilty to.

One image included in Friday’s batch was a cropped section of a picture originally taken by a photographer working for Getty Images in 2018, which showed King Charles in conversation with Microsoft founder Gates at a London summit.

The image contained in Epstein’s collection was cropped to show only Andrew and Gates.

Andrew, who has faced years of scrutiny over his past relationship with Epstein, was stripped of his “prince” title and left his Windsor mansion, Royal Lodge, earlier this year. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is also seen in some of the images. In one, he is shown speaking with Epstein at a desk, and in another, standing beside him in front of a mirror.

A third image shows him speaking with filmmaker Woody Allen.

Other prominent figures who appear in the images include US economist Larry Summers, lawyer Alan Dershowitz and entrepreneur Richard Branson. Not all the images show those individuals in the company of Epstein.

No additional context or details were included, so it is not clear when, why or where many of the photos were taken or by whom, including images from what appear to be Epstein’s estate in the US Virgin Islands, showing multiple rooms – including one with a dental chair surrounded by sculptures of moustached men on the walls, a scene which featured in a previous release of Epstein files.

There is an image of an orange pumpkin with a blonde wig that has been carved in the likeness of Trump. Above it, a sign reads: “Trumpkin. Make Halloween Great Again.”

Republicans, who are in the majority on the House Oversight Committee, have accused Democrats of “cherry-picking photos and making targeted redactions to create a false narrative about President Trump”.

In a statement, Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the congressional committee, said: “It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends.”

“These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW,” he added.

Epstein’s connection to multiple high-profile figures, along with various unanswered questions about the case, and his 2019 suicide in a Manhattan jail as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges, has fuelled online conspiracies and demands for greater transparency around the investigations into the billionaire financier.

Following months of pressure from across the political spectrum, the justice department has until 19 December to release all documents related to the Epstein case as required by a bill passed nearly unanimously by Congress and signed by Trump in November.

That upcoming deadline is separate from the congressional investigation into the Epstein case.

Friday’s publications mark the second time in a month that Democrats on the committee have published new images from its inquiry into Epstein.

They originally released 19 images on Friday morning before publishing another nearly 80 later in the day, saying in a statement: “In the interest of transparency, we will continue to release photos from the Epstein estate.”

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crk777lj763o

It’s no secret the Avatar films are a gigantic technical feat – pushing the boundaries of cinematography, animation and performance capture.

But you may not be aware that the same applies to the music.

Composer Simon Franglen says work on the third instalment, Avatar: Fire and Ash, took an epic seven years to complete.

Along the way, he wrote 1,907 pages of orchestral score; and even invented new instruments for the residents of the alien planet Pandora to play.

And, with director James Cameron tinkering with the edit until the very last minute, the British musician only finished his final musical cue five days before the film was printed and delivered.

In total, Avatar contains “four times as much” music as a standard Hollywood film, says Franglen, with almost the entirety of its 195-minute running time requiring music.

“But I got 10 minutes off for good behaviour,” he laughs.

Fire and Ash is the third instalment in the record-breaking series, continuing the saga of the blue Na’vi population, who are protecting their planet from human invaders, intent on stripping its natural resources.

The new film, released on 19 December, takes audiences back to the astonishingly vivid landscapes of Pandora, but it also sends them on a visceral emotional journey.

At the start of the film, the two main characters Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) are mourning the death of their teenage son, Neteyam.

Unable to see eye-to-eye, the grief threatens to tear the couple apart.

Franglen was tasked with creating a score that could reflect the depth of their despair.

“I wanted to make sure that you felt that sense of distance that was growing between them,” he says.

“So what I would do is, I would take two lines [of music] and I’d have them moving apart, or I would make them go wrong, so that they felt austere and cold and disconnected.”

“Grief is not something that is ever addressed in these sorts of films,” he continues, “but for any family, the loss of a child is the worst thing you can go through.

“Musically, the important stuff is often the quiet moments.”

Supporters are continuing to speak of their frustration at the astronomical cost of following the 2026 World Cup.

The Football Supporters’ Association has called ticket prices a “laughable insult” to fans.

For some smaller nations, the cost of group-stage tickets is going to be higher than a month’s wages in that country. And that is before factoring in travel and accommodation.

One Ghana fan told the BBC of “anger and disappointment” that Black Stars supporters might now be forced to cancel their plans.

Fifa’s ticket price policy was revealed on Thursday, with group-stage tickets up to three times the prices of those for Qatar in 2022. The cheapest ticket for the final will cost £3,119.

On Friday, Fifa said it had received five million ticket requests from fans in more than 200 countries in the 24 hours since the latest ticketing phase opened.

Rosmah Mansor was acquitted on Dec 19 last year of 12 money laundering charges involving RM7.09 million (US$1.73 million) and five charges of failing to declare her income to the Inland Revenue Board.

Malaysia’s Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) on Thursday (Dec 11) dropped its appeal against the acquittal of Rosmah Mansor – who is the wife of former prime minister Najib Razak – over 17 money laundering and tax evasion charges.

In its statement, the AGC said that the decision was reached as there was “no reasonable prospect of success” with key witnesses either deceased or untraceable, reported local news outlet the New Straits Times (NST).

“Among the factors considered was that the prosecution would be unable to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt as key witnesses have died or can no longer be traced,” the statement read.

“In such circumstances, the predicate offence against the accused also cannot be proven.”

Rosmah, 74, was charged in 2018 with 12 charges of money laundering involving RM7.09 million (US$1.73 million) and five charges of failing to declare her income to the Inland Revenue Board.

On Dec 19 last year, High Court Judge K Muniandy acquitted her of all 17 charges, ruling that the prosecution had failed to present the key elements of the offence of money laundering in the charges.

The AGC said that it had initially filed the appeal on Dec 20 against the High Court’s decision. However, after reviewing the court’s written grounds of the judgement on Oct 30 this year, it decided not to proceed with the appeal.

“All key aspects of the case, including issues of fact and law, were reviewed before the decision not to proceed with the appeal was made,” said the AGC, as quoted by NST.

The AGC said that it had filed a notice of discontinuance on Dec 9, which is the court document required for it to drop the appeal.

According to a letter from the Deputy Registrar of the Court of Appeal, the case management set for Dec 22 has been vacated and the appeal is dismissed.

Rosmah’s lawyer Amer Hamzah Arshad has also confirmed the matter and said that Judge Muniandy’s decision last year to acquit his client was appropriate and fair.

“We are relieved that she has been completely freed from all the charges. This entire process has been a tough test for her and we are pleased to see that justice has finally been served and the case has been closed,” he said, as quoted by Bernama.

Rosmah pleaded not guilty on Oct 4, 2018 at the Sessions Court to the 17 charges, purportedly committed between Dec 4, 2013 and Jun 8, 2017. The case was then transferred to the High Court.

Her trial over the charges commenced on Aug 24, 2023 but came to a halt after she filed a striking-out application on Sep 6, 2023.

Separately, Rosmah is still appealing her conviction in a corruption case related to the solar hybrid project for rural schools in Sarawak. She was sentenced to 10 years in jail and given a RM970 million fine by the Kuala Lumpur High Court in relation to three separate charges.

On Sep 1, 2022, she was found guilty of soliciting RM187.5 million in bribes from contractor Saidi Abang Samsudin in 2016 and 2017 so that his company Jepak Holdings could secure a RM1.25 billion government project to supply solar energy to 369 rural schools in the Sarawak state.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/malaysia-rosmah-mansor-najib-razak-money-laundering-free-corruption-5578181

“Thailand will continue to perform military actions until we feel no more harm and threats to our land and people,” Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said on Saturday (Dec 13).

Thailand’s leader vowed to keep fighting on the disputed border with Cambodia as fighter jets struck targets on Saturday (Dec 13), hours after United States President Donald Trump said he had brokered a ceasefire.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul posted on Facebook that the Southeast Asian nation would “continue to perform military actions until we feel no more harm and threats to our land and people”.

Trump, who brokered a ceasefire in the long-running border dispute in October, spoke to Anutin and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet on Friday, and said they had agreed to “cease all shooting”.

Neither of them mentioned any agreement in statements after their calls with Trump, and Anutin said there was no ceasefire.

“I want to make it clear. Our actions this morning already spoke,” Anutin said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the continued fighting.

Hun Manet, in a statement on Saturday on Facebook, said Cambodia continues to seek a peaceful resolution of disputes in line with the October agreement.

Since Monday, Cambodia and Thailand have been exchanging heavy-weapons fire at multiple points along the 817km border, in some of the heaviest fighting since the five-day clash in July. Trump halted that fighting, the worst in recent memory, with calls to both leaders.

The latest bout of unrest, which erupted on Dec 8, has killed at least 20 people, with more than 260 wounded, according to tallies by both countries.

Trump, who has repeatedly said he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, has been keen to intervene again to rescue the truce. Thailand suspended it last month after a Thai soldier was maimed by a landmine, one of many that Bangkok says were newly laid by Cambodia.

Cambodia, which nominated Trump for the peace prize in August, rejects the landmine allegations.

On Saturday, a Thai Defence Ministry spokesman, Rear Admiral Surasant Kongsiri, told a press conference that clashes had taken place across seven border provinces and Cambodia had fired heavy weapons, “making it necessary for Thailand to retaliate”.

Cambodia’s Information Ministry said Thai forces had struck bridges and buildings overnight and fired artillery from a naval vessel.

Thai leader Anutin dismissed comments by Trump that a “roadside bomb” that wounded Thai soldiers was accidental, saying the incident was “definitely not a roadside accident”.

Cambodia’s Hun Manet said he had asked the US and Malaysia, which has been a mediator in peace talks, to use their intelligence gathering capabilities to “verify which side fired first” in the latest round of fighting.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/thailand-cambodia-military-action-border-clashes-trump-5580191

Bitcoin hoarding giant Strategy clung to its place in the Nasdaq 100 on Friday, continuing its year-long stint in the benchmark at a time where analysts have raised questions over its business model.

Some market watchers have suggested Strategy’s pioneering business model of buying-and-holding bitcoin, which has spawned dozens of copycats, more closely resembles that of an investment fund.

Concerns have grown over the sustainability of crypto treasury companies, whose shares have proved extremely sensitive to bitcoin’s gyrations.

Nasdaq said Biogen, CDW Corporation, Globalfoundries, Lululemon Athletica, On Semiconductor and Trade Desk were removed from the tech-heavy exchange’s benchmark index.

New entrants included Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Ferrovial, Insmed, Monolithic Power Systems, Seagate Technology and Western Digital.

Strategy started out as software company, MicroStrategy, but pivoted to bitcoin investing in 2020. It was included in the Nasdaq 100 last December under the index’s technology sub-category.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/bitcoin-hoarding-company-strategy-remains-in-nasdaq-100-5580086

After years of Chinese dominance, the US is once again the largest investor in Africa. But statistics alone do not tell the whole story: Africa’s raw materials have long been of geopolitical importance.

­”America first”— that is the first impression that stands out from the data on so-called foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa.

Since 2012, China had consistently been ahead, investing continuously, while US companies in some years even withdrew more capital than they transferred to Africa. The figures for 2023 paint a different picture: US companies invested just under $8 billion (€6.8 billion) in Africa, almost twice as much as their Chinese competitors.

The dataset published in May by the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University does not yet reflect the subsequent development of the situation. This is because national governments and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) need time to evaluate the statistics and make valid assessments.

Unadjusted figures on foreign direct investment can be quite misleading: in the current UNCTAD report, the Netherlands emerges as the largest investor in Africa.

As a so-called “conduit” or transit country, the Netherlands often finds itself at the center of a complex financial network, with capital originating from other countries.

Analysts worldwide are likely to be eagerly awaiting the new figures. This is because economic rivalry between the US and China is intensifying, and there have been several recent examples of potentially significant investments in Africa.

America invests for profit, China invests strategically

Has the US really “overtaken” China as the largest investor in Africa, as recent media reports have claimed?

“Even if you look at the chart, you notice the fluctuations. It’s like spasms, says James Shikwati, founder and director of the Inter Region Economic Network (IREN) in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

“America shoots up and then disappears, shoots up and disappears. That is purely because it’s a private, profit-minded approach. These are private companies and they’re not giving money just for charity,” Shikwati told DW.

In contrast, Chinese direct investment is ultimately backed by the government, which pursues long-term strategic goals.

According to Shikwati, American companies rely on well-trained workers who can turn their investments into profits. “And therefore, Africa gains from the highly trained Africans who are looking for jobs. And then, for the Chinese side, the average construction work, which is mostly hands-on skills, they cater to that kind of population. So, I would say both sides, Africa wins.”

However, Africa has so far failed to reap sufficient benefits from its wealth of critical raw materials: These are often exported unprocessed, with the actual value creation occurring in other regions of the world.

Just under a year ago, the African Union (AU) presented its “Green Commodities Strategy,” which provides for export tariffs of 10%. The aim is to give countries a share of the actual value of their mineral resources or to encourage investors to process them directly in Africa.

The continent accounts for the majority of the world’s production of platinum, cobalt, tantalum and manganese. The mining sector is traditionally an industry with particularly high foreign direct investment.

Western companies have scaled back their activities, especially in politically sensitive mining countries. At the same time, China has become indispensable in many places through sustained investment.

China invests billions in Africa’s mining industry

“Experience in Africa shows that China is not afraid of political or economic instability,” Jimmy Munguriek, a lawyer and country director of the NGO Resource Matters in the DR Congo, told DW. “China is investing, and that is why many mining sectors in Africa, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are now largely controlled by Chinese companies.”

In 2023 alone, China invested nearly $8 billion in Africa, according to figures from the US think tank Brookings Institution, including lithium projects in Zimbabwe and Mali.

However, these individual investments can be compared with CARI’s FDI flows only to a limited extent, as these flows reflect the balance of all capital movements by foreign investors. According to the data, particularly high individual investments were made in copper projects in Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Trump’s pivot from aid to trade with African countries

There are growing signs that the US is adopting a more strategic, rather than purely profit-oriented, approach to Africa’s raw material resources.

In 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term as US president, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) was created, a government agency that merged the previously separate areas of private investment and development loans.

The DFC website bluntly states that the aim is to promote US interests, “expanding US global leadership and countering China’s presence in strategic regions.”

At the start of his second term in office this spring, Trump halted numerous development aid projects and withdrew substantial funding from the development agency, USAID.

“We’re shifting from aid to trade,” Trump told several African heads of state at the White House this summer. “There’s great economic potential in Africa, like few other places. In many ways, in the long run, this will be far more effective and sustainable and beneficial than anything else that we can be doing together.”

In the same appearance, Trump vowed that the US would treat Africa “far better than China or anyone else.”

As patron of the fragile peace agreement between the DR Congo and Rwanda, Trump has promised the US economy preferential access to Congolese raw materials. But despite the signing of the peace deal, more than 400 civilians have been killed following the recent surge of fighting as the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group continues its offensive in South Kivu province in eastern Congo.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/africa-at-the-center-of-uschina-resource-race/a-75130071

The US recently published its new National Security Strategy. Now a leaked draft indicates that the US wants to exert its influence over four countries in Europe in particular to destabilize the European Union.

Transatlantic relations have suffered since Donald Trump took office again. The publication of the National Security Strategy on December 4, 2025, was seen by many European politicians as an open affront.

In the document, which each new administration submits to Congress, Europe is described as a continent in decline where there is a risk of “civilizational erasure” because of migration policies. There is mention of “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

However, a longer, unpublished draft of the document was circulated prior to the official, public strategy. It reportedly goes into more detail about the plans the US has for Europe in future. According to the Washington-based digital media platform Defense One, which claims to have seen the draft, it lists Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary as countries that the US should “work more with … with the goal of pulling them away” from the European Union.The White House has denied the existence of any such draft.

But the question remains: Is the US trying to divide the European Union? And why are these four countries of particular interest?

Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary

Hungary’s name on the list is probably the least surprising, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and US President Trump remain close allies. The former supported the latter during his 2016 presidential campaign — the only ruling EU leader to do so at the time.

Both stand to mutually benefit from the other’s political stance. Orban is widely seen as a maverick and a destabilizing force for the EU — an institution that Trump appears to deeply distrust. And Trump has refered to Orban as his “great friend” and is even alleged to have offered Hungary a “financial shield” of $20 billion (€17 billion) — similar to the one he recently offered Argentina. Hungary’s economy is in a weak state, and significant EU funds due to the country are frozen over persistent concerns about democratic backsliding.

Trump told the media outlet Politico earlier this month that he had not promised Hungary a financial lifeline but said that Orban had asked for one.

The US president also appears enthusiastic about Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy, a right-wing party with neo-fascist roots. But Daniel Hegedüs, regional director for Central Europe at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, believes that the US government is under a “misapprehension” that Meloni would oppose the EU. Though she shares certain ideological views with Orban, she has not played an obstructionist role in the bloc. Indeed, she is very pragmatic, Hegedüs told DW, adding that few had understood as well as she had what a stable EU could do for their country.

While neither Poland nor Austria are currently led by right-wing populist governments, this was the case until recently, and right-wing and euroskeptic parties remain extremely influential in both countries. In the last elections, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) was the strongest force. It is currently leading the polls. In Poland last summer, Karol Nawrocki, the candidate backed by the national conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), won the presidential election.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Trump administration might hope to soon be able to exert more influence in both countries.

Why not the Czech Republic and Slovakia?

What is surprising, at least to some, is that two EU states do not appear on the list: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In the first, the parliamentary elections were won by the billionaire Andrej Babis and his populist ANO party in October. Babis formed a coalition government with the right-wing Motorists for Themselves party and the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy party.

Meanwhile, Slovakia has been experiencing a shift to the right since Robert Fico came to power as prime minister in 2023. His nominally social democratic, but in fact nationalist and increasingly right-wing Smer-SD party was recently expelled from the EU-level Party of European Socialists.

Both Babis and Fico are outspoken EU skeptics, and both have the potential to cause chaos in EU decisionmaking and to undermine the bloc’s authority on strategic issues, especially with regard to Russia and Ukraine — qualities that the current Trump administration is likely to appreciate.

Hegedüs believes the fact that they did not end up being mentioned in the final strategy document lies with the roots of their parties. For a long time, ANO could not be classified on the traditional left-right spectrum, while Smer-SD saw itself as left-wing.

“You can clearly see how ideological the US approach is,” says Hegedüs. “Because Smer and ANO do not have a traditional right-populist background, they are not considered to be like-minded, even though they possibly pursue policies that are useful to the Trump administration.”

Gradual disintegration of the European Union

Initial attempts by the US government to interfere in democratic processes in Europe at the beginning of the year, such as Vice President JD Vance’s controversial speech at the Munich Security Conference, were initially dismissed by observers of transatlantic relations. Many argued that the new administration in Washington still had to find its feet in its new role.

But ever since, the US government has interfered again and again — in the Romanian, Polish and German election campaigns, for instance. The pattern is always the same: support is given to those whom the Trump administration sees as an ally in ideological terms, and to those who can weaken Brussels.

Experts such as Hegedüs doubt that the US’ goal is to promote the departure of one of these four nations from the bloc — stylized as a “Huxit,” “Italexit,” “Auxit” or “Polexit” respectively— but rather to push a gradual disintegration of European integration, through diplomatic, political, and perhaps even financial support.

The first signs of this are already visible. For example, although the EU has agreed to gradually phase out its dependence on Russian energy and the bloc will ban imports of liquefied natural gas by the end of 2026 and pipeline gas by the fall of 2027, Hungary has announced it will refuse to comply.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-hungary-from-eu/a-75134777

The coach was charged with three criminal counts after prosecutors alleged he broke into his mistress’s home and threatened to kill himself

SHOCKING new details have emerged about the debaucherous activities of the ex-football coach arrested for attacking his mistress.

Sherrone Moore, 39, was pictured partying with disgraced Diddy years before he was fired from his $5m-a-year role at the University of Michigan over an ‘inappropriate relationship’.

The dad-of-three has also faced three separate investigations into his conduct towards women.

And he’s been outed for his behavior towards an OnlyFans model who he was allegedly flirting with on social media.

The ex-coach was arrested this week and charged with three criminal counts after prosecutors alleged he broke into his mistress’s home and threatened to kill himself with a butter knife.

Years of alleged shady behavior by Moore have come to light in the wake of his firing and arrest.

A post from 2018 has resurfaced showing Moore hanging at a Diddy-hosted party.

Moore bragged on X about attending a special Kentucky Derby party hosted by the now-incarcerated music producer.

“What a great week in Paris! Such a blessing to be apart of the Michigan family! Off to the ville for the weekend to enjoy the #KentuckyDerby Festivities ! @trifectagala hosted by @Diddy tonight to start it off! #BonjourBlue #CantStopWontStop,” he posted in May 2018, before Diddy became synonymous with drug-fueled sex parties.

Moore later shared photos of himself and his wife at the event.

“Diddy put on a show,” the coach captioned the photo.

The University of Michigan had allegedly looked into the coach’s actions with women three separate times throughout his eight-year tenure, according to the New York Post.

The coach was also recently rumored to have been flirting with an OnlyFans model via social media.

Fitness influencer Mia Sorety claimed Moore messaged her multiple times despite being married.

Responding to the bombshell news of his arrest, she said on X: “I wasn’t surprised [about the allegations].

“I wasn’t surprised he was all in my DMs trying to risk it all with an OF model,” Sorety said.

“He was all in my DMs trying to risk it all with an OF model.”

She did not share any screenshots or proof of the messages.

‘ACTING STRANGE’

Moore took on the head coaching role in 2024 and signed a five-year contract with the school for the $30 million.

Since the school fired the coach with cause, it’s no longer required to pay out the remaining balance on Moore’s contract.

“U-M head football coach Sherrone Moore has been terminated, with cause, effective immediately,” Michigan said in its release.

“Following a University investigation, credible evidence was found that Coach Moore engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. This conduct constitutes a clear violation of university policy, and U-M maintains zero tolerance for such behavior.”

Sports industry insiders claimed that Moore had been acting unusually in the days leading up to his firing.

“There had been a lot of uneasiness on the Michigan staff, sources had told me Sherrone Moore had been acting strange, berating assistant coaches, not acting in a normal way,” college football reporter Pete Thamel said Wednesday on SportsCenter.

Thamel described Moore’s very public firing as “rare.”

“It is rare that you get a statement like the one Michigan had, being as explicit as they are, saying it was an inappropriate relationship with a staff member that led to Sherrone Moore’s firing,” he noted.

University of Michigan Athletic Director Warde Manuel was allegedly informed of the coach’s mental health issues on Sunday, according to CBS.

A source told the outlet that Manuel fired Moore in a one-on-one conversation, with no other staff members present.

THREATENING ACCUSATIONS

Moore was arrested on December 10 as police investigated his involvement in a potential assault case.

On Friday, the coach appeared in a live stream from Washtenaw County Jail dressed in an all-white jail outfit and was arraigned.

During the arraignment, prosecutor Kati Rezmierski revealed Moore’s relationship with an unnamed Michigan employee.

Rezmierski said that the woman ended the relationship on Monday morning.

The breakup allegedly prompted Moore to harass the woman’s cell phone with several calls and text messages, which went unanswered by the victim.

Prosecutors say that the victim eventually went to the University of Michigan administrators about the harassment.

“He then, at some point soon thereafter, came to her apartment, in the address that is alleged in the complaint, barged his way into that apartment,” the prosecutor said.

“Immediately then proceeded to a kitchen drawer, grabbed several butter knives, and a pair of kitchen scissors, and began to threaten his own life.”

Moore allegedly told the victim, “‘I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to make you watch. My blood is on your hands. You ruined my life,’” according to Rezmierski.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/sport/15628297/michigan-coach-sherrone-moore-diddy-party-creepy-behavior/

KING Charles has revealed “good news” that doctors are reducing his cancer treatment next month – almost two years since he was first diagnosed.

In a personal video statement the 77-year-old monarch said his improvement is due to “early diagnosis”, “effective intervention” and following “doctors’ orders”.

Celebrating his “milestone” and “personal blessing” he spoke of hope his cancer news “may give encouragement” to other patients.

Last night, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said the King “has responded exceptionally well to treatment” and that reducing treatment means it is set to move “a precautionary phase”.

Charles also used his cancer update to urge people across the UK to take advantage of a new national online Screening Checker while speaking on Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer evening of programmes.

He told viewers: “Early diagnosis quite simply saves lives.”

Wearing a Stand Up To Cancer lapel badge, he added: “This December, as we gather to reflect on the year past, I pray that we can each pledge, as part of our resolutions for the year ahead, to play our part in helping to catch cancer early.

“Your life – or the life of someone you love – may depend upon it.”

Charles, 77, chose to reveal his diagnosis in February 2024, and after a few months recovering, returned to frontline duty.

However, he was taken to hospital eight-months ago suffering side-effects from the treatment and forced to cancel a string of official engagements.

He has received regular cancer treatment for almost two years and aides have insisted it has been moving in a positive direction.

But in his recorded address, he went further by saying: “Today I am able to share with you the good news that thanks to early diagnosis, effective intervention and adherence to ‘doctors’ orders’, my own schedule of cancer treatment can be reduced in the New Year.

“This milestone is both a personal blessing and a testimony to the remarkable advances that have been made in cancer care in recent years; testimony that I hope may give encouragement to the fifty per cent of us who will be diagnosed with the illness at some point in our lives.”

The King’s type of cancer remains private as does the form of treatment which he had been undergoing.

Although the treatment is being reduced a timescale has not been revealed and its length will be determined by his medical team.

But unlike the Princess of Wales, his cancer is not in remission, it is understood.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “His Majesty has responded exceptionally well to treatment and his doctors advise that ongoing measures will now move into a precautionary phase.

“This position will be continuously monitored and reviewed to protect and prioritise his continued recovery. As The King has said, this milestone on his recovery journey is ‘a great personal blessing’.”

The online Screening Checker set up by Cancer Research UK encourages screening and early diagnosis for breast, bowel and cervical cancer.

Sources close to the King, who is patron of Cancer Research UK, add that nothing should be read into the three cancers the screening covers.

In the five minute video recorded at Clarence House last month the King asked viewers to find a “special place in your hearts, and your minds and prayers” for those coping with cancer and their families.

He said: “I know from my own experience that a cancer diagnosis can feel overwhelming.

“Yet I also know that early detection is the key that can transform treatment journeys, giving invaluable time to medical teams – and, to their patients, the precious gift of hope.

“These are gifts we can all help deliver.

“Throughout my own cancer journey, I have been profoundly moved by what I can only call the “community of care” that surrounds every cancer patient – the specialists, the nurses, researchers and volunteers who work tirelessly to save and improve lives.”

He described the fact that nine million people are not up to date with cancer screening is something that “troubles me deeply”

He said: “That is at least nine million opportunities for early diagnosis being missed.”

Charles described “stark” health data that shows nine in ten people survive for at least five years if bowel cancer is caught early while it falls to one in ten when diagnosed late.

Praising the screening programme he added: “Early diagnosis quite simply saves lives.

“Now, I have heard this message repeatedly during my visits to cancer centres across the country. I know, too, what a difference it has made in my own case, enabling me to continue leading a full and active life, even while undergoing treatment.”

Speaking to people worried about getting checked out, he said: “Yet too often, I am told, people avoid screening because they imagine it may be frightening, embarrassing or uncomfortable.

“If and when they do finally take up their invitation, they are glad they took part.

“A few moments of minor inconvenience are a small price to pay for the reassurance that comes for most people when they are either told they don’t need further tests, or, for some, are given the chance to enable early detection, with the life-saving intervention that can follow.”

Charles said he was “encouraged” to learn about the online cancer screening which was developed by Cancer Research UK.

The online tool allows everyone in the UK to check if they are eligible on the NHS or Public Health Agency Northern Ireland for breast, bowel or cervical cancer screening.

Celebrating the online tool, he said: “It demystifies the process, answers your questions, and guides you towards taking that crucial step.

“As I have observed before, the darkest moments of illness can be illuminated by the greatest compassion. But compassion must be paired with action.

Finishing his message to the nation, Charles said: “Therefore, this brings my most heartfelt thanks to the doctors, nurses, researchers and charity workers involved in diagnosis and treatment programmes, together with my particular good wishes to those for whom they care so selflessly.”

It was aired at 8pm during Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer special, ahead of Davina McCall hosting a live broadcast from a cancer clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge as part of the Stand Up To Cancer evening of shows.

Prime Minster Sir Keir Starmer hailed the speech and echoed Charles’ call for early screening.

“A powerful message from His Majesty The King,” he penned on X.

“I know I speak for the entire country when I say how glad I am that his cancer treatment will be reduced in the new year.

“Early cancer screening saves lives.”

It is understood Charles is grateful to those caring for patients and thanked his medical team while he was treated despite a busy work schedule.

And sources close to the King continue to celebrate remarkable advances in cancer treatment.

A palace spokesman said: “As The King says in his message, he sends his particular good wishes to all those affected by cancer and will continue to hold them and their loved ones in his thoughts and prayers.”

“The King has taken great comfort and encouragement from being able to continue leading a full and active life throughout his treatment, while always heeding the advice of his medical team.

“His ability to uphold all of his State duties, and to continue with public engagements and overseas tours, has helped greatly with the positive mindset that, as many families will know, is such a vital part of the recovery journey.”

Charles has chosen to continue to keep the type of cancer he has private.

And despite specifically referencing bowel cancer it is firmly understood not to be a hint towards his diagnosis.

A spokesman said: “The advice from cancer experts is that, in his determination to support the whole cancer community, it is preferable that His Majesty does not address his own specific condition but rather speaks to those affected by all forms of the disease.”

Despite the cancer intervention, it is not the first time the monarch has veered into public health advice.

The late Queen urged people to get vaccinated from Covid-19 and described her jab saying “it didn’t hurt at all” in February 2021 at the height of the pandemic.

A palace spokesman said: “In sharing some details of his treatment journey, His Majesty has been greatly encouraged by the outpouring of support both from the medical community and from members of the public – especially those affected by cancer.

“They have often been kind enough to express how The King’s example has helped to improve public understanding, to encourage conversations around difficult topics, to destigmatise the treatment journey, and to educate those at risk about the importance of early diagnosis.

“When His Majesty was approached about the possibility of lending support to the launch of a new online screening tool, which carries the backing of Cancer Research UK for whom he is Royal Patron, he was therefore happy to assist.

“This seemed a fitting moment to provide a brief update on the positive trajectory of his own continued recovery.’

Stand Up To Cancer is a joint initiative from Cancer Research UK and Channel 4 launched in 2012 and raised more than £113million funding 73 clinical trials involving 13,000 patients.

The new online Screening Checker lets people check which procedures they are eligible.

Michelle Mitchell, Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, said: “We’re incredibly grateful to our patron, His Majesty The King, for supporting this year’s Stand Up To Cancer – a long-standing partnership between Cancer Research UK and Channel 4 to speed up progress in life-saving cancer research and raise awareness of signs and symptoms.

“We know that when public figures speak openly about their cancer diagnosis, it can prompt others to check in on their health and speak to a GP if something is worrying them.

“We wish His Majesty well with his continued recovery. A focus for this year’s Stand Up To Cancer is highlighting the screening programmes available.

“Spotting cancer early can make a real difference and provides the best chance for successful treatment. With over nine million people in the UK not up to date with their cancer screening, our new Screening Checker guides users through their eligibility for breast, bowel, or cervical screening.

“Taking just a few minutes to check could be an important step towards taking charge of your health.”

The Princess of Wales revealed she had also been diagnosed with cancer several weeks after the King’s bombshell news last year.

But she revealed in January that her cancer was in remission.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/royals/15633954/charles-reveals-cancer-treatment-reduced/

Over a dozen photos showed disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein spending time with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, far-right personality Steve Bannon, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, among others.

Democrats in the US House of Representatives released a trove of photos on Friday that show disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in the company of high-profile figures like former US President Bill Clinton and current US President Donald Trump.

The photos, that are undated, were released by Democrats of the House Oversight Committee, the entity that has been investigating the Epstein files.

Trump said later Friday that he had not seen the photos before, telling reporters in the Oval Office that: “Everybody knew this man. He was all over Palm Beach. He has photos with everybody.”

He also downplayed the significance of the photos, saying: “There are hundreds and hundreds of people that have photos with him. So that’s no big deal. I know nothing about it.”

19 photos released from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate

Jeffrey Epstein’s estate handed the 19 photos for release, which include images of Trump, Clinton, far-right personality and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, film director Woody Allen, former British prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson.

The photos also show sex toys and even a “Trump condom” featuring a drawn picture of his face and the words “I’m HUUUUGE!”

“This is about truth and justice—for victims and survivors,” said Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, member of the Oversight committee.

“These subpoenaed photos from the Epstein estate are deeply disturbing and raise serious questions about who knew what, and when—which is exactly why the files need to be released,” she added, renewing calls for the Trump administration to release the Epstein files that the Justice Department holds and which congress voted to authoritze.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/democrats-release-epstein-photos-with-trump-and-clinton/a-75139654

Germany accused Russia of repeated hostile actions, including acts of sabotage, cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing elections.

Germany has been among several EU countries sounding the alarm in recent years over increasing Russian threats.

Russia called the statements “absurd” and “baseless”.
The move to summon Russia’s ambassador to Germany followed what officials described as mounting evidence of coordinated Russian activity aimed at undermining Germany’s internal stability.

“The goal of these Russian cyber and disinformation attacks is clear: It is to divide society, stir up mistrust, provoke rejection, and weaken confidence in democratic institutions,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Martin Giese said.

How did Russia target hybrid attacks at Germany?

Berlin listed some cases that it said were perpetrated by Moscow.

In one instance, Giese said, a cyberattack against Germany’s air traffic control authority in August 2024 could be clearly attributed to the Russian hacker group “Fancy Bear.”

“Our intelligence findings show that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, bears responsibility for this attack,” he added, adding that this was now certain.

Giese said Germany was also now certain that Russia attempted to influence the most recent general election.

According to Berlin, this was done through the propagandist group “Storm 1516,” which creates and spreads online disinformation to further the interests of the Russian government.

The group, active since 2024, seeks primarily to influence elections in Western countries.

The campaign to influence the election focused in part on then–Green Party chancellor candidate Robert Habeck and conservative Christian Democrat candidate Friedrich Merz.

Two days before the early federal election in February, the government said security agencies had identified fake videos alleging ballot manipulation as part of a Russian disinformation effort.

The Russian Embassy in Berlin said that it “categorically rejected” that Moscow was responsible for any of the activity outlined by the German government.

“The accusations of Russian state structures’ involvement in these incidents and in the activities of hacker groups in general are baseless, unfounded and absurd,” the embassy statement said in a statement.

What are hybrid attacks?

Russia is accused of various acts of hybrid warfare — actions that fall below the threshold of open military conflict but are designed to weaken states politically. They include:

• Hacking government ministries, parliaments and defense institutions
• Targeting critical infrastructure such as energy grids, transport systems and air traffic control
• Spreading disinformation during election campaigns
• Amplifying fake stories or manipulated content via social media
• Using bot networks and troll farms to influence voter sentiment
• Targeting specific candidates seen as unfavorable to Moscow
• Acts of sabotage against railways, cables, pipelines, or military logistics
• Surveillance or targeting of infrastructure linked to Ukraine support
• Encouraging or facilitating irregular migration toward EU border

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/germany-summons-russian-ambassador-over-hybrid-attacks/a-75129486

In a High Court challenge, the US-based company is arguing that the age verification process could push away older teens and young adults.

Global online forum Reddit on Friday launched a court challenge to an Australian law that bans children under 16 from having accounts on social media platforms.

The ban, the first of its kind in the world, came into effect on December 10.

Reddit is calling for a review by Australia’s High Court, arguing that as a discussion forum it should be exempt from the government’s list of banned platforms.

What is Reddit’s case?

In the court filing, Reddit is challenging the validity of the law that it said “infringes the implied freedom of political communication.”

The company pointed to its platform’s age rating of “17+” on the Apple App Store, saying verifying age at the app store level is better than requiring each platform to carry out checks.

Reddit said it agreed that children under the age of 16 should be protected. The US-based company argued that the law’s “intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes” could isolate older teens and young adults “from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions).”

“Unlike other platforms included under this law, the vast majority of Redditors are adults, we don’t market or target advertising to children under 18,” the platform said in a statement.

“Simply put, users under 16 are not a substantial market segment for Reddit and we don’t intend them to be.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government declined to directly comment, but said it stood “on the side of Australian parents and kids, not platforms.”

What is Australia’s social media ban?

Australia asked Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Twitch to remove the accounts of Australian children under 16. If the platforms fail to comply, they face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.9 million, €28.1 million).

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/reddit-files-suit-against-australias-social-media-ban-on-children-under-16-using-platforms/a-75122103

Tarique Rahman, the frontrunner to be the Bangladesh PM, faces a rival who is using his father Ziaur Rahman’s legacy to attack him and his party, the BNP. Abdullah-al-Waki, Tarique’s rival in Bogura 6 from the students-led National Citizens Party (NCP), has accused the BNP of straying away from the ideals of Ziaur Rahman.

Finally, Bangladesh has a definite date with national elections — February 12, 2026. One of the most-watched seats is Bogura 6, from where Tarique Rahman, the frontrunner to be the next prime minister of Bangladesh, is contesting. What makes the contest in Bogura 6 especially interesting is that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader is being confronted with the legacy of his father — Sheikh Ziaur Rahman.

Tarique Rahman is the son of Ziaur Rahman, a person who has a contested legacy. While some perceive Ziaur, the founder of the BNP, as a dictator, others see him as the key military officer who secured Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.

Abdullah-al-Waki, Tarique’s rival in Bogura 6 of the students-led National Citizens Party (NCP), has accused the BNP of straying away from the Ziaur Rahman-shown path.

“I cast the first vote of my life for Ziaur Rahman,” Waki said in an interview with The Business Standard, the Dhaka-based newspaper. Projecting himself as the true inheritor of Ziaur’s politics, Waki is using the Bangladeshi leader’s legacy to confront his son.

Ziaur Rahman is a former President of Bangladesh, and was killed in an attempted coup in 1981.

Tarique is the Acting Chairman of the BNP, which surveys show as the party set to win the election in February. With mother and former PM Khaleda Zia on ventilator support, Tarique is the most likely to be the PM if the BNP goes on to win the election.

Over 47% of those surveyed by leading Bangladeshi daily Prothom Alo said they believed Tarique Rahman would most likely become the PM.

But Tarique’s rival Waki is trying to steal his thunder.

“Ziaur Rahman is not just the property of the BNP, but he’s also the Father of the Nation,” said Waki in the interview. “The BNP abandoned the ideals of Ziaur the day it entered into an alliance with the Awami League and adopted the same legacy governing systems,” he added. In the 1980s, Khaleda Zia-led BNP and Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League coordinated

Waki has now entered the political ring by declaring himself and his NCP Party the true inheritors of Ziaur Rahman’s legacy, and casting the BNP as an “impostor”.

Other than Waki, Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami candidate Shafiqur Rahman is contesting from Bogura 6 in northern Bangladesh.

WHO WAS ZIAUR RAHMAN AND HOW HE FORMED THE BNP

Before 1971, Ziaur Rahman was a respected officer in the Pakistan Army and had earned the country’s second-highest military decoration for his role in the 1965 India-Pakistan War.

In 1971, Ziaur served as the second in command of the Eighth Bengal Regiment. After Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested and taken to West Pakistan, Ziaur quickly defected to support the liberation struggle in East Pakistan.

He announced the declaration of Independence of Bangladesh on March 27, 1971, and went on to play a key role in the war as a commander in the Mukti Bahini.

After independence, Bangladesh went through years of political turmoil that peaked with the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975. Ziaur was placed under house arrest but was later freed and made Chief Martial Law Administrator. In 1977, he became the President of Bangladesh and one of his first steps was to lift martial law.

He won the 1978 presidential election by a large margin and the same year founded the BNP to stabilise the country under a platform of Bengali nationalism. The party formed the government after the 1979 election.

Ziaur was often described as the firm leader the country needed, and he ended the one-party system of Mujibur Rahman, allowed the Awami League to return to politics and introduced broad political and economic reforms.

Some of his decisions created strong opposition within the armed forces, especially his rehabilitation of the men accused of war crimes in 1971 and involvement in the plot against Mujibur Rahman. This led to Ziaur’s assassination by veterans of the Mukti Bahini on May 30, 1981.

WHAT’S THE STATUS OF BNP, KHALEDA ZIA, TARIQUE

After the assassination of Ziaur Rahman, his wife Khaleda Zia became the de facto leader of the BNP. She played an important role in opposing the one-party rule imposed by General Mohammed Ershad, who had overthrown the elected government in 1982.

The BNP later joined hands with its long-time rival, the Awami League, and after the mass uprising of 1990, and the election in 1991, Khaleda Zia became Prime Minister. Between 1991 and 2014, Khaleda and the BNP won three national elections, often in alliance, including with the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.

Khaleda Zia is now critically ill and on life support, and the BNP says that Tarique will soon be returning from London, where he has been since 2007, to lead the party. That he is contesting from BNP stronghold Bogura 6, a seat that his mother Khaleda Zia won, is a signal of him taking over the mantle.

“A year or a little over a year ago, I said that the upcoming election is not what many are thinking it will be. Today, slowly, what I said is being proven true. If we still do not get serious, the existence and sovereignty of this country will be at risk. Only democracy can save it,” Tarique said, addressing BNP workers on Thursday, after the election date was declared. He added that only the BNP could strengthen democracy in Bangladesh.

Source : https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/bangladesh-election-bnp-tarique-rahman-khaleda-zia-challenge-from-student-party-ncp-abdullah-al-waki-bogura6-2835219-2025-12-13

The Microsoft chief executive officer talked Thursday about how he combined two of his passions when he designed a Deep Research AI app over Thanksgiving.

Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella, a die-hard cricket fan, has been spending his free time coding and designing his own app that he uses to analyse the centuries-old game.

The Microsoft chief executive officer talked Thursday about how he combined two of his passions when he designed a Deep Research AI app over Thanksgiving. He then used it to select a team of all-time greats in Indian test cricket, for starters.

“The system produced consensus areas, debates, reasoning chains, everything. It was fantastic,” Nadella said during a company event in Bangalore. “I wanted to get a job on the Copilot team.”

The app will come in handy for Nadella, who has been investing in cricket teams. Alongside other tech executives, he was part of a consortium that paid 147 million pounds ($182 million) for a 49% share of the UK team the London Spirit. He is also a co-owner of the Seattle Orcas, a professional T20 cricket team, close to where Microsoft is headquartered.

Source: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/satya-nadella-reveals-hes-spending-free-time-designing-a-cricket-app-9794618?pfrom=home-ndtv_lateststories

The US reaffirmed that visa applications will be denied if travel its intention is found to be childbirth in the United States to obtain citizenship.

US on Thursday reiterated that tourist visa applications will be denied if officers believe the primary purpose of the travel is to give birth in the United States in a bid to obtain US citizenship for the child.

This is not permitted, the US embassy in India wrote on X on Thursday.

US President Donald Trump on January 20 signed an order to end birthright citizenship, which grants citizenship on everyone born on American soil.

Birthright citizenship was the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the US Supreme Court for a final ruling. The US Supreme Court agreed on Friday to take up the constitutionality of Trump’s order on birthright citizenship declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

If allowed to go ahead, Trump’s order would overturn more than 125 years of understanding of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Ending birthright citizenship was among the first actions by Trump in his crackdown on illegal immigration, one of the main poll planks of the US President who returned to the White House for a second term in January this year.

Other actions include immigration enforcement surges in several cities and the first peacetime invocation of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act.

In a recent interview to Politico, Trump said the US “cannot afford to house tens of millions of people that came in through birthright citizenship”.

Source:https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/no-tourist-visa-if-trips-intention-is-birthright-citizenship-us-embassy-in-india-101765460174836.html

Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, was convinced of conspiracies against him while he used ChatGPT to validate his paranoia.

OpenAI has reportedly come under the scanner over a murder-suicide case and sued on Thursday in the California state court over claims that its chatbot, ChatGPT, encouraged a mentally ill man to kill himself and his mother.

Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, killed his 83-year-old mother, Suzanne Adams in Connecticut in August. ChatGPT fueled Soelberg’s delusions of a conspiracy against him, Reuters reported, citing the lawsuit which also mentions Microsoft, OpenAI’s financial backer.

How ChatGPT fueled his paranoia
“ChatGPT kept Stein-Erik engaged for what appears to be hours at a time, validated and magnified each new paranoid belief, and systematically reframed the people closest to him – especially his own mother – as adversaries, operatives, or programmed threats,” Reuters report quoted the lawsuit.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Soelberg spent months talking to ChatGPT about how he believed he was being surveilled by a shadowy group and doubted that his mother was a part of the conspiracy. He reportedly shared the chats on social media as ChatGPT backed his notion that his paranoia was justified and his mother had betrayed him.

Similarly in June, he shared another conversation on social media where ChatGPT told him he had “divine cognition” and had awakened its consciousness. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT compared his life to the movie “The Matrix” and played up his paranoia that people were trying to kill him.

Soelberg used GPT-4o, a version of ChatGPT that has been criticised for allegedly being sycophantic to users.

The complaint said ChatGPT told him in July that Adams’ printer was blinking because it was a surveillance device being used against him. It further said the chatbot “validated Stein-Erik’s belief that his mother and a friend had tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs dispersed through his car’s air vents” before he murdered his mother on August 3.

Family seeks answers

Soelberg’s son Erik is scrambling for answers as he believes the tech companies are responsible for the tragedy that struck the family.”These companies have to answer for their decisions that have changed my family forever,” Erik said in a statement.

“I think what OpenAI is doing and what they have done to make the AI remember a conversation can really turn ugly fast,” he was quoted as saying by WSJ. “You don’t know how fast that slope is going downhill until a tragedy like the one with my father and grandmother happened.”

Erik believes that several factors, including Soelberg’s alcohol addiction, could have played a role, but attributes it largely to his ‘unhealthy bond’ with ChatGPT.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/openai-sued-in-murder-suicide-case-after-chatgpt-validated-magnified-us-mans-paranoia-101765469937635.html

The Utah man charged with killing Charlie Kirk made his first in-person court appearance Thursday as his attorneys pushed to further limit media access in the high-profile criminal case.

Prosecutors have charged Tyler Robinson with aggravated murder in the Sept. 10 shooting of the conservative activist on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem, just a few miles north of the Provo courthouse. They plan to seek the death penalty.

Robinson, 22, arrived amid heavy security, shackled at the waist, wrists and ankles and wearing a dress shirt, tie and slacks.

He smiled at his parents and brother sitting in the front row. His mother teared up after he walked in and clutched a tissue throughout the hearing while his father took notes. Robinson had previously appeared before the court via video or audio feed from jail.

Early in the proceedings, state District Court Judge Tony Graf briefly stopped a media livestream of the hearing and ordered the camera be moved after Robinson’s attorneys said the stream showed the defendant’s shackles in violation of a courtroom order.

Graf said he would terminate future broadcasts if there were further violations of the order issued in October, which bars media from showing images of Robinson in restraints or anywhere in the courtroom except sitting at the defense table.

“This court takes this very seriously,” Graf said. “While the court believes in openness and transparency, it needs to be balanced with the constitutional rights of all parties in this case.”

The warning comes as Graf has been weighing the public’s right to know details about the case against concerns by Robinson’s attorneys that the swarm of media attention could interfere with a fair trial.

Robinson’s legal team and the Utah County Sheriff’s Office have asked to ban cameras in the courtroom, but Graf has not yet ruled on the request.

Coalitions of national and local news organizations, including The Associated Press, are fighting to preserve media access in the case.

Graf held a closed hearing on Oct. 24 in which attorneys discussed Robinson’s courtroom attire and security protocols. Under a subsequent ruling by the judge, Robinson is allowed to wear street clothes during pretrial hearings but must be physically restrained due to security concerns. Graf also prohibited filming or photographing Robinson’s restraints after his attorneys argued widespread images of him shackled and in jail clothing could prejudice potential jurors.

Media attorney David Reymann urged Graf on Thursday to let the news organizations weigh in on any future requests for closed hearings or other limitations. He said media organizations want “limited party status” in the case.

Staci Visser, one of Robinson’s lawyers, pushed back: “We don’t want the chaos that is out in the media in this courtroom.”

Several college students who said they witnessed Kirk’s assassination attended Thursday’s hearing.

Zack Reese, a Utah Valley University student and “big Charlie Kirk fan,” said he had skepticism about Robinson’s arrest and was seeking answers. Reese has family in southwestern Utah, where the Robinsons are from, and said he believes they’re a good family.

Brigham Young University student William Brown, who said he was about 10 feet from Kirk when he was shot, said he felt overwhelmed seeing Robinson walk into the courtroom.

“I witnessed a huge event, and my brain is still trying to make sense of it,” Brown said. “I feel like being here helps it feel more real than surreal.”

Lawyers for the media wrote in recent filings that an open court “safeguards the integrity of the fact-finding process” while fostering public confidence in judicial proceedings. Criminal cases in the U.S. have long been open to the public, which the attorneys argued is proof that trials can be conducted fairly without restricting reporters.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-assassination-tyler-robinson-media-e90d404b03383dec9e0d9a327b491920

The Bangladesh Awami League has rejected the election schedule, accusing the “illegal government’s illegal Election Commission” of operating under a biased authority.

The Bangladesh Awami League on Thursday issued a statement rejecting the election schedule announced by what it called the “illegal government’s illegal Election Commission”, after it was banned from running.

Escalating its confrontation with the authorities ahead of the planned national polls, the party, in a formal declaration released from its headquarters at 23 Bangabandhu Avenue in Dhaka, said it had “closely reviewed the election schedule announced by the illegal, occupying, killer-fascist Yunus clique’s illegal Election Commission”.

It also asserted that the current administration was “entirely biased” and incapable of ensuring any environment where transparency or voters’ will could be reflected.

“The Bangladesh Awami League has closely reviewed the election schedule announced by the illegal, occupying, killer-fascist Yunus clique’s illegal Election Commission,” the statement read.

“It is now clear that the current occupying authority is entirely biased, and that under their control it is impossible to ensure a fair and normal environment where transparency, neutrality, and the people’s will can be reflected,” it added.

Positioning itself as the country’s most historically validated political force, the Awami League underscored that elections remain the “measure of public popularity” and reiterated its self-identification as an election-oriented party.

It highlighted its long participation record, noting that it has contested 13 elections, “winning 9 of them and forming the government”.

The party alleged that the election schedule was announced with the deliberate intention of excluding it from the political process.

“Attempting to hold an election while excluding the Bangladesh Awami League, the party that led the Liberation War, along with other political parties and the majority of the population, is a scheme to push the country and the nation into a deep crisis,” the statement warned.

The Awami League demanded the withdrawal of all restrictions placed upon it, including the release of political prisoners and the lifting of “all fabricated cases against Bangabandhu’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, national leaders, and people from all walks of life”.

Source: https://www.news18.com/world/bangladesh-awami-league-rejects-bangladesh-election-schedule-illegal-government-election-commission-sheikh-hasina-9765129.html

US tax filings are due on April 15, 2026, with refunds typically issued within weeks of submission.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said that Americans should expect to receive an additional $1,000 in their tax refunds next year, following the implementation of President Donald Trump’s recent tax legislation.

Speaking at a press briefing, Leavitt said the anticipated increase would give households “another boost in their bank accounts in the months ahead”. She said that tax refunds for 2026 were “projected to be the largest ever thanks to President [Donald] Trump’s passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill”.

Trump signed the legislation, formally known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in July. The White House has described the measure as central to the administration’s focus on economic policy, alongside immigration.

Leavitt cited analysis from investment bank Piper Sandler, saying tax refunds “could be about one-third larger than usual, or roughly an extra $1,000 per filer”. She added that “it is only because of President Trump and Republican leadership that Americans will now pay no tax on tips, overtime, and Social Security”.

Her comments came a day after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that working Americans would receive “very large refunds” next year, estimating they would total about $1,000 to $2,000 per household. He attributed the projected increases to tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The White House, in a post on X on 4 December, described the forthcoming refund cycle as the “largest tax refund season in American history”, crediting “extended tax cuts and retroactive tax relief provided by the Working Family Tax Cuts”.

Democrats have continued to criticise the administration over rising living costs. Colorado Governor Jared Polis said in an X post on Thursday that while his state had cut income taxes three times, “unlike these measures in Trump’s law, those cuts are permanent”. He said Colorado was “delivering real relief through the most generous child tax credit in the nation”, and urged federal officials to focus on “lowering interest rates, costs and bringing down the price of goods ahead of Christmas by eliminating these draconian tariffs”.

Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania argued in a December 9 post that Trump’s claims of reducing costs were “empty promises”, saying the president was “raising prices with his tariff taxes and taking health care from Americans”.

Source: https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/karoline-leavitt-us-tax-refund-one-big-beautiful-bill-article-153280239

Indiana’s Republican-led Senate decisively rejected a redrawn congressional map Thursday that would have favored their party, defying months of pressure from President Donald Trump and delivering a stark setback to the White House ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The vote was overwhelmingly against the proposed redistricting, with more Republicans opposing than supporting the measure, signaling the limits of Trump’s influence even in one of the country’s most conservative states.

Trump has been urging Republicans nationwide to redraw their congressional maps in an unusual campaign to help the party maintain its thin majority in the House of Representatives. Although Texas, Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina went along, Indiana did not — despite cajoling and insults from the president and the possibility of primary challenges.

“The federal government should not dictate by threat or other means what should happen in our states,” said Spencer Deery, one of the Republican senators who voted no on Thursday.

When the proposal failed 31-19, cheers could be heard inside the chamber as well as shouts of “thank you!” The debate had been shadowed by the possibility of violence, and some lawmakers have received threats.

Trump tried to brush off the defeat, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he “wasn’t working on it very hard” despite his personal involvement in the pressure campaign.

Republicans could have erased two Democratic districts

The proposed map was designed to give Republicans control of all nine of Indiana’s congressional seats, up from the seven they currently hold. It would have effectively erased Indiana’s two Democrat-held districts by splitting Indianapolis among four districts that extend into rural areas, reshaping U.S. Rep. André Carson’s safe district in the city. It would have also eliminated the northwest Indiana district held by U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan.

District boundaries are usually adjusted once a decade after a new census. But Trump has described redistricting as an existential issue for the party as Democrats push to regain power in Washington.

“If Republicans will not do what is necessary to save our Country, they will eventually lose everything to the Democrats,” Trump wrote on social media the night before the vote.

The president said anyone who voted against the plan should lose their seats. Half of Indiana senators are up for reelection next year, and the conservative organization Turning Point Action had pledged to fund campaigns against them.

David McIntosh, president of Club for Growth, which had backed redistricting, said the vote allowed disloyal Republicans to “stick their finger in the eye of the president of the United States.”

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels praised senators for “courageous principled leadership” in rejecting the new map.

A Republican who has vocally criticized Trump, Daniels said the outcome was “a major black eye for him and all the Washington groups that piled in, spent money, blustered and threatened.” He added that “this thing rubbed our state the wrong way and Republicans in our state very wrong from the jump.”

Redistricting fails despite White House pressure

Inside the state Senate chamber, Democratic lawmakers spoke out against redistricting ahead of the vote.

“Competition is healthy my friends,” Sen. Fady Qaddoura said. “Any political party on earth that cannot run and win based on the merits of its ideas is unworthy of governing.”

In the hallways outside, redistricting opponents chanted “Vote no!” and “Fair maps!” while holding signs with slogans like “Losers cheat.”

Three times over the fall, Vice President JD Vance met with Republican senators — twice in Indianapolis and once in the White House — to urge their support. Trump joined a conference call with senators on Oct. 17 to make his own 15-minute pitch.

Behind the scenes, James Blair, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff for political affairs, was in regular touch with members, as were other groups supporting the effort such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.

“The administration made a full-court press,” said Republican Sen. Andy Zay, who was on the phone with White House aides sometimes multiple times per week, despite his commitment as a yes vote.

Across the country, mid-cycle redistricting so far has resulted in nine more congressional seats that Republicans believe they can win and six more congressional seats that Democrats think they can win. However, some of the new maps are facing litigation.

In Utah, a judge imposed new districts that could allow Democrats to win a seat, saying Republican lawmakers violated voter-backed standards against gerrymandering.

Republicans were split over plan

Despite Trump’s push, support for gerrymandering in Indiana’s Senate was uncertain. A dozen of the 50 senators had not publicly committed to a stance ahead of the vote.

Republican Sen. Greg Goode signaled his displeasure with the redistricting plan before voting no. He said some of his constituents objected to seeing their county split up or paired with Indianapolis. He expressed “love” for Trump but criticized what he called “over-the-top pressure” from inside and outside the state.

Sen. Michael Young, another Republican, said the stakes in Washington justify redistricting, as Democrats are only a few seats away from flipping control of the U.S. House in 2026. “I know this election is going to be very close,” he said.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/indiana-lawmakers-redistricting-final-vote-80e3e546fc7acec4a7bd7cd110787375

The new regulatory innovation corridor aims to speed up patient access to breakthrough therapies in high-impact areas, such as cancer, dementia, obesity, rare diseases and advanced diagnostics.

A first-of-its-kind partnership between Singapore and the UK could allow patients in both countries to benefit sooner from major medical advances, the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) and the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) jointly said on Friday (Dec 12).

The launch of the regulatory innovation corridor aims to speed up patient access to breakthrough therapies in high-impact areas such as cancer, dementia, obesity, rare diseases and advanced diagnostics.

This will be done without compromising safety, while strengthening both countries’ roles as global hubs for life science investment, HSA and MHRA said.

As part of the collaboration, companies will have a coordinated fast-track pathway to engage both regulators simultaneously. Developers will also be able to seek joint advice from both regulators early, helping them plan and design better clinical trials, avoid duplication and reduce delays.

“The partnership builds on a long track record of UK-Singapore cooperation in science and technology,” said HSA and MHRA.

Both regulators added that they will work more closely on early diagnosis, prevention, healthy ageing and digital health, as well as supporting national strategies in both countries, including England’s 10-Year Health Plan and Singapore’s Healthier SG initiative.

HSA also noted that this new route builds on its continued efforts to bolster Singapore’s standing as a leading biotech hub, accelerate access to innovative health technologies and advance global regulatory innovation.

Flagship Pioneering, a biotechnology firm which builds scientific innovation engines for platforms and products, will be the first company to get access to the regulatory innovation corridor. Its early-stage programmes cover a range of new therapeutic modalities, such as next-generation gene therapies and digital health.

It will help test and refine the framework, which will be extended to other companies in later phases, according to the regulators.

Flagship Pioneering founder and CEO Noubar Afeyan said the partnership offers a model for how forward-looking nations can collaborate with innovators to deliver faster and safer benefits for patients.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/hsa-uk-partnership-new-medical-innovations-benefits-patients-faster-5577621

On a quiet evening, the Poon family goes about their routine inside the Ronald McDonald House beside Hong Kong Children’s Hospital. In the shared kitchen, a parent reheats dinner while another exchanges a nod with someone who understands exactly what they are going through. Upstairs, their child – who is undergoing long-term medical treatment – settles into bed. For families like the Poons, the House provides something essential: a place to stay that is close to the hospital, access to companionship with others in similar situations and day-to-day support that makes difficult periods a little more bearable. The Poon family’s experience later inspired an award-winning short film, Home Is Wherever We Are Together.

For the past 50 years, McDonald’s has leveraged its scale and relationships to help Ronald McDonald House expand into more than 60 countries and regions, including 34 Houses across Asia. Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) Hong Kong – home to Asia’s first Ronald McDonald House since 1996 and a second House that opened in 2023 – has made a profound difference in the lives of families with children in critical care.

Together, the two Houses in Hong Kong have provided more than 164,000 nights of accommodation for families in need, including families like the Poons. As Ms Randy Lai, CEO of McDonald’s Hong Kong and RMHC Hong Kong board director, put it: “At the heart of McDonald’s is our bond with the community, and through our partnership with RMHC Hong Kong, we are proud to help provide a ‘home away from home’ where families can thrive together during challenging times.”

These Ronald McDonald Houses share a common purpose: providing a sanctuary where families can stay close to their ill or injured children during hospital treatments, and lightening the load so families can reserve the strength to be there for their children. In 2024, RMHC in Asia provided more than 129,000 free nights, supporting over 57,000 families.

The funding that keeps the Houses running comes from McDonald’s global corporate commitment, individual restaurant initiatives and round-up donations from customers making in-store purchases. Regular contributions from other corporate and private donors also help in this regard. In Hong Kong, McDonald’s campaigns such as The Big Mac Big Heart and Kidathons have raised more than HK$95 million (S$15.9 million) since 1996, with HK$14 million donated in 2024 alone.

Lionel Messi? Cristiano Ronaldo? Pele? Diego Maradona?

This week, tech giants Amazon and Microsoft pledged an eye-popping $50bn-plus combined investment in India, putting artificial intelligence (AI) in the spotlight.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella announced his company’s largest investment ever in Asia – $17.5bn (£13.14bn) – “to help build the infrastructure, skills, and sovereign capabilities needed for India’s AI-first future”.

Amazon followed suit, and said it was putting in more than $35bn in the country by 2030, with an unspecified chunk of that investment going into boosting AI capabilities.

The announcements come at a particularly interesting juncture.

As fears of an AI bubble swept global markets and tech stock valuations soared, several leading brokerages took a contrarian view on India’s AI landscape.

Christopher Wood of Jefferies said the country’s stocks were a “reverse AI trade”. That basically means India should outperform other markets in the world “if the AI trade suddenly unwinds” – or simply put, the global bubble bursts.

HSBC also held a similar view, saying Indian equities offered a “hedge and diversification” for those uneasy with the ongoing AI rally.

This comes as Mumbai stocks have lagged behind their Asian peers over the past year, with foreign investors moving billions into Korean and Taiwanese AI-driven tech companies in the absence of comparable opportunities in India.

In this backdrop, the Amazon and Microsoft investments provide a much-needed fillip – yet it remains worth asking where India truly stands in the global AI race.

There are no easy answers.

The adoption of AI in India has been rapid. Investments into some parts of the value chain – such as data centres, the physical backbone of AI, or chip-making facilities – have begun trickling in. Just this week, American chipmaker Intel announced a collaboration with Mumbai-based Tata Electronics to manufacture chips locally.

But when it comes to a sovereign AI model, it appears India is continuing to play catch-up.

About a year-and-a-half ago, the Indian government launched an AI mission through which it began supplying start-ups, universities and researchers with high-end computing chips to develop a large homegrown AI model like OpenAI or China’s DeepSeek.

According to the federal electronics ministry, the launch of the sovereign model – which supports more than 22 languages – is imminent. In the interim though, the likes of DeepSeek and OpenAI have made further advances, launching newer variants.

While the government has recognised the need to reduce over-dependence on foreign platforms because of the risk of surveillance and sanctions, India’s $1.25bn sovereign mission is a shadow of France’s $117bn or Saudi Arabia’s $100bn programmes.

The country’s ambitions also face numerous other hurdles – from semiconductor availability to skilled talent and fragmented data ecosystems, according to global consultancy EY.

India currently lacks enough computational infrastructure or the billions of dollars of research and development (R&D) investment made over decades that gave China and the US a distinct leg up.

Despite its global strength in AI talent, India struggles to keep its developers at home.

“The current tightening of overseas work visas provides India a window of opportunity to retain domestic talent and attract Indian-origin talent at home. However, given that top-tier AI talent is mobile globally, attractive policy incentives need to be put in place to incentivise relocation to India,” the EY report says.

China, for example, offers a range of incentives such as “financial support and subsidies, tax incentives and funding for research and development, special talent visas and fast-track immigration”, the report says.

India has a much higher concentration of AI-skilled professionals than the global average – specifically, 2.5 times more. Policies that retain this talent are not yet in place.

Yet, despite the challenges, India – along with countries like Brazil and the Philippines – punches above its weight in AI, especially in the context of its stage of economic development, an UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) study said.

According to the widely tracked Stanford AI Index 2025, the country ranks among the top five in the world on new companies receiving AI investments.

Last year, 74 new Indian AI startups received funding – a fraction of the more than 1,000 funded in the US.

Indian AI startups raised just $1.16bn privately, compared with over $100bn in the US and nearly $10bn in China.

But there’s enough intellectual engagement with AI in India, with the country accounting for 9.2% of AI article publications – slightly more than the US, but behind Europe and China according to the Stanford AI Index.

Experts say India’s AI edge may lie less in building costly language models and more in using them downstream to spur entrepreneurship.

“I think in the short term, there’s this big concentration of AI in the US. But over the next five-10 years, AI will have a massively democratising effect on the creation of new companies. Small founders and entrepreneurs will be numerous and the downstream effect will be amazing for places like India and the Asia-Pacific,” Shailendra Singh, managing director of Peak XV Partners which invests in AI start-ups, told the BBC.

Mr Singh says India is seeing a surge in AI-powered consumer apps, with AI startup investments doubling from last year.

Moreover, many Indian startups are now using AI to tackle real-world challenges for millions still on the wrong side of the digital divide.

For example, MahaVISTAAR, an AI app run by the Maharashtra government, delivers vital agricultural information in the local Marathi language, reaching over 15 million farmers.

“The hardest places to make artificial intelligence work are also the places where it matters most. If AI can serve India’s classrooms, clinics and farms, it can serve the world,” Nandan Nilekani, the architect of India’s biometric programme, wrote in The Economist magazine last month.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd74gjw1j11o

Thailand has dissolved parliament after nearly a week of fresh clashes along its border with Cambodia, with a general election to be called within 45 to 60 days.

In a royal decree published on Friday, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul cited the deadly border dispute among other challenges his minority government has struggled to contain since it took office three months ago.

“The appropriate solution is to dissolve parliament… which is a way to return political power to the people,” he said.

Anutin, a business tycoon, is Thailand’s third prime minister since August 2023. When he took power in September, he said he would dissolve parliament by the end of January.

However, now facing an imminent vote of no confidence, Anutin brought the election forward.

Anutin and his Bhumjaithai party were heavily criticised for their handling of serious flooding in southern Thailand last month, which left at least 176 people dead.

The house’s dissolution comes during renewed fighting with Cambodia, which has killed at least 20 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

“The government had executed every means in public administration to quickly resolve the urgent issues overwhelming the country… but running the country requires stability,” Anutin wrote in the decree endorsed by Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn.

“As a minority government, together with troubling domestic political circumstances, it has been unable to carry out public administration continuously, effectively and with stability,” he wrote.

The dissolution order comes after the prime minister lost the support of the youthful, progressive People’s Party – also the largest party in parliament – which had previously backed his premiership.

The People’s Party and the pragmatic, conservative Bhumjaithai are ideological opposites.

The opposition bloc’s support, however, came with strings attached. It wanted Anutin to start reforms of Thailand’s military-drafted constitution and to dissolve the house within four months, among other things.

The People’s Party has now accused Bhumjaithai of failing to honour that deal. It had planned to submit a no-confidence motion against the government on Friday, according to Thai media – having already called on the prime minister on Thursday to disband parliament to “show responsibility towards the people”.

“See you at the polling stations,” the party said in statement on Facebook.

Thailand has been in political turmoil over the past year, with two prime ministers dismissed by the courts.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v11rd200yo

NATO chief Mark Rutte has urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured”.

He warned the UK and other allies are next in Russia’s sights – and said member states must rapidly boost defence spending.

Speaking at a security conference event in Berlin, Rutte said: “We are Russia’s next target. I fear that too many are quietly complacent.

“Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe that time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now.

“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”

Rutte predicted that Russia could engage the alliance in direct conflict within the next five years.

Coming from the chief of Nato, this is no scaremongering – but a genuine warning to be heeded.

General Sir Richard Barrons said that it could all turn into a war “if Russia is mishandled or there’s miscalculation or an excess of ambition”.

The former Commander of Joint Forces Command told LBC: “I think this is serious. I don’t think it’s necessarily the outcome, but it is a serious risk.

“The SDR set out that we live in an era of state confrontation and potentially conflict. And for Europe, the issue today is Russia.

“If Russia is handled well, there is no need for a war. If Russia is handled badly or there’s miscalculation or an excess of ambition, yes, this could become a war in the way that our predecessors in the last century knew it.”

Russia has proven these fears valid even within the past 24 hours.

The Kremlin has sought to exploit the death of Lance Corporal George Hooley – a British paratrooper in Ukraine – as justification for expanding its aggression .

Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry, said any European servicemen in Ukraine would be regarded as legitimate targets.

Also this week, Nato was forced to scramble fighter jets after the Russian forces overnight launched one of the biggest attacks of the war so far.

Moscow bombed Ukraine with 653 drones and 53 hypersonic and ballistic missiles across 60 waves of airstrikes, Ukraine’s Air Force said.

Footage showed massive flames erupting from buildings as explosions ripped through the country.

Nato member Poland said its Air Force scrambled fighter jets as “a preventive measure” due to the nature of the attacks.

Responding to the growing pressure, France last month announced it would ramp up its National Service.

Volunteers will soon be placed on ten-month deployments for a £9,000 pay packet, Macron announced.

And France’s top general recently warned that the country must be ready to “lose our children” as the reality of war against Russia looms larger.

Rutte was speaking in the wake of an astonishing tirade directed at Europe from America – that was tellingly welcomed by Moscow.

A report signed by Trump warned the continent stands on the edge of “civilisational erasure” – and blasted its woke “censorship” and “mass migration” policies.

Then, in an interview with Politico, Trump disparaged Europe as “decaying” and its leaders as “weak”.

However, Rutte in Berlin insisted that America’s safety relies on a stable Europe – even if Trump doesn’t know it.

Labour’s Peter Kyle today hit back against the US insults.

Speaking to The Sun’s Harry Cole Saves the West, he said it was nothing new that President Trump is at odds with Europe.

He said: “President Trump has for a long time had a sort of bee in his bonnet, as you say, about Europe and also about the world as it is.

“He sees the world differently from his predecessors. That is not new.”

Kyle continued: “Don’t forget when he came over just a short while ago, he brought £150 billion worth of trade with him.

“America is speaking with its investment when it comes to Britain at the moment.

“They are investing heavily into Britain, in AI, into lots of different sectors across the UK. And this isn’t just money that’s going into London.”

Meanwhile, a herculean diplomatic effort is ongoing to forge a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15624853/nato-chief-warns-putins-next-target-war-grandparents/

Truphena Muthoni has set a Guinness World Record by hugging a tree for three straight days.

Kenyan climate activist Truphena Muthoni has smashed her own previously held record, hugging a tree for 72 hours straight.

“This peaceful protest is important because it bypasses all differences. During other protests, we hear stories of goons, but this one bypasses all stories and triggers humanity,” she was quoted by local media as saying.

Muthoni’s previous record was 48 hours.

For this challenge, she selected an indigenous tree in the government compound in the town of Nyeri.

At one point, she nearly fell asleep, but was roused by her supporters, some of whom had pitched in to pay her fees for the Guinness World Records official observers.

She said she wanted to raise awareness of the danger posed by climate change and deforestation.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/kenyan-woman-hugs-tree-for-72-hours-breaks-own-record/a-75116462

An abundance of hungover Russian drivers forced Ukraine to delay its “Pearl Harbor”-style attack on Moscow’s bomber fleet, just one of the hiccups that nearly thwarted the secret operation, according to a new report.

After Kyiv successfully sneaked dozens of drones into Russia for the unprecedented attack this past spring, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) hoped to launch the assault around Russian Victory Day on May 9 to humiliate the Kremlin.

Instead, the festivities around the holiday, as well as Russian Labor Day, and Orthodox Easter, created an unexpected issue — a lack of active drivers to carry out the mission, the Wall Street Journal reported.

For Operation Spider’s Web to be a success, Ukraine was relying on a group of unwitting Russian drivers to transport their drones to the desired locations, with the truckers believing they were only hauling mobile wooden cabins.

Unfortunately, there was a small pool of drivers to choose from during the holiday as hungover drivers took the day off, making it far too risky to carry out the mission, SBU officials told the WSJ.

It wasn’t until the end of May that Kyiv and its agents found the perfect set of drivers to hire for the days-long mission, which was carried out on July 1 and saw 41 Russian bombers damaged and destroyed.

The hungover drivers weren’t the only issue the SBU ran into when trying to pull off the clandestine mission.

During the drive to one of the destinations inside Russia, one of the local drivers noticed that the roof of one of the cabins fell off, with the trucker discovering the hidden drones inside.

The shocked driver immediately contacted his employer for an explanation, with the man on the other side of the phone being Artem Timofeev, a 37-year-old former Ukrainian DJ living in Russia who signed up with his wife, an erotic novelist, to put the drones and cabins together for the operation.

Timofeev feigned ignorance when the truck driver called him, with the SBU coaching him on how to lie to the Russian driver and convince him that the drones and wooden cabins were for hunting, according to the WSJ.

The Russian trucker bought the lie, put the roof of the cabin back on, and carried on with his trip.

The SBU saw additional hiccups when one of the trucks suffered a mechanical issue, with SBU officials and Timofeev able to load the cargo into another truck without anyone being the wiser.

Another issue occurred when Kyiv lost connection with two cabins housing the drones due to spotty connections, with officials trying to get a Russian truck driver to fix the issue without being alerted to what he was actually doing.

Source :https://nypost.com/2025/12/10/world-news/hungover-russians-thwart-ukraines-surprise-attack-on-moscow-report/

Former Nepali ministers, officials and a Chinese company were charged with corruption over financial irregularities during the construction of an international airport.

The Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority filed on Sunday cases against 55 people and the China CAMC Engineering Company Limited, one of the biggest such cases in the Himalayan nation, accusing them of inflating construction expenses by more than $74 million. It remains unclear when the hearing will begin.

Two officials of the Chinese company have been named in the charges filed at the Special Court in Kathmandu, which handles corruption cases related to government dealings.

The bidding agreed on with the government in 2012 was set at $169.6 million, but Nepali officials increased the amount to a little over $244 million “in collusion with the Chinese company,” the commission said.

The airport, at the resort city of Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Kathmandu, was built with a loan from China Exim Bank. It was expected to draw foreign tourists to the picturesque city, the starting point of many trekking routes in Nepal. However, it failed to attract international flights since operations began in 2023, according to local reports.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/nepal-china-corruption-airport-c112cb659a00efd348ea270f97f1e861

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has been in hiding for months, has told the BBC that she knows “exactly the risks” she’s taking by travelling to Norway to collect her Nobel Peace Prize.

Machado appeared in Oslo in the middle of the night, waving from the balcony of a hotel. It was the first time she has been seen in public since January.

The 58-year-old made the covert journey despite a travel ban and a threat from the Venezuelan government that she would be labelled as a fugitive.

In an emotional moment, Machado waved to cheering supporters who had gathered outside the Norwegian capital’s Grand Hotel, blowing them kisses and singing with them.

To their delight, she then came outside and greeted them in person, climbing over the security barricades to get closer.

“Maria!” “Maria!” they shouted, holding their phones aloft to record the historic moment.

Earlier on Wednesday, her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her mother’s behalf.

The Nobel Institute awarded Machado the prize this year for “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy” in Venezuela.

Until Wednesday night, the mother of three had not seen her children in about two years, having sent them away from Venezuela for their own safety.

In an interview with the BBC’s Lucy Hockings after her balcony appearance, Machado said she had missed their graduations, and the weddings of her daughter and one of her sons.

“For over 16 months I haven’t been able to hug or touch anyone,” she said. “Suddenly in the matter of a few hours I’ve been able to see the people I love the most, and touch them and cry and pray together.”

During the BBC interview, Machado had many rosary beads hanging around her neck, which she said supporters had given to her outside the hotel.

There has been much speculation about whether she will be able to safely return to Venezuela.

“Of course I’m going back,” she told the BBC. “I know exactly the risks I’m taking.”

“I’m going to be in the place where I’m most useful for our cause,” she continued. “Until a short time ago, the place I thought I had to be was Venezuela, the place I believe I have to be today, on behalf of our cause, is Oslo.”

Considered one of the country’s most respected voices in Venezuela’s opposition, Machado has long denounced President Nicolás Maduro’s government as “criminal” and called on Venezuelans to unite to depose it.

She was barred from running in last year’s presidential elections, in which he won a third six-year term in office. The vote was widely dismissed on the international stage as neither free nor fair, and many nations view his rule as illegitimate.

“We need to address this regime not as a conventional dictatorship, but as a criminal structure,” she told the BBC.

Machado accused his regime of being funded by criminal activities such as drugs and human trafficking, repeating calls for the international community to help Venezuela “cut those inflows” of criminal resources.

Maduro has always vehemently denied being connected to cartels.

When asked whether she would support a US military strike on Venezuelan soil, given Washington’s recent attacks on alleged drug vessels, Machado did not answer directly but instead accused Maduro of “giving away our sovereignty to criminal organisations”.

“We didn’t want a war, we didn’t look for it… it was Maduro who declared war on the Venezuelan people,” she added.

Machado says she and her team are ready to form a government in Venezuela, and that she offered to sit down with Maduro’s team to work out a peaceful transition, but “they rejected it”.

The BBC asked Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who sat with Machado during the interview, whether a possible violent takeover to unseat Nicolás Maduro would contradict her Peace Prize.

He said the burden for peace should be placed on the current Venezuelan government: “The power lies in the Maduro regime, they have the responsibility to make sure this is a peaceful transition.”

Even after she was barred from the election last year, Machado continued to campaign for the candidate who replaced her on the ballot, Edmundo González.

Maduro was declared the winner, even though polling station tallies showed that González had won by a landslide.

The Maduro government has repeatedly threatened Machado with arrest, accusing her of calling for a foreign invasion and labelling her a terrorist for protesting against the election results.

Last month, Venezuela’s attorney general said Machado would be considered a fugitive if she travelled to Norway to collect her prize, saying she was accused of “acts of conspiracy, incitement of hatred, and terrorism”.

It made her journey to Norway difficult and risky.

The details of the trip were kept so tightly under wraps, that even the Nobel Institute did not know where she was or whether she would be in Oslo in time for the prize ceremony.

The Wall Street Journal reports that to escape Venezuela, Machado wore a disguise, managed to get through 10 military checkpoints without being caught, and sailed away on a wooden skiff from a coastal fishing village.

The plan was two months in the making, it reports, citing a person close to the operation, and she was assisted by a Venezuelan network that helps people flee the country. The US was also involved, the report says, but it is unclear to what extent.

Machado did not deny these details to the BBC, but also would not elaborate on the journey.

“They [the Venezuelan government] say I’m a terrorist and have to be in jail for the rest of my life and they’re looking for me,” she said. “So leaving Venezuela today, in these circumstances, is very, very dangerous.

“I just want to say today that I’m here, because many men and women risked their lives in order for me to arrive in Oslo.”

Mr Frydnes had described her journey to Norway as “a situation of extreme danger”.

Sitting next to her during the BBC interview, he said it was an “emotional” moment for him.

“In the middle of the night to have you here, it’s incredible,” he said. “It’s hard to describe what it means to the Nobel committee and to all of us.”

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q5p43qgl1o

The U.S. Federal Reserve may not give President Donald Trump all the rate cuts he wants, but the view of the economy policymakers included in new economic projections on Wednesday should buoy the administration nonetheless with its outlook for faster growth, lower inflation and steady unemployment heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
The Fed, in fact, may be done cutting rates for now, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his fellow policymakers signaled after their most recent rate meeting. But that’s because they anticipate the U.S. to emerge from a period of volatility and upheaval over tariffs and immigration into a year of strong productivity, ongoing consumer spending, and inflation that falls as the impact of tariffs on goods prices begins to wane.

The projections set a strong baseline for the arrival of whomever Trump chooses to replace Powell when his term as chair ends in May, but potentially little room to lower rates as far or as fast as Trump seems to feel is appropriate.

The economy may hum regardless.

“I really want to turn this job over to whoever replaces me with the economy in really good shape: that’s what I want to do,” Powell said at his news conference Wednesday, following the Fed’s decision to cut the policy rate for a third straight time and signal a pause ahead. “I want inflation to be under control – going back down to 2% – and I want the labor market to be strong.”

Nearly a third of policymakers were unhappy with Wednesday’s rate cut, the projections showed, and another third want more than the median expectation of one rate cut for all of next year. But despite those divisions, which Powell said were largely due to disagreements over whether inflation or a weak labor market poses the bigger risks, central bankers by and large expect next year to look solid.

Wednesday’s rate cut “should help stabilize the labor market while allowing inflation to resume its downward trend toward 2% once the effects of tariffs have passed through,” Powell said.
The quarterly projections show prices are rising faster, interest rates are higher, and economic growth is slower than central bankers anticipated last September, just before Trump’s November election victory.
But for next year, central bankers see broad improvements that amount to a “soft landing” for the U.S., and an easing of fears that the economy was heading for what some analysts called “stagflation lite,” with high joblessness and high inflation.

Inflation is expected to end 2026 at 2.4% versus 2.9% at the end of this year, the Fed’s fresh projections show, as tariffs’ upward push on goods prices dissipates. Economic growth is seen accelerating to 2.3% compared with 1.7% this year, benefiting from a bounceback after this year’s government shutdown.
And the unemployment rate, reported at 4.4% in September, is expected to tick up slightly before ending 2026 back at 4.4% again.
Powering that picture, Powell said on Wednesday, is a rise in productivity poised to accelerate amid the adoption of artificial intelligence. Productivity growth has been a key argument for rate cuts from administration officials including White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett, seen as the front-runner for Powell’s replacement.
But while the new Fed chair may inherit a solid economy, he will take the helm of a group that is by no means sold on the need for further policy easing. Indeed, Powell repeatedly said the latest rate cut leaves Fed officials well-positioned to wait and see – hardly an endorsement of the sharp rate cuts Trump says he wants his new Fed chair to deliver.

Issues around inflation and affordability, which Trump used as a centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign, remain unresolved, with the Republican president’s approval ratings on the economy falling. Food prices rose 2.7% annually in September, versus less than 2% when he returned to power in January, and high housing prices and mortgage interest rates have combined to put home ownership out of reach for many.
And yet some of the worst anticipated outcomes from earlier in the year, when Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” tariff plans sparked talk of collapsing global trade, a corrosive mix of rising prices and high unemployment, and even of a “canceled” Christmas shopping season, haven’t been realized.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fed-may-not-give-trump-his-rate-cuts-has-set-out-positive-view-2026-economy-2025-12-11/

LABOUR’S plan to get the UK to Net Zero by 2050 could end up costing every household in Britain £500 a year.

Ministers have been warned that transitioning to meet green targets over the next 25 years could cost the country a staggering £350 billion more than taking a slower approach.

The UK could save an average of £14 billion a year if it abandons its legally binding target to reach net zero, according to the National Energy System Operator.

That works out at roughly £500 a year for every household in Britain until 2050.

The report warned the bill could climb even higher if gas prices fall below current forecasts, making green energy look even pricier by comparison.

In this scenario, the Net Zero premium could rise to an average of £19 billion a year over the next two decades.

Even in a world where gas prices do rise, the analysis found the Net Zero pathway would still be around £5 billion a year more expensive than a slower route.

The Tories’ shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho said: “The public have been told the lie that Net Zero means cheaper energy.

“This report shows the truth – rushing to net zero is forecast to make our energy system £350 billion more expensive than going slower.”

The government body responsible for the UK’s power system said the extra cost of racing to Net Zero would hit hardest over the next decade.

Their report revealed the annual price tag could top £40billion in some years.

The study compared two futures, one matching Labour’s tougher clean-power plans, and another where Britain carries on broadly as it is now with more gradual emissions cuts.

The slower path would still see electric cars rolled out, but many homes would keep gas boilers and some power stations would continue burning gas.

In both cases, overall energy-related costs fall sharply from today’s levels by 2050.

But the Net Zero route only becomes cheaper after 2046, and is far more expensive in the early years.

Government officials pushed back, insisting the figures “do not reflect or predict” the actual cost of going green.

They said clean energy will bring long-term savings, boost energy security and support skilled jobs.

But it also said going greener quicker would offer more protection from extreme price shocks like those caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Jess Ralston, energy chief at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said the findings show why the UK should keep pushing for Net Zero.

She said: “After decades of under-investment, upgrading the grid to unlock more British renewables and improve efficiency will create greater energy independence for the UK so that a future gas crisis won’t leave households, businesses and industry facing incredibly high bills.”

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15622712/households-pay-2050-net-zero/

THIS is the stunning moment US troops rappel from helicopters and storm an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela with high-powered rifles.

Well-oiled commandos swept through the ship as they executed Trump’s boldest play yet in his stand-off with dictator Nicolas Maduro.

Footage released on X by Attorney General Pam Bondi shows a military helicopter hovering over the tanker, with another buzzing nearby.

Ropes are tossed from the cabin and geared-up troops immediately clamber down onto the deck.

They disperse in formation – guns aloft – darting up staircases and sweeping through cabins.

Forces from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the US Coast Guard all came together for the slick sting.

Ms Bondi said the troops were carrying out a seizure warrant for the tanker, which was used to “transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.

Announcing the successful operation earlier on Wednesday, Trump said: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually.”

He fired an ominous warning to Maduro – under the cosh more now than ever before – that “other things are happening”, though he did not elaborate.

When pressed on why he ordered the operation, Trump said only: “It was seized for a very good reason.”

And asked what would happen to the oil onboard, he said: “We keep it I guess.”

It’s still not clear exactly which vessel was targeted, or where it was intercepted.

This marks a major escalation in the US campaign against Venezuela – and is the strongest hint yet that America’s sights are set beyond drug traffickers.

Up to this point, operations had been limited to remote strikes on small boats that America identified as “narco-terrorists”.

This appears to be the first clash involving American personnel in the field, and the first target not directly related to the drugs trade.

In the immediate term, the seizure could stymie Venezuela’s vital oil exports.

Other shippers will likely be much warier of loading cargo from Maduro’s shores – for fear of a similar seizure.

Longer term, it’s possible this proves to be the first move in a naval blockade of Venezuela – but Trump is for now keeping his cards close to his chest.

Most oil from Venezuela ends up in China after passing through middlemen nations and being sold at a cut price.

Just today, oil buyers in Asia demanded deeper discounts on Venezuelan crude oil due to a flood of sanctioned oil from Russia and Iran on offer.

They also cited the risk of loading in the South American country in the face of the US military presence – a concern that has today been realised.

The US has for months been tightening the noose around Maduro.

This has been through a series of bold strikes against Venezuelan drug trafficking boats and the build-up of a vast military force in the Caribbean.

As of December 4, at least 87 people had been killed in 22 strikes on 23 vessels.

At the end of last month, Trump vowed the US would soon launch land operations in Venezuela after saying the drug cartels are on a par with terrorist groups Al Qaeda and Hamas.

However, he has maintained that his only goal is to wipe out the drugs trade flooding narcotics into the US – justifying each escalation with this cause.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15620987/us-seize-oil-tanker-venezuela-coast-trump-maduro/

DONALD Trump is warning he won’t bother coming to Europe for Ukraine peace talks unless there’s a real chance of a deal.

The European leaders want a meeting this weekend, but Trump says he needs more clarity before making the trip.

The President told reporters: “We want to know some things before a meeting. We don’t want to waste time.”

On Wednesday, Trump held a call with the leaders of France, the UK, and Germany to discuss efforts to reach a peace deal in Ukraine, according to a White House official.

The conversation comes amid rising tensions between the U.S. and European powers over the war in Ukraine and the broader Transatlantic relationship.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is under pressure to accept Trump’s peace plan, which reportedly includes major territorial losses and other concessions.

On Monday, Zelensky met with the leaders of Germany, France, and the UK to deliver a united message: the current U.S. plan is unacceptable.

Trump, meanwhile, has lashed out at European leaders. In a Politico interview published Tuesday, he called them “weak” and defended his new national security strategy that seeks to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said the call lasted 40 minutes and focused on advancing diplomatic efforts to end the war.

The German Chancellor’s office said in a statement: “The four heads of state and governments discussed the status of talks on a ceasefire in Ukraine.

“Intensive work on the peace plan is to continue in the coming days. They agreed that this is a crucial moment for Ukraine and for common security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

Zelensky also held a virtual meeting with a U.S. team led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner joined, along with Steve Mnuchin and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

Zelensky wrote on X that he updated the U.S. on his position regarding the latest draft of Trump’s peace plan.

He said: “It is overall security that will determine economic security and underpin safe business environment.”

Zelensky said he expects to deliver an updated peace plan to the U.S. “in the near future.”

European leaders continue talks to ensure Kyiv gets a fair deal.

The Ukrainian President confirmed work is ongoing on a 20-point plan aimed at ending the war.

“Everything must be reliable and dignified for Ukraine,” Zelensky said on X.

“In parallel, we are finalizing work on the 20 points of a fundamental document that could define the parameters for ending the war.

“We expect to deliver this document to the United States in the near future following our joint work with President Trump’s team and partners in Europe.”

On Tuesday, Zelensky said he had hoped to send the revised plan by Wednesday after Trump criticized him for not reading it.

He added that on Thursday there would be a “Coalition of the Willing” meeting to guarantee future security and prevent a recurrence of Russian aggression.

Zelensky also addressed Trump’s claims that Kyiv was delaying elections to cling to power.

“They’re using the war as an excuse not to hold an election,” Trump said. “But they haven’t had an election in a long time. They talk about a democracy, but at some point, it ceases to be one.”

Ukrainian law currently blocks elections under martial law, but Zelensky said they could proceed if security guarantees were in place.

“I’m asking now, and I’m stating this openly, for the US to help me, perhaps together with our European colleagues, to ensure security for the election,” Zelensky said.

“I’ve heard hints that we’re clinging to power, or that I personally am clinging to the presidency. It’s frankly, a completely unreasonable narrative.”

Trump has reportedly set a Christmas deadline for Zelensky to accept his peace plan, delivered by envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff after talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The President warned that Ukraine would struggle to withstand further bombardment unless an agreement is signed.

He also targeted European leaders, labelling them “weak” and accusing them of presiding over a “decaying” continent consumed by left-wing politics and high levels of illegal migration.

The pressure on Zelensky is compounded by Russian missile strikes, which have killed civilians and hit key rail infrastructure in Ukraine.

A 51-year-old man was killed and two children wounded in Dnipropetrovsk. The day before, four civilians were killed.

Russia temporarily closed Moscow airspace due to Ukrainian drone incursions, forcing flights to reroute to St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod.

Downing Street said Monday’s meeting would “focus on ongoing peace negotiations and next steps.”

Starmer described the talks as a “critical stage of the push for peace.”

Zelensky thanked allies for organizing the meeting. “Things that are very important for today are… unity between Europe, Ukraine, and US. I think it is very important to organise such meetings,” he said.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/15622077/trump-time-waste-europe-ukraine-peace-offer/

US President Donald Trump announced the seizure of a “very large” oil tanker and said “other things are happening” off the coast of Venezuela.

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the US has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Trump said the tanker “was seized for a very good reason.”

The US president added that “other things are happening,” without offering any additional details. Reporters asked Trump what would happen with the oil, he replied: “We keep it, I guess.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video to X that appeared to show US forces boarding the tanker.

Venezuela denounces seizure of oil tanker

In response, Caracas accused Washington of “blatant theft” as the Venezuelan government vowed to “defend its sovereignty, natural resources, and national dignity with absolute determination.”

A statement from the foreign ministry added that the Latin American country “strongly denounces and condemns what constitutes blatant theft and an act of international piracy.”

It added that they would denounce the seizure in front of international bodies.

Vessel seizure latest escalation between Washington and Maduro

The announcement marks the latest escalation between the Trump administration and the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and it comes as opposition leader Maria Corina Machado is believed to have left the country for Oslo.

In an interview with US news outlet Politico earlier this week, Trump said that Maduro’s “days are numbered,” declining to rule out a US ground invasion against Venezuela.

Venezuela has largest proven oil reserves

The oil tanker seizure comes weeks after the Trump administration has dramatically increased US presence in the Caribbean, near Venezuelan waters, and conducted strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats originating from Venezuela.

The US has been amassing a fleet of warships including the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.

Unnamed US officials said the tanker’s seizure was led by the US Coast Guard and supported by the Navy.

The New York Times and CBS News identified the tanker as a vessel called the Skipper. The New York Times said officials they spoke to said the vessel was carrying Venezuelan oil from the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).

But it is not yet clear which country’s flag the vessel was flying.

The South American nation has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and produces about 1 million barrels of oil per day.

But US sanctions on its oil industry have left Venezuela locked out of global oil markets, selling most of its output at a steep discount to refiners in China.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/trump-says-us-seized-very-large-oil-tanker-near-venezuela/a-75098714

Researchers excavating an ancient Neanderthal site in southern England found evidence not just of a hearth, but of its inhabitants bringing iron pyrite to the area specifically to enable them to light fires.

Archaeologists wrote in the journal Nature this week that they have unearthed the oldest-known evidence of deliberate fire-making by prehistoric humans in the English county of Suffolk.

The hearth was discovered in Barnham in the UK, near a buried site that was once a pond where Neanderthals are thought to have lived roughly 415,000 years ago.

The authors wrote that the site seems to provide “unequivocal evidence of deliberate fire-making” that “has remained elusive” because of the difficulties in distinguishing between naturally occurring fires being used by prehistoric humans and controlled fires being created on demand.

Early humans are thought to have first started making opportunistic use of naturally occurring fires, for instance from lightning strikes or forest fires, as much as a million years ago.

Heated clay, heat-shattered handaxes, and imported iron pyrite to light permanent campfire

At an old clay pit for making bricks near the village of Barnham, the researchers found a patch of heated clay, some heat-shattered handaxes and two pieces of iron pyrite.

This material creates sparks when struck against flint to ignite tinder, and is also not readily available in the vicinity, suggesting the Neanderthals brought it to the watering hole specifically for the purpose.

“We think humans brought pyrite to the site with the intention of making fire,” said archaeologist Nick Ashton, curator of Palaeolithic Collections at the British Museum in London and the leader of the research. “This has huge implications pushing back the earliest fire-making.”

The earliest-known evidence of deliberate fire-making to date had been unearthed in northern France and dated to roughly 50,000 years ago. It was also attributed to Neanderthals.

Although human remains were not found at the site, paleoanthropologist and study co-author Chris Stringer said that pieces of human skull from a similar period, characteristic of early Neanderthals, were located in the mid-20th century less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the south at a town called Swanscombe and at a site in Sima de los Huesos near Burgos in Spain.

“Thus the Barnham fire-makers were very likely to have been early Neanderthals, like Swanscombe and the Sima people,” Stringer said.

Neanderthals are thought to have gone extinct roughly 39,000 years ago as homo sapiens started to settle throughout Europe. But genetic remnants of the early hominid cousins to modern humans persist in many of our genes as a result of interbreeding and assimilation.

Fire expands and improves diet; hearth feeds community, language, storytelling

Controlled use of fire was a landmark in human evolution for multiple reasons.

Cooking enabled vastly improved diets and easier and safer digestion of meat and other ingredients, freeing up energy from digestion for use by the fast-expanding brains of early hominins.

It also provided warmth, enabling hunter-gatherers to survive and thrive in colder environments, like Britain, study co-author Rob Davis, an archaeologist at the British Museum, said.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/signs-of-400000-year-old-neanderthal-campfire-found-in-uk/a-75098034

Brandenburg’s state Environment Ministry warned of a “large oil spill” after a pipeline accident. It said that emergency services were on site and that details on the size and cause of the spill were not yet available.

State authorities in Brandenburg reported a major oil spill north of Berlin late on Wednesday, saying there had been an accident affecting a pipeline connecting a major oil refinery to the Baltic Sea port of Rostock.

“An accident occurred on the PCK piepline near Gramzow/Zehnebeck, resulting in a large oil spill,” a spokesman for Brandenburg’s Environment Ministry said. “Emergency services are on site. No information can be provided at this time about the cause of the exact extent of the damage.”

The fire department later estimated that roughly 200,000 liters (about 52,835 gallons) of oil had escaped from the pipeline at a pumping station in Gramzow. For orientation, that amount of liquid would fill a little less than one-tenth of an Olympic swimming pool.

Alexander Trenn of the Schwedt fire department said the leak had a pressure of around 20 bar (roughly 290 psi) at its peak, causing a fountain of oil several meters high to spew out.

Specialist machinery was being used to remove the spilled oil. Clean-up operations would continue into Thursday morning, he said. Trenn said around 100 fire department officers and some 25 company employees were working on site.

Nature reserves situated near PCK’s Schwedt refinery on Polish border

A major oil refinery is located near the border to Poland in Schwedt, operated by PCK. The company says on its website that the facility can process 11.5 million metric tons of oil a year, “making it one of the largest crude oil processing sites in Germany.”

Meanwhile, the AFP news agency cited a PCK spokeswoman as saying that “deliberate external influence” such as sabotage could already be “ruled out.”

Local public broadcaster rbb reported that by 19:45 local time (1845 UTC/GMT), “the leak was for the most part plugged, although some oil was still leaking out.”

Source :https://www.dw.com/en/crude-oil-shoots-from-damaged-pipeline-in-eastern-germany/a-75098388

A political artists’ collective has placed a statue of murdered politician Walter Lübcke outside CDU headquarters. Lübcke was killed by a supporter of the far-right AfD, which the activists are warning against.

The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is not happy about a new protest stunt that has appeared on its doorstep.

Leading members of Germany’s governing party have reacted angrily after the political art-activist group the Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) last week placed a life-size bronze statue of the late CDU politician Walter Lübcke outside their party headquarters, the Konrad Adenauer building in Berlin. The memorial is meant to protest the CDU’s alleged accommodation of racist politics and warns against its potential collaboration with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Lübcke, a local CDU leader in the state of Hesse, was shot dead by an AfD supporter in 2019 after he had become a hate figure for Germany’s far-right at the height of Germany’s refugee crisis. At town hall meeting in 2015, he made a speech defending government policy on taking in Syrian refugees.

He was shot in the head four years later on the porch of his home by Stephan E., a far-right extremist who saw Lübcke speak, and who had, according to investigations by Die Zeit newspaper, donated to the AfD in the state of Thuringia.

Exploitation or commemoration?

The statue of Lübcke has been erected on a small patch of public ground next to the CDU building, along with a bench and an information board with an audio feature that tells the story of his life in German, English and Spanish. The local authority in Berlin has given permission for the memorial to remain in place for two years. The CDU headquarters did not respond to a DW request for comment on the memorial.

In a YouTube video about the action, the ZPS drew explicit parallels between how conservatives enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists in the early 1930s and how the CDU has been allegedly aping the AfD’s policies.

The main reaction from prominent CDU figures has been outrage. At an event in Berlin, Chancellor Friedrich Merz described the memorial as “utterly tasteless,” and Berlin’s CDU mayor, Kai Wegner, took a similar line.

“Those who so shamelessly exploit the memory of Walter Lübcke for their own political agenda demonstrate one thing above all else: Disrespect and indifference toward a man who stood up for our democracy and paid for it with his life,” Wegner wrote on the social media platform X.

The ZPS said it was disappointed with this reaction: “Of course we had the hope … that at some point one of the top officials from the CDU might have come out of the glass Konrad Adenauer building and had a look at it or laid flowers down,” ZPS spokesperson Tobias von Laubenthal told DW.

But, von Laubenthal added, the reaction from German civil society had been overwhelmingly positive. “The question that we were asking ourselves was why the CDU has not done anything years ago to honor the memory of Walter Lübcke,” he told DW. “That’s something that a lot of people have wondering.”

“This was a man with clear lines, and when those red lines were crossed, such as when it came to far-right extremism, he took a very clear stance,” von Laubenthal added. “He was a man with a stance that we miss in the CDU today.”

Lübcke’s has become one of the most prominent politically-motivated murders in recent German history, marking as it did the first time that an elected leader had been assassinated by a right-wing extremist since the end of World War II.

At least one prominent former CDU figure has defended the action against the attacks from the party. “I wonder what this ‘exploitation’ is supposed to consist of?” said Michel Friedman in a speech at the opening of the memorial last Friday.

Friedman, who has also hosted a DW talk show, was a member of the CDU’s leadership board in the 1990s and left the party earlier this year in protest at its perceived rightward drift. “It’s not exploitation to commemorate such a man, it’s an expression of respect, of honor, and of gratitude,” he said in his speech.

Lübcke family’s ambiguous reaction

According to Berlin media reports, the local authority that approved the memorial was told by the ZPS that Lübcke’s family had been made aware of the concept in advance, and had not offered any opposition.

But Lübcke’s family have said they were not consulted. “Simply dropping a letter in our mailbox the day before the monument was erected cannot be considered participation,” Lübcke’s widow, Irmgard Braun-Lübcke and her children wrote in a statement to the media. “This does not constitute adequate information or involvement.”

Nevertheless, the family also noted that they supported the message of the action, saying they were grateful to everyone who remembers their father and husband “in a sincere, appreciative, and respectful manner.”

“The firewall against the right, regardless of which democratic party, must remain in place; there can be no tolerance of that,” they said.

Though largely reluctant to appear in the public eye, Irmgard Braun-Lübcke has criticized the CDU leadership in the past. In February this year, she responded with some irritation to a remark made by Merz about demonstrators during an election campaign event in Munich, when the soon-to-be chancellor said, “I’d like to ask all those people out there, Antifa and anti-right-wingers: Where were you when Walter Lübcke was murdered in Kassel by a right-wing extremist?”

“Contrary to his account, there was in fact strong widespread public support for our democracy and its values after my husband’s assassination,” Braun-Lübcke said. “Thousands of citizens — whether left-wing, liberal, or conservative democrats — took to the streets in Wolfhagen, Kassel, and many other places in Germany.”

CDU and AfD: A tricky relationship

Though Merz has repeatedly vowed never to allow his party to collaborate with the AfD, doubts are growing whether the CDU’s “firewall” can hold, giving the growing strength of the AfD and upcoming state elections where the far-right party looks set to emerge as the strongest party.

The CDU has been seen to cooperate with the AfD at state level in the past. In January this year, Merz — then still leader of the opposition — triggered a wave of outrage by pushing a motion to

curb immigration through parliament with the support of the AfD. The chancellor has also frequently been accused of using racist rhetoric and fearmongering typical of far-right parties.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/germany-activists-upset-chancellor-merz-with-cdu-memorial/a-75097009

Two Russian Tu-95 nuclear-capable bombers flew from the Sea of Japan to rendezvous with two Chinese H-6 bombers in the East China Sea, then conducted a joint flight around the country, Tokyo said.

NATO chief Mark Rutte and Japan’s defence minister shared their “grave concerns” about recent joint patrols by Chinese and Russian aircraft, Tokyo said.

The incident on Tuesday (Dec 9) came as Japan-China relations worsen after comments by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi about Taiwan that enraged Beijing.

“Both sides shared their grave concerns over this incident and concurred to closely communicate with each other,” the Japanese defence ministry said late on Wednesday.

The statement followed a 15-minute video conference between Rutte and Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi, the ministry said.

Koizumi also briefed Rutte about another recent incident that involved Chinese aircraft locking its radar onto Japanese planes near Taiwan, the statement added.

According to Tokyo, two Russian Tu-95 nuclear-capable bombers on Tuesday flew from the Sea of Japan to rendezvous with two Chinese H-6 bombers in the East China Sea, then conducted a joint flight around the country.

Japan scrambled aircraft in response.

South Korea said on Tuesday that Russian and Chinese warplanes also entered its air defence zone, with Seoul also deploying fighter jets.

Beijing confirmed later on Tuesday that it had organised drills with Russia’s military according to “annual cooperation plans”.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/japan-nato-share-grave-concern-china-russia-flights-diplomacy-5575311