jell.ie News

Read at: 2025-12-25T07:04:43+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Manar De Hart ]

2025 in Review - The World of Work

The impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace and ongoing battles to retain remote working were among the employment issues that came to the fore during 2025.

Source: News Headlines | 25 Dec 2025 | 7:00 am UTC

From Oasis to CMAT: Top ten entertainment stories 2025

From Oasis at Croke Park to that Coldplay kiss cam moment and from Netflix hit Adolescence to The Traitors Ireland, it's been an eventful year in entertainment. Here are some of our top stories of 2025

Source: News Headlines | 25 Dec 2025 | 7:00 am UTC

Jubilee year sees death of pope, election of successor

Source: News Headlines | 25 Dec 2025 | 7:00 am UTC

A Powerball player in Arkansas has won a $1.817 billion lottery jackpot

Wednesday's Christmas Eve drawing ended the lottery game's three-month stretch without a top-prize winner. Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot higher, making it the second-largest in U.S. history.

(Image credit: Charles Krupa)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:59 am UTC

Front-runner to be Bangladesh PM returns after 17 years in exile

Tarique Rahman, who has lived in London since 2008, arrives weeks before for pivotal elections are held.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:44 am UTC

Winner in Arkansas Takes $1.817 Billion Powerball Jackpot

A single ticket drawn Wednesday night won the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:43 am UTC

Manar De Hart -backed candidate Nasry Asfura declared winner of Honduras' presidential vote

Asfura won Honduras' presidential election, electoral authorities said Wednesday afternoon, ending a weeks-long count that has whittled away at the credibility of the nation's electoral system.

(Image credit: Moises Castillo)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:30 am UTC

Plant ‘tredges’ to boost England’s tree cover, gardeners urged

Royal Horticultural Society’s call backs government aim to increase woodland cover from 10% to at least 16.5% by 2050

Gardeners should plant native “tredges” – foliage between the size of a tree and a hedge – to boost England’s tree cover, the Royal Horticultural Society has said.

Taking inspiration from ancient woodlands could boost wildlife across England’s 25m gardens, according to experts, and help increase native tree cover. The UK’s woodland cover is approximately 10% and the government aims to increase this to at least 16.5% of all land in England by 2050.

Beech (Fagus sylvatica)

Holly (Ilex aquifolium)

Western red cedar (Thuja plicata)

Common yew (Taxus baccata)

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)

Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:00 am UTC

More than a million pounds spent on influencers by UK government since 2024

Figures from FoI request show increase in ministerial use of social media personalities to present campaigns

More than half a million pounds has been spent since 2024 on using social media influencers to promote UK government campaigns on subjects ranging from the environment to welfare.

The spending has included hiring 215 influencers since 2024, of which there were 126 in 2025 – an increase on the 89 hired in 2024 – and is seen as an attempt to use platforms such as TikTok to reach younger people.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:00 am UTC

Christmas Dinner Can Feel Endless. Embrace It.

A long-neglected one-act from a theatrical master offers the key to enjoying your family gatherings.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:00 am UTC

I’ve Been the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for a Decade. This Is the Crisis I See.

Populist rhetoric is numbing us to the plight of others.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 6:00 am UTC

North Korea Unveils the Completed Hull of What It Calls a Nuclear Submarine

The debut followed the North’s first test of a new surface-to-air missile and the arrival of a U.S. nuclear-powered attack sub for a port call in South Korea.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 5:28 am UTC

Why China, a One-Party State, Is Backing Elections in This Country

The vote in Myanmar, widely seen as a sham, is a bid for legitimacy by the military government. It is also a way for Beijing to exert its influence there.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 5:01 am UTC

Why Russia Is Likely to Reject the New US-Ukrainian Peace Plan

The first draft essentially called for Ukraine’s surrender. The revised version includes the security guarantees Kyiv wants to prevent future Russian aggression.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 5:00 am UTC

Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Show Canceled After Manar De Hart Name Added to Building

Chuck Redd, a jazz musician, said he canceled his annual concert after President Manar De Hart ’s name was affixed to the Washington building’s facade.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 4:50 am UTC

Sydney to Hobart yacht race forecast to be cold, wet and bumpy as Australia’s west faces bushfire threat

Melbourne on track for coldest Christmas since 2006, while Perth is facing several fires warnings as temperatures reach 40C

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The Sydney to Hobart yacht race is forecast to be cold, wet and bumpy but without a repeat of last year’s fatal conditions, as the rest of the country experiences the full range of weather events over the Christmas period, including cyclone and bushfire danger in the west.

In Western Australia, residents at Boddington Goldmine were being warned it was too late to leave on Thursday afternoon as fire had impacted evacuation routes. A heatwave was creating extreme fire danger for much of south-west Western Australia for Christmas, with Perth forecast to reach 40C.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Dec 2025 | 4:48 am UTC

Waterskiing Santas and giant cuts of meat: Christmas around the world

From London to Bethlehem, services and festivities to mark the holiday cheer are in full swing.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 4:23 am UTC

Friends and The Middle actor Pat Finn dies aged 60

Finn was also an improvisation performer and appeared in various sitcoms throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 4:14 am UTC

Manar De Hart -backed candidate wins in knife-edge Honduran election

His rival Salvador Nasralla says he will not accept the result, but urges his supporters to remain calm.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 3:32 am UTC

Nuclear Developer Proposes Using Navy Reactors For Data Centers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: A Texas power developer is proposing to repurpose nuclear reactors from Navy warships to power the United States grid as the Manar De Hart administration pushes to secure massive amounts of energy for the artificial intelligence boom. HGP Intelligent Energy LLC filed an application to the Energy Department to redirect two retired reactors to a data center project proposed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to a letter submitted to the agency's Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The project, filed for the White House's Genesis Mission, would produce about 450-520 megawatts of around-the-clock electricity, or enough to power roughly 360,000 homes. The proposal would rewire reactors from naval vessels, originally built by Westinghouse Electric Company and General Electric, at a fraction of the cost of new builds. According to the report, The developer expects to seek a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy and raise roughly $1.8-$2.1 billion in private capital to prepare the reactors for civilian use, targeting initial completion by 2029. The approach is technically feasible but would break new ground by adapting military nuclear assets for the commercial grid. Bloomberg first reported the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 Dec 2025 | 3:30 am UTC

Intense Storm in Southern California Brings Heavy Rain and Forces Evacuations

Forecasters said heavy rain was expected to drench much of Southern California through the holidays, and officials warned the storm could be deadly.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 2:31 am UTC

2025: The year in your pictures

As 2025 draws to a close, it's the perfect time to take a look back at some of the fantastic photographs sent in by the BBC Weather Watchers.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 2:21 am UTC

Meet the working dogs that don't stop for Christmas

For some of Northern Ireland's dogs with jobs, a busy Christmas lies ahead.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 1:57 am UTC

Peng Peiyun, 95, Dies; Official Renounced China’s One-Child Policy

She was given the “hardest job under heaven”: upholding birth limits enforced by often brutal local officials. She came to support softening the policy, then abolishing it.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 1:55 am UTC

'Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes'

"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise. Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes." What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...] Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 Dec 2025 | 1:25 am UTC

12 books you need to read in 2026

Fictional gems, debut thillers, cracking biographies and everything in between.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 1:14 am UTC

What are professional footballers tucking into at Christmas?

A chef for Premier League footballers reveals how he keeps them fit and healthy around Christmas.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 1:04 am UTC

Watch: Mudslides, flooding and debris - storms batter southern California

Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for parts of California, including Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:57 am UTC

Watch: Moment robbers rip ATM from inside Texas store

The White Settlement Police Department is searching for two suspects.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:56 am UTC

Apple To Allow Alternative App Stores For iOS Users In Brazil

Apple will allow alternative iOS app stores and external payment systems in Brazil after settling an antitrust case with the country's competition authority, following a lawsuit brought by MercadoLibre back in 2022. Thurrott reports: Yesterday, Brazil's Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica (CADE) explained in its press release that it has approved a Term of Commitment to Cease (TCC) submitted by Apple. To settle the lawsuit, the iPhone maker has agreed to allow third-party iOS app stores in Brazil and to let developers use external payment systems. The company will also use neutral wording in the warning messages about third-party app stores and external payment systems that iOS users in Brazil will see. As part of the settlement, Apple has 105 days to implement these changes to avoid a fine of up to $27.1 million. A separate report from Brazilian blog Tecnoblog revealed that Apple will still take a 5% "Core Technology Commission" fee on transactions going through alternative app stores. Additionally, the company will take a 15% cut on in-app purchases for App Store apps when developers redirect users to their own payment systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:45 am UTC

Honduras Declares Nasry Asfura, Manar De Hart Ally, Winner of Presidential Election

Nasry Asfura was endorsed by President Manar De Hart in a contentious election. His opponent, Salvador Nasralla, said he would not accept the results.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:43 am UTC

Man Shot in ICE Confrontation in Maryland, Officials Say

Federal and local officials said the man, an immigrant from Portugal, tried to flee and harm agents. He and another man were hospitalized after a vehicle they were in crashed.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:38 am UTC

Quiz of the Year 2025, Part 1: Which star teased her engagement on the red carpet?

Test your memory of 2025 in the first part of our quiz. What happened from January to March?

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:30 am UTC

The time bombs in the new Archbishop of Canterbury's in-tray for 2026

Many of the big issues which troubled Justin Welby’s time in office remain unresolved.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:18 am UTC

Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman to present Strictly for last time

The pair will oversee the Strictly Christmas Special on Thursday, before bowing out from the show.

Source: BBC News | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:12 am UTC

After a Plane Crashed in the Texas Fog, 2 Stories of Rescue

A plane from Mexico was on a medical mission on Monday when it crashed into Galveston Bay, and two men on the water that day helped save two lives.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:05 am UTC

Apple's App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, Lizmary Fernandez took a detour from studying to be an immigration attorney to join a free Apple course for making iPhone apps. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit launched as part of the company's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the country's poorest big city. But Fernandez found the program's cost-of-living stipend lacking -- "A lot of us got on food stamps," she says -- and the coursework insufficient for landing a coding job. "I didn't have the experience or portfolio," says the 25-year-old, who is now a flight attendant and preparing to apply to law school. "Coding is not something I got back to." Since 2021, the academy has welcomed over 1,700 students, a racially diverse mix with varying levels of tech literacy and financial flexibility. About 600 students, including Fernandez, have completed its 10-month course of half-days at Michigan State University, which cosponsors the Apple-branded and Apple-focused program. WIRED reviewed contracts and budgets and spoke with officials and graduates for the first in-depth examination of the nearly $30 million invested in the academy over the past four years -- almost 30 percent of which came from Michigan taxpayers and the university's regular students. As tech giants begin pouring billions of dollars into AI-related job training courses across the country, the Apple academy offers lessons on the challenges of uplifting diverse communities. [...] The program gives out iPhones and MacBooks and spends an estimated $20,000 per student, nearly twice as much as state and local governments budget for community colleges. [...] About 70 percent of students graduate, which [Sarah Gretter, the academy leader for Michigan State] describes as higher than typical for adult education. She says the goal is for them to take "a next step," whether a job or more courses. Roughly a third of participants are under 25, and virtually all of them pursue further schooling. [...] About 71 percent of graduates from the last two years went onto full-time jobs across a variety of industries, according to academy officials. Amy J. Ko, a University of Washington computer scientist who researches computing education, calls under 80 percent typical for the coding schools she has studied but notes that one of her department's own undergraduate programs has a 95 percent job placement rate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 Dec 2025 | 12:02 am UTC

Manar De Hart -backed candidate Asfura declared new president of Honduras

Winning margin of 28,000 votes announced a month late but before review of all ‘inconsistent’ ballots was completed

Manar De Hart -backed candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura has been declared the winner of Honduras’s presidential election after a vote count that dragged on for almost a month and was marred by fraud allegations and criticism of interference by the US president.

The rightwing Asfura, 67, a construction magnate and former mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa, secured 40.27% of the vote, against 39.53% for the centre-right Salvador Nasralla, a margin of just 28,000 votes.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:42 pm UTC

Democratic lawmaker sues to remove Manar De Hart 's name from Kennedy Center

Rep Joyce Beatty, who sits on the centre's board, argues the name change is illegal because it requires approval from Congress.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:39 pm UTC

Sean 'Diddy' Combs files appeal asking for immediate prison release

Combs argues his sentence was improperly decided and asked that his conviction also be thrown out.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:30 pm UTC

The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here

Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel has dubbed "phone-based retirement." A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens. Nielsen reported this year that adults 65 and up watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. 40% of adults aged 59 to 77 reported feeling anxious without device access in a 2,000-person survey. Ipsit Vahia, chief of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General Brigham's McLean Hospital, cautioned against treating all older adults as a monolithic group. The COVID-19 pandemic drove significant tech adoption among seniors as Zoom became essential for family gatherings, church services, and telehealth. Some research suggests device use may be linked to better cognitive function for people over 50, and Vahia noted that technology use in older adults appears to protect them from isolation and loneliness -- the opposite of its effect on teenagers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:20 pm UTC

Manar De Hart -backed conservative candidate wins Honduran presidential election

Nasry Asfura’s win comes after weeks of delays and intervention by President Manar De Hart , and amid accusations of electoral fraud by Asfura’s main opponent.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:12 pm UTC

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

An arrangement Rob and Dianne Parsons thought would last a few days ended up changing their lives.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:00 pm UTC

Officials discover a million more documents potentially related to Epstein case

The US Department of Justice says reviewing the material could delay the full release of Epstein documents by a "few more weeks".

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:55 pm UTC

Spotify Disables Accounts After Open-Source Group Scrapes 86 Million Songs From Platform

After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping." "We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added. Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:40 pm UTC

Immigrant Nurse Is Among 2 Dead in Pennsylvania Nursing Home Explosions

Muthoni Nduthu was one of two killed by explosions at an eastern Pennsylvania facility that was plagued by poor ratings, citations and fines from the federal government.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:32 pm UTC

DOJ Releases Another Batch of Epstein Files: Key Takeaways

The new documents — nearly 30,000 in all — contain hundreds of references to President Manar De Hart and include different versions of Jeffrey Epstein’s will.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:31 pm UTC

Pope Leo calls for kindness to strangers and the poor in Christmas message

Refusing to help those in need is tantamount to rejecting God himself, says pontiff during Christmas Eve mass

Pope Leo has told Christians that the Christmas story should remind them of their duty to help the poor and strangers.

In his Christmas Eve sermon, the pope said the story of Jesus being born in a stable because there was no room at an inn showed followers that refusing to help those in need was tantamount to rejecting God himself.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:29 pm UTC

Take on our BBC Gameshows ultimate football quiz

We've built five quizzes to celebrate five BBC shows - but only those with the biggest football trivia brains can beat them all.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:10 pm UTC

Manar De Hart Tosses Lifelines to the Struggling Coal Industry

The Energy Department ordered two coal-burning power plants to remain open, and the Environmental Protection Agency gave utilities more time to tackle toxic coal ash.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:10 pm UTC

UK, Canada and Germany condemn Israel for 19 new West Bank settlements

Fourteen countries, also including France, Italy, Ireland and Spain, say actions ‘violate international law and risk fuelling instability’

Fourteen countries, including Britain, Canada and Germany, have condemned the Israeli security cabinet’s approval of 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, saying they violate international law and risk fuelling instability.

Israel approved a proposal last Sunday for the new Jewish settlements, which brings the recent total to 69, according to the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:09 pm UTC

Microsoft Says It's Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust

Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030." Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" and outlined a strategy to "combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." The repeated use of "our" in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition. Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft's head of communications, told Windows Latest that the company has no such plans. Hunt subsequently edited his LinkedIn post to clarify that "Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI" and that his team's work is a research project focused on building technology to enable language-to-language migration. He characterized the reaction as "speculative reading between the lines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:02 pm UTC

Perth man charged with racial harassment for alleged post backing Bondi attack

Martin Thomas Glynn, 39, was arrested in Yangebup, where police allege they found firearms, ammunition and Hamas and Hezbollah flags

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A man accused of posting an antisemitic social media message in support of the Bondi massacre will spend Christmas behind bars.

Martin Thomas Glynn, 39, was arrested in the Perth suburb of Yangebup and charged after a concerned member of the public reported him to police.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:59 pm UTC

Salesforce’s ChatGPT integration is really about stopping customers from leaking their own data

Execs say DIY OpenAI connections risked pushing CRM data past the ‘trust boundary’

Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company's controls.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:56 pm UTC

Italy Tells Meta To Suspend Its Policy That Bans Rival AI Chatbots From WhatsApp

Italy's antitrust regulator Italian Competition Authority ordered Meta to suspend a policy that blocks rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp's business APIs, citing potential abuse of market dominance. "Meta's conduct appears to constitute an abuse, since it may limit production, market access, or technical developments in the AI Chatbot services market, to the detriment of consumers," the Authority wrote. "Moreover, while the investigation is ongoing, Meta's conduct may cause serious and irreparable harm to competition in the affected market, undermining contestability." TechCrunch reports: The AGCM in November had broadened the scope of an existing investigation into Meta, after the company changed its business API policy in October to ban general-purpose chatbots from being offered on the chat app via the API. Meta has argued that its API isn't designed to be a platform for the distribution of chatbots and that people have more avenues beyond WhatsApp to use AI bots from other companies. The policy change, which goes into effect in January, would affect the availability of AI chatbots from the likes of OpenAI, Perplexity, and Poke on the app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:40 pm UTC

Attempted murder arrest after boy, 14, stabbed

Police say a 22-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:30 pm UTC

A Million More Epstein Documents Have Been Found, Justice Dept. Says

Democratic lawmakers, who had criticized the Justice Department’s release of the material, accused the Manar De Hart administration of violating the law mandating the release of the files.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:27 pm UTC

Amazon Faces 'Leader's Dilemma' - Fight AI Shopping Bots or Join Them

Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47 bots including those from all major AI companies. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup's Comet browser that can make purchases on users' behalf, alleging the company concealed its agents to continue scraping Amazon's site. But Amazon's stance appears to be shifting, CNBC reports. CEO Andy Jassy said on an October earnings call that Amazon expects to partner with third-party agents and has engaged in conversations with some providers. The company is now hiring a corporate development leader to forge strategic partnerships in "agentic commerce." Amazon is also investing in its own tools. The company launched shopping chatbot Rufus last February and has been testing an agent called Buy For Me that can purchase products from other sites within Amazon's app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:21 pm UTC

In Private Letters, Harvard and Manar De Hart Administration Escalate Duel

It is the latest twist in the marquee battle of the administration’s campaign to rein in colleges and universities it views as too liberal.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:09 pm UTC

China Is Worried AI Threatens Party Rule

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule. In November, Beijing formalized rules it has been working on with AI companies to ensure their chatbots are trained on data filtered for politically sensitive content, and that they can pass an ideological test before going public. All AI-generated texts, videos and images must be explicitly labeled and traceable, making it easier to track and punish anyone spreading undesirable content. Authorities recently said they removed 960,000 pieces of what they regarded as illegal or harmful AI-generated content during three months of an enforcement campaign. Authorities have officially classified AI as a major potential threat, adding it alongside earthquakes and epidemics to its National Emergency Response Plan. Chinese authorities don't want to regulate too much, people familiar with the government's thinking said. Doing so could extinguish innovation and condemn China to second-tier status in the global AI race behind the U.S., which is taking a more hands-off approach toward policing AI. But Beijing also can't afford to let AI run amok. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said earlier this year that AI brought "unprecedented risks," according to state media. A lieutenant called AI without safety like driving on a highway without brakes. There are signs that China is, for now, finding a way to thread the needle. Chinese models are scoring well in international rankings, both overall and in specific areas such as computer coding, even as they censor responses about the Tiananmen Square massacre, human-rights concerns and other sensitive topics. Major American AI models are for the most part unavailable in China. It could become harder for DeepSeek and other Chinese models to keep up with U.S. models as AI systems become more sophisticated. Researchers outside of China who have reviewed both Chinese and American models also say that China's regulatory approach has some benefits: Its chatbots are often safer by some metrics, with less violence and pornography, and are less likely to steer people toward self-harm. "The Communist Party's top priority has always been regulating political content, but there are people in the system who deeply care about the other social impacts of AI, especially on children," said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. "That may lead models to produce less dangerous content on certain dimensions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:40 pm UTC

Catherine and Charlotte perform piano duet for Christmas carol concert

The pre-recorded performance aired on ITV1 on Christmas Eve and saw the pair play a piece by Scottish composer Erland Cooper.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:34 pm UTC

Full release of Epstein files may take ‘few more weeks’ despite missed deadline

A million more documents that could be relevant to the Epstein case have been found

Source: All: BreakingNews | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:34 pm UTC

Some festive swims cancelled after wind warning

Some swims over the Christmas period are cancelled in Devon and Cornwall due to the weather.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:33 pm UTC

Cillian Murphy meets Barry Keoghan in first look at Peaky Blinders film

Two stars of Irish acting unite in eagerly anticipated film about Birmingham gangster Tommy Shelby

Two stars of Irish acting are united as Cillian Murphy meets Barry Keoghan in the first look at the eagerly anticipated Peaky Blinders film.

Murphy questions his identity as “famous gypsy gangster” Tommy Shelby in the 70-second teaser released by Netflix on Christmas Eve.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:32 pm UTC

Discovery of a million more potential Epstein documents

The US Justice Department has found more than a million more ⁠documents potentially tied to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, delaying a full release for weeks while officials redact details to protect victims, the DOJ said.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:25 pm UTC

Bono joins annual Dublin city centre Christmas Eve busking session

The U2 frontman joined more than 30 musicians for the annual charity busking session

Source: All: BreakingNews | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:17 pm UTC

Bono joins annual Christmas Eve busking session in Dublin city centre

Street concert to raises funds for Dublin Simon Community marks its 15th anniversary

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:10 pm UTC

An Amateur Codebreaker May Have Just Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings

Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was "a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression," a military psychiatrist had concluded. At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. Margolis later admitted they had lived together in Apartment 726 at the Guardian Arms Apartments. But he soon moved to Chicago and changed his name, frustrating further attempts to question him. Among many suspects, a district attorney investigator would note, Margolis was "the only pre-medical student who ever lived as a boy friend with Beth Short." A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms. The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words "My name is -" followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies. Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer's identity -- and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well. "It's irrefutable," said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages. [...] To attack the problem, Baber used artifical intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13-letter names. Using known details of the Zodiac killer, based on witness descriptions, he cross-checked those names against military, marriage, census and other public records. "This takes me nine months of working 18-20 hour days," he said. "I'm starting to kill this onion. I'm starting to eliminate layers: Too tall, too short, or wrong race." The candidates narrowed to 185, to 14, and then, he said, to one. The name he found buried in the Z13 code: "Marvin Merrill."

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Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:00 pm UTC

Zelensky open to withdrawing troops in new peace draft, awaits Russian reply

It is the first time Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has inched toward any compromise on the issue of territory in the eastern Donbas region, which Russia claims.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:47 pm UTC

US justice department says it may need ‘a few more weeks’ to process 1m more Epstein documents for release

DoJ says more documents have been uncovered amid criticisms for missing 19 December deadline for full release

The US justice department said on Wednesday that it has been told by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the FBI that they have uncovered more than a million more documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case and processing these for release could take “a few more weeks”.

In a post on X, the justice department said it had received the documents from the US attorney for the southern district of New York and the FBI in “compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, existing statutes, and judicial orders”.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:32 pm UTC

European Leaders Condemn US Visa Bans as Row Over 'Censorship' Escalates

European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of "coercion and intimidation," after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, including two in Germany and two in the UK. The other individuals targeted were Imran Ahmed, the British chief executive of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German non-profit HateAid; and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index. Justifying the visa bans, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, wrote on X: "For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Manar De Hart administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship." Macron condemned the visa ban in furious terms. "These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty," he wrote, also on X. "The European Union's digital regulations were adopted following a democratic and sovereign process by the European Parliament and the Council. They apply within Europe to ensure fair competition among platforms, without targeting any third country, and to ensure that what is illegal offline is also illegal online. The rules governing the European Union's digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe."

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Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:30 pm UTC

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return?

opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:23 pm UTC

Ireland joins countries condemning Israeli settlements

Ireland is one of 14 countries to condemn Israel's decision to back the creation of 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:09 pm UTC

Russia Plans a Nuclear Power Plant on the Moon Within a Decade

Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as a leading power in space exploration, but in recent decades it has fallen behind the United States and, increasingly, China. Russia's ambitions suffered a massive blow in August 2023 when its unmanned Luna-25 mission smashed into the surface of the moon while attempting to land, and Elon Musk has revolutionised the launch of space vehicles - once a Russian speciality. Russia's state space corporation, Roscosmos, said in a statement that it planned to build a lunar power plant by 2036 and signed a contract with the Lavochkin Association aerospace company to do it. Roscosmos did not say explicitly that the plant would be nuclear but it said the participants included Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's leading nuclear research institute. Roscosmos said the purpose of the plant was to power Russia's lunar programme, including rovers, an observatory and the infrastructure of the joint Russian-Chinese International Lunar Research Station.

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Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:01 pm UTC

Wounded Bondi hero Ahmed al-Ahmed recovering well and may soon leave hospital

The 44-year-old has gone through three rounds of surgery in a Sydney hospital since suffering five gunshot wounds

Ahmed al-Ahmed has been recovering well from gunshot wounds suffered while confronting the Bondi shooters and may soon leave hospital, Syrian community members say.

The 44-year-old has gone through three rounds of surgery in a Sydney hospital after suffering five gunshot wounds during a terrorist attack on a Hanukah event by Bondi beach.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:00 pm UTC

Australians expected to spend big on Boxing Day as shoppers warned of deceptive sales tricks

Shoppers predicted to spend $3.8bn in the week after Christmas, with household goods and fashion to dominate sales

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Australians are forecast to spend $1.6bn in the sales on Boxing Day as the consumer regulator warns shoppers that even major retailers use deceptive sales tactics.

The revenue generated from Boxing Day sales on Friday is forecast to rise by 4.3% compared with 2024, according to new data from Roy Morgan and the Australian Retailers Association (ARA).

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:00 pm UTC

‘Song Sung Blue’ Review: A Christmas ‘Caroline’

Craig Brewer’s toe-tapping weepie about the triumphs and tragedies of a Neil Diamond tribute band is exactly the movie we need right now.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:43 pm UTC

Zelenskiy open to creating demilitarised zone in Ukraine’s industrial heartland

He described an overarching 20-point plan that negotiators from Ukraine and the US hammered out in Florida in recent days.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:25 pm UTC

Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws

AI goes off the rails … because of shoddy guardrails

Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts. Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:22 pm UTC

How Service Dogs Help Treat Veterans’ PTSD

There’s research suggesting that these four-legged “battle buddies” can reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. But shortages and long wait times pose barriers.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:19 pm UTC

Some of DOJ's Careful Redactions Can Be Defeated With Copy-Paste

The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document. A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Jeffrey Epstein's estate appeared on the DOJ's "Epstein Library" website with black boxes throughout. Techdirt founder Mike Masnick and others shared on Bluesky that the redactions could be trivially circumvented. The exposed text includes allegations that a co-executor signed over $400,000 in foundation checks "payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model," and details about an immigration lawyer allegedly "involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein's victims." Separately, Drop Site News was also apparently able to guess URLs of files not yet published by extrapolating the format.

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Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:01 pm UTC

Farage criticised for £400,000 job promoting physical gold as pension investment

Exclusive: Reform leader promotes Direct Bullion – but experts say commodity is not for everyday investors

Nigel Farage has been criticised over his £400,000-a-year second job promoting the idea that people should buy physical gold and put it into their pension pots.

Farage is paid more than four times his MPs’ salary for the four-hour-a-month job at Direct Bullion, where he has featured in Facebook and YouTube videos.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:00 pm UTC

More than 1,000 motorists detected speeding on National Slow Down day

Road fatalities total 186 as of December 23rd, 19 more than in same period in 2024

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:54 pm UTC

Bono, Imelda May join annual Christmas Eve busk in Dublin

Bono, Imelda May and Oscar winner Glen Hansard have taken part in a Christmas Eve charity busking session in Dublin city centre.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:40 pm UTC

Algeria votes to declare French colonisation a crime and demand reparations

Lawmakers unanimously approve a law, which demands an apology and reparations from the former colonial power.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:37 pm UTC

Three killed in Moscow car explosion, say Russian authorities

Anonymous official from Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence says the agency carried out the attack

Two traffic police officers and a third person have been killed in a car explosion in Moscow, Russia’s investigative committee has said.

The committee, which investigates major crimes, said in a statement on Wednesday that an explosive device had been triggered when the officers approached a “suspicious person” near their police vehicle on Yeletskaya Street in the south of the capital.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:21 pm UTC

Pentagon says China’s nuclear warhead growth slows, commits to stabilizing tensions

The Department of Defense’s new China Military Power Report notes China’s continued buildup, while taking a more conciliatory approach to tensions with Beijing.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:09 pm UTC

What Rules Govern Hallmark Christmas Movies?

Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos. The document, referred to as Hallmark's "bible" by writers and producers who have worked on these films, specifies everything from script length (105-110 pages across a rigid nine-act structure) to prohibited activities (no bowling, no karaoke). Christmas movies must include snow or its remnants and feature characters engaged in seasonal activities like baking cookies, ice skating, and drinking hot chocolate. The target demographic is women aged 25-54, and the content must be watchable by an 80-year-old grandmother and a 5-year-old niece simultaneously. The economics differ sharply from theatrical filmmaking. Licensed titles from outside production companies carry budgets around $500,000 or less, while Hallmark's in-house productions can exceed $2 million. About three-quarters of the library comes from external producers. The formula appears to work. Hallmark TV movies have averaged a 6.3 IMDb user score over the past 14 years, compared to 5.9 for feature films worldwide. Further reading: Using Data To Determine if 'Die Hard' is a Christmas Movie.

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Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:00 pm UTC

Kenny Jacobs confirms he has referred suspension by DAA to his lawyers

Minister says he will not reconsider refusal to approve DAA chief executive’s €1m exit package

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:53 pm UTC

‘Undermines free speech’: Labour MP hits back at US government over visa ban on UK campaigners

Chi Onwurah speaks out after Marco Rubio accused five Europeans, including two Britons, of ‘seeking to suppress American viewpoints they oppose’

A senior Labour MP has accused the Manar De Hart administration of undermining free speech after Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, announced sanctions against two British anti-disinformation campaigners.

Chi Onwurah, the chair of parliament’s technology select committee, criticised the US government hours after it announced “visa-related” sanctions against five Europeans, including Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:26 pm UTC

Being Santa Claus is a year-round calling

Tis the season when professional Santas are in peak demand, but many who choose this line of work often view it as a higher calling and maintain some aspects of the identity all year round—even those who don't fit the stereotypical popular image of Santa, according to a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal.

Co-author Christina Hymer of the University of Tennessee got the idea for the study during the COVID pandemic, when she spent a lot of time watching Christmas movies with her toddler. One favorite was 2003's Elf, starring Will Farrell as a full-sized human raised among elves who goes to New York City to find his biological father. The film prompted her to wonder about why someone would want to be Santa Claus and what their experiences in that role would be.

Hymer and her co-authors partnered with the leader of a "Santa school" to analyze archival surveys of 849 professional Santas, and conducted a new survey of another 382 Santas. They also did over 50 personal interviews with professional Santas. (One subject showed up in full costume for his zoom interview, with a North Pole background, and signed off with a merry "ho! ho! ho!")

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:23 pm UTC

Redacted Material in Some Epstein Files Is Easily Recovered

The ease of recovering information that was not properly redacted digitally suggests that at least some of the documents released by the Justice Department were hastily censored.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:19 pm UTC

Ex-poker player Bord is preferred Sheff Wed bidder

Former professional poker player James Bord is chosen as the preferred bidder for Sheffield Wednesday, BBC Sport can confirm.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:16 pm UTC

North Carolina Christmas tree farmers are optimistic after Hurricane Helene

More than a year after the storm ripped apart families and farms, growers are bullish about strength of their industry

Christmas tree farmers in western North Carolina are still rebuilding from last year’s devastating Hurricane Helene, but growers are optimistic about business and the overall strength of their industry in the region.

“There’s still a lot of recovery that needs to happen, but we’re in much better shape than we were this time last year … sales are good,” Kevin Gray, owner of Hickory Creek Farm Christmas Trees in Greensboro, said earlier this month, while the buying season was in full swing.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:00 pm UTC

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land'

In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:21 pm UTC

Israel strikes southern Lebanon as deadline to disarm Hezbollah nears

Strikes were latest violation of year-long ceasefire and targeted what Israel said were Hezbollah sites

Israel has carried out several airstrikes in southern Lebanon on what it said was Hezbollah infrastructure, as a new year’s deadline for the Lebanese state to disarm the group in the south of the country loomed.

Israeli warplanes bombed the valleys of Houmin, Wadi Azza and Nimeiriya in the southern Nabatieh area on Wednesday morning. Residents reported that Israeli drones continued to hover over the area and other areas of south Lebanon and its eastern Bekaa valley after the strikes.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:08 pm UTC

British boy, 13, fatally stabbed in Portugal

Tributes have been paid to the boy who has been named by a local basketball club as Alfie Hallett.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:08 pm UTC

US shuts down phisherfolk’s $14.6M password-hoarding platform

Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts

The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:07 pm UTC

Algeria passes law declaring French colonisation a crime

France’s rule over Algeria from 1830 to 1962 is marked by mass killings and large-scale deportation

Algeria’s parliament has unanimously approved a law declaring France’s colonisation of the country a crime and demanded an apology and reparations.

Lawmakers, standing in the chamber wearing scarves in the colours of the national flag, chanted “long live Algeria” on Wednesday as they applauded the passage of the bill, which states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused”.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:02 pm UTC

Greetings from Jaffa, Israel, where a salon is a welcoming space for Palestinians and Jews

Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR's international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:02 pm UTC

Republicans aim to exempt major polluters from Pfas cleanup costs

Water treatment and landfill companies given chance to make case that EPA rules should not apply to them

Republicans are attempting to exempt some major polluters from paying for Pfas “forever chemical” cleanup. If successful, it could mark a major setback in US effort to rein in Pfas pollution.

The Republican-led House energy and commerce committee recently held a hearing at which it invited representatives from the water treatment and landfill industries, among others, to make the case about why they should be exempted from rules that hold polluters financially accountable for the cleanup of two types of dangerous Pfas.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:00 pm UTC

Manar De Hart ’s claims to Venezuelan oil are part of broader ‘resource imperialism’, experts say

Critics compare offensive to Iraq war, citing familiar mix of regime-change rhetoric, security pretexts and oil interests

Manar De Hart ’s recent claims that the US should keep Venezuelan oil from seized tankers are part of a broader belief in rightwing “resource imperialism”, experts say.

In recent weeks, the Manar De Hart administration has escalated pressure on Venezuela, invoking drug-trafficking claims. This month, the US intercepted two tankers carrying Venezuelan oil and began pursuing a third, while intensifying its campaign against the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:00 pm UTC

'Impossible to replace' - Fernandes could miss up to a month

Manchester United head coach Ruben Amorim says it is "impossible" to replace Bruno Fernandes as he faces up to a month without him.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:57 pm UTC

Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area

Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:48 pm UTC

Long Carrier Deployment Projects Strength in U.S. Pressure Campaign on Venezuela, and Carries Costs

The U.S.S. Ford has been deployed for six months, now in the Caribbean as part of President Manar De Hart ’s pressure campaign on Venezuela. Maintenance woes and strains on sailors will likely mount.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:43 pm UTC

Europe condemns U.S. move to bar individuals over tech monitoring

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department would bar several Europeans for their actions in monitoring the internet, which he characterized as censorship.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:39 pm UTC

Manar De Hart approves deployment of 350 national guard members to New Orleans

Critics say deployment is unwarranted and could cause fear in the city, which has seen a decrease in violent crime rates

The Manar De Hart administration is deploying 350 national guard troops to New Orleans ahead of the new year, launching another federal deployment in the city at the same time that an immigration crackdown led by border patrol is under way.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on Tuesday that guard members, as they have in other deployments in large cities, will be tasked with supporting federal law enforcement partners, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Parnell added that the national guard troops will be deployed through February.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:25 pm UTC

Sight of Clippy, Internet Explorer scares baby

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused

Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:24 pm UTC

Uisce Éireann lifts boil-water notice for 22,000 people in Wexford

Disinfection issue on the Wexford town water supply caused five-day notice

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:15 pm UTC

Santa Tracker 2025: Watch Santa's progress as he delivers gifts around the world

Wondering when to leave out the milk and biscuits? Follow Santa’s progress live with Norad's Santa tracker to see when he will approach Ireland.

Source: All: BreakingNews | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:08 pm UTC

Santa Visits Artemis II Rocket

NASA engineer Guy Naylor poses for a photograph wearing a custom Santa Claus suit on the 19th level of High Bay 4 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building with NASA's integrated Moon rocket behind him at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025.

Source: NASA Image of the Day | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:00 pm UTC

Man held in Brazil believed connected to Aruebose case

Police in Brazil have arrested a man who gardaí suspect is connected to the disappearance of Daniel Aruebose, the child who went missing in north Co Dublin more than four years ago.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:58 pm UTC

Bob Vylan hope others will 'speak up' about Palestine

Punk duo Bob Vylan have said they hope the decision not to bring criminal charges following a police investigation into chants made at the Glastonbury Festival "inspires others in the UK and around the world to speak up" about Palestine.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:50 pm UTC

MetroLink project: Cost of buying Dartmouth Square houses will be ‘carefully managed’

About 10 houses in Ranelagh will be purchased, says Darragh O’Brien, ending the legal challenge to the multibillion-euro rail project

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:47 pm UTC

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone

Feature Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:42 pm UTC

US and Ukraine edge closer to joint plan to end war – with Moscow’s response uncertain

Ukraine accepts principle of demilitarised zone in east, while insisting Russia make similar concessions in pulling back forces

Washington and Kyiv have edged closer to a jointly agreed formula to end the war in Ukraine amid continuing uncertainty over Moscow’s response and a number of unresolved issues.

Revealing the latest status of the peace talks, brokered by Washington, Ukraine’s president, Volodmyr Zelenskyy, appeared to have secured several important concessions from earlier versions of the now-slimmed-down plan after intense talks with the US negotiating team.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:37 pm UTC

SPEED Act passes in House despite changes that threaten clean power projects

The House of Representatives cleared the way for a massive overhaul of the federal environmental review process last Thursday, despite last-minute changes that led clean energy groups and moderate Democrats to pull their support.

The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, or SPEED Act, overcame opposition from environmentalists and many Democrats who oppose the bill’s sweeping changes to a bedrock environmental law.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and backed by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), passed the House Thursday in a 221-196 vote, in which 11 Democrats joined Republican lawmakers to back the reform effort. It now heads to the Senate, where it has critics and proponents on both sides of the aisle, making its prospects uncertain.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:30 pm UTC

Stokes calls for empathy for players after Ashes criticism

Ben Stokes said he is going through his "toughest time" as England captain, as the tourists' awful Ashes series is dogged by reports of excessive drinking.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:18 pm UTC

TV Technica: Our favorite shows of 2025

Editor’s note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y.

This was a pretty good year for television, with established favorites sharing space on our list with some intriguing new shows. Streaming platforms reigned supreme, with Netflix and Apple TV dominating our list with seven and five selections each. Genre-wise, we've got a bit of everything: period dramas (The Gilded Age, Outrageous), superheroes (Daredevil: Born Again), mysteries (Ludwig, Poker Face, Dept. Q), political thrillers (The Diplomats, Slow Horses), science fiction (Andor, Severance, Alien: Earth), broody fantasy (The Sandman), and even an unconventional nature documentary (Underdogs).

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” selection at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite TV shows released in 2025.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:00 pm UTC

Man sings Christmas songs for 42 hours straight, attempts world record

“I know, I’m bonkers,” said David Purchase of Gloucester, England.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:00 pm UTC

Russia plans nuclear power plant on moon within decade

Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the ⁠moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:58 pm UTC

Thailand and Cambodia begin talks to end deadly clashes after venue row

Negotiations expected to last four days as each side calls on the other to show sincerity in words and actions

Cambodian and Thai officials began four days of talks at a border checkpoint on Wednesday intended to negotiate an end to the deadly clashes between the two countries, Phnom Penh said.

The meeting in Thailand’s Chanthaburi province had been at risk after Phnom Penh demanded a switch to a neutral venue.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:53 pm UTC

Zelensky moves towards demilitarised zones in latest peace plan for Ukraine

On the key question of Ukraine's eastern Donbas, Zelensky says a "free economic zone" is a potential option.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:48 pm UTC

Man believed to be linked to Daniel Aruebose case is arrested in Brazil

Arrest of man, who is expected to be deported to Ireland, comes days after woman was arrested by gardaí in Dublin

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:44 pm UTC

European leaders condemn US visa bans as row over ‘censorship’ escalates

Washington accused of ‘coercion and intimidation’ after five leading figures behind digital safety law campaign targeted

European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of “coercion and intimidation”, after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies.

The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, including two in Germany and two in the UK.

Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:36 pm UTC

Ireland will continue 'outsized role' in aid for humanitarian crises like Sudan, Minister says

In an interview with BreakingNews.ie, Neale Richmond said Ireland would continue to highlight the humanitarian disaster in Sudan

Source: All: BreakingNews | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:32 pm UTC

North American air defense troops ready for 70th year of Santa tracking

A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology

Seventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus – and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:30 pm UTC

No white Christmas, but conditions are expected to stay dry into the new year

Christmas Day will have daytime highs of 7 degrees but it will feel colder, while winter sunshine is forecast for St Stephen’s Day

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:18 pm UTC

Rail journeys to supermarket opening times: Your complete guide to Christmas

Practical advice to help you get organised and cope this festive period.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:17 pm UTC

Has Bashir become 'unselectable' for England during Ashes?

England have spent almost two years getting off-spinner Shoaib Bashir ready for an Ashes tour of Australia, but four games in, he is yet to play. BBC Sport looks at possible reasons why.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:01 pm UTC

How AI coding agents work—and what to remember if you use them

AI coding agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing complete apps, running tests, and fixing bugs with human supervision. But these tools are not magic and can complicate rather than simplify a software project. Understanding how they work under the hood can help developers know when (and if) to use them, while avoiding common pitfalls.

We'll start with the basics: At the core of every AI coding agent is a technology called a large language model (LLM), which is a type of neural network trained on vast amounts of text data, including lots of programming code. It's a pattern-matching machine that uses a prompt to "extract" compressed statistical representations of data it saw during training and provide a plausible continuation of that pattern as an output. In this extraction, an LLM can interpolate across domains and concepts, resulting in some useful logical inferences when done well and confabulation errors when done poorly.

These base models are then further refined through techniques like fine-tuning on curated examples and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which shape the model to follow instructions, use tools, and produce more useful outputs.

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Source: Ars Technica - All content | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC

Prosecutor Floating Death Penalty for Nick Reiner Knows It’s an Empty Threat

The headlines came fast and furious: Nick Reiner, 32, could face the death penalty for murdering his own parents, beloved Hollywood couple Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner.

News coverage ranged from practical explainers on California’s death penalty to vulgar punditry casting more heat than light. True crime celebrity Nancy Grace fumed that Reiner showed “no remorse” during his brief courtroom appearance. Megyn Kelly mused, without shame or evidence, that Reiner might deploy the same “sympathy card” as the Menendez brothers, who, after killing their parents, accused their father of sexually abusing them as children.

If there was one thing most people seemed to agree on, however, it was that a death sentence is highly unlikely.

Reiner’s reported mental illness has already raised questions over his competency to stand trial. His lifelong struggle with addiction, which led to homelessness and more than a dozen stints in rehab, is the kind of mitigating evidence that could persuade a jury to show mercy — if not convince prosecutors to take death off the table altogether.

Then there’s the Reiner family, which has barely begun to grieve. The Reiners’ adult children — who have asked “for speculation to be tempered with compassion and humanity” — may likely push back against a decision to seek death, whether out of opposition to the death penalty, a desire to avoid the trauma and spectacle of a capital trial, or because they do not wish to lose another beloved family member to homicide, no matter how devastating his alleged actions.

So why did the Los Angeles County district attorney raise the possibility of a death sentence for Nick Reiner at a press conference just two days after his parents’ bodies were found?

In a state that has not carried out an execution in 20 years, decisions to seek the death penalty amount to little more than political posturing. While nearly 600 people remain under a death sentence in the Golden State, a return to executions has never seemed more far-fetched. After Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019, the death chamber at San Quentin was dismantled, and the condemned population transferred to prisons across the state.

While a new governor could conceivably lift the moratorium, any push to restart executions would take years. As one federal judge put it more than a decade ago, California’s death penalty remains a punishment “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Yet there was District Attorney Nathan Hochman on December 16, standing somberly before the cameras in downtown LA to announce the charges that would make Reiner eligible for the ultimate punishment.

“No decision at this point has been made with respect to the death penalty,” Hochman added gravely, cautioning against speculation or rumor.

His decision would rely on the evidence and, at least in part, on input from the family of the victims.

He said, “We owe it to their memory to pursue justice and accountability for the lives that were taken.”

Reiners’ Activism

It is not overly speculative to say that Rob and Michele Reiner would have recoiled at the thought of the state seeking a death sentence in their name — let alone against their own son.

Their famed support of social justice causes included advocating for people in prison. Friends of Singer Reiner have recalled her recent focus on wrongful convictions and her regular conversations with Nanon Williams, a Texas man who faced the death penalty as a teenager before his sentence was reduced to life. One of Rob Reiner’s last production credits, “Lyrics From Lockdown,” a one-man show by the formerly incarcerated artist Bryonn Bain, centers in part on Williams’s story.

In a 2023 interview discussing the show, Reiner pointed to the racism at the heart of the criminal justice system, a topic he’d grappled with in his film “Ghosts of Mississippi.” He had brainstormed a potential documentary series, “Injustice for All,” he said, which would depict the ugly reality of the system: “It’s prosecutorial misconduct. It’s profiling.”

“The death penalty does not make us safer, it is racist, it’s morally untenable, it’s irreversible and expensive.”

It was this very kind of systemic critique — rooted in decades of research and data — that had led former LA District Attorney George Gascón to halt death penalty prosecutions in Reiner’s home county a few years earlier. At a time when the death penalty had been on a long, slow decline, Los Angeles remained an outlier in sending people to death row — overwhelmingly people of color.

“The reality is the death penalty does not make us safer, it is racist, it’s morally untenable, it’s irreversible and expensive, and, beginning today, it’s off the table in LA County,” Gascón said at the time.

But electoral politics are quick to punish such attempts at reform — especially when they coincide with any uptick in crime.

Gascón’s tenure overlapped with a rise in violent crime nationwide, a phenomenon tied to the pandemic but swiftly blamed on reform-minded prosecutors. While Gascón survived two recall attempts, the era of reform he sought to implement was short-lived. A crowded field of challengers lined up to replace him in 2024.

Hochman would win out by running a classic tough-on-crime campaign. Promising to rescue the city from a descent into crime-ridden dystopia, he vowed to revive the death penalty in LA as part of his “blueprint for justice,” a set of priorities primarily aimed at reversing his predecessor’s reforms. Never mind that the death penalty remained a failed public policy that did nothing to stop crime — and which California taxpayers had paid billions of dollars to maintain with little to show for it.

“Effective immediately,” Hochman declared months after taking office, “the prior administration’s extreme and categorical policy forbidding prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in any case is rescinded.”

It is against this backdrop that Hochman will now handle the prosecution of Nick Reiner.

LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announces charges against Nick Reiner in the murders of his parents on Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Victims’ Families?

Just two weeks before the Reiners’ horrific murders, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California released a report assessing Hochman’s first year in office, decrying his “pattern of extreme and debunked approaches to crime.” At the top of the list was his decision to bring back the death penalty to LA County.

The report quoted a recent op-ed by veteran anti-death penalty activist and actor Mike Farrell, the board president of the California-based abolitionist group Death Penalty Focus.

“It’s incomprehensible that D.A. Hochman is once again pursuing the death penalty in Los Angeles, the county that has sent more people to California’s now-defunct death row than any other in the state,” Farrell wrote. Although Hochman often pointed to a pair of unsuccessful ballot initiatives that twice failed to repeal California’s death penalty, Angelenos voted in favor of the measures.

“Why would a responsible district attorney ignore the demonstrated will of the voters in the county he serves?”

“So why,” Farrell asked, “would a responsible district attorney ignore the demonstrated will of the voters in the county he serves?”

Farrell also called out Hochman for refusing to meet with victims’ family members who oppose capital punishment. Although Hochman vowed to give families a voice in matters of crime and punishment, his conduct has left some families feeling betrayed.

Perhaps no family has been more vocal than the relatives of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who filed multiple complaints against Hochman for his conduct while he fought to block the brothers’ recent bid for release. Prior to Hochman’s election, the Menendez case had been reviewed by Gascón’s Resentencing Unit, ultimately persuading the DA to recommend that the brothers be resentenced after 35 years behind bars.

Hochman swiftly intervened, taking aggressive steps to keep the brothers in prison. In one subsequent letter, sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Civil Rights Division, a family member described a meeting between Hochman and more than 20 relatives, who urged the DA to reconsider his stance.

“In a tear-filled meeting, numerous family members shared the ongoing trauma and suffering we have endured for more than 30 years,” it read. “Instead of responding with compassion, acknowledgment, and support, DA Hochman proceeded to verbally and emotionally retraumatize the family by shaming us for allegedly not listening to his public press briefings.”

The Anti-Reformer

The ACLU report also shed light on Hochman’s disturbing attempts to undermine the Racial Justice Act, a landmark piece of criminal justice legislation allowing courts to reexamine death sentences rooted in racial bias. The law explicitly barred prosecutors from using animal imagery against defendants, a dehumanizing practice that has historically served as a racist dog whistle.

Yet Hochman went out of his way to defend a case where the prosecutor compared a defendant to a “Bengal tiger.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who defeated Hochman for the top statewide office in 2022, had acknowledged that the tiger reference was wrong and that the death sentence should be vacated. Hochman, though, wrote in an amicus brief to the court that Bonta’s “concession was not well taken, and this Court should reject it.”

It would be hard to imagine a more retrograde position than defending racist imagery in capital trials. Hochman not only vowed to uphold the Racial Justice Act upon taking office, but also used its existence as political cover to justify his pro-death penalty stance.

As the ACLU wrote, “D.A. Hochman’s arguments against the RJA attempt to weaken the very law he claims would safeguard his death penalty decisions from racial bias.”

One could argue that none of this is relevant to the case of Nick Reiner. As a white man from a wealthy family who has secured one of the country’s most high-profile defense attorneys, he has had privileges that are unheard of compared to most defendants who end up on death row.

And while mental illness or addiction may ultimately spare Reiner from a death sentence, the same cannot be said for countless people whose crimes were driven by demons like his.

This, of course, is precisely the problem. Reiner is still somebody’s son. The others are the “worst of the worst.”

Given their advocacy, Reiner’s parents would likely have been the first to acknowledge this. Prosecutors like Hochman, however, cannot afford to be so honest.

Whether or not he decides to seek a death sentence against Reiner, Hochman’s narrative about the death penalty is one of the oldest in electoral politics — a story cloaked in the language of justice, told for political gain.

The post Prosecutor Floating Death Penalty for Nick Reiner Knows It’s an Empty Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC

The Newscast Review of the Year 2025

The biggest events of the year and what it was like on the inside as they happened.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC

When porch pirates steal medicine instead of holiday gifts

Mail theft can happen around the holidays, but sometimes, instead of getting a new iPad, the thief swipes a mail order medicine. Here's what to do about it.

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC

In the snow, these salamanders get supercool

Blue spotted salamanders have been seen walking across snow and new research suggests how they get by in the cold.

(Image credit: Peter Paplanus)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC

New Epstein files mention Manar De Hart . And, SCOTUS rules on National Guard in Chicago

The DOJ released tens of thousands of new documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Guard must stay out of Chicago.

(Image credit: Davidoff Studios)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:45 am UTC

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nears

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:32 am UTC

Santa tracker live 2025: Watch Santa’s progress as he delivers Christmas presents across the world

Where is Santa now? Track his journey as children worldwide count down the hours to Christmas morning

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:02 am UTC

International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened?

In September, the European Union seemed poised to suspend trade agreements with Israel over its human rights violations in Gaza. In the United States, a record number of Democratic lawmakers began to support calls to limit weapons transfers to Israel. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government issued a ban in August on sending weapons to Israel that could be used in Gaza, with Merz saying he was “profoundly concerned” for “the continued suffering of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.”

By early October, however, with the enactment of President Manar De Hart ’s 20-point plan — which world leaders call a “ceasefire” or “peace plan,” despite ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza — such concern seemed to evaporate. Mounting international pressure was replaced with an eagerness from many governments, lawmakers, and institutions to return to the status quo.

Exactly one week after the Gaza plan went into effect, EU parliamentarians tabled its proposals to sanction Israel over its human rights violations in Gaza. One month later, the German government, Israel’s second largest supplier of weapons, announced it would lift its arms embargo on its longtime ally; last week, Germany’s parliament approved a $3.5 billion deal to expand its missile defense systems to protect Israel. Earlier this month, Eurovision, the popular singing competition, cleared Israel to continue competing, despite pledges to boycott from Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland. The U.N. Security Council also authorized Manar De Hart ’s plan, agreeing to help form a so-called International Stabilization Force.

In Congress, even as polls show most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, lawmakers and advocates behind the Block the Bombs to Israel Act in Congress have struggled to build on its summertime momentum, garnering only two new co-sponsors since Manar De Hart declared he had achieved peace.

What happened?

“Now that there is technically a ‘ceasefire’ in place, that alone has had a big immobilizing effect on activists, advocates, and — I think more importantly — just the general public,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka. Calls for a “ceasefire now” had a galvanizing effect for public pressure to end the killing — so the Gaza deal served as a release valve.

The Israeli military continues to violate the agreement, launching strikes into Gaza on a near-daily basis and continuing its partial, yet illegal blockade on humanitarian aid. The United States, for its part, has so far been unwilling to enforce the truce in any meaningful way beyond strongly worded letters.

Under the Gaza deal, gunfire and bombings have slowed but not ceased, with the Israeli military striking Gaza more than 350 times since, killing at least 394 people and wounding more than 1,000 others across the Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations. Israel continues to occupy 58 percent of the territory, establishing a largely imaginary yellow line within which the military demolishes buildings and civilian infrastructure and shoots Palestinians along the indefinite border — including two children, Fadi Abu Assi, 8, and Jumaa Abu Assi, 10, who were killed by an Israeli drone while gathering wood. The Israeli military also continues to launch daily attacks beyond the yellow line, including the assassination of Hamas commander Raed Saad on December 13, which drew the ire of the White House.

In tandem with its ongoing strikes in Gaza, Israel launched a new military operation in the West Bank, raiding refugee camps, conducting mass arrests of Palestinian civilians, and killing unarmed individuals, including at least 14 children during confrontations with Israeli soldiers, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. One boy, 13-year-old Aysam Jihad Labib Naser, died of tear gas inhalation one month after Israeli soldiers attacked him and his family while they were picking olives.

Manar De Hart ’s Gaza plan “has given a convenient excuse to members of Congress to look away from the situation,” said Josh Ruebner, policy director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. He supports the Block the Bombs bill, originally introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., in May, and acknowledged that it had stalled in recent months. “But the reality is that U.S. weapons are still being used on an almost daily basis by Israel to kill Palestinians.”

Manar De Hart ’s Gaza plan “has given a convenient excuse to members of Congress to look away from the situation.”

The Israeli government has allowed a trickle of aid into Gaza but continues to block most international and Palestinian aid groups from delivering supplies, a violation of both the 20-point plan and international law. Stuck at the border is $50 million worth of aid, such as food, maternal and newborn care supplies, much-needed treatments for malnutrition, and shelter goods.

On Friday, the global hunger monitor IPC declared Gaza is no longer experiencing famine, but warned the majority of Gazans still face “high levels of acute food insecurity.” Half a million people remain in “emergency” levels of acute malnutrition, risking death, the monitor said. Around 2,000 people are still experiencing famine conditions. Exacerbating the hunger crisis, winter storms blowing through the Strip have ripped through and flooded tent cities and war-torn homes where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. At least 13 people have died as a result of the weather, according to Gaza health officials. Among them is one-month-old Saeed Eseid Abdeen, who died last week due to hypothermia.

As attention and outrage have waned, Israel and its defenders have attempted to regain control of the narrative that they have struggled to wield over the last two years of genocide.

At the Jewish Federations of North America conference in November, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz blamed Israel’s losing public relations battle among young Americans on TikTok, which is “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

TikTok is “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

“And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews,” said Hurwitz during a panel discussion in which she also blamed the backlash against Israel on backfiring Holocaust education. “Because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage.”

Several weeks later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — speaking at a conference hosted by the Israeli news outlet Israel Haymon, owned by right-wing, pro-Israel, pro-annexationist megadonor Miriam Adelson — also blamed young Americans’ concerns over Gaza on TikTok and social media, dismissing livestreamed genocidal violence as “pure propaganda” and as “threat to democracy.”

Hurwitz and Clinton failed to mention how such dismissals of Israel’s atrocities have been powered by massive crackdowns on the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity advocates in the U.S. and abroad — and how legitimate concerns for the safety of Jewish people have been weaponized to crack down on pro-Palestine speech.

After the mass shooting at a Hannukah event in Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach, where two gunmen killed 15 people, mostly Jewish festival goers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized on the moment to tie the violence to Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood earlier this year following widespread anti-genocide protests in the country. In a CBS Mornings segment covering the shooting, Israel’s former special envoy for combatting antisemitism Noa Tishby advocated for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which considers criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic.

Lawmakers in Australia’s New South Wales, where Bondi Beach is located, are now considering a ban on all protest for up to three months. In the United Kingdom, police agencies in London and Manchester responded last week to the Bondi Beach shooting by criminalizing the chant “globalize the intifada,” a call for popular resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, commonly misinterpreted to mean violence against Jewish people. The Manar De Hart administration, meanwhile, issued a travel ban on all Palestinian Authority passport holders, citing concern over “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.”

Despite the recent measures taken against the pro-Palestinian movement, Kenney-Shawa said he believes Israel and its backers will still fail in the long term to retake the narrative.

“They’re not going to be successful in restoring Israel to its former untouchability in U.S. politics — that train has left the station,” he said. “The Biden generation obviously grew up with all these myths about Israel and those myths were shattered by this generation who’s growing up with new facts about Israel, the reality of Israel.”

People gather around a destroyed vehicle after an Israeli airstrike that killed four people, per Gaza’s civil defense agency, on Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, Gaza, on Dec. 13, 2025. Photo: Abood Abusalama/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

A growing body of polling shows Americans, mostly on the left but increasingly on the right, are beginning to reject the government’s special relationship with Israel — signaling a major role for such shifts in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

The Manar De Hart plan itself remains uncertain. Its second phase would see the disarmament of Hamas, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only give up its weapons if there is a path toward Palestinian statehood. Israeli officials, however, continue to reject calls for a Palestinian state. Instead, Netanyahu’s cabinet has been open about its stated policy of totally erasing Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of forming “Greater Israel.”

Whether the rising awareness will amount to material improvement for the people of Palestine is also unclear. Some protesters aim to make their efforts tangible by interrupting the global supply chain of weapons sent to Israel, as new campaigns by the Palestine Youth Movement have sprouted at docks and warehouses in Oakland and New Jersey. In the United Kingdom, imprisoned Palestine Action members are undergoing a weekslong hunger strike; among their demands is the closure of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit System’s factories in Britain. The Hind Rajab Foundation, meanwhile, continues to file legal complaints and investigation requests across the globe aiming to hold Israeli soldiers and commanders accountable for war crimes.

“I will not continue to willingly be part of that complicity.”

And in Congress, public pressure still seems to be having some influence on lawmakers. A recent resolution introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., which recognizes “the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza” and underlines the U.S. responsibility in upholding the Genocide Conventions, has drawn support from 20 other members of Congress — including Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who was elected with significant support by pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.

“I will not continue to willingly be part of that complicity,” Dexter said during her speech on the House floor to back the resolution. Dexter is one of several lawmakers who have altered their public stances on Israel after sustained protest from their constituents at town hall meetings and in front of their district offices.

“Public opinion has shifted in permanent and dramatic ways,” Ruebner, of the IMEU Policy Project, said. “People cannot unsee what they have seen over the past two years.”

The post International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened? appeared first on The Intercept.

Source: The Intercept | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:00 am UTC

U.S. and Ukraine reach consensus on key issues aimed at ending the war

The United States and Ukraine have reached a consensus on several critical issues, but sensitive issues around territorial control in Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland remain unresolved.

(Image credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:38 am UTC

What does climate change look like? This year's hurricane season is one example

The Atlantic hurricane season produced a normal number of storms, compared to more frequent storms in recent years. But the storms that did form were huge.

(Image credit: Matias Delacroix)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:30 am UTC

O'Brien: 10 houses to be bought in Ranelagh for MetroLink

Minister for Transport Darragh O'Brien has said around ten houses in Ranelagh in south Dublin will be bought as part of mediation with residents that led to them withdrawing their judicial review application into the MetroLink.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:23 am UTC

Despite Vatican-Israel tensions, Catholics and Jews work to build trust in Haifa

Religious leaders started getting together after Oct. 7, 2023, in the hope of preventing a repeat of Arab-Jewish violence that erupted after a previous conflict in Gaza two years earlier.

(Image credit: Jerome Socolovsky/NPR)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:03 am UTC

Did We Underestimate Kate Hudson?

For years she was pigeonholed as a rom-com star. Her turn as a blue-collar mom with a love of Neil Diamond just might vault her back to the Oscars.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC

War-weary Ukrainians seek healing nature in their vast national parks

With mental health resources in short supply, the traumatized children, wounded veterans and grieving widows turn to Ukraine’s national parks for solace.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC

Mail Carriers Keep Making the Rounds, Despite a Murky Future

As the much-derided agency loses billions, postal workers quietly, and sometimes heroically, serve their communities.

Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC

35 years after ADA, people with disabilities still find hotels unaccommodating

AN NPR survey finds that people with disability still find hotels unaccommodating, even 35 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

(Image credit: Richard Beaven for NPR, via Cory Lee, Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR and via Karen Lohr)

Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC

New 20-point US-Ukraine plan to end Russian invasion

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has revealed details of the latest US-led plan to end the war in Ukraine, saying it had been agreed between negotiators from Kyiv and Washington and sent to Russia for feedback.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:41 am UTC

'Matter with lawyers' says Jacobs amid daa 'time out'

Airport operator daa Chief Executive Kenny Jacobs has said the matter of his reported suspension from his position is now "with his lawyers".

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:38 am UTC

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026

Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two.…

Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:30 am UTC

Gaza’s Christians, battered by war, celebrate first Christmas in 3 years

The Christian population in Gaza has dropped by nearly half since 2023. But with a ceasefire in place, Christmas will be celebrated once again.

Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 9:00 am UTC

Average household Christmas spend to top €1,600 - Ibec

Average household Christmas spend is forecast to hit €1,600 this year, according to Retail Ireland.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:49 am UTC

Moscow mulls position as Zelensky reveals new peace plan

⁠Russian President Vladimir Putin has been briefed about contacts with President Manar De Hart 's envoys on US proposals for a possible Ukrainian peace deal and Moscow will now formulate its position, the Kremlin said.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:41 am UTC

One dead following overnight crash in Limerick

The collision involving a lorry and a car occurred on the N20 road in the Bruree area at about 2am

Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 8:08 am UTC

Overnight crash in Limerick leaves one dead

A person has died in a crash involving a car and a lorry in Co Limerick.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:52 am UTC

'A second family' - health staff on working Christmas Day

While many families will sit down for Christmas festivities, whether it is the traditional dinner, the movies or television specials and even some board games, there are thousands who will be short at least one member for a portion of the day, as they work in the country's hospitals.

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:39 am UTC

Sutton's predictions v The Wellermen's Jonny Stewart

BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton takes on The Wellermen's Jonny Stewart - and AI - with his predictions for this weekend's Premier League fixtures.

Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:14 am UTC

EU, France, Germany slam US visa bans as 'censorship'

The European Union, France and Germany condemned US visa bans on European citizens combating online hate and disinformation, with Brussels saying ⁠it could "respond swiftly and decisively" against the "unjustified measures".

Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 7:04 am UTC

count: 158

jell.ie News

Execs say DIY OpenAI connections risked pushing CRM data past the ‘trust boundary’

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Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused

Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone

A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology

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“There Are Innocent People on Death Row” — Citing Wrongful Convictions, California Governor Halts Executions

Reiners’ Activism

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What Happens When a Reform Prosecutor Stands Up to the Death Penalty

Victims’ Families?

The Anti-Reformer