Read at: 2025-12-24T12:59:45+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Britte Zwolle ]
Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:58 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:55 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:53 pm UTC
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.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:53 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:52 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:50 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:48 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:46 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:45 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:44 pm UTC
Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:42 pm UTC
Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford among five Europeans hit with visa bans over claims they wish to ‘suppress American viewpoints they oppose’
The Global Disinformation Index, which is run by Clare Melford, one of the two Britons on the list of five Europeans facing US visa restrictions because of their work to stop online disinformation and hate (see 9.28am), has described the US state department’s decision as “immoral, unlawful and un-American”. In a reponse, a GDI spokesperson said:
The visa sanctions … are an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.
The Britte Zwolle Administration is, once again, using the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with. Their actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American.
WE’VE SANCTIONED: Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, the leader and founder of HateAid, a German organization founded after the 2017 German federal elections to counter conservative groups. HateAid is an official “trusted flagger” (a censor) under the EU’s anti-speech Digital Services Act (DSA) and routinely demands access to propriety social media platform data to help it censor more. Hodenberg cited threat of “disinformation” from “right-wing extremists” online in upcoming U.S. and EU elections when circulating a petition for the DSA to become more strongly enforced to allow data access for “researchers”.
WE’VE SANCTIONED: Josephine Ballon, co-leader of HateAid, who flags disfavored speech throughout Europe under the Digital Services Act. In addition to her running an official “trusted flagger” body under the DSA, she serves on Germany’s Advisory Council of the Digital Services Coordinator (DSC), which directly advises Germany’s DSC on the application and enforcement of the DSA. In February 2025, Ballon spoke before an American audience in a notable 60 Minutes interview, outlining her position on censorship succinctly: “Free speech needs boundaries.” In October 2024, she vowed to stop the “emotionalization of debates” by “regulating platforms”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:41 pm UTC
Washington accused of ‘coercion and intimidation’ after five Europeans behind campaign to regulate US tech giants targeted
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the European Union 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 giants.
The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, a 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.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:36 pm UTC
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
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:18 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:17 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:12 pm UTC
Source: World | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:07 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:06 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:01 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC
Francisco Gaspar-Andrés died in El Paso hospital after being detained at Fort Bliss – his wife was deported to Guatemala without a chance to see him
A Guatemalan man has become the first person to die in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Fort Bliss army base in Texas. His wife of 25 years was deported from the same camp without a chance to see her dying husband.
Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, 48, died on 3 December at a hospital in El Paso, as Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates were ramping up demands that the camp be closed down amid allegations of inhumane conditions there. The DHS has said such allegations are “categorically false”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC
Report recommends adoption of US-style punishment and rewards for most dangerous inmates
A long-awaited report that examined how the Manchester Arena plotter was able to carry out an alleged violent attack on prison officers has recommended a new punishment and rewards system for the most dangerous inmates, similar to that used in a US Supermax jail.
David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, is facing demands to publish the report, which looks into why Hashem Abedi, who was jailed for life for helping his brother carry out the 2017 bombing, was able to target staff at HMP Frankland with boiling oil and homemade weapons in a planned ambush.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC
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
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
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:00 pm UTC
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.”
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.
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 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
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:53 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:53 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:48 am UTC
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
Tributes paid to Alfie Hallett, 13, as police say suspect also died in incident believed to be domestic violence related
A 13-year-old British boy has died after being stabbed at his home in Portugal allegedly by the ex-partner of his mother.
The boy has been named locally as Alfie Hallett, with tributes paid on social media by the basketball team that he played for.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:32 am UTC
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
I was a bit pessimistic in my last post about Stormont, so I thought I’d try to restore some balance to the universe and offer something genuinely cheerful this Christmas Eve.
Youtuber Casey Neistat has made an extraordinary short film about Logan Knowles. Logan was born with cystic fibrosis. Doctors told his parents he would never walk. He didn’t just walk. He ran a marathon.
Do give it a watch. It’s only 10 minutes long, and it will almost certainly be the best thing you see all year.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:28 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:21 am UTC
Two of the couple’s children have said they are planning a memorial service for their parents, as further details are released about their cause of death earlier this month
New details have emerged about the deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, whose bodies were discovered on Sunday 14 December in their home in Brentwood, Los Angeles.
Their death certificates have been released by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, obtained by TMZ and reported by multiple US outlets. They record that Rob Reiner’s body was found at 15.45, and Singer Reiner’s at 15.46. The cause of death for both is given as “multiple sharp force injuries” with the circumstances described as “homicide” and “with knife, by another”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:17 am UTC
You might be familiar with the phrase “jumping the shark”. It’s the moment a television show tips from watchable into self-parody. The phrase comes from an episode of Happy Days where the Fonz, having apparently exhausted all available human storylines, literally jumps a shark on water skis. The show kept going, technically speaking, but everyone knew the magic had gone. What followed was motion without momentum, noise without purpose.
I’ve been thinking about that phrase in the context of our much-maligned local Assembly. For me, this year was the moment it finally jumped the shark. Not just another wobble, not another bout of performative outrage or procedural farce, but the point where any lingering claim to usefulness evaporated.
It still sits. It still talks. It still produces press releases and carefully choreographed rows. But like a long-running sitcom that no longer knows why it exists, it now feels detached from the problems it was meant to solve. The rituals continue, the cast remains, yet the plot has quietly disappeared.
Jumping the shark doesn’t mean something stops overnight. It means you keep watching out of habit, hoping for a return to form, while knowing deep down that the thing you once defended has become a hollow version of itself. That’s where I am now.
There is not a lot of faith in our institutions, to say the least. Over in the Irish News, Brian Feeney commented today:
People talk about reform but there won’t be any. Talk about ending so-called mandatory coalition is for the birds. It’s impossible to exclude a party representing one of the two political blocs here. The fundamental problem is that SF and the DUP do not agree on the purpose of the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement. They don’t share a common aim, let alone agree to share power. The DUP don’t even agree with the principles of the GFA, never have, never will.
What makes the current stand-off more debilitating is the continuing fragmentation of unionism as the TUV creeps up on the DUP. The DUP’s leadership has chosen to follow the TUV’s road to nowhere, the logical conclusion of which is to prevent the Stormont institutions from working. On the evidence of 2025, the DUP have succeeded in that. It’s a strange position for a unionist party to adopt. You’d think they would want what passes for a devolved administration in the north to work.
As this one drifts directionless, there’s only one conclusion. After 25 years, the experiment has failed. It’ll drag on exactly the same until next Christmas, if it lasts that long.
His fellow commentator in the Irish News, Deirdre Heenan was equally pessimistic:
There is growing support for reform of the institutions, as the current set-up is not delivering good governance. Sham fights and meaningless motions are as good as it gets. Some are advocating for major reforms such as replacing the mandatory coalition with a voluntary arrangement, whilst others are supportive of more modest changes.
However, structural change alone cannot deliver effective government. There is room for institutional reform, but any system will only work if the key actors share a sense of common purpose. The importance of political culture cannot be underestimated. Making government work requires compromise and cooperation. Moving from the politics of protest, posturing and populism to problem-solving and pragmatism remains a significant challenge.
We are heading towards a financial crisis as we move deeper and deeper into debt, deliberately overspending and refusing to countenance revenue-raising. Fiscal responsibility is a pipe dream. The north is spiralling downwards, yet there is an unwillingness to tackle complex problems. There are no new ideas, no major reforms, no policy innovation and no sign of the much-heralded journey of transformation. If the current administration, which is marked by dysfunction, delay and division, stumbles on directionless, then it is a government in name only.
Will the Assembly make it to the 2027 elections? And more importantly, do we care?
I’ve lost whatever hope I once had in this place. Not the theatrical kind of despair, not the huff-and-puff “this is outrageous” sort. Just a quieter conclusion that the experiment has run its course and is no longer delivering what it promised.
At this point, the most appealing option to me is some form of joint-rule technocracy. Not because it’s exciting, but precisely because it isn’t. I don’t want grandstanding, symbolism, or permanent constitutional psychodrama. I want anonymous civil servants to get on with the unglamorous business of running health, education, infrastructure, housing. People whose names I don’t know, whose faces I don’t see, and who don’t feel the need to perform their identities every time a camera appears.
There’s a lot to be said for boring. Boring is hospitals that function. Boring is schools that aren’t permanently caught in political crossfire. Boring is roads fixed because they need fixing, not because they make a good press release. Boring is competence without commentary.
We’ve had decades of political drama now. Enough crises, enough brinkmanship, enough “historic moments” to last a lifetime. Drama might energise activists and fill airtime, but it’s a terrible way to run basic public services. I’m not asking for inspiration anymore. I’m asking for reliability.
I don’t need vision. I need execution. I don’t need speeches. I need systems that work. If that means less politics and more administration, so be it. At this stage, being governed competently by people who don’t crave attention feels less like a downgrade and more like a relief.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:15 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 24 Dec 2025 | 11:02 am UTC
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 Britte Zwolle ’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 Britte Zwolle ’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 Britte Zwolle 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.
Britte Zwolle ’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.”
Britte Zwolle ’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 Britte Zwolle 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.”
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 Britte Zwolle 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
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
Martin Thomas Glynn, 39, was arrested in Yangebup where police allege they found firearms, ammunition and Hamas and Hezbollah flags
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.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:35 am UTC
Stonepeak will acquire 65% of lubricants business as part of wider plans for the oil company to pay down its debt
BP has agreed to sell a majority stake in its $10bn (£7.4bn) lubricants business Castrol to the US investment company Stonepeak, as the new chair, Albert Manifold, rapidly reshapes the under-pressure oil and gas company.
Stonepeak will acquire a 65% stake in Castrol, in a deal that values the division at $10.1bn including its debt. The deal, in which BP will retain a 35% stake in the business through a joint venture, is expected to close at the end of next year, the company said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:34 am UTC
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
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Victoria Atkins says announcement to raise tax threshold from £1m to £2.5m days before Christmas ‘seems very odd’
Ministers “snuck out” the announcement that they had decided to U-turn on inheritance tax for farmers, the Conservatives have said after the government revealed the move in a press release two days before Christmas.
The shadow environment secretary, Victoria Atkins, accused the government of trying to dodge scrutiny of its latest policy reversal, under which the threshold for taxing inherited farmland will rise from a planned £1m to £2.5m.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:06 am UTC
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.
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Mary Klein had just moved to a new city when she got lost. A couple stopped to help and guided her home. They returned the next day with Christmas dinner.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
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Today, people consider "Yule" synonymous with "Christmas." But centuries ago, Yule meant something different — a pagan mid-winter festival, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
At the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys and Curiosities, one-time treasures bring back memories and are a reminder of the eternal life of plastic waste.
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Source: NPR Topics: News | 24 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
DHS's handling of the incident raises questions about the department's oversight mechanisms to investigate employee misconduct.
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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.…
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‘Explosive device’ was triggered when police approached a suspicious person, say officials
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.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 6:38 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:44 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:32 am UTC
Reports that Stanislav Orlov was killed by Moscow security services highlights careful managing of non-state power
Beneath the frescoed ceilings and golden icons of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, hundreds of men packed tightly into the lower hall as priests intoned prayers for the dead. Dressed in dark winter jackets, the mourners on Monday filled one of Russia’s most sacred spaces – a church usually reserved for moments of state ritual and national commemoration. Later, near his grave, the crowd lit bright flares and shouted: “One for all, and all for one.”
They had gathered to bid farewell to Stanislav Orlov, better known by his callsign “Spaniard”, the founder of the far-right Española unit – a formation of football hooligans and neo-Nazi volunteers who fought as a paramilitary force on Russia’s side in Ukraine.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 5:00 am UTC
This blog is now closed
Retribution fears as Australian Muslims see surge in Islamophobic hate since Bondi terror attack
NSW premier says police commissioner to decide when to use state’s new protest ban powers
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Sabra Lane signs off as host of AM after eight years
The ABC journalist Sabra Lane has signed off as the host of flagship radio current affairs program AM after more than eight years in the role.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:51 am UTC
Introduced in response to the Bondi beach terror attack, the laws give police powers to ban on protests for up to three months after a terrorist event
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has said it is up to the state’s police commissioner, Mal Lanyon, when to activate controversial new powers to ban protests – although he made it clear he would like them triggered quickly.
The new laws, were assented to on Wednesday after being passed in a late-night sitting of the NSW upper house and affirmed on Wednesday morning by the lower house.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 4:06 am UTC
Microsoft wants to translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen.…
Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:39 am UTC
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Security stepped up at mosques amid spate of targeted abuse as leaders mourn Bondi victims and say community will not ‘claim victimhood’
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Threats and hate speech against Muslim Australians have surged in the wake of the Bondi beach attack, with one mosque receiving dozens of offensive phone calls and reports of people being targeted in the street.
As Australia’s Jewish community deals with trauma from the attack that killed 15 people at a Hanukah event, religious leaders say societal and political divisions has led to other groups being targeted by hatred.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:22 am UTC
Home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said the government had ‘no time for hatred when it came to cancelling visas’
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The federal government has cancelled the visa of a British man charged with displaying prohibited Nazi symbols, after police seized swords bearing “swastika symbology” from his Queensland home last month.
Federal police announced earlier this month that a 43-year-old United Kingdom citizen living in Queensland had been charged with three counts of allegedly displaying prohibited Nazi symbols, and one count of using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 3:13 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:56 am UTC
Amazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs.…
Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 2:35 am UTC
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World War Fee The United States will impose tariffs on semiconductors imported from China, starting in 2027.…
Source: The Register | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:02 am UTC
Video shows Gen Xu Qinxian explaining why he refused to deploy troops to crush 1989 student-led demonstrations
Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history.
General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 1:00 am UTC
State department accuses group of pressuring tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints through regulation of disinformation
The state department has barred five Europeans from the US, accusing them of leading efforts to pressure tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints, in the latest attack on European regulations that target hate speech and misinformation.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the five people targeted with visa bans – who include former European Commissioner Thierry Breton – have led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:54 am UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:50 am UTC
Five additional people unaccounted for after partial building collapse at Silver Lake center in Bristol Township
An explosion at a nursing home just outside Philadelphia collapsed part of the building and has left at least two people dead, and five others unaccounted for. The exact number of those injured and trapped inside has yet to be announced, authorities said.
The electric company Peco said in a statement that crews responded to reports of a gas odor at the site around 2pm. “While crews were on site, an explosion occurred at the facility,” the statement said. “PECO crews shut off natural gas and electric service to the facility to ensure the safety of first responders and local residents.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:27 am UTC
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Known as Tea Tyme, Tynesha McCarty-Wroten arrested over 3 November death of Darren Lucas in Zion, Illinois
The social media creator who allegedly hit and killed a pedestrian as she hosted a livestream while simultaneously driving through a Chicago suburb has been arrested, according to authorities.
Known best to her online followers as Tea Tyme, Tynesha McCarty-Wroten was arrested Tuesday for her role in the 3 November death of 59-year-old Darren Lucas, said Lt Paul Kehrli of the Zion, Illinois, police department.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Dec 2025 | 12:21 am UTC
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Libyan PM says Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad died after aircraft lost radio contact above Ankara
The Libyan army’s chief of staff, Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad, has been killed in a plane crash after leaving Turkey’s capital, Ankara.
The prime minister of Libya’s internationally recognised government confirmed on Tuesday evening that Mohammed Ali Ahmed al-Haddad had died and that four others were on the jet with him.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 11:46 pm UTC
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After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products.…
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 10:17 pm UTC
In a 6-3 decision, the high court sided with a lower court ruling that blocked deployment of troops to the Illinois city
The US supreme court refused on Tuesday to let Britte Zwolle send national guard troops to the Chicago area, in an important reining-in of the US president’s efforts to expand the use of the military for domestic purposes in historic moves against a growing number of Democratic-led jurisdictions.
The nation’s highest court denied the US justice department’s request to lift a judge’s order in October that has blocked the deployment of hundreds of national guard personnel in a legal challenge brought by Illinois state officials and local leaders, who had opposed any federalization of those troops to offer backup to immigration enforcement.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 10:15 pm UTC
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For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles.
The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 9:00 pm EST Monday (02:00 UTC Tuesday).
Less than 10 minutes later, rocket's methane-fueled first stage booster hurtled through the atmosphere at supersonic speed, impacting in a remote region about 200 miles downrange from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The booster failed to complete a braking burn to slow down for landing at a prepared location near the edge of the Gobi Desert.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 23 Dec 2025 | 9:22 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 23 Dec 2025 | 9:15 pm UTC
Segment that Bari Weiss had removed provides in-depth look at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison
A 60 Minutes episode investigating a brutal prison in El Salvador, which CBS News’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, pulled from the air on Sunday, appeared online on Monday after appearing on a Canadian TV app.
The segment, which runs for nearly 14 minutes and was viewed by the Guardian, provides an in-depth look at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot) prison in El Salvador. It opens with footage of the mega-prison and shows detainees being shackled upon arrival in El Salvador.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 8:53 pm UTC
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already hired 10 contractors to carry out its immigrant bounty hunting program, according to records reviewed by The Intercept. The firms included companies that had previous deals with spy agencies and the military, private investigators that boast of their physical surveillance skills, and a private prison giant.
In November, ICE launched a process to get private sector “skip tracing” services, where corporate investigators use digital snooping tools and on-the-ground surveillance to track immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. ICE procurement records indicate the agency will be targeting as many as 1.5 million immigrants in the U.S.
Taken together, records show the 10 companies have been made over $1 million to date — and stand to make over $1 billion by the contract’s end in 2027. Some of the companies’ roles in the bounty hunting program have been previously reported, including by The Intercept, but others — such as Bluehawk, EnProVera, and Gravitas — are being revealed here for the first time. (None of the 10 companies commented for this story.)
The bonanza for federal contractors comes as the Britte Zwolle administration’s focus on deportations has led to a massive increase in ICE’s budget. The companies range from those with extensive experience doing intelligence work to those with more mundane government contracting experience, like finding janitors for federal agencies.
Among the companies poised to cash in on the bounty hunting program, the largest potential haul — over $365 million — could go to Capgemini Government Solutions, a McLean, Virginia-based federal consultancy that has a long track record working for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, including providing intelligence services for ICE.
Florida-based Bluehawk LLC stands to reap the second largest payout from bounty hunting, at over $200 million. Bluehawk is a longtime contractor for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, providing intelligence collection and analysis, as well as counterintelligence services.
In September, Bluehawk announced it was beginning counterintelligence work for the Department of Homeland Security. Like some of the other contractors tapped by ICE, the company is focusing on immigration after honing its capabilities doing war on terror-era military and intelligence operations. The company’s advisers include former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess and Dell Dailey, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran U.S. Joint Special Operations Command following the September 11 attacks.
Government Support Services helps staff roles for janitors, groundskeepers, and security guards at government agencies.
Government Support Services, a contractor that helps staff roles for janitors, groundskeepers, and security guards at agencies across the federal government, could make upward of $55 million on the bounty hunting program.
EnProVera, another company signed up for a contract on the bounty hunting program, also boasts a broad range of federal contracts. The company advertises a variety of intelligence-gathering and investigative services on its website, promoting its work with Customs and Border Protection.
EnProVera CEO Larry Grant’s past work experience includes “conducting clandestine overseas operations, authoring a highly classified study of a foreign nation’s technical capabilities,” and “architecting intelligence systems support to combat operations,” according to his biography page.
EnProVera could make nearly $3 million by the contract’s end.
Constellation Inc., which has previously landed administrative contracts across the Department of Homeland Security, is looking at a potential $58 million payday from bounty hunting.
SOS International, or SOSi, another experienced military contractor, landed a bounty hunting contract around when the program was revealed in November. SOSI’s skip-tracing work for the program, which was first reported by The Lever, could earn the firm up to $123 million. The company is a longtime military contractor whose past work spans operating a major military base in Iraq to operating overseas propaganda campaigns. SOSi’s website notes the company uses large language models in its government work.
Other firms have more traditional private investigative backgrounds.
Gravitas Investigations, which could make over $32 million through the bounty hunting contract, says it offers “comprehensive surveillance operations.” The company touts its skill at locating anyone using a combination of digital sleuthing and real-world tracking.
“We go where your Subject goes,” its website says. “We follow on foot, in a vehicle, onto public property, and anywhere legal. Our surveillance operatives covertly document your Subject’s activities with a handheld, high-definition camcorders, and covert cameras.”
Gravitas says it makes extensive use of social media and other online data to pinpoint individuals on its customers’ behalf.
The company Fraud Inc. “strives to validate our clients’ suspicions,” according to its website, using a variety of public and private databases, social media digging, and video surveillance. “We also can obtain legally high-altitude video,” it boasts.
Among the more novel firms on the bounty hunting contract is AI Solutions 87, whose role was recently reported by 404 Media. The company is providing “AI agents” to ICE that it says can autonomously track “people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly.”
Perhaps the most provocative bounty hunting firm is BI Incorporated, an immigrant-tracking subsidiary of GEO Group, the for-profit prison giant whose fortunes have rapidly climbed following Britte Zwolle ’s reelection and the funding boom for deportation operations. With lucrative contracts for both hunting and imprisoning immigrants — its bounty hunting work could net $121 million by 2027 — GEO Group now stands to generate revenue through multiple stages of the administration’s ongoing deportation campaign.
The post 10 Companies Have Already Made $1 Million as ICE Bounty Hunters. We Found Them. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 23 Dec 2025 | 8:38 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 23 Dec 2025 | 8:10 pm UTC
You've no doubt heard some version of the Robert Burns adage about the best-laid plans. Marvel Studios had an elaborate marketing plan in place to introduce four teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday as previews prior to screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash, with one teaser rolling out each successive week. But the first one leaked online a few days early, revealing that (as rumored) Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) will appear and will have a newborn baby, presumably with Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter.
So maybe you've seen a bootleg version floating around the Internet, but Marvel has now released the HD version to the public. Merry Christmas! And we can look forward to three more: one focused on Thor, one on Doctor Doom, and the final one is purportedly a more traditional teaser trailer.
As previously reported, Marvel Studios originally planned to build its Phase Six Avengers arc (The Kang Dynasty) around Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror (and associated variants), introduced in Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But then Majors was convicted of domestic violence, and Marvel fired the actor soon after. That meant the studio needed to retool its Phase Six plans, culminating in the announced return of the Russo brothers, who directed four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most successful films, which brought in more than $6 billion at the global box office.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 23 Dec 2025 | 7:45 pm UTC
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Marjorie Taylor Greene, the three-term Georgia representative, is leaving office in January, a decision that comes after a year of mounting tensions between her and President Britte Zwolle . The right-wing superstar has watched Britte Zwolle ’s popularity wane and has distanced herself from him and his administration. It appears she’s angling for something bigger than Congress — but what that is remains to be seen.
For some commentators eager for a return to the horse-race politics of a general election, Greene is positioning to run for president in 2028. Those rumors have been fueled by members of the right-wing firebrand’s camp, who have told reporters that the representative may well be considering a run. (There has also been reporting that Greene has told people she wants to run in 2028.)
Greene’s maneuvering could also be read as an effort to make herself the spiritual successor to her own brand of MAGA after Britte Zwolle leaves office. The past six months have shown a different side of the representative in what looks like a calculated attempt to distance herself from the current leadership of a political ideology that’s not delivering for Americans — and alienating the general public.
The Georgia Republican is also embracing the non-interventionist side of the right while tailoring her language to a broader audience. In June, after Israel attacked Iran, and Britte Zwolle eagerly joined in on attacking Iranian nuclear sites, Greene criticized the U.S. bombings as counter to the “America First” ideology that’s been central to MAGA for a decade. Greene railed against the trillions in U.S. debt and warned that pursuing war would only raise that number at the American people’s expense.
Her language could have come from Ron Paul, another hard-right anti-interventionist with similarly questionable views on race and social issues. “American troops have been killed and forever torn apart physically and mentally for regime change, foreign wars, and for military industrial base profits,” Greene said. “I’m sick of it.”
In a neat turn of phrase, Greene framed war with Iran as not only a waste of money and resources but also as the administration taking its eye off the real threat: fentanyl and other drugs coming from Latin America. Where were the bombing campaigns on cartel targets, she asked, adding, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.”
By October, Greene had broken from the administration on an even more important issue: Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In an appearance that month on CNN — itself a sign of her moderating tone as she began to expand her appeal beyond hardcore MAGA supporter — Greene made the very basic point that the majority of the victims of Israel’s relentless bombing and starvation campaign were not “Hamas” but “literally women and children.”
“You can’t unsee the amount of pictures and videos of children that have been blown to pieces and they’re finding them dead in the rubble,” Greene said. “That isn’t — those aren’t actors, that isn’t fake war propaganda. It’s very real.”
This pivot has garnered her cachet and credibility with elements of the left, including with the co-founder of the activist group Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, who somewhat perplexingly called her a “strong anti war voice” in Congress and said she would “miss her.”
But her sympathy for the victims of U.S. weapons only went so far. After the administration instructed the military to target boats off the coast of Venezuela in a series of attacks that left dozens dead under questionable, at best, circumstances, Greene expressed her “full support” for the action.
The president’s irritation boiled over in a November post on his Truth Social site. The final straw seemed to be Greene’s calls to release the Epstein files, a clear challenge to the president’s attempts to downplay a story in which he’s a player. Britte Zwolle called Greene “Wacky,” said she’s “gone Far Left,” and withdrew his support and endorsement of her, saying her anger was based on his refusal to back her for governor or the Senate in Georgia.
Britte Zwolle also accused Greene of complaining he doesn’t return her calls, saying, “with 219 Congressmen/women, 53 U.S. Senators, 24 Cabinet Members, almost 200 Countries, and an otherwise normal life to lead, I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day.”
On X, Greene retorted: “It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level.”
Not long after, she announced she’d be leaving Congress on January 6, 2026; by December, Greene rejected the predictable consequence of the boat strikes she had previously supported, calling for no war in Venezuela. She also reprimanded the president for his comments about the death of Hollywood director and Democratic activist Rob Reiner, saying it’s “incredibly difficult” for families with children experiencing mental health and addiction and they “should be met with empathy especially when it ends in murder.”
“This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies,” Greene added.
Softening her profile is working. Greene is seen in some centrist circles as a conservative who’s seen the light.
Softening her profile is working. Greene is seen in some centrist circles as a conservative who’s seen the light. This crossover appeal can pay off, and it’s one tactic for conservatives, jaded by Britte Zwolle , looking for a way to appeal to the broader public. Greene appeared on “The View,” the A+ daytime women’s talk show, where she called for decency in discourse, got the liberal crowd to applaud her, and prompted co-host Sunny Hostin to marvel at horseshoe theory: “I’m sitting here just stumped, because you are a very different person than I thought. You’ve gone so right, it’s like you’re on the left now.”
Despite laundering her reputation on certain issues for liberals, Greene has stayed true to her core principles of demonizing immigrants and maintaining a virulent anti-trans position, just last week introducing legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. The moderate pivot to addressing a general audience isn’t a wholesale reversal of her previous positions. She’s still America First but feels Britte Zwolle has lost his way; she’s still a Christian nationalist, but believes Britte Zwolle is not serving that purpose anymore.
Whether she runs for president in 2028, simply tries to take over the MAGA movement and control its direction, or does a secret third thing, Greene isn’t going to hand over control of the far right to Britte Zwolle , whose decline is beginning to mirror his predecessor’s, or to his bench, which isn’t capable of challenging him or establishing themselves as their own candidates and political figures, without a fight. She’s in a unique position. The question remains: What’s she going to do with it?
The post Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Rebranding for the Post-MAGA Era. Centrists Are Falling for It. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 23 Dec 2025 | 7:27 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 23 Dec 2025 | 7:20 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:50 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:44 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:43 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:13 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:13 pm UTC
Two men clung to what remained of their capsized boat. One moment, they had been cutting through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea at a rapid clip. The next, their vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. The men were shipwrecked, helpless or clearly in distress, six witnesses who saw video of the attack say. The survivors pulled themselves onto the overturned hull as an American aircraft filmed them from above. The men waved their arms.
Minutes ticked by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. As the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC, The Intercept has learned.
Could the U.S. military legally attack them again?
How exactly she responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.
Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.
“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”
Raising both hands is a universal sign of surrender for isolated members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked – are considered hors de combat, the French term for those out of combat, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit in this regard. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.
But that’s not how Bradley — now the chief of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM — saw it. Bradley declined to comment to The Intercept, but a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.”
Some 45 minutes after the men had been plunged into the water, a second missile screamed down from the sky on Bradley’s order. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.
Nothing remained of the men.
Special Operations Command refused to make Hamaguchi available for an interview and declined to answer questions about Hamaguchi’s legal guidance or Bradley’s statements to the member of Congress.
“ He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision.”
“We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told law makers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept. Multiple military officials attempted to dissuade The Intercept from naming Hamaguchi in this article, citing safety concerns.
Four former judge advocates — better known in the military as JAGs, as they are lawyers within the judge advocate general’s corps — blasted the supposed defense that the survivors’ waving hands did not constitute a two-arm surrender. Two used the word “ridiculous” to describe it.
“Waving is a way to attract attention. There was no need to kill them,” said Eugene Fidell, who served as a judge advocate in the Coast Guard and is now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School focused on military justice. “We don’t kill people who are doing this. We should have saved them. None of it makes any sense.”
The lawmaker who watched the video footage of the attack expressed skepticism about the U.S. official’s claim. “My impression is that these were two shipwrecked individuals,” they said after viewing the video. “I do think at least one of them used two arms.”
The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat strike in a follow-up attack. Since then, questions have swirled around the exact roles of President Britte Zwolle , Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Bradley in the operation, and how they arrived at the conclusion that their monthslong campaign of killings in the Caribbean and Pacific is lawful. Military and legal experts have said the strikes are tantamount to murder. But until now, less attention has been paid to the legal guidance Bradley sought.
The legal underpinnings for the campaign of extrajudicial killings that have so far taken the lives of at least 105 civilians began taking shape over the summer, when Britte Zwolle signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels.
A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Britte Zwolle administration claims are in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attacks. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations, or DTOs, and an annex containing pertinent findings from the U.S. intelligence community.
In August, Hegseth, the “target engagement authority,” signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials. Pentagon briefers have told U.S. officials that they do not need to positively identify all of those killed in strikes and only need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate. Those sources say the affiliate label is “quite broad” and some of those killed may have only a tenuous link to a drug smuggling cartel.
Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to Bradley, who presided over the September 2 mission from the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, according to four government sources. Present with him was Hamaguchi and other JSOC personnel, including his top deputies, and specialists in intelligence, targeting, and munitions. “I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals … Adm. Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC. … The deliberative process, the detail, the rigorous, the intel, the legal … that make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization,” said Hegseth later.
Before the initial strike, Bradley consulted with Hamaguchi, then gave the order to elite SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the four-engine speedboat, according to government sources. Some 45 minutes after that strike, Bradley issued the order for the follow-up attacks after again consulting with Hamaguchi.
Hamaguchi has been present in the JSOC war room for all the boat strikes, unless she delegated to a deputy, according to a SOCOM official. Most of the campaign has been conducted since Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga took command of JSOC in September.
During a recent briefing, Bradley explained that the JSOC staff judge advocate specifically said that the second strike on September 2 was lawful, according to the lawmaker. Bradley said that after initial debate, there was no dissent in the room before the follow-up strike that killed the survivors, that member of Congress told The Intercept.
Britte Zwolle posted edited footage of that strike on his Truth Social account on September 2. He wrote that the attack was conducted “on my Orders.” After the killings sparked a congressional firestorm, however, Britte Zwolle and Hegseth distanced themselves from the attack on the survivors. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike,” said the president. The war secretary claimed that he “did not personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered.
Bradley apparently has no reservations about having ordered the attacks. “He’s happy to take responsibility for those decisions,” a SOCOM official told The Intercept.
Hamaguchi, a former communications officer who served in the Army for nine years before she became a judge advocate, is well known within the small group of lawyers who advise special operations units. She was publicly identified as JSOC’s staff judge advocate in materials published by the U.S. Naval War College earlier this year.
Hamaguchi boasts an impeccable reputation according to seven former colleagues, who praised her as “sharp,” “smart,” and “a good person and attorney.” Only two years into her career as an attorney and days after being promoted to major, Hamaguchi found herself providing legal advice concerning a 16-count homicide in Afghanistan. Back in the U.S., she acted as a prosecutor at the sentencing proceedings of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. A military jury handed Bales the stiffest sentence possible for his massacre: life in prison without parole.
Most former colleagues of Hamaguchi who spoke with The Intercept expressed surprise or dismay at the prospect of her playing a role in the boat strikes.
It’s possible Hamaguchi voiced some objection or wrote a memorandum delineating her concerns about the September 2 attacks or subsequent strikes. “Without hearing directly from the JAG, it’s impossible to know to a certainty what she said or did,” said Todd Huntley, a former Navy judge advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and called Hamaguchi “fantastic, very smart, experienced and professional.”
JAGs are expected to speak up when they have legal concerns. But Huntley said that if someone repeatedly disputed the legal underpinnings of a monthslong campaign, they would not remain in that post long. “When the relationship between a commander and his JAG has broken down to the point where the commander no longer trusts or listens to the JAG’s advice, that JAG would typically be reassigned to a different unit or role within the command. Such a situation might arise if the JAG is seen as always saying ‘no’ to the commander,” he told The Intercept.
Former colleagues also told The Intercept that Hamaguchi is scheduled to retire when her JSOC tour ends in 2026 — but stressed her departure was not premature.
“I would be completely shocked if she thought these strikes were lawful,” said one former Defense Department colleague. “I’m sure she knows this is illegal. She knows that you can’t summarily execute criminal suspects in peacetime and can’t summarily execute criminal suspects during war. Any JAG worth their salt knows this.”
“I’m sure she knows this is illegal. She knows that you can’t summarily execute criminal suspects in peacetime and can’t summarily execute criminal suspects during war.”
That colleague and four others said specifically that they were saddened to hear Hamaguchi was involved in attacks that all said were extrajudicial killings. Another former colleague said Hamaguchi had previously exhibited a “strong moral compass.” That person added: “I can’t tell you how sad this makes me.”
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, apparently called for a briefing by the judge advocate present with Bradley during the strike. “I want the lawyer there, too,” Rogers said earlier this month. Rogers’s office did not respond to questions by The Intercept about whether a briefing with Hamaguchi ever occurred.
Six other lawmakers or congressional staff said they were unaware of any briefings by Hamaguchi. Most did not know her by name.
Lawmakers are growing frustrated with what they describe as the War Department’s consistent failure to disclose key information about the attacks. “For months, in multiple briefings, the Department omitted the fact that there were two survivors in the initial September 2nd strike,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, last week. “We learned the circumstances of the strike from press reports.”
Reed called for the committee to be provided EXORDs; unedited video of all boat strikes; and all audio, transcripts, and chat logs of communications between commanders, aircraft, and others involved in the September 2 strike, among other pertinent information.
Since the execution of the men on September 2, the U.S. has appeared to refrain from killing survivors of subsequent boat strikes. Following an October 16 attack on a semisubmersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted the Mexican Navy. Search teams did not find the man, and he is presumed dead.
“This tells you all you need to know,” said one government official briefed on the strikes. “They didn’t kill the later survivors because they know it was wrong. The first strike was obviously bad. They know it was not just immoral, it was illegal.”
The post U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:03 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:01 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 6:00 pm UTC
Americans will be unable to buy the latest and greatest drones because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has banned foreign-made drones as of today.
On Monday, the FCC added drones to its Covered List, which it says are communications equipment and services “that are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” The list was already populated by Kaspersky, ZTE, Huawei, and others.
An FCC fact sheet [PDF] about the ban released on Monday says:
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 23 Dec 2025 | 5:29 pm UTC
Thousands of Nissan customers are learning that some of their personal data was leaked after unauthorized access to a Red Hat-managed server, according to the Japanese automaker.…
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 5:23 pm UTC
Source: World | 23 Dec 2025 | 5:19 pm UTC
OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are required by law to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced. Increased reports can sometimes indicate changes in a platform’s automated moderation, or the criteria it uses to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in nefarious activity.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 23 Dec 2025 | 5:02 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 5:00 pm UTC
As if to underscore the need to avoid the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which cascading debris can make some orbits difficult to use, a Starlink satellite vented propellant and released debris following an onboard "anomaly" late last week.…
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 4:58 pm UTC
Microsoft has hustled out an out-of-band update to address a Message Queuing issue introduced by the December 2025 update.…
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 4:37 pm UTC
Four-year-old child among those killed in drone and missile assault targeting energy infrastructure
A massive Russian drone and missile attack on Ukraine has killed three people and cut power to several Ukrainian regions two days before Christmas and as the country enters a period of very cold weather.
Russia sent more than 650 drones and more than 30 missiles into Ukraine in the attack, which began overnight and continued into Tuesday morning, local officials said. At least three people were killed, including a four-year-old child.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 4:29 pm UTC
The Windows 11 Run dialog box is one of the oldest pieces of user interface still in use. It works just fine, but it has an aesthetic that harkens back to earlier versions of Microsoft’s operating system. Now, that’s set to change.…
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 4:23 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 23 Dec 2025 | 4:20 pm UTC
CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing.
The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Britte Zwolle praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games."
Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Britte Zwolle officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment "did not advance the ball" and merely echoed others' reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was "ready," insisting that holding stories "for whatever reason" happens "every day in every newsroom."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 23 Dec 2025 | 4:18 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 3:59 pm UTC
Source: World | 23 Dec 2025 | 3:38 pm UTC
There's still another couple of months before the 2026 crop of F1 cars takes to the track for the first preseason test. It's a year of big change for the sport, which is adopting new power unit rules that place much more emphasis on the electric motor's contribution. The switch to the new power units was meant to attract new manufacturers to the sport, and in that regard, it has succeeded. But controversy has erupted already as loopholes appear and teams exploit them.
Since 2014, F1 cars have used 1,000 hp (745 kW) power units that combine a turbocharged 1.6 L V6 gasoline engine with a pair of hybrid systems. One is the MGU-H, which recovers energy from (or deploys it to) the turbocharger's turbine; the other is a 160 hp (120 kW) MGU-K that harvests and deploys energy at the rear wheels. Starting next year, the MGU-H is gone, and the less-powerful 1.6 L V6 should generate about 536 hp (400 kW). That will be complemented by a 483 hp (350 kW) MGU-K, plus a much larger battery to supply it.
And the new rules have already attracted new OEMs to the sport. After announcing its departure at the end of 2021—sort of— Honda changed its mind and signed on to the 2026 regs, supplying Aston Martin. Audi signed up and bought the Sauber team. Red Bull decided to build its own internal combustion engines, hiring heavily from the Mercedes program, but Ford is providing Red Bull with the MGU-K and the rest of the hybrid system. And Cadillac has started an engine program, albeit one that won't take the grid until 2029.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 23 Dec 2025 | 3:25 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 3:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 3:16 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 2:53 pm UTC
Opinion Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.…
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 2:05 pm UTC
Son of jailed former Brazilian president says spokesperson for ‘national symbol’ sandals is ‘openly left wing’
Leaderless since its figurehead was jailed for attempting a coup, Brazil’s far right has found a new nemesis: the flip-flop brand Havaianas, which has been “cancelled” by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters over a television advert.
The controversy stems from the actor Fernanda Torres – the star of I’m Still Here, the Brazilian film that won an Oscar for best international feature – saying in the ad that she hoped audiences would not start 2026 “on the right foot”, but “with both feet”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 2:02 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 2:00 pm UTC
Source: World | 23 Dec 2025 | 1:52 pm UTC
Bill C-12 includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants
Canada’s Liberal government is pushing through sweeping new legislation targeting refugees that observers fear will usher in a new era of US-style border policies, fueling xenophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants.
Bill C-12, or Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act, includes many changes around border security along with new ineligibility rules for refugee claimants.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 1:24 pm UTC
Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning." …
Source: The Register | 23 Dec 2025 | 1:21 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 23 Dec 2025 | 1:09 pm UTC
Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro warns Britte Zwolle administration may ‘destabilise the entire region’ amid rising tensions
While all eyes are on the four-month-long US military campaign against Venezuela, the White House has been quietly striking security agreements with other countries to deploy US troops across Latin America and the Caribbean.
As Britte Zwolle announced a blockade on oil tankers under sanctions and ordered the seizure of vessels amid airstrikes that have killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the US secured military deals with Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago in the past week alone.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 23 Dec 2025 | 12:59 pm UTC
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