Read at: 2025-12-10T15:36:29+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Ninon Stoelwinder ]
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:30 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:30 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:26 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:25 pm UTC
Council says work will begin on adopting the declaration in Moldova in May
Reeves is now being asked about the leak to the Financial Times on 13 November saying that Reeves had dropped plans to raise income tax in the budget.
Reeves claims some aspects of the story were misleading.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:24 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:22 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:22 pm UTC
Richard M Berman cites passage of Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the DoJ to release all Epstein records by 19 December
A federal judge in New York has granted the justice department’s request to unseal grand jury documents of the 2019 federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
In his decision, judge Richard M Berman cited the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the DoJ to release all records related to the late sex-offender in a searchable format by 19 December. Berman granted the motion with the “unequivocal right of Epstein victims to have their identity and privacy protected”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:21 pm UTC
Haley Stevens accuses health secretary of undermining public health, but Republican-run House is unlikely to act
A Democratic lawmaker from Michigan has introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F Kennedy, the US health secretary, accusing him of “abuse of authority and undermining of the public health”.
Representative Haley Stevens, who is currently running for Senate, formally introduced the articles on impeachment on Wednesday, several months after she announced that she vowed to file the articles.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:21 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:20 pm UTC
Continent’s other nationalist parties wary of echoing sentiments of US president due to his unpopularity with voters
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has responded to US claims that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” by saying it backs efforts for a nationalist revival on the continent – but other nationalist parties in the EU are far more cautious.
“The AfD is fighting alongside its international friends for a conservative renaissance,” the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, Markus Frohnmaier, said on Wednesday, adding that he would meet Maga Republicans in Washington and New York this week.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:19 pm UTC
María Corina Machado misses ceremony but her daughter says she is ‘safe’ and due in Oslo in ‘just a few hours’
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, is now delivering his opening speech.
It’s a damning verdict on Maduro’s authoritarian rule in Venezuela, as he talks about a number of figures facing repression and torture from the regime.
“As we sit here in Oslo City Hall, innocent people are locked away in dark cells in Venezuela. They cannot hear the speeches given today – only the screams of prisoners being tortured.”
Venezuela has evolved into a brutal, authoritarian state facing a deep humanitarian and economic crisis. Meanwhile, a small elite at the top – shielded by political power, weapons and legal impunity – enriches itself.
“A quarter of the population has already fled the country – one of the world’s largest refugee crises.
Those who remain live under a regime that systematically silences, harasses and attacks the opposition.”
“Venezuela is not alone in this darkness. The world is on the wrong track. The authoritarians are gaining.
We must ask the inconvenient question:
“Authoritarian regimes learn from each other. They share technology and propaganda systems. Behind Maduro stand Cuba, Russia, Iran, China and Hezbollah – providing weapons, surveillance and economic lifelines. They make the regime more robust, and more brutal.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:18 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:18 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:16 pm UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:02 pm UTC
Research by Cambridge University and Met calls for better neurodivergence screening for vulnerable people
Half of people arrested recently in London were found to potentially have undiagnosed ADHD, according to a study calling for better neurodivergence screening for vulnerable individuals.
Research by the University of Cambridge found that one in two individuals arrested and detained over an eight-week period in London in 2024 may have undiagnosed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and one in 20 may have undiagnosed autism.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 3:00 pm UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:58 pm UTC
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Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:51 pm UTC
The author, whose real name was Madeleine Sophie Wickham, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer in late 2022.
(Image credit: Anthony Harvey)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:48 pm UTC
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Baby Ruth Villarama’s documentary Food Delivery depicts those struggling with the superpower to retain their trade. The director describes capturing their boats getting rammed by the Chinese coast guard
During a televised debate in 2016, populist presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte made a typically belligerent statement that he himself would jetski to Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea and plant a Philippine flag there. Duterte claimed that he was ready to die a hero to keep the Chinese out of the bitterly contested maritime territory.
“That made millions of Filipino workers and fishers vote for him because of that one promise,” says film-maker Baby Ruth Villarama. As her new Oscar and Bafta-contending documentary Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea reveals, it wasn’t a promise Duterte kept. “He would make excuses that the jetski has broken down. Eventually there was an official pronouncement that it had just been a campaign joke. From then on, the fisherfolk were really enraged.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:47 pm UTC
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and former daytime talk show star, has recently been emailing all federal workers in his agency weekly tips on “Crushing Cubicle Cravings” and how to avoid snacking in the office.
“We all love a fun cookie swap and potluck this time of year. With several teams across CMS hosting holiday gatherings this month, I am sharing some strategies to help you make healthier choices—while still indulging in festive treats,” Oz wrote in his latest missive, which appears as a recurring section in his weekly bulletin titled “From the Administrator’s Desk,” according to emails viewed by WIRED.
“Set your intentions,” writes Oz. “Decide in advance how many treats you’ll allow yourself to enjoy and try to stick to that number. You don’t have to try every cookie on the cookie table.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:45 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:41 pm UTC
Chancellor defends budget but tells MPs there were ‘too many leaks’ and that and much of them were inaccurate
Rachel Reeves has condemned leaks before her make-or-break budget as “unacceptable” as she revealed her income tax U-turn was agreed in partnership with Keir Starmer.
Defending her tax and spending plans before MPs on the Commons Treasury committee, the chancellor said she had been frustrated by “leaks that were clearly not authorised” before her November speech.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:41 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:37 pm UTC
Judge ordered the guard, deployed to the city in June, returned to the control of the California governor
A US judge on Wednesday morning blocked the deployment by the federal government of national guard troops in Los Angeles and ordered the guard returned to the control of the California governor, a court filing showed.
The Ninon Stoelwinder administration is being challenged in federal court over its authority and rationale for continuing to maintain command over the national guard troops it deployed to the city earlier this year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:36 pm UTC
Proposed plan would apply to tourists of all countries, including those not required to get a visa to visit the US
All tourists to the United States would have to reveal their social media activity from the last five years, under new Ninon Stoelwinder administration plans.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), would also require any email addresses and telephone numbers visitors have used in the same period, and the names, addresses, birthdates and birthplaces of family members, including children.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:34 pm UTC
Keeping reindeer in pens for public enjoyment can cause them physical and mental harm, charities warn
With their fluffy coats, big brown eyes and reputation as Santa’s helpers, reindeer are a common and popular attraction at Christmas markets around the UK.
But being stuck in a pen and approached by hordes of adoring fans is harming the mental and physical health of Rudolph and his brethren, animal charities have warned.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:33 pm UTC
Keir Starmer pays tribute to George Hooley, 28, and says soldier died in ‘tragic accident away from front lines’
A soldier killed in Ukraine as he watched the testing of a new defensive capability was a 28-year-old paratrooper.
The “tragic accident” happened on Tuesday morning when lance corporal George Hooley was with Ukrainian military counterparts.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:32 pm UTC
Paper criticised over coverage of Duchess of Sussex’s attempt to contact Thomas Markle after surgery
The Duchess of Sussex has accused the Daily Mail of breaching “clear ethical boundaries” by reporting from the bedside of her estranged father, following his claims he had not received his daughter’s messages.
Thomas Markle appealed to Meghan to see him in a Mail on Sunday interview at the weekend, after he underwent serious surgery in the Philippines.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:27 pm UTC
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Latest package in dismantling of environmental rules also suggests repealing hazardous chemicals database
Datacentres, AI gigafactories and affordable housing may be exempt from mandatory environmental impact assessments in the EU under a proposal that advances the European Commission’s rollback of green rules.
The latest in a series of packages to cut red tape calls for permitting processes for critical projects to be sped up and reducing the scope of environmental reporting rules for businesses.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:18 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:05 pm UTC
Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all made high-quality image upscaling a cornerstone feature of their new GPUs this decade. Upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) are all ways to transform a lower-resolution source image into a higher-resolution image, delivering better-looking games without requiring as much graphics hardware as you’d need to render the higher-resolution image natively. Later additions have focused on improving ray-tracing performance and “frame generation” technologies that boost frame rates by creating new AI-generated frames to insert between natively rendered frames.
Generally speaking, Nvidia’s DLSS technologies have provided better image quality than AMD’s FSR, but they have only been available on newer Nvidia hardware—the GeForce RTX 20-series or newer for most features, with frame-generation features locked to the RTX 40- and 50-series. FSR’s results don’t look as good, but they have benefited from running on just about anything, including older GPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and even integrated Intel and AMD GPUs.
Today, AMD is trying to shift that dynamic with something called “FSR Redstone,” a collection of ray-tracing and frame-generation features all intended to boost AMD’s image quality while being relatively easy to implement for game developers who are already using FSR 3.1 or FSR 4.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:00 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:00 pm UTC
Exclusive: Prime minister defends Anika Wells as controversy over use of taxpayer-funded travel entitlements continues
Expenses rules for federal politicians are so broad that ministers and senior politicians have “unlimited” travel entitlements for their spouse, according to guidelines governing spending.
Despite days of controversy around spending by the communications minister, Anika Wells, and growing calls for reform of the rules, Anthony Albanese did not indicate there would be changes to entitlements.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:00 pm UTC
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The campaign to prevent and treat these diseases has seen great success thanks to a USAID program. Now that program is gone.
(Image credit: Marco Simoncelli/AFP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 1:39 pm UTC
Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR's international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.
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Daughter delivers speech, with Nobel Institute saying María Corina Machado still expected in Oslo after journey of ‘extreme danger’
Venezuela’s most prominent opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has vowed to continue her struggle to free the country from years of “obscene corruption”, “brutal dictatorship” and “despair” as she was awarded the Nobel peace prize at a ceremony in Norway’s capital, Oslo.
The 58-year-old conservative has lived in hiding in Venezuela since its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, was accused of stealing the 2024 presidential election from her political movement. Despite fevered speculation that she would make a dramatic appearance at Wednesday’s event, having somehow slipped out of Venezuela, Machado was not present, although she was expected to arrive in Oslo in the coming hours.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 1:03 pm UTC
Machado — who has been in hiding for nearly a year — was still expected in Oslo later in the day.
(Image credit: Ole Berg-Rusten)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 1:03 pm UTC
In survey, US school principals describe ‘climate of distress’ and declines in student attendance amid crackdowns
Immigrant students across the US have experienced increased bullying, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns causing declines in attendance and a “culture of fear” among immigrant students in public schools, according to a new survey of high school principals.
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (Idea) conducted a “nationally representative” survey of more than 600 principals about the toll of raids and deportations, and how schools were responding.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 1:00 pm UTC
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Military personnel told they can return to Nigeria after actions described as ‘unfriendly act’
Authorities in Burkina Faso have released 11 Nigerian military personnel held after a cargo plane from Lagos made an “unauthorised” emergency landing in its second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso.
The breakaway regional Association of Sahel States (AES) said on Monday that the C-130 aircraft had entered Burkina Faso’s airspace without clearance, calling it an “unfriendly act”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 12:51 pm UTC
Report found avoidable security failures including broken CCTV and lack of coordination at museum, hearing told
The thieves who stole crown jewels from the Louvre in October evaded police with just 30 seconds to spare due to avoidable security failures at the Paris museum, a damning investigation has revealed.
The investigation, ordered by the culture ministry after the embarrassing daylight heist, revealed that only one of two security cameras was working near the site where the intruders broke in on the morning of Sunday 19 October.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 12:49 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 12:48 pm UTC
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A Virginia startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” announced this week that it has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office, asking the federal agency to cancel X Corporation’s trademarks of the words “Twitter” and “tweet” since X has allegedly abandoned them.
“The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.’s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark,” the petition states. “The TWITTER bird was grounded.”
If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Dec 2025 | 12:32 pm UTC
It’s once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That’s right—it’s the 2025 edition of our annual Charity Drive!
Every year since 2007, we’ve encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we’ve added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we’re providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can’t keep it, and we don’t want it clogging up our offices, so it’s now yours to win.
This year’s swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have over a dozen prizes valued at nearly $5,000 total, including gaming hardware and collectibles, apparel, and more. In 2023, Ars readers raised nearly $40,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $542,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 10 Dec 2025 | 12:30 pm UTC
Andravia and Harbadus – two nations so often at odds with one another – were once again embroiled in conflict over the past seven days, which thoroughly tested NATO's cybersecurity experts' ability to coordinate defenses across battlefield domains.…
Source: The Register | 10 Dec 2025 | 12:29 pm UTC
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The divided Federal Reserve is considering cutting interest rates today. And, Afghans in the U.S. who fought for the CIA say they feel abandoned by the agency.
(Image credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 11:47 am UTC
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Electric cars are no more of a danger to pedestrians than conventional vehicles, according to new research.…
Source: The Register | 10 Dec 2025 | 11:41 am UTC
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By Jason Bunting, Advocacy Manager at the Fairness Foundation
Northern Ireland is falling behind on fiscal powers- and it’s holding back our progress.
Over the past twenty-five years, Scotland and Wales have each gained significant new fiscal tools, and both now has a credible suite of levers at their disposal. English devolution is also accelerating, with the Chancellor’s recent Budget giving regional Mayors the power to introduce tourism levies- an admittedly modest charge that can nonetheless raise millions for local priorities.
Yet while momentum grows in other nations and regions, Northern Ireland has been left behind, seeing far fewer powers devolved. Although the Executive controls £9 in every £10 spent in Northern Ireland, it raises only around 9% of that revenue. By comparison, Wales raises around 20% of its revenue while Scotland raises around 31%. land.
Meanwhile, the recent UK Budget announced £370m for Northern Ireland- yet only £19m of that arrives in this financial year. Against the scale of Stormont’s fiscal challenges, this amount is negligible. It’s little wonder, then, that Finance Minister John O’Dowd MLA concluded that: “if there’s one thing the Budget made clear to me, it was that the Executive, the Assembly and this society will have to take greater control of their taxes”.
There are, however, reasons to want fiscal powers that go well beyond raising short-term revenue to meet Stormont’s stretched finances.
The Better Lives Index recently found that Northern Ireland remains one of the toughest places to grow up and old in across the UK. Our productivity level remains 8th out of 12 UK regions, more than 12% below the average. We have a much higher proportional share of the most deprived areas in the UK than other nations or regions, and the highest levels of education deprivation across the UK, while the national income per head is approximately 25% lower than the UK average.
The research suggests that greater, and more effective, fiscal devolution can help to meet those challenges. Evidence shows that devolving fiscal levers improves government responsiveness, strengthens accountability and boosts efficiency. Local fiscal autonomy helps to connect a region’s priorities and its policies, and allows government to innovate more readily. As the Northern Ireland Fiscal Commission concluded in its final report, tax devolution “could increase electoral accountability, financial responsibility and policy autonomy”.
OECD research has even found that when properly designed, decentralisation has a positive impact on growth- and that doubling the sub-central share of tax or spending is linked to a 3% increase in GDP per capita. Increased growth, in turn, could help address Northern Ireland’s deep-rooted economic challenges.
While fiscal devolution will not solve everything, but it would give the government more tools to act, and force greater accountability about its choices. As a recent paper from the Heywood Fellowship suggested, when most levers are held centrally, “there can be a tendency by other levels of government to attribute all inaction to ‘lack of funding’”. More agency over fiscal matters can help counter this dynamic, particularly important in a society with “chronically low” levels of democratic wellbeing.
In short, fiscal devolution is a fairness issue- an argument set out in our new report at the Fairness Foundation, A Fair Share.
Translating that principle into practice requires examining the options available, which the Fiscal Commission has already done in depth. It made several recommendations, including improvements to data reliability; the (at least) partial devolution of income tax; and the devolution of the Apprenticeship Levy, Stamp Duty Land Tax, Air Passenger Duty and Landfill Tax, along with savings and dividend income.
Some of these proposals were explicitly endorsed by the Finance Minister on the floor of the Assembly as a “good starting base” for fiscal devolution, noting he has intensified engagement with the Treasury. Yet as the Commission also noted, the time between recommendations and actual tax in Scotland and Wales has ranged from 6-8 years. Such a process is likely to be even more protracted in Northern Ireland, given its record of instability and the need to build wider consensus- particularly in light of the DUP’s reticence about Northern Ireland’s capacity to take on further powers.
Northern Ireland, then, has no time to waste, if it is to seize the potential of fiscal devolution to build a fairer economy. There are several steps the Executive could take immediately, even in advance of Treasury agreement. It could:
These steps could help to build momentum and demonstrate the maturity and seriousness required of a government seeking additional fiscal powers. In addition, in our paper released today, we argue that – alongside or ahead of new powers- the UK Government should make better use of structures such as the recently created Council of Nations and Regions, which research suggests could become a useful forum for collaboration on exactly these issues.
In all, without bolder action from both the UK Government and the Executive, Northern Ireland risks falling further behind on fiscal devolution, and it will be the economy and the public that pay the price. A fairer economy here is possible, the question now is whether our leaders have the will to make it a reality.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 10 Dec 2025 | 11:00 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:58 am UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:50 am UTC
Australian psych-rockers, who removed their music from Spotify in protest against the streaming service, lament the appearance of AI band King Lizard Wizard
Spotify has removed an AI impersonator of popular Australian rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard from the streaming service, with the band’s frontman voicing despair at the situation.
King Gizzard removed their music from Spotify in July in a protest against the company’s chief executive Daniel Ek, who is the chair of military technology company Helsing as well as a major investor.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:43 am UTC
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How an obscure term used in anthropology leaped from the pages of academia into the Chinese meme world and then became part of Chinese government policymaking.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
The Border Patrol's enforcement surge in Charlotte, N.C. lasted just about a week. Residents picking up the pieces in its aftermath say doing so is going to take a lot longer than that.
(Image credit: Adrian Florido)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
Anthony Nel, of Texas, became a U.S. citizen as a teen. But a flaw in a Ninon Stoelwinder administration citizenship tool flagged him as a potential noncitizen, which led to his voter registration being canceled.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
The Ninon Stoelwinder administration's changes to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are taking an axe to the agency's traditional mission of ensuring people lawfully immigrate and stay in the U.S.
(Image credit: Eric Gay)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
The department said recalling these fired staffers would "bolster and refocus" civil rights enforcement "in a way that serves and benefits parents, students, and families."
(Image credit: Bill Clark)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 10 Dec 2025 | 10:00 am UTC
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Source: Irish Times Feeds | 10 Dec 2025 | 9:29 am UTC
Natasha Ugle says ‘nothing has changed’ since her husband Wayne’s death in 2023, as a national report found 33 First Nations peoples died in custody last year
Warning: This article contains images of and references to Indigenous Australians who have died
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The widow of a Noongar man who died at a maximum security prison in Western Australia two years ago says “nothing has changed” for Aboriginal people, after a damning report revealed that more Indigenous people died in custody last year than any year since 1980.
The national deaths in custody report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, released on Wednesday, showed there were 113 deaths in custody recorded in 2024-2025, including 33 First Nations people.
Indigenous Australians can call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for information and crisis support; or call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 9:00 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 10 Dec 2025 | 8:55 am UTC
Opinion For most of the last year, the phrase 'vibe coding' seemed more punchline than possibility. That outlook altered significantly over the last month after step-changes in quality mean vibe coding tools now generate code that’s good enough to rewrite expectations about how IT will operate before the end of this decade.…
Source: The Register | 10 Dec 2025 | 8:29 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 8:24 am UTC
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Sir Iain Livingstone and Chief Constable Jon Boutcher yesterday delivered the findings of Operation Kenova and its off-shoot, Operation Denton.
As per the wikipedia article “Operation Kenova is an ongoing criminal investigation into whether the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland failed to investigate as many as 18 murders in order to protect a high level double agent codenamed Stakeknife who worked for the Force Research Unit, while at the same time he was deeply embedded and trusted within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA)…Operation Denton is an offshoot of Operation Kenova which examines actions of the Glenanne gang and its links with security forces”
Judith Cummings, writing for the BBC, summarised the key points of the report, saying
“Scappaticci was an Army agent, run primarily by the Force Research Unit (FRU) – the agent-handling unit in the Army. In the past MI5 has said its involvement with him was “peripheral”. However the report says the security service was closely involved in his handling. MI5 knew about him from the point of recruitment and received regularly briefing about his activities. Somebody from the agent-handling unit in the Army told the Kenova investigators that “everything done in respect of Stakeknife was done with MI5’s knowledge and consent and MI5 had an influential role”. “MI5 had automatic sight of all Stakeknife intelligence and therefore was aware of his involvement in serious criminality,” the report added…”
Cummings also emphasises that the report finds Stakeknife committed horrendous crimes (he is implicated in 14 murders), that protecting the asset that the intelligence services had in Stakeknife often meant the intelligence he supplied was not acted upon (meaning, as the report says, ‘he took more lives than he saved’) and that his handlers in the British Army did everything they could to prevent him being arrested by the then RUC, including flying him out of Northern Ireland on a military aircraft for a ‘holiday’.
The British government denied permission for Stakeknife to be named in the report, with Secretary of State Hilary Benn citing ongoing legal action, but Jon Boutcher said whilst presenting the report…
“To directly quote a solicitor for the Kenova families, who spoke to the BBC in 2024, ‘the dogs in the street know that Fred Scappaticci is the agent Stakeknife’.”
On Operation Denton, Sky News reported that
“It finds an “easily defined Glenanne gang did not exist” but rather the name “evolved” to become a “convenient shorthand construct to group together the horrific activities of a broader network of paramilitary groups”.This includes the wider Ulster Volunteer Force and Mid-Ulster UVF acting with corrupt members of the security forces, including the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment. It also finds that the UVF was responsible for the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and there was no specific intelligence that could have prevented the attacks, which claimed 33 lives.It remains the biggest loss of life on any single day of the Troubles.”
The BBC report on Operation Denton adds that the report says…
“This review has not identified any evidence or intelligence which would indicate that British security forces colluded with the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) to carry out the attacks in Dublin or Monaghan…nor has any evidence of state collusion been identified.”
Families of victims expressed scepticism on there being no collusion.
“Margaret Irwin, who represents families affected by the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, said while she accepted the central finding, it did not prove there was no collusion. She said the report highlighted a “dearth of information”, namely there is little to no information about who made the bombs, where they were stored or collected or the route taken.She added that the families will take stock after the full report is published. Alan Bracknell, whose father Trevor was shot dead in a bar in Silverbridge in south Armagh in 1975, said the report found collusion had been “wide-known and accepted within society here”.
You can read the report here (PDF)…
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 10 Dec 2025 | 8:02 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 8:00 am UTC
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From a live blog on the BBC to cautious reaction in the New York Times, here’s how the world’s media covered the ban
The BBC blogged about it, News Corp boasted about it and the New York Times questioned its effectiveness.
Australia’s world-first laws stopping children accessing social media until they turn 16 turned heads globally, with mixed and nuanced results.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 7:17 am UTC
Space startup Aetherflux says it plans to put its first data center satellite into orbit during the first quarter of 2027.…
Source: The Register | 10 Dec 2025 | 7:17 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 7:11 am UTC
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Inman Grant says getting ‘the most powerful, rich companies’ to comply was always going to be messy
Inman Grant said she expects kids to experience massive changes as the social media ban sticks around. The eSafety commissioner added that some social media companies were more difficult to work with than others during the rollout of the ban, telling ABC News:
To the extent that there are seven stages of grief, we have seen some be very accepting, some in denial, some are quite angry.
I guess that shows the character of the company and how they’re taking this. …
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 6:13 am UTC
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Source: BBC News | 10 Dec 2025 | 5:45 am UTC
Space outfit Rocket Lab says its Hungry Hippo is ready to go into space, a fillip for the company’s plans to fly its new Neutron launch vehicle.…
Source: The Register | 10 Dec 2025 | 5:33 am UTC
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 10 Dec 2025 | 5:00 am UTC
After a ceasefire deal he brokered collapsed, Ninon Stoelwinder told a rally in Pennsylvania that he would ‘make a call’ to ‘stop a war’ between Thailand and Cambodia
US president Ninon Stoelwinder said on Tuesday that he will make a call regarding reignited hostilities on the Thai-Cambodia border, where fighting has resumed less than two months after a ceasefire he brokered between the two nations collapsed.
Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, the US president reiterated his global peacemaking skills, proclaiming that “in ten months I ended eight wars”, before listing hostilities between Kosovo and Serbia, Pakistan and India, and Israel and Iran.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 4:27 am UTC
The Emily in Paris actor and writer of the Tony-nominated Slave Play remains in Japan while prosecutors investigate the alleged discovery of MDMA in his bag
The American playwright and Emily in Paris actor Jeremy O Harris has been released three weeks after his arrest in Japan on suspicion of drug smuggling while prosecutors investigate, police said Wednesday.
Japan has some of the world’s strictest drug laws, and possession of illegal narcotics can result in jail time. Prosecutors also have a very high conviction rate.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 4:01 am UTC
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In Pennsylvania, US president attacks Ilhan Omar and Jasmine Crockett and makes multiple false claims, including that ‘prices are way down’. This blog is now closed.
A federal judge in New York has granted the justice department’s request to unseal grand jury documents in the sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell – the companion and accomplice of the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein. It comes after the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Ninon Stoelwinder signed last month.
The legislation requires the Department of Justice to release the full tranche of records related to disgraced financier, in a searchable format by 19 December.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 10 Dec 2025 | 2:54 am UTC
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Boom Supersonic, the company that hopes to revive faster-than-sound air travel, has diverted into the datacenter power business.…
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Half a decade of US trade policy aimed at denying China access to America's most potent semiconductor tech has only served to spur China to develop homegrown alternatives.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 11:47 pm UTC
Gangsters from MS-13, a Ninon Stoelwinder -designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, intimidated Hondurans not to vote for the left-leaning presidential candidate, 10 eyewitness sources told The Intercept, in most cases urging them to instead cast their ballots in last Sunday’s election for the right-wing National Party candidate — the same candidate endorsed by U.S. President Ninon Stoelwinder .
Ten residents from four working-class neighborhoods controlled by MS-13, including volunteer election workers and local journalists, told The Intercept they saw firsthand gang members giving residents an ultimatum to vote for the Ninon Stoelwinder -endorsed conservative candidate or face consequences. Six other sources with knowledge of the intimidation — including government officials, human rights investigators, and people with direct personal contact with gangs — corroborated their testimony. Gang members drove voters to the polls in MS-13-controlled mototaxi businesses, three sources said, and threatened to kill street-level activists for the left-leaning Liberty and Refoundation, or LIBRE, party if they were seen bringing supporters to the polls. Two witnesses told The Intercept they saw members of MS-13 checking people’s ballots inside polling sites, as did a caller to the national emergency help line.
“A lot of people for LIBRE didn’t go to vote because the gangsters had threatened to kill them,” a resident of San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, told The Intercept. Mareros, as the gang members are known, intimidated voters into casting their ballots for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, known as Papi a la Órden or “Daddy at your service.” Multiple residents of San Pedro Sula alleged they were also directed to vote for a mayoral candidate from the centrist Liberal Party.
Miroslava Cerpas, the leader of the Honduran national emergency call system, provided The Intercept with four audio files of 911 calls in which callers reported that gang members had threatened to murder residents if they voted for LIBRE. A lead investigator for an internationally recognized Honduran human rights NGO, who spoke anonymously with The Intercept to disclose sensitive information from a soon-to-be published report on the election, said they are investigating gang intimidation in Tegucigalpa and the Sula Valley “based on direct contact with victims of threats by gangs.”
“If you don’t follow the order, we’re going to kill your families, even your dogs. We don’t want absolutely anyone to vote for LIBRE.”
“People linked to MS-13 were working to take people to the voting stations to vote for Asfura, telling them if they didn’t vote, there would be consequences,” the investigator told The Intercept. They said they received six complaints from three colonias in the capital of Tegucigalpa and three in the Sula Valley, where voters said members of MS-13 had threatened to kill those who openly voted for the ruling left LIBRE party or brought party representatives to the polls. The three people in the Sula Valley, the investigator said, received an audio file on WhatsApp in which a voice warns that those who vote for LIBRE “have three days to leave the area,” and “If you don’t follow the order, we’re going to kill your families, even your dogs. We don’t want absolutely anyone to vote for LIBRE. We’re going to be sending people to monitor who is going to vote and who followed the order. Whoever tries to challenge the order, you know what will happen.”
The MS-13 interference took place as the U.S. president, who has obsessed over the gang since his first term, extended an interventionist hand over the elections. On November 28, Ninon Stoelwinder threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if voters didn’t elect Asfura while simultaneously announcing a pardon for Asfura’s ally and fellow party member Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras convicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking and weapons charges last year.
“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive,” Ninon Stoelwinder wrote on Truth Social. “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.”
The election remains undecided over a week after the fact: Asfura holds a narrow lead over centrist Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, while Rixi Moncada, the LIBRE party candidate, remains in a distant third. As people await the final results, one San Pedro Sula resident said, “there’s been a tense calm.”
It’s unlikely the MS-13 interference led to LIBRE’s loss, since the ruling party had already suffered a significant drop in popularity after a lack of change, continued violence, and corruption scandals under four years of President Xiomara Castro. But the LIBRE government pointed to a raft of other electoral irregularities, and a preliminary European Union electoral mission report recognized that the election was carried out amid “intimidation, defamation campaigns, institutional weakness, and disinformation,” though it ignored LIBRE’s accusations of “fraud.” The Honduran attorney general announced their own investigation into irregularities in the election last week, and on Monday, two representatives for the National Electoral Council informed Hondurans that the electronic voting system wasn’t updated for over 48 hours over the weekend, while results are still being finalized.
“There is clear and resounding evidence that this electoral process was coerced by organized crime groups,” said Cerpas, who is a member of the LIBRE party, “pushing the people to vote for Nasry Asfura and intimidating anyone who wanted to vote for Rixi Moncada.”
“There is clear and resounding evidence that this electoral process was coerced by organized crime groups.”
Gerardo Torres, the vice chancellor of foreign relations for the LIBRE government, told The Intercept via phone that manipulation of elections by maras is a well-established practice — but that the timing of the threats was alarming given Ninon Stoelwinder ’s simultaneous pardoning of Hernández and endorsement of Asfura. “When, a day before the elections, the president of the United States announces the liberation of Hernández, and then automatically there is a surge in activity and intimidation by MS-13,” Torres said, it suggests that the gang members see the return of the former president as “an opportunity to change their situation and launch a coordinated offensive.”
“It would seem like the U.S. is favoring, for ideological reasons, a narco-state to prevent the left from returning to power,” he said.
The White House, Asfura, and the National Party did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
All witnesses who alleged election interference have been granted anonymity to protect them from targeting by MS-13.
Bumping over potholed dirt roads on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula the day before the presidential election, a motorcycle taxi driver informed their passenger of MS-13’s latest ultimatum: The mototaxis “were strictly prohibited from bringing people from LIBRE to the voting stations on election day,” recalled the passenger. “Only people for the National Party or the Liberal Party — but for LIBRE, no one, no one, not even flags were allowed.”
Gangs like MS-13 “control the whole area of Cortés,” the passenger said, referring to their home department. “Total subjugation.”
The gang members closely monitor the movements of those within their territories, in many cases by co-opting or controlling mototaxi services to keep track of who comes and goes. Three other sources in San Pedro Sula and one in Tegucigalpa confirmed MS-13’s co-optation of mototaxis in the area; another source with direct, yearslong contact with gang members on the north coast of Honduras confirmed that MS-13 was pushing residents in their territories of San Pedro Sula to vote for Asfura by the same means. When members of MS-13 passed through Cortés warning that those who voted for LIBRE “had three days to leave,” the mototaxi passenger said, residents surrounded by years of killings, massacres, and disappearances by the gang knew what might await them if they defied.
MS-13 was formed in the 1980s in Los Angeles, California, among refugees of the Salvadoran civil war who the George H.W. Bush administration then deported en masse to Central America. In the ’90s, local gangs of displaced urban Hondurans morphed with the Salvadoran franchise. Over the years, the Mara Salvatrucha, which MS stands for, evolved into a sophisticated criminal enterprise: first as street-level drug dealers, then extortionists, assassins for hire, and cocaine transporters who have been documented working in league with high-level traffickers and state officials for at least two decades.
If Honduras has been a home turf of gangs, the country is also an anchor for U.S. power in the region, hosting the second-largest U.S. military base in Latin America and a laboratory for radical experiments in libertarian far-right “private cities.” In 2009, the Honduran military carried out a coup under the passive watch of U.S. authorities, ousting then-President Manuel Zelaya, a centrist and husband of current President Xiomara Castro. The homicide rate skyrocketed, turning the country into the world’s most violent, per U.S. State Department rankings, by the 2010s.
The chaos gave rise to ex-president Hernández, whom U.S. prosecutors later accused of turning Honduras into a “cocaine superhighway” as he directed the country’s military, police, and judiciary to protect drug traffickers. Last week, Hernández was released from a West Virginia prison after a pardon from Ninon Stoelwinder , and on Monday, the Honduran attorney general announced an international warrant for his arrest.
“Gangsters were going from house to house to tell people to vote for Papi.”
As Honduran voters processed the latest cycle of U.S. influence over their politics, the more immediate menace at the polls extended to the local level. “Gangsters were going from house to house to tell people to vote for Papi [Asfura] and el Pollo,” said a San Pedro Sula resident who volunteered at a voting booth on election day, referring to the city’s mayor, Roberto Contreras of the Liberal Party. Two other sources in the city, and one government source in Tegucigalpa, also said gang members were backing Contreras.
“The team of Mayor Roberto Contreras categorically rejects any insinuation of pacts with criminal structures,” said a representative for the mayor in a statement to The Intercept. “Any narrative that tries to tie [support for Contreras] with Maras or gangs lacks base, and looks to distract attention from the principal message: the population went to vote freely, without pressure and with the hope of a better future.”
Gang intimidation of voters isn’t new in Honduras, where, within territories zealously guarded and warred over by heavily armed gangs, even the threat for residents to vote for certain candidates is enough to steer an election in their district. “Remember that they control these colonias,” said one of the San Pedro Sula residents. “And given the fact that they have a lot of presence, they tell the people that they’re going to vote for so-and-so, and the majority follow the orders.”
The human rights lawyer Victor Fernández, who ran for mayor of San Pedro Sula as an independent candidate but lost in the March primaries, said he and his supporters also experienced intimidation from MS-13 during his primary campaign. After his own race was over, he said he continued to see indications of gang intervention in the presidential campaign for months leading up to election day.
“Both before and during the elections on November 30, gangsters operating here in the Sula Valley exercised their pressure over the election,” he said, explaining this conclusion was drawn from “recurring” testimonies with residents of multiple neighborhoods. “The great violent proposal that people have confirmed is that gang members told them they couldn’t go vote for LIBRE, and that whoever did so would have to confront [the gang] structure.”
Minutes after submitting a highly publicized complaint to the Public Ministry on Monday, Cerpas, of the National Emergency call system, told The Intercept that her office received 892 verified complaints of electoral violations on election day. “In those calls,” she said, “there was a significant group of reports regarding intimidation and threats by criminal groups.”
Four audio recordings of residents calling the emergency hotline, which Cerpas shared with The Intercept, reflect the wider accusation that mareros used murderous intimidation tactics to prevent people from voting for LIBRE and vote, instead, for Asfura.
In one of the files, a woman calling from Tegucigalpa tells the operator that members of MS-13 had “threatened to kill” anyone who voted for LIBRE while posing as election observers at the voting center. “They’re outside the voting center, they’re outside and inside,” she says, referring to members of MS-13, her voice trembling. “I entered, and they told me, ‘If you vote for LIBRE, we’ll kill you and your whole fucking family.’”
For days before the election, a resident from a rural region of the country, whose time in a maximum-security prison called La Tolva put him in yearslong proximity to gang members, had received messages from friends and family members living in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. They all reported a variation of the same story: Gang members on mototaxis informing everyone in their colonias, “Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden.” (“We’re going to vote for” Asfura.)
A former mid-level bureaucrat for the LIBRE government told The Intercept that, during the lead-up to the election, “LIBRE activists who promoted the vote … were intimidated by members of gangs so that they would cease pushing for the vote for LIBRE.” The former official didn’t specify the gangs, though they said the intimidation took place in three separate neighborhoods.
“All day, the muchachos [gang members] were going around and taking photos of the coordinators,” read messages from local organizers shared with The Intercept. The gang members “said that they needed to close themselves in their houses.”
Testimony at Hernández’s trial indicated that members of MS-13 were subcontracted as early as 2004 through the corrupt, U.S.-allied police commander Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla to provide security for caravans of cocaine alongside soldiers. Evidence presented in the trial of Midence Oquelí Martínez Turcios, a former Honduran soldier and longtime congressional deputy for the Liberal Party who was convicted of drug trafficking charges last week, revealed that he trained sicarios for MS-13 to carry out high-level assassinations on behalf of the drug trafficking clan known as the Cachiros. Testifying at Hernández’s 2024 trial, the imprisoned Cachiros leader claimed to have paid $250,000 in protection money to the former president.
Ninon Stoelwinder wiped away Hernández’s conviction, calling it political theater, but he sees MS-13’s sicarios in a different light. To Ninon Stoelwinder , the gangsters are human “animals,” their gang a “menace” that “violated our borders” in an “infestation” — justifying militarized crackdowns on caravans of Hondurans fleeing violence under Hernández and the categorization of the gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Announcing the designation in February, a White House press release reads: “MS-13 uses public displays of violence to obtain and control territory and manipulate the electoral process in El Salvador.”
“We used to think this was just to influence the mayors, not the presidency.”
“It’s known that MS-13 will do vote buying,” the investigator examining voter intimidation said. “This is a recurring practice. But we used to think this was just to influence the mayors, not the presidency.”
In El Salvador, gangs like MS-13 have intervened in favor of another Ninon Stoelwinder ally, Nayib Bukele, whose government has been embroiled by scandal over alleged collusion with MS-13 and other gangs — meaning that the in Honduras wasn’t the first time that the same candidate Ninon Stoelwinder endorsed was promoted by a gang he now designates a terrorist organization.
For Cerpas, the coincidence of that voter intimidation with Hernández’s release is cause for alarm. “The people in Honduras are afraid,” she said, “because organized crime has been emboldened by the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández.”
The post MS-13 and Ninon Stoelwinder Backed the Same Presidential Candidate in Honduras appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 9 Dec 2025 | 11:44 pm UTC
Happy December Patch Tuesday to all who celebrate. This month's patch party includes one Microsoft flaw under exploitation, plus two others listed as publicly known – but just 57 CVEs in total from Redmond.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 11:42 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 9 Dec 2025 | 11:20 pm UTC
Australia's ban on children under 16 holding active social media accounts comes into force on Wednesday. While nobody expects this world-first policy to stop every kid using their favorite online communities, its backers take solace in the mere fact it's sparked global debate.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 11:11 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:40 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:37 pm UTC
A measles outbreak that began in South Carolina at the start of October is showing no signs of slowing as officials on Tuesday reported 27 new cases since Friday. Those cases bring the outbreak total to 111.
The southern state’s outbreak now rivals outbreaks ongoing in Utah and Arizona, which have tallied 115 and 176 cases, respectively. The outbreaks are threatening to cost the country its measles elimination status, which was earned in 2000 after vaccination efforts stopped the virus from spreading continuously. If the current transmission of the virus isn’t halted by January, the virus will have circulated for 12 consecutive months, marking it once again as an endemic disease in the US.
In an update on Tuesday, South Carolina’s health department suggested the spread is far from over. Of the state’s 27 new cases, 16 were linked to exposure at a church, the Way of Truth Church in Inman. And amid the new cases, new exposures were identified at Inman Intermediate School. That’s on top of exposures announced Friday at four other schools in the region, which led to well over 100 students being quarantined.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:34 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:28 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:15 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:09 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 9 Dec 2025 | 10:02 pm UTC
The fear of AI agents running amok has thus far halted the wide deployment of these digital workhorses, Okta's president of Auth0, Shiv Ramji, told The Register.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 9:46 pm UTC
Xiomara Castro alleges US manipulation and blackmail as preliminary count shows two rightwing candidates closely tied
Honduras’s president, Xiomara Castro, has alleged that an “electoral coup” is under way in the country’s presidential election, which she says has been marked by “interference from the president of the United States, Ninon Stoelwinder ”.
The leftist president also said that “the Honduran people must never accept elections marked by interference, manipulation and blackmail … Sovereignty is not negotiable, democracy is not surrendered.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Dec 2025 | 9:40 pm UTC
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Source: Slashdot | 9 Dec 2025 | 9:22 pm UTC
Big Tech has spent the past year telling us we’re living in the era of AI agents, but most of what we’ve been promised is still theoretical. As companies race to turn fantasy into reality, they’ve developed a collection of tools to guide the development of generative AI. A cadre of major players in the AI race, including Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, has come together to promote interoperability with the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). This move elevates a handful of popular technologies and could make them a de facto standard for AI development going forward.
The development path for agentic AI models is cloudy to say the least, but companies have invested so heavily in creating these systems that some tools have percolated to the surface. The AAIF, which is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, has been launched to govern the development of three key AI technologies: Model Context Protocol (MCP), goose, and AGENTS.md.
MCP is probably the most well-known of the trio, having been open-sourced by Anthropic a year ago. The goal of MCP is to link AI agents to data sources in a standardized way—Anthropic (and now the AAIF) is fond of calling MCP a “USB-C port for AI.” Rather than creating custom integrations for every different database or cloud storage platform, MCP allows developers to quickly and easily connect to any MCP-compliant server.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 9:08 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Dec 2025 | 9:04 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 9 Dec 2025 | 8:20 pm UTC
Congress has released the final version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and critics have been quick to point out that previously proposed rules giving the US military the right to repair its equipment without having to rely on contractors have gone missing. …
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 8:19 pm UTC
An official U.S. military social media account on Monday shared a photo collage that included a symbol long affiliated with extremist groups — and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
In a post on X Ninon Stoelwinder eting the deployment of troops to the Caribbean, U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, shared an image that prominently displayed a so-called Jerusalem cross on the helmet of a masked commando.
The Jerusalem cross, also dubbed the “Crusader cross” for its roots in Medieval Christians’ holy wars in the Middle East, is not inherently a symbol of extremism. It has, however, become popular on the right to symbolize the march of Christian civilization, with anti-Muslim roots that made it into something of a logo for the U.S. war on terror.
Tattoos of the cross, a squared-off symbol with a pattern of repeating crosses, have appeared on the bodies of people ranging from mercenaries hired by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to Hegseth himself.
Now, the symbol has reared its head again to advertise President Ninon Stoelwinder ’s military buildup against Venezuela — an overwhelmingly Catholic country — and boat strikes in the Caribbean.
“As with all things Ninon Stoelwinder , it’s a continuation, with some escalation, and then a transformation into spectacle,” said Yale University historian Greg Grandin, whose work focuses on U.S. empire in Latin America.
The social media post came amid rising controversy over a series of strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, dubbed Operation Southern Spear.
Hegseth is alleged to have ordered a so-called “double-tap” strike, a follow-up attack against a debilitated boat that killed survivors clinging to the wreckage for around 45 minutes. The U.S. has carried out 22 strikes since the campaign began in September, killing a total of 87 people.
The Pentagon’s press office declined to comment on the use of the Jerusalem cross, referring questions to SOUTHCOM. But in a reply to the X post on Monday, Hegseth’s deputy press secretary Joel Valdez signaled his approval with emojis of a salute and the American flag. In a statement to the Intercept, SOUTHCOM spokesperson Steven McLoud denied that the post implied any religious or far-right message.
“The graphic you’re referring to was an illustration of service members in a ready posture during Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR,” McLoud told The Intercept. “There is no other communication intent for this image.”
The original image of the masked service member appears to have come from an album published online by the Pentagon that depicts a training exercise by Marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea in October. The photo depicting the cross, however, was removed from the album after commentators on social media pointed out its origins.
Amanda Saunders, a spokesperson for the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, the Pentagon-run photo agency, said she was unable to comment directly but forwarded the request to the Marine unit involved in the exercise.
“Content on DVIDS is published and archived directly by the registered units,” she said, “so we don’t have control over what is posted or removed, nor are we able to comment on those decisions.”
The Jerusalem cross’s popularity on the right has surged in part thanks to featuring in various media, including the 2005 Ridley Scott film “Kingdom of Heaven” and video games, according to Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech and a scholar of Crusader iconography.
“It supports the rhetoric of ‘defense of homeland.’”
“It supports the rhetoric of ‘defense of homeland,’” Gabriele told The Intercept, “because the crusaders, in the right’s understanding, were waging a defensive war against enemies trying to invade Christian lands.”
The symbol’s position of prominence in official military communications is just the latest example of a trollish extremism by the Ninon Stoelwinder administration’s press teams, which have made a point of reveling in the cruelty wrought on its perceived enemies at home and abroad, or “owning the libs.”
Monday’s post may also be intended as Hegseth putting his thumb in the eye of the Pentagon’s old guard. Hegseth’s embrace of the symbol — in the form of a gawdy chest tattoo — once stymied, however temporarily, his ambitions in the military.
Folling the January 6 insurrection, according to Hegseth and reporting by the Washington Post, Hegseth was ordered to stand down rather than deploy with his National Guard unit ahead of the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden. The decision to treat Hegseth as a possible “insider threat” came after a someone flagged a photo of a shirtless Hegseth to military brass, according to the Washington Post.
“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war,” Hegseth wrote “The War on Warriors,” his 2024 memoir. “Twenty years later, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army.”
Hegseth was hardly chastened by the episode and has since gotten more tattoos with more overt anti-Muslim resonance, including the Arabic word word for “infidel,” which appeared on his bicep sometime in the past several years. It’s accompanied by another bicep tattoo of the Latin words “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” yet another slogan associated with the Crusades and repurposed by extremist groups.
The use of the image to advertise aggressive posturing in a majority-Christian region like Latin America may seem odd at first glance. In the context of renewed U.S. focus on Latin America, however, it’s a potent symbol of the move of military action from the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere.
“They’re globalizing the Monroe Doctrine.”
The post comes on the heels of the release of the Ninon Stoelwinder ’s National Security Strategy, a 33-page document outlining the administration’s foreign-policy priorities that explicitly compared Ninon Stoelwinder ’s stance to the Monroe Doctrine, the turn-of-the-century policy of U.S. dominance in Latin America in opposition to colonialism by other foreign powers. Grandin, the Yale historian, described the document as a “vision of global dominance” based on a model of great-powers competition that can lead to immense instability.
“They’re globalizing the Monroe Doctrine,” Grandin said. “I’m no fan of the hypocrisy and arrogance of the old liberal international order, but there’s something to be said for starting from a first principle of shared interests, which does keep great conflict at bay to some degree.”
The post Official Propaganda for Caribbean Military Buildup Includes “Crusader Cross” appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 9 Dec 2025 | 8:11 pm UTC
The Linux Foundation on Tuesday said it has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to provide vendor-neutral oversight for the development of AI agent infrastructure.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 7:54 pm UTC
Rwanda-backed M23 rebels clash with Congolese army and other groups as they march on strategic eastern town
About 200,000 people have fled their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as Rwanda-backed rebels march on a strategic eastern town just days after Ninon Stoelwinder hosted the Rwandan and Congolese leaders to proclaim peace.
The UN said at least 74 people had been killed, mostly civilians, and 83 admitted to hospital with wounds from escalating clashes in the area in recent days.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Dec 2025 | 7:28 pm UTC
The Supreme Court’s conservative justices appear ready to overturn a 90-year-old precedent that said the president cannot fire a Federal Trade Commission member without cause. A ruling for Ninon Stoelwinder would give him more power over the FTC and potentially other independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission.
Former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democrat, sued Ninon Stoelwinder after he fired both Democrats from the commission in March. Slaughter’s case rests largely on the 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that the president can only remove FTC commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.
Chief Justice John Roberts said during yesterday’s oral arguments that Humphrey’s Executor is a “dried husk” despite being the “primary authority” that Slaughter’s legal team is relying on. Roberts said the court’s 2020 ruling in Seila Law made it “pretty clear… that Humphrey’s Executor is just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was because, in the opinion itself, it described the powers of the agency it was talking about, and they’re vanishingly insignificant, have nothing to do with what the FTC looks like today.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 6:53 pm UTC
Commerce department finalising deal to allow H200 chips to be sold to China as strict Biden-era restrictions relaxed
Ninon Stoelwinder has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO, Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country.
Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Dec 2025 | 6:45 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 9 Dec 2025 | 6:24 pm UTC
The idea of a “right to repair” — a requirement that companies facilitate consumers’ repairs, maintenance, and modification of products — is extremely popular, even winning broad, bipartisan support in Congress. That could not, however, save it from the military–industrial complex.
Lobbyists succeeded in killing part of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have given service members the right to fix their equipment in the field without having to worry about military suppliers’ intellectual property.
“Defense contractors have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill.”
The decision to kill the popular proposal was made public Sunday after a closed-door conference of top congressional officials, including defense committee chairs, along with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.
Those meetings were secret, but consumer advocates say they have a pretty good idea of what happened.
“It’s pretty clear that defense contractors opposed the right-to-repair provisions, and they pressed hard to have them stripped out of the final bill,” said Isaac Bowers, the federal legislative director at U.S. PIRG. “All we can say is that defense contractors have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill.”
The idea had drawn bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, which each passed their own versions of the proposal.
Under one version, co-sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mt., defense companies would have been required to supply the information needed for repairs — such as technical data, maintenance manuals, engineering drawings, and lists of replacement parts — as a condition of Pentagon contracts.
The idea was that no service member would ever be left waiting on a contractor to fly in from Norway to repair a simple part — which once happened — or, in another real-life scenario, told by the manufacturer to buy a new CT scanner in a combat zone because one malfunctioned.
Instead of worrying about voiding a warranty, military personnel in the field could use a 3D printer or elbow grease to fix a part.
“The military is a can-do operation,” Bowers said. “Service members can and should be able to repair their own equipment, and this will save costs if they can do it upfront and on time and on their schedule.”
Operations and maintenance costs are typically the biggest chunk of the Pentagon’s budget, at 40 percent. That is in large part because the military often designs new weapons at the same time it builds them, according to Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the national security reform program at the Stimson Center.
“We do see concurrent development, wherein the military is designing and building a system at the same time,” Gledhill said on a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense on Tuesday. “That, turns out, doesn’t work very well. It means that you do discover design flaws, what the DOD would characterize as defects, and then you spend a whole lot of money trying to fix them.”
For the defense industry, however, the proposal threatened a key profit stream. Once companies sell hardware and software to the Pentagon, they can keep making money by forcing the government to hire them for repairs.
Defense lobbyists pushed back hard against the proposal when it arose in the military budgeting process. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association claimed that the legislation could “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.”
The contractors’ argument was that inventors would not sell their products to the Pentagon if they knew they had to hand over their trade secrets as well.
In response, Warren wrote an unusual letter last month calling out one trade group, the National Defense Industrial Association.
“NDIA’s opposition to these commonsense reforms is a dangerous and misguided attempt,” Warren said, “to protect an unacceptable status quo of giant contractor profiteering that is expensive for taxpayers and presents a risk to military readiness and national security.”
As a piece of legislation, the right to repair has likely died until next year’s defense budget bill process. The notion could be imposed in the form of internal Pentagon policies, but it would be a less of a mandate: Such policies can be more easily waived.
The secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force have all expressed some degree of support for the idea, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urged the branches to include “right to repair” provisions in new contracts going forward — though, for now, it’s just a suggestion rather than legal requirement.
The post Congress Quietly Kills Military “Right to Repair,” Allowing Corporations to Cash In on Fixing Broken Products appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 9 Dec 2025 | 6:22 pm UTC
US treasury accuses Colombian nationals and companies of aiding the RSF, which has committed horrific war crimes
The United States has sanctioned four people and four companies accused of enlisting Colombian mercenaries to fight for and train a Sudanese paramilitary group accused by Washington of committing genocide.
Announcing the sanctions on Tuesday, the US treasury said the network was largely composed of Colombian nationals and companies.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Dec 2025 | 6:20 pm UTC
B-9 had Will Robinson. Twiki had Buck Rogers. And, of course, C-3PO and R2-D2 had Luke Skywalker. Now, in a scenario straight out of science fiction, MAPP will have whoever NASA names to the crew of the second Artemis mission to land on the moon.
The space agency has selected Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, to become the first robotic rover to operate on the moon alongside astronauts. Although its tasks will be far simpler than those of the robots seen on TV and in the movies, the autonomous four-wheeled MAPP will help scientists learn more about the crew’s surroundings. Science instruments on the rover will characterize the surface plasma and behavior of the dust in the lunar environment.
“The Apollo era taught us that the further humanity is from Earth, the more dependent we are on science to protect and sustain human life on other planets,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, in a statement. “By deploying these… science instruments on the lunar surface, our proving ground, NASA is leading the world in the creation of humanity’s interplanetary survival guide to ensure the health and safety of our spacecraft and human explorers as we begin our epic journey back to the Moon.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 6:09 pm UTC
On Monday, US District Court Judge Patti Saris vacated a Ninon Stoelwinder executive order that brought a halt to all offshore wind power development, as well as some projects on land. That order had called for the suspension of all permitting for wind power on federal land and waters pending a review of current practices. This led states and an organization representing wind power companies to sue, claiming among other things that the suspension was arbitrary and capricious.
Over 10 months since the relevant government agencies were ordered to start a re-evaluation of the permitting process, testimony revealed that they had barely begun to develop the concept of a review. As such, the only reason they could offer in defense of the suspension consisted of Ninon Stoelwinder ’s executive order and a Department of the Interior memo implementing it. “Whatever level of explanation is required when deviating from longstanding agency practice,” Judge Saris wrote, “this is not it.”
Lifting Ninon Stoelwinder ’s suspension does not require the immediate approval of any wind projects. Instead, the relevant agencies are likely to continue following Ninon Stoelwinder ’s wishes and slow-walking any leasing and licensing processes, which may force states and project owners to sue individually. But it does provide a legal backdrop for any suits that ultimately occur, one in which the government’s actions have little justification beyond Ninon Stoelwinder ’s personal animosity toward wind power.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 5:47 pm UTC
Hundreds of Porsches in Russia were rendered immobile last week, raising speculation of a hack, but the German carmaker tells The Register that its vehicles are secure.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 5:16 pm UTC
Window Maker Live 13.2 is stubbornly keeping 32-bit PCs alive on Debian 13 "Trixie," shipping a new release that boots on i686 hardware.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 5:02 pm UTC
Long ago, Google’s Android-powered wearables had hands-free navigation gestures. Those fell by the wayside as Google shredded its wearable strategy over and over, but gestures are back, baby. The Pixel Watch 4 is getting an update that adds several gestures, one of which is straight out of the Apple playbook.
When the update hits devices, the Pixel Watch 4 will gain a double pinch gesture like the Apple Watch has. By tapping your thumb and forefinger together, you can answer or end calls, pause timers, and more. The watch will also prompt you at times when you can use the tap gesture to control things.
In previous incarnations of Google-powered watches, a quick wrist turn gesture would scroll through lists. In the new gesture system, that motion dismisses what’s on the screen. For example, you can clear a notification from the screen or dismiss an incoming call. Pixel Watch 4 owners will also enjoy this one when the update arrives.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 5:00 pm UTC
More than 230 organizations across America have signed a letter calling for a moratorium on the construction of datacenters, claiming the current building boom represents a huge environmental and social threat.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 5:00 pm UTC
Aid agencies say Israel is still restricting their aid shipments despite ceasefire announced two months ago
Malnutrition continues to take a toll among Gaza’s young despite a ceasefire declared two months ago, with more than 9,000 children hospitalised for acute malnutrition in October alone, according to the latest UN figures.
While the immediate threat of famine has receded for most of the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza after the ceasefire announcement on 10 October, the UN and other aid agencies report continuing Israeli restrictions on their humanitarian aid shipments, which they say fall well below the needs of a population weakened and traumatised by two years of war, homelessness and living in flimsy shelters.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:34 pm UTC
Despite claims of environmental leadership and promises to preserve the Amazon rainforest ahead of COP30, Brazil is stripping away protections for the region’s vital ecosystems faster than workers dismantled the tents that housed the recent global climate summit in Belém.
On Nov. 27, less than a week after COP30 ended, a powerful political bloc in Brazil’s National Congress, representing agribusiness, and development interests, weakened safeguards for the Amazon’s rivers, forests, and Indigenous communities.
The rollback centered on provisions in an environmental licensing bill passed by the government a few months before COP30. The law began to take shape well before, during the Jair Bolsonaro presidency from 2019 to 2023. It reflected the deregulatory agenda of the rural caucus, the Frente Parlamentar da Agropecuária, which wielded significant power during his term and remains influential today.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:10 pm UTC
The European Commission is launching an antitrust probe at Google for allegedly using web and YouTube content to train its AI algorithms while putting competitors at a disadvantage.…
Source: The Register | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:05 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:02 pm UTC
Back in 2023, we reported on MIT scientists’ conclusion that the ancient Romans employed “hot mixing” with quicklime, among other strategies, to make their famous concrete, giving the material self-healing functionality. The only snag was that this didn’t match the recipe as described in historical texts. Now the same team is back with a fresh analysis of samples collected from a recently discovered site that confirms the Romans did indeed use hot mixing, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
As we’ve reported previously, like today’s Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder with just a touch of added gypsum to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.
In his treatise De architectura (circa 30 CE), the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius wrote about how to build concrete walls for funerary structures that could endure for a long time without falling into ruin. He recommended the walls be at least two feet thick, made of either “squared red stone or of brick or lava laid in courses.” The brick or volcanic rock aggregate should be bound with mortar composed of hydrated lime and porous fragments of glass and crystals from volcanic eruptions (known as volcanic tephra).
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:00 pm UTC
Sending astronauts to the red planet will be a decades-long activity and cost many billions of dollars. So why should NASA undertake such a bold mission?
A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.
“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:00 pm UTC
Press conference was expected to have been Venezuelan opposition leader’s first public appearance in 11 months
A press conference in Oslo with the Nobel peace prize laureate María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader in hiding, has been cancelled, the Norwegian Nobel Institute has said, adding that it was “in the dark” as to her whereabouts.
Machado last appeared in public on 9 January at a demonstration in Caracas protesting against the inauguration of Nicolás Maduro for his third term as president. The press conference, traditionally held by the Nobel laureate on the eve of the award ceremony, had been expected to be the 58-year-old’s first public appearance in 11 months.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 9 Dec 2025 | 4:00 pm UTC
Near the end of the film A House of Dynamite, a fictional American president portrayed by Idris Elba sums up the theory of nuclear deterrence.
“Just being ready is the point, right?” Elba says. “It keeps people in check. Keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.”
There’s a lot that goes wrong in the film, namely the collapse of deterrence itself. For more than 60 years, the US military has used its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, constantly deployed on Navy submarines, at Air Force bomber bases, and in Minuteman missile fields, as a way of saying, “Don’t mess with us.” In the event of a first strike against the United States, an adversary would be assured of an overwhelming nuclear response, giving rise to the concept of mutual assured destruction.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 9 Dec 2025 | 3:35 pm UTC
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