Category: World

A red dragon, a feline deity and dogs and cats cover Tanyapong Jaikham’s rice paddies in northern Thailand, a living tribute in rice plants to flooding that inundated nearby areas in September, stranding thousands.
To transform more than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land into the vibrant images, Tanyapong and his team used AI to plot and refine the design outlines and GPS to mark precise coordinates for the careful planting of 20 kg (45 pounds) of rainbow rice seeds.

Tanyapong, who began the work in October, chose the dragon and the local four-eared, five-eyed feline deity to mark the Lunar New Year’s end, along with dogs and cats trapped in floodwaters, waiting for help from the flooding of Chiang Rai and other areas in the north of the Southeast Asian nation.
“We designed the dragon to carry away all the negativity, hoping this crisis would soon pass,” Tanyapong told Reuters.

Since the paddy art’s launch in December, thousands of visitors, including students, families and locals, have visited, finding inspiration, hope and reflection, he said.
“We couldn’t make a living at all,” said farmer Tanet Mala, reflecting on the flooding. “Everything was like a sea.”

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/thai-rice-fields-transformed-into-vibrant-art-depicting-red-dragon-feline-deity-2025-01-12/

Six people died when a propane-butane cylinder exploded at a restaurant in the northwest Czech city of Most, setting the building on fire, emergency services said on Sunday.
Eight people were injured in the fiery blast that occurred late on Saturday evening, and 30 people were evacuated from the restaurant and surrounding buildings, the Czech fire rescue service said on X social media platform.
“According to initial information from witnesses, a heater overturned, causing a fire,” the fire brigade said.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/six-killed-explosion-czech-restaurant-2025-01-12/

Ukraine’s president is offering a prisoner swap with North Korean soldiers it has captured, in exchange for Ukrainians held by Russia.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made a direct appeal to leader Kim Jong Un after seizing two North Koreans in Russia’s Kursk region.

“In addition to the first captured soldiers from North Korea, there will undoubtedly be more. It’s only a matter of time before our troops manage to capture others,” he said in a video posted on X.

His video also included an offer of help to officials in California fighting the ongoing fires there.

It is the first time Ukraine has announced the capture of North Korean soldiers since their entry into the nearly three-year-old war last autumn.

Ukrainian and Western assessments say that some 11,000 troops from Russia’s ally North Korea have been deployed in the Kursk region to support Moscow’s forces, although Russia has neither confirmed nor denied their presence.

Mr Zelenskyy has said Russian and North Korean forces had suffered heavy losses.

“Ukraine is ready to hand over Kim Jong Un’s soldiers to him if he can organise their exchange for our warriors who are being held captive in Russia,” Mr Zelenskyy added.

He posted a short video showing the interrogation of two men, presented as North Korean soldiers.

One of them is lying on a bed with bandaged hands, the other is sitting with a bandage on his jaw.

One of the men said through an interpreter that he did not know he was fighting against Ukraine and had been told he was on a training exercise. He said he hid in a shelter during the offensive and was found a couple of days later.

He said that if he was ordered to return to North Korea, he would, but he was ready to stay in Ukraine if given the chance.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/zelenskyy-offers-captured-north-korean-soldiers-for-ukrainians-held-by-russia-13287924

Firefighters scrambled Sunday to make further progress against wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes and killed 24 people in the Los Angeles area as forecasters again warned of dangerous weather with the return of strong winds this week. At least 16 people were missing, and authorities said that number was expected to rise.

The National Weather Service issued red flag warnings for severe fire conditions through Wednesday, with sustained winds of 50 mph (80 kph) and gusts in the mountains reaching 70 mph (113 kph). The most dangerous day will be Tuesday, said weather service meteorologist Rich Thompson.

“You’re going to have really strong gusty Santa Ana winds, a very dry atmosphere and still very dry brush, so we still have some very critical fire weather conditions out there,” Thompson said at a community meeting Saturday night.

Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone said 70 additional water trucks arrived to help firefighters fend off flames spread by renewed gusts. “We are prepared for the upcoming wind event,” Marrone said. Fire retardant dropped by aircraft Sunday will act as a barrier along hillsides, officials said.

Fierce Santa Anas have been largely blamed for turning the wildfires sparked last week into infernos that leveled entire neighborhoods around the city where there has been no significant rainfall in more than eight months.

Twelve people were missing within the Eaton Fire zone and four were missing from the Palisades Fire, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said. Luna added that “dozens” more reports might have come in Sunday morning and investigators were reconciling whether some of the missing might be among the dead. There are no children among those reported missing, he said.

Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 24 over the weekend. Eight of the deaths were attributed to the Palisades Fire and 16 resulted from the Eaton Fire, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said in a statement Sunday evening.

Officials said they expected that figure to increase as teams with cadaver dogs conduct systematic grid searches in leveled neighborhoods. Authorities have established a center where people can report the missing.

Officials also were building an online database to allow evacuated residents to see if their homes were damaged or destroyed. In the meantime, LA city Fire Chief Kristin Crowley urged people to stay away from scorched neighborhoods.

“There are still active fires that are burning within the Palisades area, making it extremely, extremely dangerous for the public,” Crowley said at a Sunday morning briefing. “There’s no power, there’s no water, there’s broken gas lines, and we have unstable structures.”

Officials warned the ash can contain lead, arsenic, asbestos and other harmful materials.

About 150,000 people in Los Angeles County remained under evacuation orders, with more than 700 residents taking refuge in nine shelters, Luna said. Officials said most of the orders in the Palisades area were unlikely to be lifted before the red flag warnings expire Wednesday evening.

“Please rest assured that first thing Thursday we will begin talking about repopulation,” Marrone said.

By Sunday morning, Cal Fire reported the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth and Hurst fires had consumed more than 62 square miles (160 square kilometers), an area larger than San Francisco. The Palisades Fire was 11% contained and containment on the Eaton Fire reached 27%. Those two blazes accounted for 59 square miles (nearly 153 square kilometers).

Crews from California and nine other states are part of the ongoing response that includes nearly 1,400 fire engines, 84 aircraft and more than 14,000 personnel, including newly arrived firefighters from Mexico.

Fighting to save public and private areas

LA’S rich and famous are hiring $2,000-an-hour private firefighters to save their million-dollar homes and businesses as the wildfires rage on.

As the flames continue to force thousands out of their homes, some celebs and billionaires have sparked backlash for their “tone-deaf” move to save their investments.

Keith Wasserman, co-founder of real estate investment firm Gelt Venture Partners, provoked fury after a post on X, in which he asked for “private firefighters” to protect his land in the A-list neighbourhood of the Pacific Palisades.

The region has been devastated by the ongoing inferno with emergency services still struggling to contain the fires there.

Keith’s post on Friday read: “Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades?

“Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning. Will pay any amount. Thank you.”

The billionaire owns a mansion in the wealthy area, as well as an upscale outdoor mall, which he is trying to protect from raging fires.

Social media users criticized Keith, slamming his call for help as “incredibly tone deaf”.

Commenter Sam Vance wrote: “Incredible nerve. His family is evacuated and he’s trying to hire private firefighters to risk their lives to save a home he most certainly has insured.

“Incredibly tone deaf.”

User Renny added: “So you’re suggesting that potentially lifesaving resources (even if ‘private’) should be diverted to save your house because you’re rich while tens of thousands of people try to evacuate?”

Keith hit back at those commenting on his post online dubbing them “trolls”.

Billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso is also receiving backlash online after it was reported that had hired private fire crews to protect his properties in the Palisades Village.

Rick served two stints as president of the Department of Water and Power and owns a mansion in the area as well as a luxury mall.

He confirmed that he had a team of private firefighters deployed in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night to protect his retail space but that water was in short supply.

This outraged many who believed that water supplies were not being fairly disrupted to help save people’s lives and homes in the area with some online calling for an investigation to be launched.

On Wednesday, a video shared to X showed private firefighters guarding a home, and using sprinklers to fight the flames.

San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporter Matthias Gafni said: “They’ve set up sprinklers to cascade water from the second story eaves.”

She also noted that the crew were expected to guard the home all night to protect the owner’s property.

Company Covered 6, who offer fire protection services and safety training to the Hollywood elite, revealed that they had been inundated with calls.

Owner Chris Dunn told the Mail on Sunday: “My phone has been ringing off the hook. Demand has never been higher.”

One wealthy source said: “This week’s events have shown you can’t trust the city to protect your property.

However, some have argued that if the city cannot be trusted to protect people, then celebs have every right to seek private support.

The source added: “I have the money, so why not?”

Private firefighters are not uncommon in LA with Kim Kardashian admitting that her home in Hidden Hills California was saved by private crews in the 2013 wildfires.

In 2019, private firefighting companies started offering “on-call” wildfire protection to wealthy Californians in the face of increasing blazes of greater intensity.

In 2023, the Los Angeles Times reported that some private crews were failing to coordinate with local agencies.

This meant that first responders were left having to worry about private crews as well as the residents in threatened areas.

Strict water-conserving measures have been in place since 2022, with residents restricted to watering their gardens twice a week for eight minutes at a time.

Kim has been fined previously for going over her water allowance in 2022, by using 232,000 gallons of water more than her allocation.

Other celebrities including Sylvester Stallone and comedian Kevin Hart were also fined.

It has since been noted that Kim has since installed water-saving measures.

One neighbor of Ms Kardashin said: “Everyone was told to cut back on water precisely for this situation, to preserve it to fight fires.

“They carried on watering because they could afford the fines.”

LA DEVASTATION

This comes as the devastating fires continue to rip through Los Angeles, displacing thousands and resulting in unseen damage to the area.

Some 153,000 LA residents are now under mandatory evacuation orders as wind gusts as high as 80mph are set to hit in the next few days – making it even more difficult to contain the blazes.

The wildfires are thought to have killed at least 16 people so far.

Four wildfires are currently burning around Los Angeles with two of to others now being described as contained.

The Palisades fire is the biggest of all and has so far burned down 22,660 acres of land destroying more than 5,316 structures.

Firefighters have only been able to contain 11 per cent of the fire, according to the LA Fire Department.

High winds have caused the Palisades Fire in Southern California to spread towards the east.

LA’s fire chief Kristin Crowley said last night saw a “significant flare up” in parts of the Palisades Fire tragedy.

The chief added that “we will be facing another critical weather event” due to the high winds as the flames continue to starch the region.

Authorities have now turned previous evacuation warnings into mandatory orders, urging people to leave the area from Sunset Boulevard north to Encino Reservoir.

High winds have caused the Palisades Fire in Southern California to spread towards the east.

LA’s fire chief Kristin Crowley said last night saw a “significant flare up” in parts of the Palisades Fire tragedy.

Affluent residents of Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood are now desperately looking for a way out as the fire approaches the area.

Thousands of locals have been ordered to evacuate immediately.

The nearby Sunset Boulevard has started to overflow with escaping motorists as long queues are starting to form on the busy roads.

Brentwood is one of the poshest areas of LA – known for its large homes and celebrity residents.

Celebrities including Lebron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Garner have homes in the area.

Their residences are all now under threat.

American politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr also lives in Brentwood in his $6.6million home, while Vice President Kamala Harris also has a home in the area.

The Getty Centre – an iconic $1.3billion art gallery – is also within the evacuation zone.

The nearby Sunset Boulevard has started to overflow with escaping motorists as long queues are starting to form on the busy roads.

Prevent looting

A 6pm to 6am curfew has been imposed in the worst-hit areas to prevent looting.

Looters dressing as firefighters are storming residential areas in the wake of the tragedy.

Members of the National Guard — the equivalent of the UK’s Army Reserve — have been drafted in to help enforce it.

LA County Sheriff Robert Luna said 22 people had so far been arrested for curfew violations, trespassing, burglary and looting.

He said yesterday that it was unclear how the blazes began and urged the public to get in touch if they have useful information.

He added: “We are not going to leave any rock unturned if this is a criminal act . . . everything is absolutely on the table.”

Mayor Karen Bass said she condemns criminal “predators” who are using the fires to take advantage of others.

Authorities are now working alongside the FBI as investigations continue over the wildfires.

Meanwhile, LA County officials have declared a health emergency – warning people that wildfire smoke and particulate matter could pose immediate and long-term threats.

People have been advised not to leave their houses and wear masks if needed.

Fires and strong winds have “severely degraded air quality… posing immediate and long-term risks to public health”, a statement read.

The devastating fires are set to have a costly impact on the city and its residents – with private forecaster Accuweather estimating the total damage and economic loss up to $150 billion.

Governor Gavin Newsom has deployed over 1,400 firefighters, with additional teams arriving from neighbouring states, but the battle to contain the flames is far from over.

He has also called for an independent investigation after firefighters complained about dropping water pressure in many hydrants across the city.

A CHINESE scientist at the centre of the Covid origins debate is still carrying out “risky” research on coronaviruses, scientists have warned.

Shi Zhengli, 60, earned herself the nickname of China’s “batwoman” as one of the world’s leading scientists working on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan.

Her team at Wuhan Institute of Virology collected more than 20,000 samples from bat colonies in China over nearly two decades.

Then, when a mystery pneumonia-like illness emerged just a stone’s throw from the lab in late 2019, Shi was thrust into the spotlight.

Many scientists questioned whether the virus – which had unusual features suggesting it was genetically engineered – may have leaked from the lab.

Five years later, a landmark congressional report has ruled that the “weight of the evidence” suggests it was a lab leak that sparked the pandemic – and left millions dead.

Despite the report’s damning conclusion, Shi and her team are still carrying out “risky” research, according to top scientists and virologists.

Robert Redfield, the director of America’s CDC during the pandemic, said the experiments have “potentially catastrophic consequences”.

In a paper published in Nature, Shi and a team of scientists boasted they had built the first “customised” coronavirus “receptors”.

In other words, Shi is creating the building blocks to change viruses so that they can infect different species – including humans, Mr Redfield said.

He said: “Take bird flu – you can modify the receptor so that instead of chickens and turkeys, it can infect humans.

“It’s potentially dangerous research. You are taking a non-pathogenic virus and changing it so that it could end up being dangerous to humans.

“You may have a pathogen that is restricted to pigs – but now you could totally change it so that it’s highly infectious to other species too.

“She’s playing around with bat viruses and modifying their receptor – so now they’ll infect cows or chickens, for example. It’s ill-advised.

“There’s potential catastrophic consequences. It could cause a new pandemic in animals or humans.”

The research will make growing viruses in human cells easier as they have created “customised” receptors for viruses.

It means viruses can be more easily adapted to humans, experts said.

It’s potentially dangerous research. You are taking a non-pathogenic virus and changing it so that it could end up being dangerous to humans

Dr Alina Chan, a genetic engineering expert, told The Sun: “It looks like they have a new suite of engineered host cells to isolate more novel coronaviruses.

“There’s some potential here for risky work to happen downstream.”

Dr Chan, who co-authored Viral on the origins of the pandemic, added: “In other words, once you have all these novel viruses growing in the lab, what do you do with them?”

Anton van der Merwe, a professor of molecular immunology from University of Oxford, described the experiments as “broadly risky”.

He told The Sun: “Collecting viruses from remote sources, bringing them into densely populated cities, and culturing them in human cells, is inherently risky, even without performing gain of function experiments on the viruses.

“Growing the viruses in human cells will adapt them to humans, and the experiments described in this paper would make this easier.

“These sorts of experiments are broadly risky.”

Biosafety expert Professor Richard Ebright said he doesn’t believe the research counts as “gain-of-function” – where viruses are “souped” up to make them more dangerous and is banned in many countries.

Collecting viruses from remote sources, bringing them into densely populated cities, and culturing them in human cells, is inherently risky

But he added the risks are “sufficiently high to warrant international restriction or prohibition of the research”.

He added: “This is especially true, in view of the fact that the research has no civilian applications, being neither necessary for, nor even useful for, the development of vaccines, therapeutic agents, or other medical countermeasures against viruses that naturally infect humans.”

The Sun has contacted Shi for comment.

Before Covid emerged in Wuhan, there were a very limited number of laboratories in the world working on coronaviruses.

One of these was the Wuhan Institute of Virology – located just 40 minutes from the wet market where some of the first Covid cases emerged.

DRASTIC, an international team of scientists and sleuths investigating Covid’s origins, found that the lab had an extensive collection of bat coronaviruses – immediately raising concerns about a potential lab leak.

Founded in the 1950s, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had become a focal point for coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak.

Shi won international acclaim for uncovering the origin of the SARS outbreak.

It was a game changer for the lab – and coronavirus research – and sparked a global hunt for animal viruses with pandemic potential.

The Wuhan lab has been working on coronaviruses ever since – with the aim of trying to predict and prevent further outbreaks.

With Shi at the helm, the lab was carrying out controversial – and risky – research.

Shi and her team hunted for SARS-like viruses, hoping to identify pathogens in the wild which could pose a risk to humanity in the future.

Sunita Williams is set to undertake her first spacewalk in 12 years. According to a statement from NASA, she will join fellow astronaut Nick Hague on a mission aboard (on January 16) the International Space Station (ISS) to repair the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) X-ray telescope.

In addition to this, Sunita Williams will take part in another spacewalk just a few days later. Both these spacewalks are part of NASA’s ongoing efforts to upgrade and maintain the ISS.

These missions will be conducted as “US spacewalk 91” on January 16 and “US spacewalk 92” on January 23.

January 16 Spacewalk

Sunita Williams will work alongside fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague on January 16 to replace a critical rate gyro assembly, which plays a crucial role in maintaining the ISS’s orientation.

In addition to this, the duo will look at the light filters of the NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope, and replace a reflector device used for navigation on one of the station’s docking adapters.

The team will also check various access points and tools that will be used for future maintenance of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a key scientific instrument.

NICER is set to become the first NASA observatory to undergo repairs in orbit since the Hubble Space Telescope’s servicing mission in 2009.

The International Space Station shared details of the mission on social media, revealing that the January 16 spacewalk will focus on repairing the NICER telescope.

“On January 16, NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Suni Williams will exit the space station to repair the NICER X-ray telescope. Hague, along with station astronaut Don Pettit, trained for the spacewalk last year,” the ISS shared on X (formerly Twitter).

According to NASA, Sunita Williams, who will be the second crew member to step outside the station, will wear an unmarked suit, while Nick Hague, who will take the lead as spacewalk crew member 1, will be in a suit with red stripes.

This marks Sunita Williams’ eighth spacewalk and Nick Hague’s fourth. The spacewalk will be the 273rd in support of ISS assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.

Source : https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/sunita-williams-to-go-on-her-first-spacewalk-in-12-years-7449149

Former child star Rory Sykes, who appeared in the British 1990s show “Kiddy Kapers” and lived with cerebral palsy, died in the devastating Los Angeles wildfires Wednesday. He was 32.

“It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of my beautiful son @Rorysykes
to the Malibu fires yesterday,” his mother, Shelley Sykes, revealed on social media Thursday. “I’m totally heart broken [sic].”

Shelley, who hosted “Kiddy Kapers,” said he died in his cottage on the family’s 17-acre Malibu estate after she “couldn’t put out the cinders on his roof with a hose” because the water was shut off by Las Virgenes Municipal Water.

She also told Australia’s 10 News First that she was unable to remove Rory — who had difficulty walking due to his condition — from his burning home because her arm was broken.

“He said, ‘Mom, leave me,’” she tearfully recalled. “No mom can leave their kid.”

Shelley rushed to her local firehouse after failing to reach 9-1-1, but by the time she returned with help, it was too late. Firefighters told her Rory died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Rory was a British-born Australian living in America and a “wonderful son,” Shelley tweeted in his emotional death announcement.

“He overcame so much with surgeries & therapies to regain his sight & to be able to learn to walk,” she proudly noted. “Despite the pain, he still enthused about traveling the world with me from Africa to Antarctica.”

Rory founded the organization Happy Charity to help others in need and was an inspirational speaker by the age of 8, according to his mom.

She said he will be “incredibly missed.”

The Pacific Palisades Fire was the first to erupt in Los Angeles.

It began Tuesday and has consumed over 21,000 acres and more than 5,000 structures between the Palisades and Malibu.

Source : https://pagesix.com/2025/01/11/celebrity-news/former-child-star-rory-sykes-dies-in-la-wildfires/

When Elon Musk launched his own AI startup, xAI, he touted a key advantage over his competitors: access to the vast trove of data from his newly acquired social media platform Twitter. By implementing new API fees on the network he quickly renamed X, Musk locked out other AI companies, maintaining exclusive access for his own models. And he began using X’s millions of users to test the results.

Musk has been using this distribution channel since xAI launched its first version of the Grok large language model, adding features like trending story summaries and AI-generated questions on posts as well as releasing the Grok chatbot (initially) to X users exclusively. Now, a slew of new AI features is coming. Per the findings of reverse engineer Nima Owji, the platform appears to be developing AI-powered post enhancements, including a feature that lets Grok modify your tweets. The chatbot also appears to be adding location-based queries, letting users ask about things nearby, like grocery stores.

xAI’s takeover of the platform once known as Twitter is so unmistakable that even its branding has crept into X’s most visible real estate, with “xAI Grok” now commanding prominent placement in the app’s main toolbar — a striking symbol of how Musk’s AI ambitions have come to dominate the social network. An xAI employee poked fun at their company’s expanding presence, sharing an image of X’s timeline overrun with the xAI logo.

xAI and X have perhaps the closest and most complex relationship of all of Musk’s companies. On paper, all xAI staffers are also X employees (but not the other way around); on top of access to the code base, they have company laptops from X and appear in the platform’s Workday HR software as X employees. After X vacated its flagship San Francisco HQ in September, the staffers moved into xAI HQ at the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. X offers xAI an instant pipeline to millions of users — far more efficient than building Grok’s audience from scratch. With xAI’s newly acquired Colossus cluster of 100,000 GPUs, deploying AI features across X has also become more technically feasible.

Musk has a history of creating intertwined, interdependent companies. Tesla and SpaceX share engineering expertise, for instance, and after Musk acquired Twitter, Tesla and Boring Company teams were a common sight in its offices. Proponents of Musk consider this a genius strategic advantage. Critics argue that the intricate relationships between his ventures could create conflicts of interest, blur the lines of accountability, and expose the companies to shared vulnerabilities.

Two wounded North Korean soldiers have been captured as prisoners of war by Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

The two men are receiving “necessary medical assistance” and are in the custody of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kyiv, according to Zelensky.

The president said he was “grateful” to Ukrainian paratroopers and soldiers from the Special Operation Forces for capturing the North Koreans.

He added that “this was not an easy task”, claiming that Russian and North Korean soldiers usually execute wounded North Koreans “to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war against Ukraine”.

The Ukrainian intelligence service said in a statement that the prisoners were captured on 9 January and immediately after were “provided with all the necessary medical care as stipulated by the Geneva Convention” and taken to Kyiv.

“They are being held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law,” the intelligence service’s statement read.

The intelligence service said the prisoners do not speak Ukrainian, English or Russian, “so communication with them is carried out through interpreters of Korean, in cooperation with South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service)”.

In a statement posted on Telegram and X, Zelensky said the soldiers were “talking to SBU investigators” and he had instructed the Security Service of Ukraine to grant journalists access to them.

“The world needs to know the truth about what is happening,” he added.

Zelensky also posted four photographs alongside his statement. Two show wounded men. One of the photos showed a red Russian military card.

The place of birth on the document is given as Turan, in the Tuva Republic, which is close to Mongolia.

The intelligence service said that when the prisoners were captured, one of the soldiers had a Russian military ID card issued in the name of another person with registration in the Tuva Republic. The other had no documents at all.

The intelligence service said that during interrogation, the soldier with the ID card told security personnel that he had been issued the document in Russia during the autumn of 2024.

He is alleged to have stated that at that time, some of North Korea’s combat units had one-week interoperability training.

“It is noteworthy that the prisoner…emphasises that he was allegedly going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine,” the SBU statement said.

The intelligence service reported that he said he was born in 2005 and had been serving North Korea as a rifleman since 2021.

The second prisoner is reported to have given some of his answers in writing because he had an injured jaw, according to SBU. The intelligence service said it believed he was born in 1999 and had been serving North Korea as a scout sniper since 2016.

The Geneva Convention states that the questioning of prisoners should be carried out in a language they understand and prisoners must be protected against public curiosity.

Zelensky’s office said in a statement that the Russians “are trying to hide the fact that these are soldiers from North Korea by giving them documents claiming they are from Tuva or other territories under Moscow’s control”.

“But these people are actually Koreans, they are from North Korea,” the statement from the president’s office said.

In 2014, Russian forces operating in Ukraine – despite Kremlin denials – were sent without identifying markings on their uniforms.

Last year, when President Vladimir Putin was asked about Russia using North Korean troops in its war on Ukraine, he did not deny it. He said it was Russia’s “sovereign decision”.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjdek713d0xo

A teenage artist who has already sold works for £23,000 has just passed another milestone – her first ever painting lesson.

Makenzy Beard, 17, made waves back in 2020 when a portrait she painted of her neighbour went viral on social media.

The painting went on to appear at The Royal Academy of Arts, a prestigious London gallery.

She said she had learned “some quite important habits” after the lesson and was determined to continue refining her work.

“I’ve learned a little bit more about impressionism – so, not trying to make everything so realistic all the time, which I find difficult,” she said.

“Up until now, I’ve taught everything myself – just what feels right, what I find easier, watching YouTube videos and stuff like that. I got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t improving anymore.

“So, I went on this course and if I’m honest, I found it so difficult.

“I still had freedom and I could do what I wanted, but there were some things I was told… there is sort of a right and wrong way to do things, or at least, that’s how to make it easier for yourself further down the line.”

Ms Beard first took up painting canvases during lockdown in March 2020, using her mum’s old paints from the comfort of a leaky garden shed.

At the age of just 14 she launched her career as an artist, with her work now being sold to fans across the globe.

Art enthusiasts in the Middle East, the US and the UK have expressed interest in her work.

Her recent exhibition at Blackwater Gallery in Cardiff included ten original artworks as well as a collection of six prints.

The originals attracted buyers paying up to £23,000 for her work.

Since then, Ms Beard has sought to develop her art further – she joined Millfield boarding school on an art and hockey scholarship in 2023, and began painting lessons to help develop her style and technique.

“I’ve picked up some weird little things, like understanding that it’s better to use longer brushes when you want to paint something more freely,” she said.

“These are things you would completely overlook had you not been told to do that.

“I’ve never understood colour theory or anything – I just did whatever I fancied, but it’s helped me to understand that.

“How to mute things down, and more technical things that I was maybe doing intuitively to begin with. It helped me to understand what I was already doing and then making that better.”

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd608225g91o

Zoos in Berlin have closed, while the neighboring state of Brandenburg banned animal transport on Saturday following an outbreak of the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease.

Germany recorded its first cases of foot-and-mouth disease in 35 years in a herd of water buffalo in Hönow, Brandenburg, just outside the Berlin city limits.

Operators of Berlin Zoo in the city center and the Tierpark wildlife park in the city’s east said they would remain closed for the time being to protect the animals and prevent the disease from spreading.

Animal transport banned, pigs culled

In the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin but does not include it, the government has banned animal transport for 72 hours.

The ban applies to cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, camels, alpacas and llamas.

Meanwhile, around 200 pigs at a farm near where the outbreak was detected will be slaughtered as a precautionary measure.

Brandenburg’s Agriculture Minister Hanka Mittelstädt said on Friday that three water buffalo had died in Hönow due to the disease.

The remaining 11 buffalo in the same herd will also be slaughtered to minimize the risk of further spread and a 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) exclusion zone has been established around the affected farm.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/german-authorities-move-to-contain-foot-and-mouth-disease/a-71274600

Rosalind Smith is not a ‘dog person.’

“If I see a dog, I will scream, I will cry, and then I will run,” says the 48-year-old. “I scream like someone is attacking me with a knife! I don’t do it intentionally, because obviously it’s a mortifying and embarrassing thing to go through… but I am honestly that terrified.”

Smith—who lives in Hull, England—says this dog phobia has plagued her since childhood. “It really impacted my relationship with my dad,” she explains. “He’d blame me for ruining family outings and accuse me of being over-the-top with my behavior.” Instead of walking, she now spends hundreds of pounds on petrol every month to avoid running into dogs in person.

Toronto-based Sherry Bharucha still travels on foot, but completely swerves parks in the summer months, describing her fear of dogs as so visceral that it often leaves her “trapped” inside her apartment. Even dog content on social media can trigger the 50-year-old—although she finds rare solace as a member of the Facebook group ‘I hate DOGS and I’m NOT a horrible human being.’

“In a world that loves dogs so much, there’s so much shame in admitting you have a problem.”

Smith and Bharucha both had traumatic encounters with dogs as young children, leaving them with cynophobia, an anxiety disorder characterized by an overwhelming fear of canines.

It’s difficult to quantify exactly how many people suffer from cynophobia; given the prevalence of dogs, there’s surprisingly little academic research on the condition. However, an estimated 7 to 9 percent of Americans have some kind of phobia—and one study found that a fear of animals is one of the most common phobias worldwide. Of course, you’re far more likely to encounter a dog in your everyday life than you are a frog, a snake, or a bat.

“Walking through a public park is tough, because so many big dogs are let off the lead to roam around freely,” says Bharucha. “I can only leave the house to go to work after 9AM, as that’s past the peak dog-walking time. I’ve got so many friends I can’t visit any more, because most of them have pet dogs.”

A traumatic childhood experience is a common driver for the condition, but it can be brought on in various other ways; some inherit the behavior from people close to them, others might develop the phobia from reading about dog attacks. The symptoms can range from shortness of breath, all the way up to nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

“I liken one of my episodes to hyperventilating or having a panic attack,” says Bharucha. “My palms get sweaty, I start trembling, my throat gets dry, and I’m crying without any tears coming out. I can’t get my knees to stop shaking for at least 30 minutes after.”

The latest numbers show that there are approximately 12 million dogs living in the UK, 78 million in the United States, and just under 8 million in Canada. “I spoke to the management of my apartment block and discovered there were 284 registered dogs in a building with 360 units,” says Bharucha. “Right now, dogs are just unavoidable!”

Dog ownership numbers surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, we’ve seen town councils unable to cope with the hefty uptick of dog shit; owners avoiding expensive vet fees due to the cost of living crisis; a record increase of dog attacks in England and Wales; and dogs becoming an increasingly inescapable part of our daily lives.

“I believe a lot of people are suffering in silence,” says Smith. “In a world that loves dogs so much, there’s so much shame in admitting you have a problem.”

“We must realize cynophobia can be fatal, as people will literally run into traffic to avoid a dog.”

I went on a ten-minute walk from my house to a local park, and counted 56 separate dogs, many of which weren’t on their leads. If I had an extreme phobia of clowns and saw 56 in the same timeframe, I’d be terrified to the point of collapse. This type of comparative thinking, cynophobia suffers say, can help outsiders empathize with their struggles.

“There’s a real lack of empathy,” says 50-year-old cynophobia sufferer Esther Makaya, from Maidenhead, a town west of London. “If I say to a dog owner, ‘Could you please put your dog on a lead, because I am scared?’ They will always say, ‘Why? He’s lovely!’ and won’t do anything. They treat you like you’re a bad person, while others can even be rude or abusive.”

“I feel gas-lit by the dog-friendly society,” says London-based cynophobia sufferer Anna Petermann. “Dogs are fiercely territorial animals and will always protect their people. However, I’m told by society to completely ignore my senses, and treat all dogs—including guard and fight dogs—as cute, non-threatening, and non-territorial creatures.”

Like every other cynophobe I spoke to, Petermann says that, when she’s told medical professionals about her condition, she’s been met with condescension and confusion, making it difficult to pursue a cure. With this in mind, she adds that cynophobia could benefit from a rebrand and even some kind of global public health campaign.

“If we erased cynophobia and had a name like, say, ‘dog sensitivity,’ it would be much broader and easier to understand,” she says.

So, who exactly can cynophobia sufferers turn to for sustained help? Roy Dyer is the founder of the Essex Dog Training Centre. He estimates he has organized more than 2,000 classes for cynophobia sufferers, which involve the afflicted gradually being introduced to friendly, trained dogs in a non-judgmental setting. With each class, the interactions become longer and longer. In 2011, he was visited by the now Queen Camilla, who praised his work, before he was later awarded with an MBE.

Dyer, who doesn’t charge any money for his classes, claims he has a 98 percent success rate in healing cynophobes—but admits he’s somewhat of an anomaly. “We’ve had people come from Australia and South Korea just for our classes. I keep being told we’re the only cynophobia treatment center in the world, which is depressing!” he says. “There’s a lot of desperate people out there with no one to turn to.”

Of some of the worst sufferers he’s ever encountered, Dyer says, “Some people will come in and vomit, even mess themselves. There was someone who couldn’t be near their mum’s fur coat because it reminded them of a dog. I knew one child that was so scared of their neighbor’s dog, they actually tried to hang themselves.

“We must realize cynophobia can be fatal, as people will literally run into traffic to avoid a dog. It’s a particularly grueling condition for autistic people as well.”

Dyer suggests there’s been a spike in cynophobia sufferers in recent years because of an increase in poorly trained dogs purchased during the pandemic. One study found that while many owners enjoyed more quality time with their dogs during the lockdowns, some noticed behavior issues—like aggression, fear, or overexcitement—after everything opened back up.

Source : https://www.vice.com/en/article/cynophobia-dog-phobia-interviews-fear/

New York City will close 13 emergency shelters that housed asylum seekers by June as the numbers of migrants in the Big Apple have fallen to its lowest point in 18 months.

Mayor Eric Adams announced the closings in all five boroughs on Friday, crediting his administration’s strategy for dealing with the immigration crisis and the federal government’s border policy changes that have reduced the number of migrants entering the United States.

Last month, Adams said the city would close 25 other sites by March, including shelters at the sprawling Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and Randall’s Island.

The city in a press release said the number of migrants in city shelters has fallen for 27 straight weeks and is now at its lowest point in 18 months.

City shelters are housing fewer than 51,000 migrants, compared to a high of more than 69,000 in January 2024.

Since the spring of 2022, more than 229,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City.

“The policies we implemented, and the tremendous work of the dedicated public servants who execute our mission, show how our administration continues to creatively and effectively manage an unprecedented crisis,” Adams said in a statement.

“The additional closures we are announcing today, provides yet another example of our continued progress and the success of our humanitarian efforts to care for everyone throughout our system,” the mayor said.

Source : https://www.latintimes.com/new-york-city-close-13-emergency-shelters-number-migrants-city-falls-571898

Flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the Jeju Air flight that crashed at South Korea’s Muan International Airport stopped recording four minutes before the tragedy that claimed 179 lives.

On December 29, a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 traveling from Bangkok to Muan belly-landed, overshooting the runway and colliding with a concrete embankment before erupting into flames, CNN reported.

Preliminary findings indicate the pilots had reported a bird strike and declared an emergency minutes before the crash, but investigators are now dealing with the absence of crucial data from the aircraft’s black boxes.

Investigators have sent the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the severely damaged flight data recorder (FDR) to the United States for further analysis after local efforts to retrieve information were unsuccessful.

Both the CVR and FDR stopped recording about four minutes before the plane crashed, according to South Korea’s transport ministry.

The missing data from the final moments of the flight 7C 2216 has sparked speculation about a potential power failure, which experts say is highly unusual.

Source : https://www.latintimes.com/flight-data-cockpit-voice-recorders-south-korea-plane-stopped-recording-minutes-before-deadly-crash-571910

The foundational building block for Jeff Bezos’ space dreams is finally ready to launch.

A New Glenn rocket — built by Blue Origin, the rocket company that Mr. Bezos started nearly a quarter century ago — is sitting on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It is as tall as a 32-story building, and its voluminous nose cone can carry larger satellites and other payloads than other rockets in operation today.

In the predawn darkness on Sunday, it may head to space for the first time.

“This has been very long awaited,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington.

New Glenn could inject competition into a rocket business where one company — Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is winning big. While companies and governments have welcomed SpaceX’s innovations that have greatly cut the cost of sending stuff to space, they are wary of relying on one company that is subject to the whims of the world’s richest person.

“SpaceX is clearly dominating” the market for launching larger and heavier payloads, Mr. Harrison said. “There needs to be a viable competitor to keep that market healthy. And it looks like Blue Origin is probably the best positioned to be that competitor to SpaceX.”

New Glenn is larger than SpaceX’s current workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9, but not as big as Starship, the fully reusable rocket system that SpaceX is currently developing.

Blue Origin is also working on a future private space station called Orbital Reef, a lunar lander for NASA called Blue Moon and a space tug called Blue Ring — a vehicle that could move satellites around in Earth orbit.

Mr. Bezos’ other company — the behemoth online retailer Amazon — also has big space plans. Project Kuiper, a constellation of internet satellites, will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Mr. Bezos, the second richest person in the world, after Mr. Musk, also talks grandiosely about a future where millions of people live and work in space, of immense cylindrical habitats spinning to provide artificial gravity, and of moving polluting industries into space someday to allow Earth to return to a more pristine state.

“I know that sounds fantastical,” Mr. Bezos said during an interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit in December, “so I beg the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment. But it’s not fantastical.”

But those plans and hopes cannot get off the ground without a rocket. “That’s what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about,” Mr. Bezos said.

The 21st-century space age is often depicted as a race of billionaires rather than of nations, but so far it has not been a race at all. SpaceX, which Mr. Musk started in 2002, launches its Falcon 9 rockets once every few days. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has yet to put anything in orbit.

“I think a lot of people forget Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX,” Mr. Harrison said.

Blue Origin has built and launched a smaller rocket, New Shepard, which goes up and down. It passes the 62-mile-high altitude regarded as the edge of space but never comes close to reaching the velocity of more than 17,000 miles per hour needed to enter orbit around the planet. The New Shepard flights have provided a few minutes of weightlessness for space tourists, including Mr. Bezos himself, and for science experiments.

The powerful BE-4 engines that Blue Origin built for New Glenn are also a proven success. United Launch Alliance, a competing rocket company, uses the Blue Origin engines for the booster of its new Vulcan rocket, which successfully launched twice last year.

In 2015, with pomp and publicity, Mr. Bezos announced plans for the rocket, which was then unnamed.

Mr. Bezos said it would be manufactured at a factory that Blue Origin would build in Florida near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. He pledged it would launch by the end of the decade.

The factory appeared — gargantuan boxy buildings colored with the company’s signature bright blue hue — but the rocket, later named New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit Earth, did not.

Blue Origin kept pushing back the date of the rocket’s debut.

During an industry panel in 2023, Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president at Blue Origin overseeing the development of New Glenn, said he expected “multiple” launches of New Glenn in 2024. While giving a tour of the Blue Origin factory in February 2024, he said he expected two launches by the end of the year.

The delays continued. The debut flight of New Glenn, which was to carry two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to make measurements of the atmosphere of Mars, was to launch in October.

But in September, NASA, doubtful that New Glenn would be ready in time, announced it had pulled ESCAPADE off that inaugural launch.

Blue Origin said that a prototype of Blue Ring, the space tug, would fly instead. In early December, the full rocket rolled out to the launchpad.

Blue Origin had been still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to award a license for launch. That finally came on December 27.

Later that day, Blue Origin conducted a launch rehearsal, with the countdown clock ticking down to zero and the rocket’s engines lighting up and unleashing torrents of flames and smoke. But, as intended, the rocket remained firmly clamped down, and after 24 seconds, the engines were turned off — a final test to sift out and fix glitches.

As soon as 1 a.m. Eastern time on Jan. 12, Blue Origin will repeat the same countdown, but this time, instead of a shutdown of the engines, New Glenn will soar toward space. The middle-of-the-night launch window, which extends until 4 a.m., results from air restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for a large, untested rocket.

The hope is that the debut of New Glenn is better late than never.

Last year, Mr. Jones said he hoped Blue Origin could speed up its pace to as many as one launch a month in 2025 and eventually double that or more.

No rocket company, not even SpaceX, has ever been able to accelerate the launching of a new vehicle that quickly.

“That’s pretty substantial,” said Carissa Christensen, the chief executive of BryceTech, a space consulting company in Alexandria, Va. But if Blue Origin cannot keep up with its promised pace, its customers could also fall behind schedule.

Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, New Glenn aims to be partially reusable, with the booster designed to land in the Atlantic Ocean on a floating platform named Jacklyn, after Mr. Bezos’ mother.

For the first flight, the booster has been given the nickname So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.

On the social media site X, Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, explained: “Why? No one has landed a reusable booster on the first try. Yet, we’re going for it, and humbly submit having good confidence in landing it. But like I said a couple of weeks ago, if we don’t, we’ll learn and keep trying until we do.”

Mr. Harrison said the reusable boosters, designed to launch at least 25 times, would help Blue Origin compete with SpaceX on price. The Vulcan from United Launch Alliance and the Ariane 6 rocket from Arianespace both currently fly just once and drop into the ocean.

The second stage, which heads to orbit with the payload, will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere.

With several companies planning to fill the sky with multitudes of communications satellites, there appears to be more than enough business for all of the rocket companies, at least for a few years. Two years ago, Amazon announced it had signed contracts for up to 83 launches from three companies — Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace — to loft more than 3,000 Kuiper satellites.

Amazon later announced it was also buying three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX.

Blue Origin is not relying solely on business from Amazon. In November, it won an agreement from AST SpaceMobile for several New Glenn launches. AST is building a cellular broadband network that is to work directly with smartphones.

The lucrative business of launching satellites for the Department of Defense is another target for Blue Origin. If successful, this flight would count as the first of two flights needed for the U.S. Space Force to certify the rocket as ready for national security satellites.

The ESCAPADE mission, bumped off the first New Glenn launch, could head to space on a later New Glenn flight in 2025 or 2026.

Blue Origin is also aiming for business beyond rockets.

The concept of space tugs like Blue Ring is not new, and there could be several uses for a spacecraft that could nestle up to another one. A rocket launch could drop off several satellites to one particular orbit, and a space tug could then move them to different destinations. Space tugs could also repair or refuel older satellites or dispose of dead pieces of space junk by pushing them back into the atmosphere to burn up.

Source : https://dnyuz.com/2025/01/11/the-very-long-wait-for-jeff-bezos-big-rocket-is-coming-to-an-end/

The name of Luigi Mangione has come up often over the past few days in social media users’ discussions of the fires ravaging Southern California.

Many, angered by State Farm’s decision last summer to cancel hundreds of homeowners policies in some of the neighborhoods now devastated by the blazes, are looking at the 26-year-old as the type of avenger they wish would punish insurance companies that have cut coverage across the state.

Newsweek contacted State Farm for comment by email on Friday morning.

Why It Matters

The murder of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive Brian Thompson on December 4, and the online adulation of Mangione that followed it revealed the depth of Americans’ anger against health insurance companies in the country.

Mangione, whose appearance has been lionized on social media, has been made into something of a questionable folk hero, with people online hailing him as a symbol of justified violence against the perceived predatory behavior of insurance companies operating in the U.S. healthcare system.

His resurfacing now in the context of the widespread outrage that reports of State Farm’s and other insurers’ cancellations and non-renewals in California have sparked online would suggest that the U.S. property insurance sector might soon become the subject of a heated public debate.

What To Know

Several major insurers operating in California have cut coverages since 2022, especially in the most at-risk zones.

State Farm, the Golden State’s largest home insurer, canceled 72,000 policies in the state by the summer, 30,000 of which were homes. In Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood that was devastated by the Palisades fire which started on Tuesday morning and was only 6 percent contained as of Friday morning, State Farm canceled 1,626 policies.

The company cited increasing costs and catastrophe exposure as the main reason behind a decision they were “reluctant” to take, saying it was necessary to maintain claims-paying capacity for their California customers. Last year, State Farm requested a 30 percent rate hike for its homeowners line, a 52 percent rate hike for renters and a 36 percent rate hike for condo owners in the Golden State to match the growing wildfire risk.

Premium increases in the state must be approved by the California Department of Insurance (CDI), a requirement meant to protect homeowners from sudden massive hikes.

But State Farm’s decision, though justified by the company’s commitment to maintain coverage for some policyholders, left many homeowners in the state scrambling to find insurance at a time when it’s become increasingly difficult—and expensive.

In a comment to Newsweek earlier this week, a spokesperson for State Farm said: “Our number one priority right now is the safety of our customers, agents and employees impacted by the fires and assisting our customers in the midst of this tragedy.”

Seeking the ‘Luigi Mangione Way’

State Farm’s move last summer has sparked a lot of anger since the outbreak of the fires this week.

“The fact that State Farm removed their fire policies for certain zip codes in California weeks or months before the fire hit is unbelievable,” wrote content creator @stoppfeenin on X, where he has more than 108.5k followers. “People are left without means to rebuild or any access to financial support. I understand Luigi Mangione now.”

“Who is the CEO of State Farm?” wrote another user on the social media platform, sharing a photo of Mangione.

“State Farm cancelled thousands of CA insurance policies before the fires?? Palisades and other homeowners must seek the Luigi Mangione way,” an X user wrote on the platform, sharing an image of Batman and Mangione’s face.

An anti-insurance folk hero

“The fires in the Los Angeles area are devastating. We still do not know the full magnitude of destruction, specifically loss of life and property, and it will be some time before we know the full extent,” Dr. Julianna Kirschner, lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, told Newsweek.

“With the understandable confusion and anxiety people are experiencing, many users are spending time on social media to share or gather information and comment on the fires,” she added.

While Mangione “has remained a consistent figure in memes and other viral content” since December, Kirschner said, in recent days, his image has been associated with user messaging about the fires.

“Mangione has become a figurehead in online discourse about insurance companies, which has now extended from the context of healthcare to home and renter insurance,” she explained.

“Some California residents have had trouble getting insurance coverage in recent years, and many of those living in fire prone areas have limited to no options. Users on platforms like X have been commenting on this state of affairs, and the most common theme of these posts have expressed anger against insurance companies and their practices in California,” Kirschner said.

“Mangione’s image has been a consistent visual form of communicating that message.”

According to Kirschner, Mangione’s image “is so highly intertwined with anti-insurance sentiment that he has become a folk hero on social media platforms, because users align with Mangione’s known distaste for insurance companies and their tendency to deny claims.”

For certain communities on social media, Kirschner said, Mangione has become a familiar image, “a protector of sorts.”

“His face has been photoshopped on religious iconography, so the deification of him online is not a stretch. In fact, Mangione has become so representative of anti-insurance rhetoric that users need not include written commentary anymore when posting a Mangione image or meme. The image communicates the sentiment all on its own, and many users have posted this way in recent days,” she explained.

What People Are Saying

Dr. Cliff Lampe, professor of information and associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, told Newsweek: “With the Mangione posts, we’re seeing a form of publishing related to a broader societal dissatisfaction with the status quo.

“With both increased income inequality and at least a perceived sense of lack of agency around corporate power, people turn to social media expression to vent and engage in a flexible dialog about societal issues. Through darkly humorous posts, expressions of admiration, sarcasm and other forms of rhetoric, people are rebuilding a sense of agency by reacting to their personal audiences.”

Susan Campbell, distinguished lecturer in the Department of Communications, Film, and Media Studies at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Haven, told Newsweek: “People like Luigi Mangione become folk heroes when people feel powerless against systems they feel have failed them. The health insurance industry has let so many people down, and then up steps this young man to shoot one of the industry’s leaders.

“Life is more complicated than that, but we only seem to see that in retrospect. Bonnie & Clyde reached folk-hero status because they looked like winners at a time when everyone else was losing—at least financially. No amount of slavishly positive media coverage could change that at their heart, they were nothing more than bank robbers who killed people. The same goes with the James gang, other folk heroes from a long-ago.”

As of Friday morning, the Palisades fire, which has burned through about 20,000 acres, was 8 percent contained; the Eaton fire, which has expanded across 13,000 acres, was out of control; the Kenneth fire, which has covered 1,000 acres, was 35 percent contained; the Hurst fire, which has moved through 800 acres, was 37 percent contained; and the Lidia fire, which has burned through 400 acres, was 75 percent contained.

Estimates of the economic loss caused by the fire are already in the tens of billions—but the full extent of the damages will only be clear after all fires have been contained.

Source : https://www.newsweek.com/luigi-mangione-resurfaces-symbol-anger-against-california-insurers-2013057

Fear of ingesting a contaminated substance led Britain’s Emma Raducanu to turn down treatment for an insect bite ahead of the Australian Open which starts this weekend.

Speaking ahead of her opening round match against Russian 26th seed Ekaterina ­Alexandrova, the former U.S. Open champion said recent high-profile doping cases had made her wary.

“I got really badly bitten by I don’t know what, like ants, mosquitoes, something. I’m allergic, I guess,” Raducanu said at her pre-tournament media conference.

“They flared up and swelled up really a lot. Someone was giving me this antiseptic spray, ­natural, to try to ease the bites. I didn’t want to take it. I didn’t want to spray it.

“I was just left there with my swollen ankle and hand. I was like: ‘I’m just going to tough it out because I don’t want to risk it.’ It’s obviously a concern on our mind.”

Tennis was rocked last year when men’s world number one Jannik Sinner tested positive for banned substance clostebol but escaped a ban after an independent tribunal hearing found that he bore no fault or negligence.

Sinner’s explanation that he had been inadvertently contaminated with the substance by his physiotherapist during a massage was accepted, although the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has appealed against the decision.

Women’s five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek also escaped a lengthy ban after a tribunal accepted that her failed doping test for banned substance trimetazidine had been the result of a contaminated batch of sleeping drug melatonin.

Source : https://sportstar.thehindu.com/tennis/australian-open-2025-emma-raducanu-turned-down-insect-bite-spray-doping-fears/article69086454.ece

Personal items and showbiz memorabilia from Morecambe’s home in Hertfordshire were put up for sale following the death of his widow, Joan, in March 2024.

The glasses were sold along with a Barling briar pipe and two photographs of the comic. Other lots included telegrams from the late Duke of Edinburgh and letters from Margaret Thatcher and fellow comics Ronnie Barker and Tommy Cooper.

The auction comes more than 40 years after Morecambe’s death in 1984, and included more than 700 lots.

The star was also known for smoking pipes and a selection of them were sold in a lot that fetched £1,100.

Morecambe was made an OBE in 1976 and his medal, awarded by Queen Elizabeth II, sold for £11,000, which was £8,000 above its highest estimate.

A tailcoat and trousers, writing desk, and Breitling watch were among the other auctioned items previously owned by Morecambe.

Elsewhere, a personal letter from the then-Prince of Wales fetched £2,500, while a vintage Luton Town Admiral tracksuit with “Eric” stitched on the back sold for £5,500.

Morecambe met comedy partner Ernie Wise in 1940 aged 14 and despite a wartime separation formed the enduring double-act Morecambe and Wise.

They had many lean years touring theatres before they broke into TV and by 1977 their Christmas special was watched by 28 million viewers.

Source : https://www.aol.com/eric-morecambes-trademark-glasses-sell-003740944.html

Katie Piper has decided to get an “artificial eye” more than 16 years after an acid attack which left her with serious injuries and permanent scarring.

The TV presenter shared the news on Instagram, saying it follows “many years of battling” with her health.

“I’ve reached the end of [the] road somewhat, and the decision has been made to try a prosthetic eye shell,” she wrote.

The former model has had hundreds of surgeries to repair damage to her face and eyesight following an attack on the orders of her ex-boyfriend, which took place when she was 24 years old.

According to the NHS’s National Artificial Eye Service, a prosthetic eye shell – also known as a cosmetic shell – is a thin artificial eye individually manufactured for patients.

It is designed to fit over a blind and damaged eye, and is often used when people feel sensitive or conscious about their eyes, explains medical consultant Dr Chris Smith.

Katie Piper forced to pull out of ITV show
In her Instagram post, Piper, 41, also shared a video that appeared to show her being fitted with the prosthetic.

“This marks the start of a journey to have an artificial eye, with an incredible medical team behind me.

“As always I’m incredibly grateful to all those in the NHS and private health care system for their talent and kindness.

“I will share my journey, I’m hopeful and nervous about being able to tolerate it and would love to hear from any of you in the comments if you’ve been on this journey or have any advice.”

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c627ry9w5xzo

TERRIFIED Los Angeles residents trying to flee the deadly wildfires have been left trapped in gridlocked traffic.

At least 11 people have died due to the wildfires with 13 still missing as officials warn the fires could rage on for days.

Six out of control wildfires are continuing to burn through LA with flames roaring towards more star-studded neighborhoods as the time passes by.

High winds have caused the Palisades Fire in Southern California to spread towards the east – leaving them in the direct path of millionaire rows.

Affluent residents of Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood are now desperately looking for a way out as the fire approaches the area.

Thousands of locals have been ordered to evacuate immediately.

The nearby Sunset Boulevard has started to overflow with escaping motorists as long queues are starting to form on the busy roads.

Brentwood is one of the poshest areas of LA – known for its large homes and celebrity residents.

Celebrities including Lebron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kamala Harris, Jennifer Garner and US politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr all have homes in the area.

But their residences are all now under threat as the fatal flames roar across the neighborhoods.

Traffic hasn’t been helped with the immediate closure of several slip roads.

Several off-ramps to the 405 Freeway including Getty Center Drive, Skirball Center Drive, Sunset, Wilshire, Santa Monica and Olympic boulevards are all closed off.

This has left those fleeing stuck for hours trying to move away from the burning embers.

One panicked woman said she hardly moved in two hours as the mood and environment around her rapidly changed.

She told ABC: “There was a visibility when I first got here, a little bit of blue sky, and it has unfolded to absolutely ugliness.”

Authorities issued fresh mandatory evacuation orders earlier today as wind gusts as high as 70mph are set to hit – making it even more difficult to contain the blazes.

LA’s fire chief Kristin Crowley said last night saw a “significant flare up” in parts of the Palisades Fire tragedy.

The chief added that “we will be facing another critical weather event” due to the high winds as the flames continue to starch the region.

Search and rescue efforts are finally getting underway today after days of devastation.

Cadaver dogs are leading the hunt to help find “remains and reunite families”, Sheriff Robert Luna said.

Eight people have died in the Eaton Fire with the remaining three being killed in the Palisades Fire.

Around 153,000 people have been evacuated across the county with 166,000 more being placed under severe warnings.

Tens of thousands of structures have been burnt to the ground across several areas.

The devastating fires are set to have a costly impact on the city and its residents – with private forecaster Accuweather estimating the total damage and economic loss up to $150 billion.

Governor Gavin Newsom has deployed over 1,400 firefighters, with additional teams arriving from neighbouring states, but the battle to contain the flames is far from over.

He has also called for an independent investigation after firefighters complained about dropping water pressure in many hydrants across the city.

Meanwhile, satellite pictures have revealed whole blocks of homes in Los Angeles have been burned to rubble by the wildfires.

The snaps show before, during, and after the uncontrolled blazes have burned through LA homes and celebrity enclaves and caused thousands to flee.

Some of those homes belong to celebrities, with Paris Hilton, Billy Crystal, Miles Teller, and Anthony Hopkins among those to lose their abodes.

Online disinformation about the LA wildfires has sparked a resurgence of bizarre conspiracy theories revolving around ‘smart cities’.

More than 100,000 people have had to be evacuated and 10 died after fires tore through parts of Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

Follow our live blog for the latest updates on the LA wildfires

An estimated 10,000 buildings have been destroyed, including affluent suburbs, churches, Hollywood film locations and a school whose alumni include Will.i.am and Forest Whitaker.

A number of wild claims have been touted, including one from none other than President-elect Donald Trump who said the fires are ‘all [the] fault’ of California governor Gavin Newsom.

Right-wingers have also seized on a video of Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) firefighters to blame Democrats for allegedly diverting supplies to Ukraine.

Firefighters were seen using small canvas bags to quickly put out a garbage fire.

Widely-shared social media posts claimed the firefighters were resorting to using women’s handbags due to budget cuts.

Officials said the bags were part of standard gear, and are a more efficient way to tackle small fires than using a hose, which takes time to set up.

One of the strangest theories which generated traffic online is that the fires were deliberately set in order to create ‘smart cities’.

Fact-checkers Politifact said Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, had flagged a number of posts which created a buzz around this idea.

The posts made confused and sometimes inaccurate references to plans for improving planning, public transport and sustainability, loosely grouped under the term ‘smart cities’.

Some of these plans include retrofitting homes to become more energy-efficient, or bringing bus and train networks online.

A 2020 United Nations document called People-Smart Sustainable Cities defines the term as ‘an innovative city that uses information and communication technologies and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness’.

The UN has not made ‘smart cities’ a defined part of its 2030 agenda, contrary to some of the claims.

There have also been no references to any need to destroy existing buildings or structures.

Politifact said its investigators ‘found no credible evidence or reports that Los Angeles or other areas in the U.S. are being destroyed to build smart cities’.

Authorities in LA briefly investigated the possibility that an individual was responsible for starting one of the blazes, which has been named the Kenneth Fire.

Source : https://metro.co.uk/2025/01/10/la-wildfires-spark-conspiracy-theories-around-smart-city-plot-22339711/

Special Counsel Jack Smith resigned Friday from the Department of Justice as President-elect Donald Trump and others continued efforts to block the release of Smith’s final report on his criminal investigations of the Republican.

Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022, left his post 10 days before Trump’s inauguration.

His departure was expected, as Smith indicated he would leave before Trump took office, and because the president-elect planned to fire the special counsel if he did not resign.

But the timing of it was only disclosed Saturday, in a brief footnote of a DOJ court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida, who was appointed to the bench by Trump.

“The Special Counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and separated from the Department on January 10,” the filing reads.

DOJ officials urged Cannon not to extend an order she issued last week, which is temporarily blocking the agency from releasing Smith’s investigation into Trump’s interference in the 2020 election results.

Trump’s former co-defendants in another criminal case asked Cannon to extend her order, and are trying to keep Garland from releasing a portion of Smith’s report to members of Congress.

The DOJ filed an emergency motion late Friday asking a federal appeals court to reverse the order, which would allow for the swift release of Smith’s report.

Smith had filed two criminal cases against Trump.

One, in federal court in Washington, D.C., charged with crimes related to his attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

In the other case, which Cannon presided over, Trump was charged with retaining classified government records at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after leaving the White House in January 2017, and with his efforts to prevent officials from recovering those documents

Also charged in that case were Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago worker Carlos De Oliveira, who were accused of helping Trump try to hide the documents from officials.

Cannon last year dismissed the Mar-a-Lago documents case against Trump after ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional.

Source : https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/11/special-counsel-jack-smith-resigns-from-doj-as-trumps-fight-to-block-final-report-continues.html

Karla Sofía Gascón reads the hate. All of it. Alongside the flood of praise for her lead performance in the late-breaking Oscar favorite Emilia Pérez, a steady trickle of vitriol has flowed in the gutters of social media. When we meet in her native Madrid, Gascón takes out her phone to show me messages she has screenshotted and marked up. “I hope you die before you make another movie,” spewed one X user. After beloved Spanish actress Marisa Paredes passed away a few days before our interview, another anonymous online wit mused, “I wish you could have died instead of her.” She’s also received death threats in Mexico, where Emilia Pérez is set and where she has spent much of her professional life: “I was told I would be found dismembered in a bag.”

Should she be nominated for an Oscar, which most pundits expect, Gascón is poised to become the first transgender performer to win. (Only one has been nominated, Juno’s Elliot Page, who revealed his gender identity only afterward.) Not since 2017’s Moonlight has an Academy Award front-runner been so well suited to trigger Donald Trump’s base: A Mexican cartel kingpin named Manitas (Gascón) hires a careerist corporate lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help him transition to a new life as a woman, fake his death and resettle his wife (Selena Gomez) and kids in Switzerland. And it’s a musical.

The undisguised transphobia that became a pillar of Trump’s second presidential campaign (we all remember the ads) is a global phenomenon, Gascón hastens to note, one that has grown in proportion to the cultural progress of trans issues. “There is a part of society that lives off hate, that lives off selling hate, and there is another part that wants to live in hope, with the same rights, all of us in peace and respect,” she says. “I always see it as a struggle between light and dark.” (A practicing Buddhist for more than a decade, Gascón would hit on similar themes in an emotional speech from the Golden Globes stage on Jan. 5, after Emilia Pérez won the last prize of the night.) “The brighter the light is, the darker the shadows are. And I am public enemy number one right now in the world for many people.”

I ask why she bothers to read all the filth, to keep it on her phone?

“I’ve gotten used to it,” she says in Castilian Spanish, distinct from the Mexican accent she puts on in the film. “In fact, I love it. It’s my gasoline to then tell the people of the light: ‘You have won.’ The more people hate me, the more insulting messages they send, the more I say, ‘Thank you,’ and the more I’m going to enjoy this moment.” The bigotry, she says, has only fired up her competitive instinct: “I’ve developed a taste for revenge.”

Gasoline is an apt metaphor. The 52-year-old actress arrived on a high-octane Yamaha MT-07 motorcycle from Alcobendas, the Madrid suburb where she lives with her wife of 30 years, Marisa Gutierrez, and their 14-year-old daughter, Victoria. As she strutted across a sun-swept plaza in her leather jacket and fur-lined boots in search of a quiet café where we could record the interview, she showed me a picture she took on her ride down of an Emilia Pérez poster on the side of a newsstand. Above the faces of Gascón and co-stars Saldaña and Gomez is the name of the vendor: Good News. “It’s a promising omen, no?”

Gascón has already made history by winning the best actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival that she shared with Saldaña, Gomez and Adriana Paz. The victory prompted a reactionary backlash in France, most prominently from far-right politician Marion Maréchal, niece of the National Rally standard-bearer Marine Le Pen and granddaughter of the movement’s late founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. “So a man has won best actress,” Maréchal tweeted. “Progress for the left means the erasure of women and mothers.” Gascón wasted no time in counterpunching, suing Maréchal over a “sexist insult on the basis of gender identity.” (“It’s with the lawyers now,” she says. “It’s going to be a long process.” She intends to give any indemnities to trans rights organizations.) The actress says she is bracing herself for “Señora Rowling” to weigh in.

As she speaks, laughter swallows the ends of her sentences. Whether it’s a nervous tic or an overflow of joviality is unclear. It happens when she describes her first meeting with Emilia Pérez writer-director Jacques Audiard in central Paris in January 2022. “It was as if I’d entered a store, bought an oil lamp, rubbed it and out came a genie,” she says. “He would have said, ‘Hi, I’m Jacques, what are your three wishes?’ and I would have said, ‘I want to make the best film in the history of cinema, I want to be the best actress in the history of cinema, and I want us to do very well.’ ”

It took Audiard several years to find his way to Gascón. In the first four or five drafts of his script (which he initially planned to stage as an opera), all the characters were far younger. Manitas/Emilia was just 30 years old. “I was looking for actresses in Los Angeles and a good amount in Mexico,” says the director. “And they were wonderful, but it just wasn’t working.” Eventually, his music supervisor, Pierre-Marie Dru, told him he had seen a trans actress in Spain. “I said, ‘Why not?’ ” recalls Audiard. He quickly realized she was the one. “First of all, she’s very funny, she’s very inventive and she already had a certain idea of her character when she arrived.”

The filmmaker had seen Saldaña read for the lawyer part around the same time, “and it was a real shock. The actresses weren’t 20. They were 40, 45, 50. And it changed everything, absolutely everything about the movie.” But it worked.

As in every genie story, Gascón’s came with a catch. The monkey’s paw in this scenario was that she had to sing and dance. “I said to myself, ‘Well, this is going to be absurd,’ ” she recalls. “There are other people who are much more qualified than me.”

Her voice, by her own account, was “broken” as a result of hormone therapy that left her with a sultry rasp and limited range. As for cutting a rug, she says, “I’d always felt like RoboCop when it came time to dance, to move my body. Very Terminator.”

Audiard didn’t mind. “The fact that different actors had different lyrical and choreographical abilities felt very natural,” he says. If anything, he found it fitting that a hardened gangster wouldn’t bust a move: The modern noir master thought of the Norman Mailer novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

In the end, Gascón convinced herself that she, and perhaps no one else, could find the essence of Emilia Pérez. “I wouldn’t sing well, and I wouldn’t be the best dancer,” but “I understood that this character was for me.”

It helped that the musical Audiard had in mind was not exactly of the Busby Berkeley variety. At that point, Gascón had only seen one of the celebrated auteur’s hard-edged movies — the English-language Western The Sisters Brothers — and didn’t even realize it was his. She hadn’t watched The Beat My Heart Skipped, the magisterial prison drama A Prophet or the equally bleak Palme d’Or winner Dheepan. She had, however, read his script for Emilia Pérez, and she had notes.

“The most important thing for me was the motivation” for the protagonist’s sex change. Audiard’s original script, she says, treated Manitas’ transition as a screwball premise, an elaborate disguise allowing him to disappear and evade the authorities that the character only later grows into. Gascón told Audiard it’d be far more interesting, and truer to life, to have Manitas genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria.

Audiard long had imagined an internal struggle within Emilia between man and woman, demon and angel. “I now realize it was a profound psychological error,” he says. “She’s a powerful educator. She led me to understand that, well before transitioning, we’re already what we want to become.”

Likewise, Gascón felt that Emilia’s sexuality was ill-defined. Emilia’s first post-op sexual encounter, for example, was originally with a man she picked up on the street. “It was a very funny scene,” Gascón says, “but it changed the whole perspective of the character and turned her into someone far more promiscuous.” The notion that Emilia’s sexual proclivities would abruptly change along with her gender expression did not correspond to Gascón’s own experience.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about my script?” Audiard told Gascón, she recalls with a laugh.

Again, the filmmaker invited the feedback: “She considerably softened her character, made her more likable and more empathetic.”

“I’ve known since the age of 4,” says Gascón. “I would see other girls and say, ‘I want to be like that.’ Or I saw a girl on television and identified more with that character.” But to say as much to her parents, brothers or friends would have been “absurd” during the 1970s and ’80s.

“The first things I was given were pistols, a machine gun, a bow and arrow, a soccer ball,” Gascón says. “If you looked too closely at a doll, people would say, ‘No, that’s for girls, it’s very bad.’ And if you cried, they would tell you that you’re a girl, as if it were bad to cry. That was the period in which I grew up.”

Her own childhood could have been the stuff of an Audiard movie. Violence was always around the corner. “I come from the world of the streets, even if it wasn’t the Bronx,” she says. “It was a place and a time in which you had to survive a little, and you had to be stronger so they wouldn’t beat you up at school.”

She found refuge in video games — particularly a pre-Nintendo 8-bit system called the Sinclair ZX Spectrum — and in playacting with her younger brother, Roberto. Together they’d turn the sound off on the TV and dub the characters’ voices, or record their own pretend radio programs. Their parents dismissed this as a silly pastime and insisted they focus on their studies instead. “Parents never know how important something is going to be in the future of a child,” she notes.

Gascón did. At 16, she decided she wanted to act and dropped off headshots at a casting agency. She soon got calls for background parts: “Applauding, brandishing a spear, saying ‘good afternoon,’ whatever it is an extra does.” The time on set gave her a practical education in filmmaking and an enduring sympathy for extras. “I recognize their work because I know what it feels like when you think not even God pays attention to you,” she says. “I always want to give them a message of encouragement and tell them I was there, so don’t lose hope.”

When Gascón was 20, her older brother, Gregorio, died in a skiing accident. The pain of the loss is still raw decades later. “When something like that happens, you lose faith in life,” she says, her eyes suddenly glistening with tears. “You start to question everything you were taught to believe. I was filled with a rancor against life itself.”

Even as she wrestled with grief and her own identity, Gascón at last began to find regular employment, much of it outside of Spain. She spent time in London, working on a BBC series meant to teach Spanish to English speakers, though she never managed to learn English herself — “because I’m ignorant,” she says with a laugh. In her mid-20s, she married her longtime girlfriend, Gutierrez, and the two moved to Milan, where Gascón voiced puppets for children’s shows. Gascón says she was asked to follow members of the company to the U.S. to work with the Muppets — including “Gustavo” the frog, or Kermit, as he’s more widely known. Despite the dearth of non-puppet work, she declined the offer. She had a different vision for her life.

Gascón finally broke through as a soap opera heartthrob, first in Spain with a recurring role in the late ’90s series El Súper and later in the telenovela-mad nation of Mexico. “The first sequence that I recorded,” Gascón recalls, “I asked an actress who was there, an older lady, ‘Did they tell you when we can rehearse?’ And she looked at me like this and said, ‘Rehearse?’ ”

It’s difficult for any actor, no matter how gifted, to transcend the ludicrous plots, the porny production values and the cheap synth scores of mid-2000s Mexican soaps, but Gascón gave it her all. Nowhere did she do so more flamboyantly than in Corazón salvaje, in which she played a guitar-swinging, flamenco-dancing bearded gypsy with hoop earrings, come-hither eyes and an Aladdin vest. Gascón bucked against the show’s accelerated production schedules and one-and-done takes. She refused to wear the earpiece through which the actors were fed their lines. “I had to make an extra effort to learn by heart the 40-odd scenes we had to get through every day,” she says. “And because I didn’t listen to the instructions they gave me, we were in constant conflict.” The laugh again: “But my sequences were wonderful.”

In Mexico, feeling confined in her own body, she sought release. She began to paint and write, both quite well. Her wife and daughter had remained in Spain, and Gascón, who has made no secret of her extramarital relationships, began a long love affair with a female Mexican senator. For the actress, the romance coincided with a period of “great suffering.” She had told the senator early on about her desire to live as a woman. She gathered the courage to act on it only to be abandoned. “The person I was with told me she would help me, and it wasn’t so,” she says. “She told me she would be with me forever, and it wasn’t so.”

Gascón felt the urge to end her life. The thought wouldn’t leave her alone. “I started thinking how I would do it,” she says. But rather than carry out the plan, she decided to write about it, experiencing suicide on the page first as a form of catharsis. “At the very least, before dying, I’d have written everything down,” she says. She kept writing until she completed a book, a magical realist memoir in which the narrator, hanging from a belt in a loft apartment, relives her own life, her childhood, her dysphoria, her brother’s death, her lover’s betrayal — “How it hurts to go, more from the going than from the pain.” The book culminates in a fight between dragons. “All of it is true,” Gascón says.

Karsia: An Extraordinary Story, as the book is titled, was published in 2018 under her birth name, Carlos Gascón, by which she was known at the time. It doubled as an announcement of her new identity. By then, she had completed much of her transition — all of it, she emphasizes, paid for by Spanish government health care — and the back cover shows her in full splendor, signed “Karla Sofía Gascón.”

Gutierrez, her wife, welcomed Gascón back home. “She’s always known who I am,” Gascón told Spanish newspaper El Mundo, “but turned to stone when she saw me as a woman.” Gascón’s brother Roberto burst into laughter when he first heard the name she chose after her transition. Her mother, meanwhile, was not surprised. Gascón had told her about her intentions long before. “And she said, ‘I believe you, because you always do what you say.’ ”

In Emilia Pérez, as in Karsia and Gascón’s own experience, transitioning is associated with death. Emilia wakes up in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages, quasi-mummified. Her previous incarnation, the drug lord Manitas del Monte, is reported dead. Gascón inhabits both roles so convincingly that many have assumed they’re played by two different actors. (Prosthetics help.) She gives Manitas an eerie whisper, an echo of Don Corleone, evoking a coiled snake capable of sudden violence. He is a fearsome presence even though he never picks up a gun or raises a hand. “It reminds me a little of what Steven Spielberg did with Jaws,” says Gascón. “It was scarier when the shark was going to arrive than when it was in front of you.”

Gascón takes issue with the notion, advanced by interviewers and commentators, that playing Manitas required her to somehow go back to a previous state of being, a transition in reverse. “When they ask me what it was like to return to that part, I say I have not returned,” she explains. “I have never been Manitas, I have never been this person. I have only gotten into the skin of this character and I have given him my soul so that he has life. In the end, for an actor or an actress, the most important thing in this world is to have lived and experienced all kinds of things. But it is obvious that when you play a murderer, you don’t have to have murdered anyone.”

The role nonetheless required Gascón to call upon a memory of masculinity. “I have noticed the difference between what testosterone gave me and what estrogen gives me,” she says. “Testosterone made me a much more aggressive person than I am; estrogen makes me a more sensitive person.”

For a while now, there has been a debate about whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should introduce gender-neutral acting categories, as some other awards-granting bodies have. But while a nomination for Gascón would be a watershed moment for AMPAS, it would likely not force the organization to rethink its binary classification. “In the end, the Academy and the festivals will decide to change their rules depending on what happens in society,” she says. “But for me, it would have caused me tremendous discomfort if they had created a special category. I would feel very bad because I do not feel strange or special. I have simply made a transition,” she says between sips of tea and bites of a chocolate palmier. “I am a lady, and I am 52 years old.” And to the voices who’ve suggested she should be considered for best actor since she plays a man for the first half of the film, she answers, “It’s as if you told Dustin Hoffman when he did Tootsie that he had to be nominated for best actress.”

And anyway, Manitas was the easy part. The fun part. The more outlandish the role, the freer an actor can be, says Gascón. Playing Emilia, who finds love and dedicates her life to helping the victims of cartel violence as a form of repentance, demanded a subtler touch.

Despite her inexperience at the top of the call sheet, she realized that she had to take command. “In this film, I had power as a protagonist that I had not had in other places,” she says. “So there were two ways to take this film. When you face world-class Hollywood stars, you can either approach them as a fan — like, ‘Wow, sorry, excuse me, forgive me for speaking to you,’ etc., etc. — or you can say, ‘I admire you, I adore you, and I respect you, but now we are going to make a movie together and we’re going to do what we have to do.’ ”

She retained Emilia’s imperiousness and menace between takes: “There were moments in which I treated Zoe Saldaña as if she were my assistant and Selena as if she were my wife. So they were very confused by me.”

Emilia Pérez was filmed mostly in a Paris studio. Mirroring Emilia’s own sense of isolation, Gascón spent the months-long shoot in self-exile, declining invitations to socialize with the cast and crew, including one outing to a Beyoncé concert. “I was lonely because I had no one,” she says. “No family, nothing. The truth is that it was very good for the character, but it was very bad for me.”

When production wrapped, Gascón shared a photo on Facebook of her at dinner with her beaming castmates Saldaña, Gomez and Édgar Ramírez. (That she favors Facebook, of all social networks, is perhaps the best indicator of her age.) “Forgive me for my desperation,” she wrote. “For how much of a beast I can be in life. It was a luxury to share the screen with each one of you. A true privilege.”

Gomez says Gascón had no reason to apologize for her stubborn dedication to character. On the contrary, “I thought that [her method] actually helped me. I was scared to take this project on. I was a mess. We had really powerful moments where we would both just feel tender and personal.”

There also were more unsettling moments, such as the scene in which Emilia throws Jessi (Gomez) onto a bed in a fit of jealous rage. “It was really intense,” Gomez says. “I did feel scared. Not of Karla, but when I watched that scene, I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ I freeze completely. My body does. And it felt like a natural reaction. She really challenged me. She is able to fully transform herself.”

Adds Gomez: “I can’t wait to watch all the nominations because I’m going to lose it for her. She is worthy of every accolade for doing this movie.”

Gascón is settling into Hollywood stardom nicely. She’s been invited to sit front row at Saint Laurent, which produced the movie and dressed her for several of her events. Just the night before, she was hanging out with her neighbor and Alcobendas’ most famous export, Penélope Cruz, who still lives there with husband Javier Bardem. Gascón is suddenly fielding the kind of offers she could never have dreamt of just a few years ago. Pedro Almodóvar has told her he wants to work with her. She soon will begin shooting Las Malas, a dark Spanish-language fairy tale directed by the Academy Award–winning co-writer of Birdman, Armando Bó. And now, having accompanied Gascón across the world on the festival circuit and befriended her glamorous co-stars, even her daughter, Victoria, is harboring cinematic ambitions. “She’s the improved version of me,” says Gascón.

With notoriety comes scrutiny. Emilia Pérez has taken flak not just from the reactionary right but also from young online progressive circles, and Gascón is glad to take both on. The film has been criticized for trafficking in clichés and gender stereotypes, for equating transitioning with death, for presenting it as a kind of moral redemption, for making older cisgender audiences feel virtuous by endorsing it, among other objections. An article in Vox sums it up: “Could a movie musical about a trans Mexican drug lord be this awards season’s Crash?”

Gascón doesn’t hold back. “First off, I’m tired of TikTokers, Instagrammers, influencers and people who get up in the morning and are all soccer coaches, they are all journalists, they are all film critics. You must be super well-adjusted to criticize the work of 700 people from your couch, sitting there next to your PlayStation,” she says. “Second, they claim to speak for everyone. Let me tell you: Being LGBT doesn’t make you less of an idiot.”

Source : https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/karla-sofia-gascon-interview-emilia-perez-backlash-oscars-transphobia-1236104208/

NORWAY is set to build thousands of bomb shelters as they prepare for the “worst-case scenario” amid fears of a Russian war with Nato.

The Norwegian government say the creation of safety bunkers in all new large-scale buildings is being done to counter the huge amount of “uncertainty” plaguing Europe around Vladimir Putin’s next move.

It has been almost three years since Vlad ordered his troops to illegally invade Ukraine and plunge the continent into chaos.

Ever since the strongly condemned power play from the ageing despot, Putin has continued to launch scathing attacks on all those who defend Ukraine.

This has dragged Nato into the conflict amid several chilling threats of an escalation of war if they continue to arm and fund Russia’s enemies.

Now Norway, which has a border with Ukraine, fears Vlad’s reign of tyranny will not stop after he claims his first country.

The bloodthirsty dictator is believed to want to take more nations if he is victorious in Ukraine as he looks to rule over Europe with an iron fist.

Norway shares a more than 120 mile border with Russia in the Arctic Circle.

They are also a founding member of Nato since joining in 1949.

Any attack of them will prompt a swift and immediate response from the remaining members of the European alliance to ensure their safety.

In light of Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine, Norway’s government has been planning to bolster their safety measures.

They spoke about over 100 methods to help reassure civil preparedness on January 10, in a crunch talk on national security.

One of these is a plan to reintroduce an obligation to build bomb shelters in new buildings.

The practice was a common priority for years before it was stopped in 1998.

Norwegian Minister of Justice and Public Security Emilie Enger Mehl revealed the calls for additional shelter is due to the looming threat of being attacked in the future.

He told public broadcaster NRK: “There’s more uncertainty around us.

“We must take care of the civilian population, in case of a ‘worst-case scenario’ with war or armed attack.

“Going forward, we must prepare for a new era.”

The potential new legislation will apply to any building complex larger than 1,000 square meters.

Two separate shelters are set to be created with one protecting people from chemical or radioactive weaponry.

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The other will be mainly used to guard against more conventional weapons and be similar to what was used decades ago.

These could be repurposed from subway stations or parking garages.

Mehl added: “Russia’s willingness to use military force to achieve political goals shows that Norway will likely have to deal with an unpredictable and risk-averse neighbour for a long time to come.”

Despite a future conflict being the main reason for the bunker plans, they are also going to act as fallback plans in the case or extreme weather events or even another pandemic.

The government plans will need to be passed through parliament if they are to go ahead.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are also set to bolster up their defence systems over similar fears.

NATO’S WAR PREPARATIONS

The head of Nato, Mark Rutte, has warned the alliance must gear up for war or its members will flounder in the face of Russian aggression.

The secretary general harked back to the Cold War days when countries cranked up defence spending to over three per cent of GDP.

It comes as analysts have told The Sun that Nato is not ready for a brutal Arctic war with Putin.

Despite an influx of Nato drills in the region, troops will struggle to survive war in the freezing wilderness, they claim.

The Arctic security experts at the Centre for European Policy Analysis warned Russia is already “up to no good” in the region and that China must also “be kept in check”.

In November’s latest Arctic drills, 3,600 soldiers from the US, Sweden, the UK, France and other Nato members conducted live fire drills in preparation for war.

Colonel Janne Makitalo, director of the Dynamic Front 25 drills, said the main goal was to prepare troops for harsh Arctic conditions – now that Norway, Sweden and Finland are all Nato members.

He told reporters at the time: “This sends a message that we are able to train together and we are developing our assets.”

Joel Linnainmaki, a researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said the drills were a message for Russia.

Source : https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/32749406/bomb-shelters-norway-putin-nato/

The Canadian government on Friday refused the reports claiming that all four Indian nationals arrested on charges of their alleged involvement in the killing of Khalistani terrorists Hardeep Singh Nijjar are out on bail. “All four of them are in custody and have not been granted bail,” a spokesperson for the BC Prosecution Service (BCPS) told Times Now.
The rebuttal from Canadian authorities came after viral reports claiming “bail to all four accused” made headlines. Hardeep Nijjar, 45, was killed outside Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia on June 18, 2024. Nijjar, who was a designated terrorist, was wanted in India under several terror charges. In June 2020, MHA designated Nijjar as a listed terrorist under UAPA . Interpol issued a Red Notice in 2016. Investigations by agencies showed that Nijjar had links with SFJ chief Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who openly posts threat videos against India.
On May 22, 2024 Canada’s Integrated Homicide Investigation (IHIT) team arrested three Indian nationals—Karan Brar (22), Kamalpreet Singh (22), Amardeep Singh (22)—and 28-year-old Karanpreet Singh for their alleged involvement in the Nijjhar killing.

Relations between India and Canada deteriorated sharply after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged in September last year the “potential” involvement of Indian agents in Nijjar’s killing, claims India dismissed as “absurd” and “motivated.”

A woman in Australia has annulled her marriage after realising that a fake wedding ceremony she took part in for a social media stunt was in fact real.

The unknowing bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a “prank” for his Instagram account.

She only discovered the marriage was genuine when he tried to use it to gain permanent residency in Australia.

A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman was tricked into getting married, in a judgement published on Thursday.

The bizarre case began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, where they lived at the time.

In December that year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.

Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. She was told it would be a “white party” – where attendees would wear white-coloured clothing – and was told to pack a white dress.

But when they arrived she was “shocked” and “furious” to find no other guests present except for her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend and a celebrant, according to her deposition quoted in court documents.

“So when I got there, and I didn’t see anybody in white, I asked him, ‘What’s happening?’. And he pulled me aside, and he told me that he’s organising a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetising his Instagram page,” she said.

She said she had accepted his explanation as “he was a social media person” who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would be valid only if it were held in a court.

Still, she remained concerned. The woman rang a friend and voiced her worries, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it would be fine because, if it were real, they would have had to file a notice of intended marriage first, which they had not.

Reassured, the woman went through the ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. She said she was happy at that time to “play along” to “make it look real”.

Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependant in her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both of them are foreigners.

When she told him she could not as they were technically not married, he then revealed that their Sydney wedding ceremony had been genuine, according to the woman’s testimony.

The woman later found their marriage certificate, and discovered a notice of intended marriage which had been filed the month before their Sydney trip – before they even got engaged – which she said she did not sign. According to the court documents, the signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman’s.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vpx5x6wdvo

I’ll spare you the experience of listening to one of the richest men in the world whine and just tell you straight out: Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies.

Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, sets the tone at the very beginning: “I think at some level you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?”

Unfortunately I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first attempt at getting rich: FaceMash, a clone of HotOrNot where he uploaded photos of his fellow female students to be rated — without their consent. “Giving people a voice” is one way of describing that, I suppose. Personally, I’d call it “creep shit.”

The retailer previously announced it would shutter 150 ‘nonproductive’ stores as part of a revitalization plan

Macy’s announced that it will close 66 stores across the country this year as part of the retailer’s revitalization program, including its location in Philadelphia’s Center City, a process the CEO said is “never easy.”

The company said in February 2024 that it would shutter 150 stores over a three-year period “to return the company to sustainable, profitable sales growth,” Macy’s said Thursday.

It included a list of the 66 stores closing.

At the same time, Macy’s said it would invest in its other 350 locations throughout fiscal year 2026.

“Closing any store is never easy, but as part of our Bold New Chapter strategy, we are closing underproductive Macy’s stores to allow us to focus our resources and prioritize investments in our go–forward stores, where customers are already responding positively to better product offerings and elevated service,” Tony Spring, chairman and chief executive officer of Macy’s, said.

Macy’s opened its Philadelphia location in 2006 in the former Wanamaker’s Department Store on Market Street, one of the first department stores in the nation. Built from 1904 to 1911, the 12-story structure is a National Historic Landmark.

The retailer said revitalization efforts at Macy’s First 50 locations have resulted in increased sales for three consecutive quarters.

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/macys-store-closures-2025-3758670

The last two years exceeded on average a critical warming limit for the first time as global temperatures soar “beyond what modern humans have ever experienced”, an EU agency said Friday.

This does not mean the internationally-agreed 1.5C warming threshold has been permanently breached, but the Copernicus Climate Change Service said it was drawing dangerously near.

The EU monitor confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023 and extending a streak of extraordinary heat that fuelled climate extremes on all continents.

Another record-breaking year is not anticipated in 2025, as climate sceptic Donald Trump takes office, and a deadline looms for nations to commit to deeper cuts to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

But the UK weather service predicts 2025 will still rank among the top three warmest years in the history books.

This excess heat supercharges extreme weather, and 2024 saw countries from Spain to Kenya, the United States and Nepal hit by disasters that cost more than $300 billion by some estimates.

Los Angeles is battling deadly wildfires that have destroyed thousands of buildings and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes. US President Joe Biden said the fires were the most “devastating” to hit California and were proof that “climate change is real”.

Copernicus said sustained, unprecedented warming made average temperatures over 2023 and 2024 more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times.

Nearly 200 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 that meeting 1.5C offered the best chance of preventing the most catastrophic repercussions of climate change.

But the world is nowhere on track to meeting that target.

“We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5C level,” said Copernicus climate deputy director Samantha Burgess.

Copernicus records go back to 1940 but other sources of climate data, such as ice cores and tree rings, allow scientists to say the Earth today is likely the warmest its been in tens of thousands of years.

The 1.5C threshold is measured in decades, not individual years, but Copernicus said reaching this limit even briefly illustrated the unprecedented changes being brought about by humanity.

Scientists say every fraction of a degree above 1.5C is consequential, and that beyond a certain point the climate could shift in ways that are difficult to anticipate.

At present levels, human-driven climate change is already making droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves more frequent and intense.

The death of 1,300 pilgrims in Saudi Arabia from extreme heat, a barrage of powerful tropical storms in Asia and North America, and historic flooding in Europe and Africa marked grim milestones in 2024.

The oceans, a crucial climate regulator which absorb 90 percent of excess heat from greenhouse gases, warmed to record levels in 2024, straining coral reefs and marine life and stirring violent weather.

Warmer seas mean higher evaporation and greater moisture in the atmosphere, causing heavier rainfall, feeding energy into cyclones and bringing sometimes unbearable humidity.

Water vapour in the atmosphere hit fresh highs in 2024 and combined with elevated temperatures caused floods, heatwaves and “misery for millions of people”, Burgess said.

Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said hitting 1.5C was a “stark warning sign”.

“We have now experienced the first taste of a 1.5C world, which has cost people and the global economy unprecedented suffering and economic costs,” he told AFP.

Scientists say the onset of a warming El Nino phenomenon in 2023 contributed to the record heat that followed.

But El Nino ended in early 2024, and scientists have puzzled over why global temperatures have remained at record or near-record levels ever since.

In December, the World Meteorological Organization said if an opposite La Nina event took over in coming months it would be too “weak and short-lived” to have much of a cooling effect.

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/last-2-years-crossed-15c-global-warming-limit-eu-monitor-3758601

Actor Alec Baldwin sued New Mexico prosecutors and sheriff’s office officials on Thursday alleging a “malicious” prosecution against him for the 2021 fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the Western movie “Rust.”
The action against special prosecutor Kari Morrissey and others is among at least a dozen civil lawsuits filed over Hutchins’ death, which shocked Hollywood and sparked calls for an overhaul of firearms safety on movie sets.

The lawsuit, filed in a Santa Fe court, followed the dramatic dismissal of Baldwin’s case during his July manslaughter trial in the New Mexico capital.
A judge ruled the special prosecutor and sheriff’s office deliberately withheld evidence from Baldwin on the source of a live round that killed Hutchins.
For the best part of three years, New Mexico officials pursued Baldwin for “political” and “personal” goals in a “conspiracy” to bring him to trial, Baldwin’s attorneys say in the complaint, which seeks financial damages via a jury trial.

“Defendants must now be held accountable for their malicious and unlawful pursuit of Baldwin,” they wrote in the complaint.
Actions ranged from special prosecutor Andrea Reeb’s comment that the case could benefit her political career as a Republican state representative to Morrissey presenting “false and incomplete” testimony to win a grand jury indictment, they said.
Morrissey said prosecutors had long known the actor would file a retaliatory civil lawsuit.

“We look forward to our day in court,” she said in a text message.
Reeb and the Santa Fe sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Ukrainian-born cinematographer died when Baldwin pointed his pistol at her, cocked it and possibly pulled the trigger as they set up a camera shot on a movie set near Santa Fe, his lawyers said.
The gun, a reproduction 1873 single-action army revolver, fired a live round inadvertently loaded by Hannah Gutierrez, the movie’s weapons handler. Gutierrez was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced to 18 months in jail.
Baldwin, also a “Rust” producer, has always said live rounds should not have been allowed on set and he was not responsible for weapons safety.
His lawsuit focuses on the decision by Morrissey and sheriff’s office officials to file evidence on the source of live rounds under a case number different from that of the “Rust” case.
New Mexico First Judicial District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer tossed the case on grounds that “willful withholding of this information” came “so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice.”

Source : https://www.reuters.com/legal/alec-baldwin-sues-malicious-prosecution-over-rust-shooting-2025-01-10/

Paris Hilton says her “heart has shattered into a million pieces,” after visiting the charred remains of her Malibu beach house which has been destroyed in wildfires sweeping LA.

Describing herself on Instagram as “in complete shock,” the hotel heiress said seeing her family memories “reduced to ashes” was “devastating”.

Meanwhile, Mel Gibson has said the loss of his family home and all his belongings in the fire was “emotional”. It burned down while he was recording the Joe Rogan Experience in Texas.

At least 10 people have been killed in the blazes, which have been burning for four days, forcing 179,000 to evacuate their homes. Tens of thousands of acres of land still burning.

The fires affected multiple celebrities, as the fires have ripped through exclusive suburbs in southern California, home to film stars and billionaires.

Hilton, 43, said she watched her home burn to the ground on TV – and shared a video on social media from inside her gutted home.

She said she was grateful to be safe along with her husband Carter Reum and their two children, Phoenix and London, but was devastated to have lost her family home.

She wrote on Instagram: “I’m standing here in what used to be our home, and the heartbreak is truly indescribable.

“When I first saw the news, I was in complete shock – I couldn’t process it. But now, standing here and seeing it with my own eyes, it feels like my heart has shattered into a million pieces.”

She has lived in the multi-million-pound property for three years.

Hilton added: “This house wasn’t just a place to live – it was where we dreamed, laughed, and created the most beautiful memories as a family.

“It was where [son] Phoenix’s little hands made art that I’ll cherish forever, where love and life filled every corner. To see it reduced to ashes… it’s devastating beyond words.

“What breaks my heart even more is knowing that this isn’t just my story. So many people have lost everything. It’s not just walls and roofs – it’s the memories that made those houses homes. It’s the photos, the keepsakes, the irreplaceable pieces of our lives.”

She described herself as “incredibly lucky,” adding: “My loved ones, my babies, and my pets are safe. That’s the most important thing”.

She thanked the firefighters, first responders and volunteers who she said were “all risking their lives” to help, adding “Even in the ashes, there is still beauty in this world”.

‘When I got home, it wasn’t there’

Braveheart star Mel Gibson, who was away when the fires began, told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports that the home he had lived in for over a decade had burned while he was appearing on an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast.

The 69-year-old actor said it was “emotional” to know all his belongings have been lost, but he was doing his best to stay positive.

He said he felt “relieved from the burden of my stuff, because it’s all in cinders”.

Gibson, who lived in his Hollywood home with his partner Rosalind Ross and their seven-year-old son Lars, described finding out about the loss of his house.

“I was doing the Rogan podcast… And [I was] kind of ill at ease while we were talking, because I knew my neighbourhood was on fire, so I thought, I wonder if my place is still there.

“But when I got home, sure enough, it wasn’t there. I went home and I said to myself, well, at least I haven’t got any of those pesky plumbing problems anymore.”

He said the family’s pet chickens had survived the blaze, and while many “personal things from over the years” had been lost, the important things were still there.

“These are only things. And the good news is that those in my family and those I love are all well, and we’re all happy and healthy and out of harm’s way, that’s all I can care about, really.”

The ancestral home of Big Lebowski actor Jeff Bridges is also understood to have been destroyed.

The four-bedroom home, which had been in the Bridges family for generations, had been inherited by Bridges and his two siblings in 2018 according to the Los Angeles Times.

Tina Knowles, the mother of singer Beyonce, has also lost a house she owned in Malibu to the fires.

She shared a short video of dolphins playing in the sea on Instagram, writing: “This is what I was looking at on my birthday this past weekend from my tiny little bungalow on the water in Malibu! It was my favorite place, my sanctuary, my sacred Happy Place. Now it is gone!!”

She went on to thank the fire department and first responders and offered condolences to others affected by the fires.

Take That star Mark Owen and his family were evacuated from their home, with his wife Emma Ferguson describing them waking to “helicopters, thick black smoke and winds howling”.

She said while she was grateful her family was safe, it was “exhausting” to be “constantly looking online to see if your house is gone.”

Actor Steve Guttenberg, best known for his role in the Police Academy film franchise, has called the fires “absolutely the worst” he’s ever seen, and has been doing what he can to help distressed residents.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/paris-hilton-shares-video-of-charred-remains-of-malibu-home-mel-gibsons-family-house-also-destroyed-13286445

David Beckham has joined calls for football authorities to do more to help footballers affected by dementia and their families.

The former England captain threw his support behind the Football Families for Justice group which gathered retired players and relatives on Friday to lobby authorities on brain injuries caused by the sport.

In a video message played at an event in Manchester, Beckham highlighted how three of his mentors around Manchester United – England World Cup winners Sir Bobby Charlton and Nobby Stiles and “Class of 92” youth coach Eric Harrison – died from neurodegenerative diseases.

He said: “I want to add my support to the work of John Stiles (Nobby’s son) and Football Families for Justice in their campaign to meet the needs of those affected.

“We need the football family to come together and allocate resources to help address the tragedy of these devastating diseases.

“Let’s ensure that victims and their families are treated with kindness, respect and best-in-class support.

“I hope you will join us in ensuring a better future for our former colleagues – the many ex-professional footballers who have brought so much joy to so many fans and for their loved ones.”

The football campaigners were joined by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and Liverpool City Region counterpart Steve Rotheram to call on the government to amend the Football Governance Bill to deal with the “brain disease epidemic” in the sport.

They want it to require “football authorities and the players’ union to develop a care and support scheme for players who develop dementia or other neurodegenerative conditions, linked to their football career, and a requirement that it be agreed with players past and present and their families”.

Five members of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning squad later suffered from dementia.

The family of Nobby Stiles, who died in 2020, say his brain was severely damaged by repeated heading of the ball.

Son John Stiles, who played for Leeds, said the existing Professional Footballers’ Association and Premier League fund is “not fit for purpose” – with the £1m annual investment insufficient with so many former players requiring long-term treatment.

“We want a properly financed care fund so players know if they get ill with dementia they will be cared for,” said John Stiles.

“Football is so wealthy it could sort this out tomorrow but we are nowhere near getting that.”

Mr Stiles said chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) will become “more prevalent” in the game.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/david-beckham-joins-calls-for-more-support-for-footballers-affected-by-dementia-13286605

The US Supreme Court heard arguments on Friday over whether to accept the appeal of social media platform TikTok against a law which could see the platform shut down if Chinese owner ByteDance does not sell it to a US owner.

The law was passed by Congress and ratified by outgoing President Joe Biden last year, citing national security concerns. Such concerns were reiterated by a majority of the justices on the nine-member bench during the hearing.

What happened during the hearing?

Several justices echoed during the two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments US government concerns that Beijing could use TikTok to collect critical data on its 170 million US users, many of whom are currently in their adolescence or early 20s.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeated the administration’s concerns “that they [China] would use that information over time to develop spies to turn people, to blackmail people, people who a generation from now will be working in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, asked the lawyer representing TikTok, Noel Francisco, whether the court is “supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?”

Francisco argued that the law violates the First Amendment free speech rights.

“This case ultimately boils down to speech,” Francisco said. “What we’re talking about is ideas. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government cannot restrict speech.”

Several of the justices challenged this accusation.

“There’s a good reason for saying that a foreign government, particularly an adversary, does not have free speech rights in the United States,” said Justice Samuel Alito. “Why would it all change if it was simply hidden under some kind of contrived corporate structure?”

What happens next?

The court is expected to reach a decision before January 19, the deadline the law has given TikTok. This would be an unusually rapid turnaround for the Supreme Court. Should ByteDance fail to sell before the deadline, Francisco said the popular platform would “go dark.”

President-elect Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on January 20, has unexpectedly come to the platform’s support, despite efforts to shut it down during his first term in office.

Source : https://www.dw.com/en/us-tiktok-ban-supreme-court-considers-appeal/a-71269919

Business was brisk at Teddy’s Cocina in Pasadena as wildfire evacuees ate lunch and passersby ducked indoors to escape from the brown, smoky air blanketing the city.
“It’s not breathable,” said Dulce Perez, a cook at the restaurant, as an eye-watering haze hung overhead on Thursday about two miles (3.2 km) away from one of the multiple fires burning around Los Angeles. “We just try to stay indoors.”

This week, as the wildfires raged and smoke billowed across Los Angeles, officials issued air quality alerts, schools canceled classes and scientists warned about the dangerous – even fatal – consequences of wildfire smoke.
All around the United States’ second-largest city, residents worried about air that has, at times, turned lung-burning from the ash, soot and smoke emanating from fires that have destroyed 10,000 structures.

Air purifiers were sold out at some big-box stores, according to interviews with employees at four businesses. Some residents were taping windows to keep the smoke out of their homes. And Los Angeles officials urged people to stay indoors in areas where smoke was visible.
While conditions improved on Friday, an air quality alert remained in effect until the evening and dangerous particulate matter remained around four times World Health Organization guidelines.

At the Pasadena Convention Center, which has been converted to a temporary shelter, aid workers from Sean Penn’s global humanitarian organization, CORE, were handing out N95 masks on Friday.
Emergency response programs manager Sunny Lee said the homeless were particularly vulnerable to bad air.
“There was no place for them to go inside, and so they were suffering even more outside with the poor air quality, without any kind of masks,” said Lee. “So, we pushed out N95 to our partners that reached those communities. We’re distributing as many as we can.”

A HOVERING HAZE

Fanned by fierce winds and fueled by vegetation bone-dry after a long period of little or no rain, the Los Angeles fires broke out on Tuesday and have relentlessly burned more than 34,000 acres (13,760 hectares), or some 53 square miles (137 sq km). Neighborhoods have turned to ash in some parts of Los Angeles.
Wildfire smoke typically carries with it noxious gases and particulate matter that make it more toxic than normal air pollution. Not only do wildfires burn plants, brush and trees, but also buildings, houses and cars that contain plastics, fuels, metals and a host of chemicals.
Studies have linked wildfire smoke with higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and cardiac arrests as well as weakened immune defenses.
Environmental health scientists and doctors warned that particulate matter posed a hazard to people with preexisting lung and heart conditions as well as the elderly and children.
Carlos Gould, an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego, said the concentration of fine particulate matter in the Los Angeles area reached alarming levels between 40 and 100 micrograms per cubic meter earlier in the week before declining to around 20 on Friday.
The WHO recommended maximum is 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
“The levels of wildfire smoke we’ve seen in LA these past few days imply between a 5-15% increase in daily mortality,” Gould said.
Chemical byproducts from the fires, particularly those stemming from burned man-made materials, penetrate deeper into the lungs and can even enter the bloodstream, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a spokesperson for the American Lung Association.
“If you’re working harder to breathe and your body is being challenged that way, it can also put a strain on the heart. And that’s why you see an increase in heart attacks,” said El-Hasan.
Even well outside of the immediate fire zone, residents complained about the smoke. With winds blowing wildfire smoke out to sea, customers at the Potholder Cafe in the coastal community of Long Beach declined to sit outdoors.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/los-angeles-wildfires-trigger-air-quality-warnings-health-concerns-2025-01-10/

The “pizzagate” gunman who fired his rifle in a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant in 2016, acting on a debunked conspiracy theory, has died after police shot him in a traffic stop.

Edgar Maddison Welch was shot by police over the weekend and died from his injuries Monday, authorities in North Carolina said Thursday.

Almost 10 years ago, Welch made national headlines when he traveled to the nation’s capital from North Carolina and fired shots in the Comet Ping Pong restaurant, spurred by a conspiracy theory that had spread online.

Prosecutors said at the time that Welch was trying to investigate an internet conspiracy theory about the pizza restaurant’s being home to a child sex-trafficking ring connected to prominent Democratic politicians, a false claim that became known as “pizzagate.”

Welch, who was 28 when the incident occurred, ended up surrendering to police after he did not find evidence to support the conspiracy theory, according to court documents at the time.

Welch was sentenced in 2017 to four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to weapons charges. He had carried an AR-15 rifle and a revolver into the restaurant, according to investigators. No one was injured by the gunfire.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Welch when she was a federal judge, saying at the time that his actions “literally left psychological wreckage,” according to The Associated Press.

Police Chief Terry L. Spry of Kannapolis, North Carolina, near Charlotte, said in a news release Thursday that police shot Welch on Saturday during a traffic stop and that a police officer “recognized the front seat passenger as the person with the outstanding warrant for arrest.”

Source : https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/pizzagate-gunman-killed-police-traffic-stop-north-carolina-rcna187082

Last year was the planet’s hottest in recorded history, multiple government agencies announced Friday, marking two years in a row that global temperatures have shattered records.

Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2024 was hotter than any year since at least 1880. Previously, 2023 was named the planet’s warmest year on record.

Last year’s average land and ocean surface temperatures topped the 2023 milestone by less than two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, according to NOAA.

The back-to-back broken records are part of a continued warming trajectory that climate scientists have long warned about and that was predicted in numerous climate models.

“Once again, the temperature record has been shattered — 2024 was the hottest year since record keeping began in 1880,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “Between record breaking temperatures and wildfires currently threatening our centers and workforce in California, it has never been more important to understand our changing planet.”

NASA scientists estimated that in 2024, Earth was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) hotter than the average from the mid-19th century — a period from 1850 to 1900.

While almost every corner of the planet was warmer-than-usual in 2024, there were some regional differences. North America, Europe, Africa and South America all had their warmest year on record in 2024, while Asia and the Arctic had their second-warmest year.

Still, the overall warming trend is clear. The planet’s 10 hottest years since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade, according to NOAA.

The new record comes as little surprise after a year beset by extremes. From June 2023 through August 2024, the planet notched 15 consecutive months of monthly temperature records, a trend NASA scientists called an “unprecedented heat streak.”

“The pattern of warming that you see is, in fact, very close to what models have predicted for many years, and we are now seeing very, very clearly,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said Friday in a news briefing

The hot streak in 2024 was boosted by El Niño, a natural climate pattern characterized by warmer-than-usual waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. El Niño typically compounds background warming from human-caused climate change, making temperature extremes both more likely and more intense.

“There were a number of truly notable extreme heat episodes last year,” said Russell Vose, chief of the monitoring and assessment branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

A brutal heat wave in Mexico in May and June, for instance, killed more than 100 people. And in Arizona, the city of Phoenix logged a record 113 straight days with triple-digit high temperatures last year. The previous record of 76 consecutive days was set in 1993.

“I used to live out there,” Vose said of Phoenix. “It was not like that 30 years ago.”

The consequences of such warming have been apparent: In recent years, climate change has intensified heat waves on every continent, deepened drought in already-parched parts of the world, strengthened storms and hurricanes and fueled deadly wildfires.

Even as the findings were announced on Friday, blazes were raging out of control in the greater Los Angeles area.

“This is no longer an esoteric, academic exercise for us,” Schmidt said of his research on global temperature trends. “This is now quite personal.”

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed the record Friday, announcing that according to its analysis, 2024 was the first full year in which global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial times.

Countries agreed in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above preindustrial times to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.

NOAA and NASA scientists said that record-setting warmth may ease up in 2025 with the return of El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña. La Niña is characterized by a cooling of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which produces atmospheric reverberations that can strongly influence weather around the world.

Source : https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change/last-year-2024-hottest-recorded-history-nasa-rcna186193

Nigel Farage has told Sky News he “can’t be pushed or bullied” by anybody after Elon Musk said the Reform MP “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead his party.

In an interview with Sky’s political correspondent Ali Fortescue, Mr Farage said he has spoken with the billionaire owner of X since his criticism on 5 January, when Mr Musk said: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

Asked if the pair are still friends, Mr Farage said: “Of course we’re friends. He just says what he thinks at any moment in time.”

He added he has “been in touch” with Mr Musk, though wouldn’t divulge what they had discussed.

“Look, he said lots of supportive things. He said one thing that wasn’t supportive. I mean, that’s just the way it is,” Mr Farage said.

Asked if he was afraid to criticise the tech mogul, the Clacton MP said the situation was “the opposite”, and he openly disagreed with Mr Musk on his views on far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Mr Farage said: “What he [Musk] was saying online was that effectively Tommy Robinson was a political prisoner and I wouldn’t go along with that.

“If I had gone along with that, he wouldn’t have put out a tweet that was against me.

“By the way, you know, I can’t be pushed or bullied or made to change by anybody.

“I stick to what I believe.”

Mr Musk has endorsed Robinson and claimed he was “telling the truth” about grooming gangs, writing on X: “Free Tommy Robinson.”

But Mr Farage said that Robinson, who is serving an 18-month jail term for contempt of court, isn’t welcome in Reform UK and neither are his supporters.

He said: “If people within Reform think Tommy Robinson should be a member of Reform and play a central role in Reform, that disagreement is absolutely fundamental.

“I’ve never wanted to work with people who were active in the BNP. I’ve made that clear right throughout the last decade of my on/off political career. So that’s what the point of difference is.”

Despite their disagreement, Mr Farage said he is confident Mr Musk will continue to support Reform and “may well” still give money to the party.

The entrepreneur has previously spoken positively about Reform UK and there have been suggestions he could make a multi-million-pound donation in its favour.

Grassroots row as Reform councillors quit

Mr Farage was speaking from Reform’s South East of England Conference, one of a series of regional events aimed at building up the party’s support base.

Just as he was due to address members in a speech, it emerged that ten Reform councillors had quit in protest over Mr Farage’s leadership.

The statement from the Amber Valley group in Derbyshire said Reform is operating “in an increasingly autocratic manner” and that it had lost its sense of direction, with a focus on recruiting former Tory councillors rather than the grassroots.

“This shift away from the party’s founding principles and values has caused deep concern,” the statement said.

However, Zia Yusuf, the chairman of Reform UK, said on X that the rebel group’s leader Alex Stevenson had been suspended for nominating candidates that failed vetting in December.

He said many of those who had resigned alongside Mr Stevenson were effectively “illegitimate” and new elections must be held.

Mr Stevenson confirmed to Sky News he had been suspended and said it was due to an internal fight within the party.

The row may cause trouble for Mr Farage as he eyes gains in the local elections in May.

Devolution plans a ‘denial of democracy’

In his interview with Sky News earlier, Mr Farage hit out at the Labour government’s devolution plans which could see some May elections postponed.

This would apply when councils seek permission to reorganise, so that smaller district authorities merge with other nearby ones to give them more sway over their area.

Mr Farage claimed the plans are not about devolution but “elections being cancelled”.

“I thought only dictators cancelled elections. This is unbelievable and devolution or a change to local government structures is being used as an excuse,” he said.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/nigel-farage-says-he-cant-be-pushed-or-bullied-after-elon-musk-said-reform-needs-new-leader-13286723

Donald Trump has been handed a no-penalty sentence following his conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.

The incoming US president has received an unconditional discharge – meaning he will not face jail time, probation or a fine.

Manhattan Judge Juan M Merchan could have jailed him for up to four years.

The sentencing in Manhattan comes just 10 days before the 78-year-old is due to be inaugurated as US president for a second time on 20 January.

Trump appeared at the hearing by video link and addressed the court before he was sentenced, telling the judge the case had been a “very terrible experience” for him.

He claimed it was handled inappropriately and by someone connected with his political opponents – referring to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.

As it happened:

Trump said: “It was done to damage my reputation so I would lose the election.

“This has been a political witch hunt.

“I am totally innocent. I did nothing wrong.”

Concluding his statement, he said: “I was treated very unfairly and I thank you very much.”

The judge then told the court it was up to him to “decide what is a just conclusion with a verdict of guilty”.

He said: “Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances.

“This has been a truly extraordinary case.”

He added that the “trial was a bit of a paradox” because “once the doors closed it was not unique”.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass had earlier argued in court that Trump “engaged in a campaign to undermine the rule of law” during the trial.

“He’s been unrelenting in his attacks against this court, prosecutors and their family,” Mr Steinglass said.

“His dangerous rhetoric and unconstitutional conduct has been a direct attack on the rule of law and he has publicly threatened to retaliate against the prosecutors.”

Mr Steinglass said this behaviour was “designed to have a chilling effect and to intimidate”.

It comes after the US Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch attempt by Trump to delay sentencing in the case on Thursday.

Trump’s lawyers argued that evidence used during the trial violated last summer’s Supreme Court ruling giving Trump broad immunity from prosecution over acts he took as president.

Trump’s hush money conviction in May 2024 means he will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the US presidency.

He was found guilty in New York of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to payments made to Ms Daniels, an adult film actor, before he won the 2016 US election.

Prosecutors claimed he had paid her $130,000 (£105,300) in hush money to not reveal details of what Ms Daniels said was a sexual relationship in 2006.

Trump has denied any liaison with Ms Daniels or any wrongdoing.

The trial made headlines around the world but the details of the case or Trump’s conviction didn’t deter American voters from picking him as president for a second time.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/trump-avoids-jail-as-sentencing-in-hush-money-case-makes-him-officially-a-felon-13286551

Authorities in California have vowed to arrest anybody caught looting in burnt-out neighbourhoods, with one official warning: “We are not screwing around with this.”

Five separate wildfires continue to burn across Los Angeles County, including the Pacific Palisades blaze – which has torn through more than 20,000 acres of land and destroyed an estimated 5,000 structures.

Los Angeles sheriff Robert Luna said a curfew enforced overnight on Thursday would start again at 6pm local time on Friday (2am on Saturday, UK time).

The curfew – which forbids anyone from entering mandatory evacuation areas between 6pm and 6am – was brought in after officers arrested several people for looting in the burned areas. It will be “strictly enforced”, Sheriff Luna added.

“We’re not screwing around with this, we don’t want people taking advantage of our residents that have already been victimised,” he said at a press conference.

The punishment for looting is a $1,000 fine and even potential jail time.

The National Guard has been deployed to help secure areas affected by the fires. They are helping to manage restriction zone checkpoints and prevent looting.

Pacific Palisades, which has borne the brunt of the destruction, is an exclusive neighbourhood loved by celebrities – many of whom have seen their homes completely burnt out.

Paris Hilton’s house in the nearby Malibu has also been destroyed, along with a number of other beachfront properties.

Authorities are cracking down on illegal drone usage in fire traffic areas after a fire-fighting ‘super scooper’ plane was grounded due to being damaged by a drone.

They are continuing to investigate what caused the fires. A suspected arsonist was arrested near the Kenneth fire on Thursday afternoon local time.

The officials’ warning to looters came as 153,000 people remain under evacuation orders. While the fires are still burning, some evacuated residents have been able to make brief trips to their neighbourhoods – where many have discovered their homes reduced to ashes.

Authorities have also confirmed at least 10 people have been killed.

Among them was Rodney Nickerson, an 82-year-old who decided to stay in his home in Altadena, a suburb north of Los Angeles.

His daughter Kimiko Nickerson told Sky News: “He just didn’t want to evacuate. He’s been living here since 1968, and he’s been in Altadena my whole life.

“Like all of us on this block, in four blocks, he didn’t think it was going to be this devastating.”

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/crackdown-on-looting-in-burnt-out-areas-as-fires-continue-to-burn-in-la-13286712

Groomed and raped by a criminal gang as a teen, a British woman now in her 30s continues to live in fear 15 years on.
The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, was one of the thousands of victims of the so-called “grooming gangs” scandal, a series of criminal cases in multiple English towns and cities where organised groups sexually exploited vulnerable young girls for decades.
In recent weeks the scandal has been on the front pages again, forcing her to relive traumatic memories but giving her hope that fresh scrutiny might pressure the government to act.

Demands from British opposition politicians for a new public inquiry have been amplified in the last week by a series of social media posts from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the platform X.
Musk also accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who came to power last July, of failing to tackle the scandal when he was the country’s chief prosecutor, saying he was “complicit in the rape of Britain” and must go.

Numerous local investigations have been carried out over the years, and a broader nationwide public inquiry into child sexual abuse reported in 2022, making a number of recommendations which have not yet been implemented.
“It just kind of brought everything back up for me,” the victim said, speaking in the apartment where she spends much of her time as she is too scared to venture out.
“It might not be nice to see but it’s helpful (as) someone is raising awareness and… standing up for us. I feel like we’ve been forgotten about.”

Nine men were convicted of abusing the victim.
Her lawyer, Jonathan Bridge, who also represents other victims, said most of his clients did not want a new inquiry but wanted the Labour government to implement recommendations made at other investigations, such as providing support for victims and better rules to spot such crimes in the future.
“Absolutely nothing has been done despite all the time and money that was spent on that inquiry,” Bridge said.

Starmer’s government says a new inquiry – called for by the opposition Conservatives, who were in office from 2010 until 2024 but say the full picture has yet to come to light – would delay action it plans to take.
Among other measures, the government said on Monday it was introducing a new law that would force professionals who work with children to report claims of sexual abuse, one of the national inquiry’s main demands.

FOCUS ON VICTIMS

The victim interviewed by Reuters, who was living in a care home in a town in Greater Manchester, northwestern England, when the abuse took place, recalled how on one occasion she was drugged and locked in a house for four days: “I couldn’t move… and there was man after man coming in.”
She said those who groomed and raped her were from Pakistan. A 2014 report into abuse in a nearby town said the majority of known perpetrators were British Pakistani and that in some cases local officials and other agencies had been wary of identifying ethnic origins for fear of upsetting community cohesion, or being seen as racist.
Becky Riggs, UK police chief on child protection, previously said that media coverage has tended to focus on specific communities and the “grooming gangs”, but group-based offending occurs in various forms, and across different ethnicities.
A 2020 Home Office report said “it was likely that no one community or culture is uniquely predisposed to offending”.
Starmer, who headed Britain’s prosecution service between 2008 and 2013, has defended his record on prosecuting child abusers.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/feeling-forgotten-uk-child-rape-scandal-victim-urges-government-act-2025-01-09/

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for Donald Trump to be sentenced for the president-elect’s conviction on criminal charges involving hush money paid to a porn star, with two conservative justices joining the three liberal members in a 5-4 decision.
The court turned down Trump’s last-minute bid to prevent his sentencing, scheduled for Friday in New York state court in Manhattan 10 days before his inauguration for his second term as president. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – in forming a majority to deny Trump’s request.

The court’s brief, unsigned order gave two reasons for the decision.
“First, the alleged evidentiary violations at president-elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal. Second, the burden that sentencing will impose on the president-elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose a sentence of ‘unconditional discharge’ after a brief virtual hearing,” the order stated.

The trial judge, Justice Juan Merchan, said last week he was not inclined to sentence the Republican president-elect to prison and would likely grant him unconditional discharge. This would place a guilty judgment on Trump’s record, but would not impose custody, a fine or probation. Merchan is set to sentence Trump at 9:30 a.m. (1430 GMT) on Friday.
Four conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – dissented from the decision, noting they would have granted Trump’s request. They did not provide their reasoning.

The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Trump appointed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett to their lifetime posts on the court during his first term in office.
Trump said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after the Supreme Court’s order: “I read it, and I thought was a fair decision, actually.”
Trump added on his social media platform: “For the sake and sanctity of the Presidency, I will be appealing this case, and am confident that JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL.”
Trump had sought relief from the justices as he pursued a state court appeal to resolve questions of presidential immunity following a landmark Supreme Court ruling last July that granted former presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.
The Supreme Court acted after New York’s top court earlier on Thursday rejected Trump’s request to halt the sentencing.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office made a filing at the Supreme Court on Thursday morning, opposing Trump’s bid for a stay.

Trump in a Supreme Court filing made public on Wednesday had asked for proceedings in the case to stop as he seeks an appeal following the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
“This appeal will ultimately result in the dismissal of the District Attorney’s politically motivated prosecution that was flawed from the very beginning,” Trump’s lawyer John Sauer wrote in the filing.
Trump was found guilty by a jury last May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence shortly before the 2016 U.S. election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump a decade earlier, which he has denied. Prosecutors have said the payment was designed to help Trump’s chances in the 2016 election, when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Trump is the first former U.S. president to be criminally prosecuted and the first former president convicted of a crime.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Trump’s lawyers contend that prosecutors improperly admitted evidence of Trump’s official acts during the trial. They also argue that, as president-elect, Trump is immune from prosecution during the period between his November election victory and his inauguration.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/legal/prosecutors-urge-new-york-court-deny-trumps-bid-halt-sentencing-2025-01-09/

The Pacific Palisades area ravaged by wildfires in Los Angeles is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the U.S., home to Hollywood A-Listers and multimillion dollar mansions. And ahead of this week’s disaster, its insurance costs were among the most affordable in the country, according to a Reuters analysis of insurance and real estate industry data.
That may be about to change. The scale of losses anticipated in the wildfires now ringing Los Angeles, as well as regulatory changes enacted late last year, could spell an end to relatively cheap homeowners’ insurance in areas like the Palisades that are at elevated risk for wildfires, four analysts told Reuters.

“One sees relatively low premiums in high-risk markets in California, but that might be starting to change,” said Philip Mulder, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies the industry.
Measured against home values, insurance costs are cheaper in the Palisades than in 97% of U.S. postal codes, according to a Reuters analysis of a national database of price data collected by Mulder and University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School professor Benjamin Keys as well as home-value data calculated by Zillow, a real-estate firm.

The fires raging around Los Angeles could be the most damaging in state history, officials say. The flames have devoured thousands of homes and businessesfrom the Pacific Ocean beaches to hills north of Los Angeles, and as of Thursday morning were 0% contained. At least five people have died, and initial estimates of the damage range from $10 billion to more than $50 billion.
The relatively low cost of insurance in the Pacific Palisades reflects the vagaries of a homeowners’ insurance market in the United States where prices can vary widely because of differing regulatory polices from state to state. Consumer-friendly regulations in California have kept a lid on prices, even in high-risk areas, but have prompted many insurers to scale back coverage.

Sangmin Oh, a finance professor at Columbia Business School, and other researchers found that homeowners in more loosely regulated states effectively subsidize homeowners in states like California, where the industry has been more tightly regulated – despite higher levels of risk.
Compared to home values, the average statewide premium in 2023 was the lowest among all 50 states, according to the Reuters analysis. California’s high property values may make that insurance seem relatively cheap, but even on an absolute dollar basis residents the average annual premium of $2,200 was less than residents paid in 30 other U.S. states.
At least six fires have burned near Pacific Palisades since 1980, including a 2018 blaze that was the third-most expensive in California history. First Street, a climate risk research firm, found that 95% of the homes in Pacific Palisades face a “major” risk of burning to the ground.
Homeowners in Pacific Palisades paid a median insurance premium in 2023 of $5,450, according to the data compiled by Mulder and Keys. That’s less than residents paid in Glencoe, Illinois, an upscale suburb of Chicago where homes are two-thirds cheaper and the risk of wildfire is minimal.
It’s also less than residents paid in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, the poor and historically Black neighborhood submerged by floods waters during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – even though the typical Ninth Ward home is worth less than 1/20th of the typical home in Pacific Palisades, according to Zillow.

KEEPING UP WITH EXTREME WEATHER

The insurance industry in the U.S. has struggled to keep pace with extreme weather events in recent years, with more than two dozen billion-dollar wildfires, floods and other climate-related disasters in 2023 alone.
In hurricane-prone areas of Louisiana and Florida, insurance prices more than doubled after hurricanes in 2020, 2021 and 2022 threw state markets into turmoil, Keys and Mulder found.
In California, regulators until recently mandated price controls for home insurance, which limited annual increases. However, insurers fled the state as they struggled to turn a profit. According to state regulators, 7 of the 12 largest insurers have paused or restricted new business since 2022.
Insurance companies dropped 1.72% of Californian homeowners’ policies in 2023, according to a December report by the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. Only three other states – Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina – had a higher nonrenewal rate.
Dropped by their insurance companies, Californian homeowners increasingly turned to a state-run pool that provides bare-bones policies for those who can’t find coverage elsewhere. Some 450,000 homes – about 3% of all state residents – were covered through the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan in September, a 40% increase from a year earlier. The fund is administered by the state but funded by insurance providers.
In Pacific Palisades, 1,430 homes were on the state plan, up 85% from the year earlier. The state pool now covers $5.9 billion worth of property in the area.
The increasing difficulty of finding insurance coverage prompted state regulators to reassess their approach.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pacific-palisades-fire-may-spell-an-end-cheap-homeowners-insurance-california-2025-01-09/

A small-time Chinese actor had been missing for two days in Thailand when his girlfriend decided to ask the internet for help.

“We have no choice but to borrow the power of the internet to amplify our voices,” Wang Xing’s girlfriend wrote on the Chinese social media platform Weibo on 5 January.

The plea went viral after it was shared by some of China’s biggest celebrities, including singer Lay Zhang and actor Qin Lan.

Wang, 31, had the country’s attention – as well as that of his government.

On 7 January, Wang was rescued from a scam centre across the border, in Myanmar – news met with a wave of relief.

But the swift yet mysterious rescue has also led to questions about the fate of those who remain trapped inside the scam centres. The case is a grim reminder of the thriving criminal businesses that still entrap hundreds of thousands of people, forcing them in to cybercrime.

Families of Chinese nationals who may be being held in one of these compounds have started a petition urging their government to help them too. The petition document is shared online for anyone to fill in cases of their missing ones. The number of cases has already climbed to more than 600 from the initial 174, and is still increasing.

Wang told the police that there were around 50 Chinese nationals held in the same place as him alone.

“We are desperate to know if the remaining Chinese nationals [who were] with him have been rescued,” reads one top-liked comment on Weibo.

“Other people’s lives are also lives.”

Wang went missing on 3 January in the Thai border city of Mae Sot, which has become a hub for trafficking people into Myanmar.

He had flown to Bangkok for an acting job offered to him on WeChat. The person claimed to represent a major Thai entertainment company, according to Thai police.

The actor later told reporters that he had been on a shoot in Thailand around 2018 and did not suspect this was any different. But he was picked up in a car and taken to Myanmar, where his head was shaved and he was forced to undergo training on how to scam people on phone calls.

His girlfriend wrote on Weibo that she and his brother tried to track him down and get police involved, but “there had been little results”: Chinese police had yet to register a case, while the embassy in Thailand had simply advised Wang’s family to approach the police in Mae Sot.

But as discussions of Wang’s whereabouts grew louder on Chinese social media, authorities began to act. The case was finally registered, and the embassy told the media they had attached great importance to the case.

The next day, Thai and Chinese officials announced that Wang had been rescued.

His first public appearance was alongside Thai police, but he said little, leaving officials to explain what happened.

Details of the rescue itself have been scant. Officials have not even revealed which scam centre he had been in as conflicting versions of the story spread.

One reason could be that withholding more information was part of the deal that led to his release, according to a source who has previously rescued people from scam centres who did not wish to be named.

He told the BBC that these scam centres are keen to avoid attention. That meant releasing Wang was the better option, compared to risking the whole operation because of the attention his disappearance was drawing.

Beijing too wanted to end the discussion about Wang’s case. It wants its citizens to believe it has done enough and that scam centres along its border are no longer an issue.

A joint operation by China and ethnic insurgent groups back in 2023 did seek to shut down scam centres in Myanmar’s Shan State.

But those on the ground — NGOs and independent rescuers—tell the BBC the scams are still growing, with construction expanding into even more remote regions.

These days, the area along the border with Thailand is the main centre for international scams in Myanmar, taking advantage of partnerships with the various armed groups competing for power there.

New scam compounds have been built south of the town of Myawaddy, close to the Thai border, where the worst cases of forced labour and other abuses are now being reported.

This has put huge pressure on Thailand, whose economy relies heavily on tourism, especially from China.

Wang’s case has had some Chinese wondering about how safe it is to travel to Thailand. “It feels like after this Wang Xing incident, there will be fewer people going to South East Asia, including Thailand,” reads a popular Weibo post.

His rescue may well be a success for Thai officials and a win for Beijing, but it has not ended the discussion, or the spotlight on scam compounds.

On Thursday, lines from a recent interview of his were trending on Weibo: “actor Wang Xing claims he could not eat much food in Myanmar and did not have time to use the toilet”.

His brief disappearance has only exposed how common the danger has become: others in the Chinese film industry have since shared their own accounts of being duped by scammers offering them jobs in Thailand.

Thai police are reported to be now investigating the case of another Chinese model disappeared at Thai-Myanmar border, after he was promised work in Thailand.

The China Federation of Radio and Television Association said in a statement Tuesday that “many actors” have gone abroad on fake promises of film shoots, and as a result suffered “serious damage to their personal and financial security”.

“We are very concerned about this,” the statement said.

“Please save [Wang] from danger and bring to life the story of No More Bets,” Wang’s girlfriend urged in her Weibo post – a reference to the protagonists of the 2023 movie being rescued after they were trafficked into scam centres.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd606l1407no

It had all the hallmarks of a cold-blooded, professional assassination.

Next to a well-known temple in Bangkok’s historic royal quarter a man is seen on a security camera video parking his motorbike, removing his helmet, so that his face was clearly visible, and walking calmly across the road.

A few minutes later shots are heard. Another man falls to the ground.

The assassin walks quickly back to his motorbike, appearing to throw something away as he does, and drives off.

The victim was Lim Kimya, a 73-year-old former parliamentarian from the main Cambodian opposition party, the CNRP, which was banned in 2017. He had been hit in the chest by two bullets, according to the Thai police. He had just arrived in Bangkok with his wife on a bus from Cambodia.

A police officer attempted to resuscitate him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

“He was courageous, with an independent mind,” Monovithya Kem, daughter of the CNRP leader Kem Sokha, told the BBC.

“No-one but the Cambodian state would have wanted to kill him.”

Lim Kimya had dual Cambodian and French nationality, but chose to stay in Cambodia even after his party was outlawed. The CNRP – Cambodia National Rescue Party – was an amalgamation of two earlier opposition parties, and in 2013 came close to defeating the party of Hun Sen, the self-styled “strongman” who ruled Cambodia for nearly 40 years before handing over to his son Hun Manet in 2023.

After his close call in the 2013 election Hun Sen accused the CNRP of treason, shutting it down and subjecting its members to legal and other forms of harassment. In 2023 Kem Sokha, who had already spent six years under house arrest, was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

High-level political assassinations, though not unknown, are relatively rare in Cambodia; in 2016 a popular critic of Hun Sen, Kem Ley, was gunned down in Phnom Penh and in 2012 environmental activist Chut Wutty was also murdered.

From the security camera video the Thai police have already identified Lim Kimya’s killer as an ex-Thai navy officer, now working as a motorbike taxi driver. Finding him should not be difficult.

Whether the killing is fully investigated, though, is another matter.

In recent years dozens of activists fleeing repression in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have been sent back after seeking sanctuary, or in some cases have been killed or disappeared. Human rights groups believe there is an unwritten agreement between the four neighbouring countries to allow each other’s security forces to pursue dissidents over the border.

Last November Thailand sent six Cambodian dissidents, together with a young child, back to Cambodia, where they were immediately jailed. All were recognised by the United Nations as refugees. Earlier in the year Thailand also sent a Vietnamese Montagnard activist back to Vietnam.

In the past Thai anti-monarchy activists have been abducted and disappeared in Laos, it is widely presumed by Thai security forces operating outside their own borders. In 2020 a young Thai activist who had fled to Cambodia, Wanchalerm Satsaksit, was abducted and disappeared, again it is assumed by Thai operatives.

The Cambodian authorities did little to investigate, and announced last year that they had closed the case. It is possible the same will now happen in the case of Lim Kimya.

“Thailand has presided over a de facto ‘swap arrangement’,” says Phil Robertson, director of the Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates in Thailand.

“Dissidents and refugees are traded for political and economic favours with its neighbouring countries. The growing practice of transnational repression in the Mekong sub-region needs to be stopped in its tracks.”

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr0rx307p3o

Several iconic Los Angeles restaurants and landmarks have been burned down as multiple wildfires have ravaged the Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, Altadena, the Hollywood Hills and surrounding areas.

The Palisades Fire, which began the morning of Jan. 7, the Eaton Fire and the Sunset Fire have resulted in the evacuations of nearly 180,000 Los Angeles residents and the destruction of thousands of buildings.

Here are the celebrity-loved hotspots that are no longer standing.

Moonshadows

Moonshadows Malibu was listed as “permanently closed” on Google after the Palisades Fire ripped through the neighborhood on Jan. 8.

A news report shared to the beachfront restaurant’s Instagram Story showed the seafood eatery in ruins from the flames.

Several patrons mourned the loss of Moonshadows by recalling their favorite memories at the establishment on social media.

Rosenthal Wine Bar & Patio

All five of the living US presidents have been pictured together at the funeral of Jimmy Carter.

The 39th US president died at the age of 100 on 29 December, in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.

President Joe Biden gave a eulogy to his fellow Democrat at the state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral.

He appeared alongside president-elect Donald Trump and other former presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton and their respective spouses.

Vice president Kamala Harris, who lost the 2024 election to Mr Trump, was also seated with the group alongside her husband.

It’s the first time the Democrat nominee has been seen with the president-elect since the US election, and after she certified Mr Trump’s election win on Monday.

Before the service, Mr Trump was also seen shaking hands with former vice president Mike Pence – the first time the pair have been seen in public together since leaving the White House in 2021.

Prior to that, Mr Pence had refused to back Mr Trump’s claim he had won the 2020 election.

Mr Obama and Mr Trump were also seen talking before the service began.

During his eulogy, Mr Biden said Mr Carter taught him the importance of treating “everyone with dignity and respect.”

“To young people, to anyone in search of meaning and purpose, study the power of Jimmy Carter’s example,” the president said. “Character, faith, love – a true patriot.”

Joshua Carter, the former president’s grandson, also said at the service: “He built houses for people who needed homes.

“He eliminated diseases in forgotten places. He waged peace anywhere in the world, wherever he saw a chance. He loved people.”

From 4 January, Mr Carter’s body was carried by a motorcade through Plains, before heading to the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta.

The former president’s remains were then flown to Maryland and transferred in a ceremony to a hearse, which was carried in a motorcade to the US Navy Memorial in Washington to honour Mr Carter’s service as a lieutenant in the Navy.

He has since been lying in state at the Capitol Building, where the public could pay respects from Tuesday evening through to Thursday morning

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/all-five-living-us-presidents-pictured-together-at-funeral-of-jimmy-carter-13286012

Hollywood celebrities are among thousands of people who have been evacuated in Los Angeles, some fleeing homes now burned to the ground.

Paris Hilton and actor Billy Crystal have both lost their houses as fires rip through parts of California, including exclusive suburbs home to film stars and billionaires.

Oscar-winning songwriter Diane Warren, talk show host Ricki Lake, actor Cary Elwes, and reality stars Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag have also confirmed their homes have been destroyed.

US media is reporting that Eugene Levy, and Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, have lost their homes. The stars are yet to confirm this.

Sky News’ US correspondent Martha Kelner reported that Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and Reese Witherspoon were among those evacuated.

The blaze in Pacific Palisades, a hillside area between Santa Monica and Malibu dotted with celebrity homes, is one of at least five raging in California.

Thousands of firefighters are trying to contain the flames, with a new fire breaking out overnight in the Hollywood Hills, threatening a host of tourist sites including the Walk Of Fame.

‘The loss is overwhelming’

Photographs have captured the moments after a baby girl was born on a packed migrant dinghy heading for the Canary Islands.

The small boat was carrying 60 people and had embarked from Tan-Tan – a Moroccan province 135 nautical miles (250km) away.

One image shows the baby lying on her mother’s lap as other passengers help the pair.

The boat’s passengers – a total of 60 people, including 14 women and four children – were rescued by a Spanish coastguard ship.

Coastguard captain Domingo Trujillo said: “The baby was crying, which indicated to us that it was alive and there were no problems, and we asked the woman’s permission to undress her and clean her.

“The umbilical cord had already been cut by one of her fellow passengers. The only thing we did was to check the child, give her to her mother and wrap them up for the trip.”

The mother and baby were taken for medical checks and treated with antibiotics, medical authorities said.

Dr Maria Sabalich, an emergency coordinator of the Molina Orosa University Hospital in Lanzarote, said: “They are still in the hospital, but they are doing well.”

When they are discharged from hospital, the pair will be moved to a humanitarian centre for migrants, a government official said.

They will then most likely be relocated to a reception centre for mothers and children on another of the Canary Islands, they added.

Thousands of migrants board boats attempting to make the perilous journey from the African coast to the Spanish Canaries each year.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/picture-shows-baby-girl-moments-after-birth-on-packed-migrant-boat-13286209

NOVAK Djokovic claims he was “poisoned” by food he ate while detained during his 2022 Australian Open visa saga.

The 24-time tennis Grand Slam winner had his visa cancelled ahead of the tournament following days of drama over the country’s Covid entry rules and his unvaccinated status.

The 37-year-old Serbian was detained in a Melbourne hotel shared with asylum seekers.

“I realised that in that hotel in Melbourne I was fed with some food that poisoned me,” Djokovic, who is known to monitor his diet strictly, told GQ.

“I had some discoveries when I came back to Serbia. I never told this to anybody publicly, but discoveries that I was, I had a really high level of heavy metal. Heavy metal.

“I had the lead, very high level of lead and mercury.”

Djokovic went on to describe how he was “very sick” with flu-like symptoms as he then headed back to Europe and an emergency medical team had to treat him multiple times.

However, ahead of this year’s Open, which kicks off on Sunday, he says he doesn’t hold any grudges.

Australia’s Department of Home Affairs had declined to comment on the matter, citing privacy reasons, according to GQ.

VACCINATION

Djokovic had missed out Grand Slams in Australia and the US after choosing not to get a Covid shot, violating the countries’ vaccination policies.

He has since said he was never against the Covid vaccine, insisting that he was simply exercising his freedom to choose not to have it.

Speaking to John McEnroe in an interview aired in September 2023, Djokovic said: “I was never anti-vax.

“I was always pro-freedom to choose. And that’s something that we took really for granted.

“I didn’t feel like a lot of people had a choice really.”

Djokovic also said his bans made him feel like a “villain of the world.”

He added: “I just wanted to compete and I wanted to play tennis, because that’s what I do best.”

BACKLASH

In 2022, the tennis ace faced a tirade of backlash after coming clean about knowingly flouting isolation measures in Serbia while infected – which according to the country’s law was punishable by up to three years behind bars.

The Serb is seeking a record-extending 11th Australian Open men’s singles title and 25th Grand Slam in Melbourne later this month.

It comes after he suffered a straight sets defeat to 6ft 11in giant Reilly Opelka at the Brisbane International last week.

In 2024, he ended the year without a Grand Slam title for the first time since 2017.

And Djokovic fans will be concerned about his form heading into his favourite Slam, following defeat to world No293 Opelka in the quarter-finals in Brisbane.

The American, 27, whose best Grand Slam performance came at the 2021 US Open when he reached the fourth round, claimed a stunning 7-6 (8-6) 6-3 victory over Djokovic.

Source : https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/32714682/novak-djokovic-poisoned-detained-covid/

Singapore has the world’s most powerful passport, according to the 2025 Henley Passport Index.

The nation-state was one of six countries which tied for the top spot in 2024 in the list produced by the migration consultancy Henley & Partners, which ranks passports by the number of destinations that holders can access without needing a visa.

Singapore broke ahead of the other five countries — Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain and France — with its citizens granted visa-free access to 195 out of 227 global destinations, according to the ranking published Wednesday.

Japan is ranked No. 2, with visa-free access to 193 spots, while the four European countries that were tied for the top spot last year, plus Finland and South Korea, share third place, with each granting passport holders the ability to visit 192 destinations without needing a visa.

Climbers and fallers

The United Arab Emirates is one of the “biggest climbers” on the list, according to a press release, having gained visa-free access to 72 destinations in the past decade, for a total of 185 destinations worldwide.

It’s just behind the United States, whose citizens can visit 186 places without needing a visa, according to the ranking.

The U.S. is one of 22 places where passports fell in the index in the past 10 years, it said.

“Surprisingly, the US is the second-biggest faller between 2015 and 2025 after Venezuela, plummeting seven places from 2nd to its current 9th position,” the release stated.

Passports from the United Kingdom — which topped the list in 2015 — and Canada also fell, it said.

China rose in the ranking to land in 60th place in 2025. Its openness to other countries also greatly increased, with China now allowing citizens from 58 destinations to visit visa-free — half of which were added in the past year — according to the Henley Openness Index.

Bottom of the list

PRESIDENT Joe Biden has been blasted for putting his head down at Jimmy Carter’s funeral by viewers who thought he was falling asleep.

Social media users speculated that Biden dozed off after his wife, Jill Biden, was seen nudging him during the service.

The president, 82, closed his eyes as he was surrounded by other politicians including Vice President Kamala Harris as well as Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“Is Biden asleep at Carter’s funeral??” one eagle-eyed viewer joked on X.

“Biden asleep on the job again,” another joked.

“How much sleep is Biden getting during this service,” another added.

All five recent presidents, George W. Bush, Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Biden were seated together at the funeral on Thursday to honor former President Carter, who died aged 100 on December 29.

Bush was seen leaning forward to speak to Biden and Harris multiple times as he appeared to check on him.

Biden gave a eulogy at today’s service, leaving some viewers speculating that he was simply looking down at his notes for the speech instead of closing his eyes altogether.

However, footage from the cathedral showed the president’s eyes closed for extended portions of the service.

“They need to let Biden deliver his eulogy before he falls asleep and they have to wake [him] up to go up there,” another critic wrote on X.

It comes as Michelle Obama is also facing criticism for being the only living former first lady who’s not in attendance at the funeral.

CNN journalist Jeff Zeleny explained she had a scheduling commitment as she’s still on an “extended holiday” in Hawaii.

Plus, Trump and Obama were seen sharing a joke while seated in the National Cathedral in Washington DC.

NOT HIS FIRST NAP

Biden has a stacked track record of dozing off during important events throughout his presidency.

Just last month, he appeared to fall asleep during a meeting with African leaders when he closed his eyes for over a minute.

In 2021, he was caught nodding off during the opening speeches of a climate summit before one of his staffers had to wake him up.

He even admitted that he nearly fell asleep on stage during his presidential debate against Trump last June.

“I wasn’t very smart,” Biden said a week after the face-off while talking to donors at a fundraiser in Virginia.

He said that traveling around the world left him exhausted ahead of the disastrous debate, which was one of the key events that got the ball rolling on Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.

Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/13258265/joe-biden-sleeping-jimmy-carter-funeral/

Imagine that your city experiences its worst drought in decades, only to be suddenly inundated by record-breaking rainfall weeks later. This dramatic swing between weather extremes, known as “hydroclimate whiplash,” is becoming increasingly common worldwide – and new research suggests it’s getting worse due to climate change.

Published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the report reveals that these rapid transitions between very wet and very dry conditions have increased by 31-66% globally at seasonal timescales since the mid-twentieth century. Even more concerning, with continued warming, these weather whiplashes are projected to increase by a staggering 113% over land areas if global temperatures rise by 3°C.

Los Angeles provides a timely example of this phenomenon. After experiencing two extremely wet winters that produced abundant grass and brush growth, 2024 brought a record-hot summer followed by an extraordinarily dry start to the 2025 rainy season. The result? Tinder-dry vegetation that has fueled a series of devastating wildfires.

“The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases,” says lead author Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, in a statement. “This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold: first, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”

The science behind these intensifying weather swings is rooted in what researchers call the “expanding atmospheric sponge” effect. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold and process more water – approximately 7% more for each degree Celsius of warming. “The problem is that the sponge grows exponentially, like compound interest in a bank,” Swain explains. “The rate of expansion increases with each fraction of a degree of warming.”

This increased capacity works both ways: when conditions are right for rain, there’s more moisture available for extreme precipitation events. When conditions are dry, the warmer atmosphere’s increased “thirst” can more rapidly pull moisture from soil and vegetation.

Many previous studies have focused solely on precipitation patterns while overlooking the atmosphere’s growing evaporative demand. This thirstier atmosphere pulls more water from plants and soil, making drought conditions worse beyond just the lack of rainfall.

The impacts of these weather whiplashes extend far beyond immediate flooding or drought damage. Rapid transitions between extreme wet and dry conditions can trigger a cascade of secondary disasters: harmful algal blooms in water bodies, increased wildfire risk from vegetation growth followed by rapid drying, and disease outbreaks as changing conditions create favorable environments for pathogens.

“Hydroclimate in California is reliably unreliable,” says co-author John Abatzoglou, a UC Merced climate scientist. “However, swings like we saw a couple years ago, going from one of the driest three-year periods in a century to the once-in-a-lifetime spring 2023 snowpack, both tested our water-infrastructure systems and furthered conversations about floodwater management to ensure future water security in an increasingly variable hydroclimate.”

The study’s authors found that these effects are not distributed evenly across the globe. The largest increases in weather whiplash are projected for high latitudes (especially northern Eurasia and Canada) and a broad swath extending from northern Africa across the Arabian Peninsula into South Asia. These regions face potentially devastating impacts on agriculture, water resources, and infrastructure.

While climate change hasn’t necessarily increased the likelihood of specific wind events in places like Southern California, it has increased the overlap between extremely dry vegetation conditions and the occurrence of these wind events – creating perfect conditions for destructive wildfires.

The research suggests that reducing global warming could directly slow or reduce the increase in weather whiplash. However, with the world currently on track for 2-3 degrees Celsius of warming this century, substantial increases in these extreme transitions are likely, requiring careful consideration in risk assessments and adaptation planning.

Source : https://studyfinds.org/california-wildfires-why-hydroclimate-whiplash-to-blame-for-deadly-blaze/

Elon Musk’s biographer has warned the billionaire is “going mad” and could “endanger us all” as concerns grow over his wellbeing.

The owner of X has been writing unhinged comments and reacting to posts on his platform, including criticising the UK government after it rejected a call for a public inquiry into the grooming scandal in the Oldham.

Musk has also targeted Keir Starmer, who he falsely claimed had failed to bring what many term “rape gangs” to justice when he was the director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013. The scandals, Musk said Friday, represent a “massive crime against humanity.”

He has also recently expressed his support for Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – the founder of the far-right English Defense League, who is serving an 18-month jail term for contempt of court.

And now Musk’s biographer Seth Abramson believes the billionare maybe “going mad” as he manages Tesla, X, SpaceX while being part of Donald Trump’s transition team.

“I legitimately believe Elon Musk may be going mad. I’m a Musk biographer who has been tracking his online behavior for the last two years—and given that he’s admitted to all of mental illness, heavy drug use, and crippling stress, it is now reasonable to fear he is deeply unwell,” he wrote on Tuesday.

The biographer believes Musk, not Trump, will attempt to run the US administration. Mr Abrahamson added: “His private struggles would not be of general concern except they have dramatic public consequences. His holdings across many civilization-essential industries and the fact that he’s the incoming POTUS mean that his madness and increasing incitement of violence endanger us all.”

It comes as reports last year suggested Musk suffered a mental breakdown after facing angry boos at Dave Chappelle’s San Franciso show in December 2022. The comic brought him on stage just two months after Musk purchased Twitter for $44billion when he was filmed being booed by a large part of the 18,000 audience.

Source : https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/elon-musk-going-mad-warns-34439131

Firefighters are battling to control a series of major fires in the Los Angeles area that have killed seven people, ravaged communities from the Pacific Coast to Pasadena and forced over 180,000 people to flee their homes.

Steve Kerr’s mother among those who lost their home to the blazes

The 90-year-old mother of Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr is among thousands who have lost their homes as fierce wildfires rage in the Los Angeles area.

“My mom is in good hands, but her house is gone,” Kerr said Thursday night before the Warriors played the Detroit Pistons. “I’ve been on the phone with my siblings quite a bit.”

Kerr said his mother, Ann, left her home in Pacific Palisades — Kerr’s hometown — after the evacuation orders earlier in the week.

Death toll rises to 7 in Los Angeles-area fires

County and city officials have confirmed that the death toll from the two main fires in and around Los Angeles has risen to seven.

There have been five deaths from the Eaton Fire near Pasadena, according to Carlos Herrera, a public information officer with the LA County Fire Department.

To the west in Pacific Palisades, two people have died in the fire burning in the LA area, according to LA Fire Department spokesperson Margaret Stewart.

Firefighters have achieved some containment of the Palisades Fire, officials say

The Palisades Fire, which started Tuesday and has burned through the seaside enclave of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, remained uncontained until Thursday evening, when officials said containment was at 6%.

“Thank you to our brave firefighters working around the clock to combat the blaze fueled by hurricane-force winds,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a social media post.

All Los Angeles Unified schools to remain closed Friday

All Los Angeles Unified schools and offices will remain closed on Friday because of the fires, district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Thursday evening.

Classes will not resume until the conditions improve, he said.

Carvalho said the district has lost two elementary schools and that one high school is significantly damaged. He also said the district’s foundation is working to support district employees who have lost their homes.

900 more firefighters to battle fast-moving Kenneth Fire, governor says

Gov. Gavin Newsom in a social media post Thursday evening said 900 additional firefighters are now being deployed to battle the fast-moving Kenneth Fire near the West Hills and Calabasas.

The fire ballooned in size — charring over a square mile (2.6 square kilometers) — within hours of igniting.

Source : https://apnews.com/live/wildfire-los-angeles-palisades-eaton-updates

A MILLIONAIRE has been slammed for asking if any private firefighters were available to protect his home as devastating wildfires ravaged Los Angeles.

Keith Wasserman, an LA-based real estate developer, swiftly deleted a post in which he requested private firefighters to come to his Pacific Palisades home.

“Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades?” he asked in a viral post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Need to act fast here. All neighbors’ houses burning. Will pay any amount. Thank you.”

The post was made on Wednesday, as flames were ravaging the dry hills in the north of Los Angeles County.

But Wasserman’s post was met with swift condemnation, with many branding him tone-deaf.

“The disconnect is jaw-dropping,” one X user wrote. “Just wow.”

Another user shared a tweet purportedly made by Wasserman in October 2021 in which he bragged “Real estate ballers don’t pay any taxes!”

The user wrote, “This rich guy Keith Wasserman bragged about not paying taxes and now wants private firefighters to protect his home while neighbors’ homes burn.”

Another previous post Wasserman reportedly made in September 2024, in which he called on President-elect Donald Trump to halve “property taxes” also went viral.

Wasserman responded to his critics by branding them “trolls,” posting, “Mama I’m going viral!”

PRIVATE PROBLEM

The story has brought to attention the phenomenon of private firefighters, which have been in use across Los Angeles for some time.

On Wednesday, video was shared on X of private firefighters guarding a house in the Hollywood Hills.

“They’ve set up sprinklers to cascade water from the second story eaves,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporter Matthias Gafni as he shared the video.

“They will guard all night.”

In 2019, private firefighting companies started offering “on-call” wildfire protection to wealthy Californians in the face of increasing blazes of greater intensity.

For $3,000 a day, the companies would protect homes from wildfires.

Historically, private firefighting was used by government agencies such as the National Forest Service.

They would hire crews as and when needed to fight and prevent wildfires.

But today, many firms see this as a business opportunity, with problematic outcomes.

In 2023, the Los Angeles Times reported that some private crews were failing to coordinate with local agencies.

This meant that first responders were left having to worry about private crews as well as the residents in threatened areas.

The efficacy of private firefighting crews is also in doubt.

Also in 2023, Kim Kardashian claimed that her home in Hidden Hills California was saved by private crews.

However, it was subsequently revealed that the hired crews didn’t show up until a day after a team of homeowners and city security guards ignored evacuation orders to protect the homes of the wealthy.

More than 400 people trapped by rubble in earthquake-stricken Tibet have been rescued, Chinese officials said on Wednesday, with an unknown number still unaccounted for in freezing weather a day after a strong tremor rocked the Himalayan foothills.
The epicentre of Tuesday’s magnitude 6.8 quake, one of the region’s most powerful tremors in recent years, was located in Tingri in China’s Tibet, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. It also shook buildings in neighbouring Nepal, Bhutan and India.

Twenty-four hours after the temblor struck, those trapped under rubble would have endured a night in sub-zero temperatures, adding to the pressure on rescuers looking for survivors in an area roughly the size of Cambodia.
Temperatures in the high-altitude region dropped as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight. People trapped or those without shelter are at risk of rapid hypothermia and may only be able to live for five to 10 hours even if uninjured, experts say.

Footage broadcast on state television CCTV showed families huddled in rows of blue and green tents quickly erected by soldiers and aid workers in settlements surrounding the epicentre, where hundreds of aftershocks have been recorded.
At least 126 people were known to have been killed and 188 injured on the Tibetan side, state broadcaster CCTV reported. No deaths have been reported in Nepal or elsewhere.

The quake was so strong part of the terrain around the epicentre slipped as much as 1.6 metres (5 feet 3 inches) over a distance of 80 km (50 miles), according to an analysis by the United States Geological Survey.

LONE CLIMBER

Chinese authorities have yet to announce how many people are still missing. In Nepal, an official told Reuters the quake destroyed a school building in a village near Mount Everest, which straddles the Nepali-Tibetan border. No one was inside at the time.
German climber Jost Kobusch said he was just above the Everest base camp on the Nepali side when the quake struck. His tent shook violently and he saw several avalanches crash down. He was unscathed.
“I’m climbing Everest in the winter by myself and…looks like basically I’m the only mountaineer there, in the base camp there’s nobody,” Kobusch told Reuters in a video call.
His expedition organising company, Satori Adventure, said Kobusch had left the base camp and was descending to Namche Bazaar on Wednesday on the way to Kathmandu.
No avalanches have been observed on Everest so far from the Chinese side, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday, citing Chinese scientists.
But damage round the epicentre was extensive.

An initial survey showed 3,609 homes had been destroyed in the Shigatse region, home to 800,000 people, state media reported late on Tuesday. More than 14,000 rescue personnel had been deployed.
More than 46,500 people affected by the quake have been relocated, and 484 tourists in Tingri have been safely transported to the city of Shigatse, local officials said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Home to some 60,000 people, Tingri is Tibet’s most populous county on China’s border with Nepal and is administered from Shigatse, the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism.
No damage has been reported to Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo monastery, state media reported, founded in 1447 by the first Dalai Lama.
The 14th and current Dalai Lama has said he was deeply saddened by the quake, speaking from exile in India where he fled in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.
China routinely rejects criticism from exiles and rights groups of its rule in Tibet, saying it has brought much-needed development to a remote region and that it respects Tibetan culture and religion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Taiwan President Lai Ching-te have also expressed condolences to the earthquake’s victims.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/rescue-efforts-under-way-after-earthquake-tibet-kills-more-than-120-2025-01-08/

Italian journalist Cecilia Sala was freed by Iran on Wednesday and returned home, three weeks after she was detained in Tehran during a reporting trip.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani were on hand to greet the 29-year-old as she flew back into Rome, highlighting the political importance attached to her case.
Sala, a writer and podcaster, had been working with a regular journalist visa when she was detained in Tehran on Dec. 19, accused of “violating the laws of the Islamic Republic”.

She was held three days after Iranian businessman Mohammad Abedini was arrested in Milan on a U.S. warrant for allegedly supplying drone parts that Washington says were used in a 2024 attack that killed three U.S. service members in Jordan.
Iran has denied involvement in last year’s attack and had dismissed accusations that it imprisoned Sala to pressure Italy into release Abedini.
The Italian government said in a statement that Sala, who had been held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin jail, was freed “thanks to intense work on diplomatic and intelligence channels”. It made no mention of Abedini.

Abedini remained in a Milan prison on Wednesday, with a court due to decide next week on his request to be released to house arrest ahead of eventual proceedings to extradite him to the United States.
“For the moment, Abedini’s position remains unchanged,” Milan prosecutor Francesca Nanni told reporters.

TRUMP MEETING

Sala was released just three days after Meloni made a surprise visit to Florida to see U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. No details of the talks were released, but Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said they had discussed Sala.

Italian news website Il Post, where Sala’s partner works, reported that Trump had given “a sort of green light” to Italy to negotiate with Iran and had promised not to politicise the issue with the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden.
A senior political source declined to give details, but said the Florida meeting had been important and had played a role in Sala’s release.
Sala, who works for the newspaper Il Foglio and the podcast company Chora Media, had been in Tehran to report on recent changes in Iranian society. Her father Renato Sala said he was overcome by emotion when he heard that she was heading home.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/italian-journalist-cecilia-sala-freed-iran-prison-italian-pm-office-says-2025-01-08/

Raging wildfires surrounding Los Angeles spread to the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday, after other fires in the area killed at least five people, destroyed hundreds of homes and stretched firefighting resources and water supplies to the limit.
More than 100,000 people were ordered to evacuate as dry, hurricane-force winds hindered firefighting operations and spread the fires, which have burned parched terrain almost unimpeded since they began on Tuesday.

“This firestorm is the big one,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told a press conference after rushing back to Los Angeles upon cutting short an official trip to Ghana.
A new fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening, Fire Chief Kristin Crowley told a press conference, forcing more evacuations and raising to six the number of wildfires burning in Los Angeles County.
Four of them were 0% contained according to state officials, including a pair of major conflagrations on the eastern and western flanks of the city that continued to grow as night fell on Wednesday.

In between, the so-called Sunset Fire in Hollywood Hills scorched 50 acres (20 hectares) on Wednesday, Cal Fire said. Helicopter crews doused the flames with water drops, appearing to impede its rapid advance.
The L.A. Fire Department issued an evacuation order for people in an area within Hollywood Boulevard to the south, Mulholland Drive to the north, the 101 Freeway to the east and Laurel Canyon Boulevard to the west – all iconic addresses for people in the entertainment industry.

Within that area is the Dolby Theater, where the Oscars are held. Next week’s Oscar nominations announcement was already postponed by two days because of the fire, organizers said.
Though relatively small compared to the others, the Sunset Fire burned just above Hollywood Boulevard and its Walk of Fame. It would need to cross the 101 Freeway to endanger the Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory further up in the hills.

SMOLDERING RUINS

On the west side of Los Angeles, the Palisades Fire consumed 15,832 acres (6,406 hectares) and hundreds of structures in the hills between Santa Monica and Malibu, racing down Topanga Canyon until reaching the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday.
Aerial video by KTLA television showed block after block of smoldering homes in Pacific Palisades, the smoky grid occasionally punctuated by the orange blaze of another home still on fire.
To the east, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Eaton Fire claimed another 10,600 acres (4,289 hectares), another 1,000 structures, and killed at least five people, officials said.
Private forecaster AccuWeather estimated initial damage and economic loss at more than $50 billion.
“We’re facing a historic natural disaster. And I think that can’t be stated strong enough,” Kevin McGowan, director of emergency management for Los Angeles County, told a press conference.
Even though forecasters said winds would subside briefly on Wednesday night, so-called red flag conditions were expected to remain until Friday.

Nearly 300,000 homes and businesses lost power in Los Angeles County, down from nearly 1 million earlier on Wednesday, according to PowerOutage.us. School was canceled throughout Los Angeles County at least through Thursday, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said.
“We’ve had fires over the years but not something like this,” Frances Colella, a 71-year-old retiree, told Reuters at an evacuation center in Pasadena, resting in a wheelchair alongside dozens of others. “It’s a really sad occurrence and I can’t remember anything like this.”

WATER WOES

The scale and spread of the blazes stretched exhausted firefighting crews beyond their capacity.
Firefighters from six other states were being rushed to California, while an additional 250 engine companies with 1,000 personnel were being moved from Northern California to Southern California, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told a press conference.
Water shortages caused some hydrants to run dry in upscale Pacific Palisades, officials said.
“We pushed the system to the extreme. We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems,” Janisse Quinones, chief executive of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told a press conference.
Pacific Palisades relies on three tanks that hold about a million gallons (3.78 million liters) each, and the demand for water to fight fires at lower elevations was making it difficult to refill water tanks at higher elevations, she said.
By Wednesday afternoon, all three of those tanks and all 114 reservoirs throughout the city were refilled, Quinones said in a later press conference.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/tens-thousands-flee-wildfires-tear-through-los-angeles-area-2025-01-08/

CES, the annual trade show of all things tech, kicks off this week in Las Vegas.

Swaths of the latest gadgets and advances across industries like personal tech, transportation, health care, sustainability and more are set to be on display. And, like last year, artificial intelligence is everywhere you look.

The golden CES ticket

Fresh from pouring his money and energies into helping Donald Trump win reelection, Elon Musk has trained his sights on Europe, setting off alarm bells among politicians across the continent.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany, demanded the release of jailed U.K. anti-Islam extremist Tommy Robinson and called British Prime Minister Keir Starmer an evil tyrant who should be in prison.

Many European politicians have been left concerned by the attention. Musk’s feed on his social network X is dotted with abusive language — labeling politicians “stupid cretin” and “sniveling cowards” — as well as retweets of far-right and anti-immigrant accounts.

Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University, said Musk is using X “a bit like an old-style newspaper mogul,” to promulgate his political views.

“We’ve seen Musk start to align himself much more obviously with an international movement of the far right,” Chadwick said. ”If you look at the kinds of people who Musk himself is boosting on his platform … he’s increasingly started to assemble a group of different right-wing influencers, many of them with large followings, and presenting their evidence as a basis for his interventions into European politics.”

Musk has inserted himself into politics in Germany, which is headed for a Feb. 23 election after center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious three-party coalition government collapsed.

On Dec. 20, Musk wrote on X: “Only the AfD can save Germany,” a reference to the Alternative for Germany party, which is under observation by the domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism.

He doubled down on support for the AfD in an article for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, claiming Germany is “teetering on the edge of economic and cultural collapse.” Later this week Musk is due to hold a live chat on X with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel.

Scholz’s response embodies the dilemma faced by European politicians — should they ignore and let Musk’s comments go unchallenged, or engage and risk amplifying them?

Scholz has said it’s important to “stay cool” over personal attacks, but called Musk’s involvement in German politics worrying. In a new year message, Scholz pointedly noted that Germany’s way forward “will not be decided by the owners of social media channels” but by German voters.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned Monday about the risks posed by unchecked power in the hands of tech billionaires and the destabilizing impact they could have on democratic institutions.

“Who could have imagined, 10 years ago, that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would intervene directly in elections, including in Germany?” Macron said.

Greek Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis said Musk’s behavior was “troubling and far from amusing.”

“Someone cannot simply use their platform, wealth and connections to try to dictate how governments are formed in each nation,” he told Parapolitika Radio. “This is becoming increasingly dangerous.”

Musk has increasingly focused on British politics since the center-left Labour Party was elected in July, calling Starmer an “evil” leader presiding over a “tyrannical police state.”

Musk’s recent focus is on child sexual abuse, particularly a series of cases that rocked northern England towns several years ago, in which groups of men, largely from Pakistani backgrounds, were tried for grooming and abusing dozens of mostly white girls. The cases have been used by far-right activists to link child abuse to immigration and Islam.

Musk has accused Starmer of failing to bring perpetrators to justice when he was England’s director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 — a charge Starmer strongly denies.

“Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain,” Musk tweeted.

Chadwick said “there’s been a hesitancy on the part of the political elite in the U.K. to engage” with Musk’s “incredibly inflammatory remarks.” But Starmer changed tack Monday, condemning “lies and misinformation” and accusing U.K. Conservative politicians who have echoed some of Musk’s points of “amplifying what the far right are saying.”

“I enjoy the cut and thrust of politics, the robust debate that we must have, but that’s got to be based on facts and truth, not on lies,” the prime minister said.

Starmer is facing calls to tighten Britain’s laws on foreign interference, and governments around the world are under pressure to leave X. Both the U.K. and German governments say they have no plans to quit the platform.

Musk’s X is under investigation by European authorities attempting to curb hatred, disinformation and other toxic content on social media. The European Union has launched infringement proceedings against X under the bloc’s Digital Services Act, and EU spokesman Thomas Regnier said it will look at whether Musk’s livestream interview Thursday with the AfD’s Weidel gives inappropriate “preferential treatment” to the party during a preelection period.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-europe-politics-germany-uk-f50d69d0d192a2d81c95f5d64c6d4acd

Immigration has long been a polarising issue in the West but Canada mostly avoided it – until now. With protests and campaign groups springing up in certain quarters, some argue that this – together with housing shortages and rising rents – contributed to Justin Trudeau’s resignation. But could Donald Trump’s arrival inflame it further?

At first glance, the single bedroom for rent in Brampton, Ontario looks like a bargain. True, there’s barely any floor space, but the asking price is only C$550 (£300) a month in a Toronto suburb where the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom flat is C$2,261. Inspect it more closely, however, and this is actually a small bathroom converted into sleeping quarters. A mattress is jammed up next to the sink, the toilet is nearby.

The ad, originally posted on Facebook Marketplace, has generated hundreds of comments online. “Disgusting,” wrote one Reddit user. “Hey 20-somethings, you’re looking at your future,” says another.

But there are other listings like it – one room for rent, also in Brampton, shows a bed squashed near a staircase in what appears to be a laundry area. Another rental in Scarborough, a district in Ontario, offers a double bed in the corner of a kitchen.

While Canada might have a lot of space, there aren’t enough homes and in the past three years, rents across the country have increased by almost 20%, according to property consultancy Urbanation.

In all, some 2.4 million Canadian families are crammed into homes that are too small, in urgent need of major repairs or are seriously unaffordable, a government watchdog report released in December has suggested.

This accommodation shortage has come to a head at the same time that inflation is hitting Canadians hard – and these issues have, in turn, moved another issue high up the agenda in the country: immigration.

For the first time a majority of Canadians, who have long been welcoming to newcomers, are questioning how their cities can manage.

Politics in other Western countries has long been wrapped up in polarised debates surrounding immigration but until recently Canada had mostly avoided that issue, perhaps because of its geography. Now, however, there appears to be a profound shift in attitude.

In 2022, 27% of Canadians said there were too many immigrants coming into the country, according to a survey by data and research organisation the Environics Institute for Survey Research. By 2024, that number had increased to 58%.

Campaign groups have sprung up too and there have been marches protesting against immigration in Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary, and elsewhere around the country.

“I would say it was very much taboo, like no one would really talk about it,” explains Peter Kratzar, a software engineer and the founder of Cost of Living Canada, a protest group that was formed in 2024. “[But] things have really unfrozen.”

Stories like that of the bathroom for rent in Brampton have fuelled this, he suggests: “People might say, like, this is all anecdotal evidence. But the evidence keeps popping up. You see it over and over again.”

“People became concerned about how the immigration system was being managed,” adds Keith Neuman, executive director at the Environics Institute for Survey Research. “And we believe it’s the first time the public really thought about the management of the system.”

Who might replace Trudeau as Liberal Party leader?
Why the Trudeau era has come to an end now
What happens next for Canada?
Once the golden boy of Canadian politics, prime minister Justin Trudeau, resigned on 6 January during a crucial election year, amid this widespread discontent over immigration levels.

His approval levels before his resignation were just 22% – a far cry from the first year of his premiership, when 65% of voters said they approved of him.

Though immigration is not the main reason for his low approval levels nor his resignation – he cited “having to fight internal battles” – he was accused of acting too late when dealing with rising anxiety over inflation and housing that many blamed, in part, on immigration.

“While immigration may not have been the immediate cause of the resignation, it may have been the icing on the cake,” says Professor Jonathan Rose, head of the department of political studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Under Trudeau’s administration, the Canadian government deliberately chose to radically boost the numbers of people coming to the country after the pandemic, believing that boosting quotas for foreign students and temporary workers, in addition to skilled immigrants, would jumpstart the economy.

The population, which was 35 million 10 years ago, now tops 40 million.

Immigration was responsible for the vast majority of that increase – figures from Canada’s national statistics agency show that in 2024, more than 90% of population growth came from immigration.

As well as overall migration levels, the number of refugees has risen too. In 2013, there were 10,365 refugee applicants in Canada – by 2023, that number had increased to 143,770.

Voter dissatisfaction with immigration was “more a symptom than a cause” of Trudeau’s downfall, argues Prof Rose. “It reflects his perceived inability to read the room in terms of public opinion.”

It’s unclear who might replace Trudeau from within his own Liberal Party but ahead of the forthcoming election, polls currently favour the Conservative Party, whose leader Pierre Poilievre advocates keeping the number of new arrivals below the number of new homes being built.

Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November, Poilievre “has been speaking much more about immigration”, claims Prof Rose – “so much that it has become primed in the minds of voters”.

Certainly Trump’s arrival for a second term is set to pour oil on an already inflamed issue in Canada, regardless of who the new prime minister is.

He won the US election in part on a pledge to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants – and since his victory, he has said that he will enlist the military and declare a national emergency to follow through on his promise.

He also announced plans to employ 25% tariffs on Canadian goods unless border security is tightened.

Every evening, Ernest Wong takes five minutes to walk from the front door of his house to the dining table, four metres away.

His steps are unbalanced, even with the aid of a walking stick the 42-year-old – diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a toddler – grips tightly.

And every evening, his mother sits at the table, watching his every move with watery eyes – while not lifting a finger to help her son.

“My heart hurts when I see him struggle, but I’m teaching him to be independent,” said his sole caregiver June Lim, her hands trembling from Parkinson’s. “Who’s going to help him if I don’t?”

Mr Wong, who has impaired vision and scoliosis, has lived his life predominantly by the side of his mother, now a 73-year-old retiree.

He still uses a wheelchair when outdoors; at home, he also gets some assistance to move about using 12 grab bars placed along the corridor.

“I always tell him: ‘I’m teaching you to do things. If not, when I die, who’s going to look after you?’” said Madam Lim.

She wants to buy a small flat for Mr Wong before she dies, but frets about how her savings won’t cover his conservancy charges. He is unemployed.

More worryingly, she isn’t 100 per cent certain her son can live alone.

The mother-son duo have looked into adult disability homes, but to Mdm Lim, nobody will understand or take care of Mr Wong’s needs as well as she does.

“It will be easier if he goes first, so I can take care of him for the rest of his life. But I don’t think that will happen, so I need to start making plans.”

Hers is a dilemma faced by many caregivers of people with disabilities (PWDs) – particularly the ageing ones.

Data from the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) showed that one in four such caregivers were above 65 years old, with a median age of 57. Almost 70 per cent of them were female.

“Many caregivers may not have formalised long-term care arrangements for their dependants due to a variety of reasons, and PWDs may face an uncertain future without a proper support network in place,” said Assistant Professor Matthew Chen from the geriatric medicine division at the National University Hospital (NUH).

A slew of initiatives is available to help PWDs negotiate eventual independence, spanning government employment, financial and infrastructural support; social and community services; and living arrangements operated by non-profits or private sector organisations.

But gaps remain, including in areas of medical costs, lifelong learning and public awareness, according to caregivers, social service agencies, advocates and experts interviewed by CNA.

In a speech in October last year, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong himself acknowledged that more can be done in this space.

“We are studying how we can give more help to caregivers and persons with disabilities, to enable them to plan for their needs, goals and aspirations, and to update these plans as their life stages and family circumstances change.”

“We are also looking into ways to enhance and extend the range of support to enable persons with disabilities to continue to live independently in the community,” he added.

“We hope this will reduce the emotional and mental strain on caregivers, by assuring them that their loved ones with disabilities can continue to live well in the community, even after they are no longer able to care for them.”

HOME AWAY FROM HOME

For almost 20 years, Mr Cheng Chiang Yong has spent five days a week away from his home. But the bond between the 54-year-old – who has an intellectual and speech disability – and his mother Tan Hum Seow remains as firm as ever.

When the 77-year-old told him she would die one day, he shook his head violently and covered her mouth with his hand.

“He always does that. He hasn’t accepted that this will one day happen,” said Mdm Tan.

Mr Cheng only started walking at age five, and eating on his own at seven. He was diagnosed at around eight years old.

As it became more difficult to care for him as he grew older, Mdm Tan started looking at options such as the residential training hostel where Mr Cheng now lives most of the time – even though it initially felt like she was “abandoning” him.

But she started relaxing when she observed her son improving and acquiring skills to be independent, while experiencing communal living at the Ubi Hostel run by TOUCH Community Services.

Mr Cheng is now employed by JOURNEY – a brand under TOUCH that represents the creative output of people with intellectual disabilities – where he paints artworks that get sold.

He has saved enough money to give his mother a red packet every Chinese New Year, and even fund her vacations.

“I would never imagine that my child would be able to bring home an income,” Mdm Tan said, beaming with pride.

She urged other caregivers to let go of any reluctance to adopt a hands-off approach. “Let your child have a purpose to do and learn something, so they can earn a living out of it.”

At the Ubi Hostel, residents must hold jobs, clean their own space, buy their own food and travel by themselves.

They are also taught financial tips on how to save money, before going home over the weekend to spend time with their families.

“Life will be even more challenging if we protect them too much,” said TOUCH’s head of caregivers support group June Sim.

She stressed that the hostel was not an end destination for PWDs, with the goal being integration back into their own homes and communities.

“It is important to increase awareness to show how capable persons with disabilities can be, and help them play an integral part in the wider community.”

This is a key focus of both disability agency SG Enable as well as the Enabling Masterplan 2030, a national roadmap for the government and community to work together to support PWDs.

“We’re a nation that has made good progress in disability inclusion over the years, and we will continue to strengthen our ecosystem of support to provide persons with disabilities the access to achieve their potential, and participate as integral members of society,” said SG Enable’s CEO Lee May Gee.

Through three enabling services hubs across Singapore – with more to come in the next five years – her agency hopes to bring community support closer to the homes of PWDs and their caregivers.

“As these hubs become more known by the community, it will create more opportunities for everyone of all abilities to connect, engage and participate in activities together,” Ms Lee added.

In September, SG Enable and MSF also announced a pilot Enabled Living Programme running from this year to 2028. It will involve up to 250 low-income PWDs with low to moderate support needs staying in a cluster of public rental flats, and receiving support from an on-site service provider.

“Enabling PWDs to live independently is essential for their empowerment, dignity and meaningful contribution to society,” an MSF spokesperson told CNA.

“The government is committed to provide a range of solutions to enable PwDs to age in place or access suitable living arrangements.”

For PWDs with up to high support needs, an adult disability home may be a better fit, social service agencies told CNA.

The THK Home for Disabled @ Sembawang, run by Thye Hua Kwan Moral Charities, is the residence of about 160 PWDs with either ageing caregivers or unfavourable living environments in their own households.

An adult disability home is not a nursing home, however, and residents are not solely confined to four walls either.

Though they still get some assistance in daily living, they are also brought out for various activities such as walks, picnics and trips to the zoo; and also trained to be independent, said Ms Chloe Lee, Superintendent at THK Home for Disabled @ Sembawang.

“It’s like a community where the residents find strength in one another and the staff are like parents.”

Experts CNA spoke to however pointed out that adult disability hostels, homes and other living arrangements can be limited in capacity, with long waiting lists to boot.

Services for adult PWDs, including residential models, “are still scarce, not scaled (and) not well-coordinated and communicated”, said Member of Parliament Denise Phua, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Social and Family Development.

JOURNEY TO INDEPENDENCE

At the Down Syndrome Association, an adult enhancement programme places emphasis on independence.

Students are trained on fine motor skills to help with employment, and taught how to control their emotions and communicate effectively with peers.

“We teach our learners functional life skills, how to live independently in the community, in their homes, as well as employment skills to get jobs,” said Evelyn Lai, executive director of Down Syndrome Association.

“People with Down Syndrome face regression issues where they lose their abilities quickly. So there is a need to train them to be independent through cognitive life skills.”

During the programme, students also simulate workplace settings and learn how to purchase groceries at the supermarket.

“It’s very hard for people with Down Syndrome to manage money and this repeated practice is very important for them to maintain their independence,” Ms Lai added.

Ms Phua, who’s also president of the Autism Resource Centre, similarly stressed the importance of continuing to equip PWDs with practical independent living skills, from their schooling years and into adulthood.

Retiree Regina Aun’s son Benjamin Lee, 36, has been enrolled in the Down Syndrome Association’s programme for 18 years. She sees it as a way of “opening up his world”, and for a semblance of what life would be like on his own.

When she first found out that he had Down’s, Mdm Aun was “completely devastated” by the prospect of the challenges ahead for him – but quickly came to her senses to start thinking about his future.

“I wasn’t very financially well-off, I started planning for him since he was a baby so there would be enough funds if he goes to an adult disability home,” said the 66-year-old.

She also called for more medical subsidies, citing how Mr Lee has already shown signs of failing eyesight, joint pains and dementia – all conditions typically faced by Down Syndrome patients.

Dr Sean Quek, a family medicine physician who’s worked with PWDs, said the cumulative costs of treatments – coupled with the need for assistive devices, specialised education and early intervention programmes – can place a “tremendous” financial strain on families.

“This can lead to delayed or foregone care, negatively impacting the individual’s overall well-being and development,” he added, suggesting that the Flexi-Medisave initiative for the elderly be expanded to cover younger PWDs.

Dr Quek also noted that transitioning to a new arrangement after a caregiver’s death could be “disruptive and traumatic” for PWDs, and that more focus on respite care and emotional support would be necessary.

Mdm Aun, for her part, just wants to ensure that Mr Lee is well-disciplined and ready to live in society.

“You cannot blame the public for being unkind to him if he misbehaves. And if he doesn’t have good behavioural skills, the stress falls onto the future caregivers,” she said.

Yet no amount of planning can determine how he will react to her inevitable passing.

“I’m petrified and have nightmares of what will happen if I’m not around. Yes, he will have a roof over his head, he’ll have three meals on his table, but what about his emotions?” said Mdm Aun.

“He gets upset whenever I broach the subject. We’re joined at the hips. I cannot imagine a life for Ben without me, and I cannot imagine my life without him.

“I only wish to live one second more than Ben. I don’t need more, just one second.”

INCLUSION THE KEY

Mdm Li Shu Yun’s son Allan Cai now says he’s “the happiest man on Earth”, but just like Mdm Aun, she worries if her death will trigger mental health issues for him.

Mr Cai, 26, has Down Syndrome as well, on top of heart and hearing issues.

When he started working as a packer at 18, the journey from their home in Bukit Timah to an industrial area in Woodlands scared 61-year-old Mdm Li.

But she didn’t want him to feel any less capable than his colleagues. Added to that was a boss who told Mdm Li then that the workplace was “not a school or care centre” and that Mr Cai “needs to be independent”.

“After much training and retraining, he could go to work on his own in two weeks,” said Mdm Li. “It was such a big milestone as it gave him the confidence to travel to other places by himself.

“He has a strong desire to be independent and has always shown determination to do things on his own.”

Now, in his second job at social enterprise Mushroom Buddies, Mr Cai wears multiple hats from harvesting mushrooms to taking charge of colleagues’ timesheets.

Asked if she would like Mr Cai to date and perhaps find a girlfriend, Mdm Li hesitated.

“Allan knows he needs to be able to completely take care of himself before he can be in a relationship. He has a long way to go in managing himself, and eventually two people,” she said.

“He used to call his female friends his girlfriends, and I had to explain to him the difference … He’s now very careful.”

Mdm Li urged the public to include PWDs in areas beyond the workplace, adding how they can often surprise people with their capabilities.

“People are friendlier and the climate in Singapore is really changing and should continue to do so,” she said.

Asst Prof Chen from NUH noted however that not all members of the public, including even professionals in healthcare and social services, have adequate knowledge and understanding in this space.

Source : https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/focus-when-i-die-whos-going-look-after-you-pains-caring-adults-disabilities-4840201

The race to be Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s successor kicked off on Tuesday, a day after he resigned amid a looming trade war with the United States and a divisive political climate at home.

The country’s new leader is likely to face elections within weeks of taking over from Trudeau in March.

With the incumbent Liberal Party slumping badly in the polls, whoever wins the leadership contest could find themselves in opposition after the votes are counted, tasked with rebuilding the party.

US President-elect Donald Trump ally Elon Musk has thrown his support behind Trudeau’s rival, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for prime minister.

Few in the Liberal Party have yet officially announced plans to seek its leadership, but several likely candidates have already been touted to AFP and other media.

Here are the frontrunners:

Chrystia Freeland was deputy prime minister before she resigned in spectacular fashion in December, clashing with her boss over Trump’s threats to impose 25-percent tariffs on Canadian imports.

The 56-year-old has held several senior cabinet posts in Trudeau’s government since 2015. Polls show her as the top candidate to now replace him.

Pollster Nick Nanos described her to iPolitics as having “the greatest appeal” in the wake of her resignation, which “actually resulted in people having positive impressions of her.”

Despite her many accomplishments, however, “she’s not an effective political communicator,” analyst Tim Powers told AFP.

Close behind in the rankings is Mark Carney, 59, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who was named special economic advisor to Trudeau in September.

He said in a statement this week he has received broad support for his candidacy from people “who want us to move forward with positive change and a winning economic plan.”

However, he has no political experience, and according to Powers, “learning on the job in three to four months is a big ask.”

Carney has “superior intelligence and a policy mind,” but his bona fides could disadvantage him in the current “anti-elite and anti-establishment” political climate, Powers added.

A childhood friend of Trudeau, Dominic LeBlanc, 57, has been a close political ally of the prime minister.

He was recently put in charge of leading negotiations with the United States, having twice visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for talks to try to avert a Canada-US trade war.

LeBlanc has held several senior cabinet posts, including his current role as finance minister, and public broadcaster CBC said he has strong support within the party.

However, “being so close to Justin Trudeau” could be a drag on his candidacy at a time when the electorate is demanding change, said Powers.

Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, 45, was profiled in the New York Times as a likely successor to Trudeau.

She was tasked with some of Canada’s most difficult diplomatic missions, including mending strained relations with China and India — following accusations of political interference and the assassination of a Canadian Sikh, respectively.

Her team told AFP they have received “a lot of calls” from people interested in her running for the leadership of the party.

Christy Clark, 59, a former premier of British Columbia, was in October among the first to publicly express interest in the federal top job.

She is a “wild card” in the race, said Powers, noting also that she was “exceptional” at interacting with people on a grassroots level, and was “not burdened” by Trudeau’s record.

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/race-begins-replace-canadian-pm-trudeau-3758196

Two people have been found dead in the landing gear compartment of a JetBlue plane after a routine inspection in Florida.

The airline said the flight had most recently landed in Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International after travelling from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport with the flight number 1801.

JetBlue confirmed the bodies were discovered during a post-flight maintenance check on Monday after the aircraft touched down.

“Tragically, both individuals were deceased. At this time, the identities of the individuals and the circumstances surrounding how they accessed the aircraft remain under investigation,” the company said early on Tuesday.

“This is a heartbreaking situation, and we are committed to working closely with authorities to support their efforts to understand how this occurred,” the statement added.

No details were given on the two dead people or how they gained access to the plane.

The landing gear compartment – also called a wheel well – is a section underneath the aircraft which stores the retractable landing gear.

Stowaways have used the void in a landing gear compartment before, but often it can prove fatal.

A 2011 report by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), determined that around 80% of stowaways do not survive the journey.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/two-bodies-discovered-in-landing-gear-of-plane-13285026

A soldier who exploded a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used generative AI – including ChatGPT – to help plan the attack, police have said.

Matthew Livelsberger, 37, a US Army Green Beret, fatally shot himself just before the truck blew up outside the hotel on New Year’s Day.

Police in Las Vegas say they have now reviewed Livelsberger’s ChatGPT searches prior to the explosion.

According to officers, the searches indicate he was looking for information on explosive targets, the speed at which certain rounds of ammunition would travel, and whether fireworks were legal in Arizona.

Kevin McMahill, sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, called Livelsberger’s use of generative AI in planning the attack a “game changer”.

“This is the first incident that I’m aware of on US soil where ChatGPT is utilised to help an individual build a particular device,” he said.

“It’s a concerning moment.”

Officials said last week that Livelsberger left notes in which he labelled the explosion as a stunt which he hoped would be a “wake-up call” for a nation he said was “terminally ill and heading towards collapse”.

The notes touched on political grievances, societal problems and domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine.

However, according to officials, Livelsberger harboured no ill will toward president-elect Donald Trump and in one of the notes he left, he said the country needed to “rally around” him and Tesla boss Elon Musk.

He also left mobile phone notes saying he needed to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took”.

The FBI said Livelsberger, who had served in the army since 2006 and was deployed twice to Afghanistan, likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that there were “potential other family issues or personal grievances in his own life” that may have been “contributing factors”.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/soldier-who-exploded-tesla-cybertruck-outside-trump-hotel-used-generative-ai-to-plan-attack-13285254

Jess Phillips has said she has “more important things to be thinking about” than Elon Musk after he accused her of being a “rape genocide apologist”.

The safeguarding minister has hit back at the billionaire’s criticism of her for the first time, telling Sky’s political editor Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast that his claims are “ridiculous” and she will be led by what victims have to say, not him.

Mr Musk made the comments after Ms Phillips denied a request for the Home Office to lead a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, saying it should be done at a local level.

The town in Greater Manchester was one of a number of areas where girls as young as 11 were groomed and raped over a decade ago in a national scandal that was exposed in 2013.

Mr Musk’s comments have sparked a political row – with the Tories and Reform UK now calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.

Ms Phillips said that the world’s richest man, who owns SpaceX and is the CEO of Tesla, should “crack on with this ‘getting to Mars'” instead of wading into UK politics.

“You know, Elon Musk is going to [do] Elon Musk. I’ve got bigger and more important things to be thinking about,” she added.

She said she has dedicated her working life to combating child exploitation and it was “painful” to watch it become a “political football”.

There has already been a seven-year national inquiry into child abuse in England and Wales, which the Conservatives commissioned in 2015 and which looked at grooming gangs, as well as abuse in places like schools and the church.

The investigation, chaired by Professor Alexis Jay, concluded in 2022 but none of its recommendations have been implemented.

Child exploitation becoming ‘political football’

Ms Phillips, who has sat in courtrooms with girls who were groomed, said she was “really angry” at people “now claiming to be the virtuous flag bearers of these victims”, having not spoken on the issue before.

“These sudden demands by the Tories, ridiculous statements made about me and my government by a man thousands of miles away, it’s really painful when you know what I know,” she said.

“It’s painful to watch it become a political football rather than an actual attempt to really do something.”

She specifically called out Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for declaring 2025 as the year victims should get justice, given her party spent the past 14 years in government.

“Funnily enough, this all started about an Oldham inquiry, which a government she was part of also said should be done locally.

“And the fact that Kemi Badenoch is reacting to something that Elon Musk has said… I am reacting to things that victims say to me.”

Taking aim at other senior Tories pushing for a national inquiry, she added: “I’ve never seen Kemi Badenoch, Chris Philp, Robert Jenrick in any of the meetings that I’ve been in over the years trying to advance policy on this.”

Summit of council leaders announced

Ms Phillips went on to announce that the Labour government is planning to hold a summit of council leaders in areas where a local inquiry on child exploitation, such as that which happened in Telford, may be needed.

The Birmingham Yardley MP said this would “ensure that what I saw that worked [in Telford] can happen everywhere”.

“I’m interested in children being safe tomorrow, not whether my political seat is safe,” she added.

On the government announcing a new victims and survivors panel to sit within the Home Office, Ms Phillips said this was always part of their plan but the Musk “furore” has elevated it.

It was among a package of measures unveiled by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on Monday, including making it a criminal offence if professionals who work with children fail to report claims of abuse.

This will be introduced in the spring as part of the Crime and Policing Bill, and was a key recommendation of the Jay Review.

Other suggestions from the review to be implemented include making grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences and creating a new performance framework for policing exploitation.

However, there is no timeline for when all 20 recommendations will be put in place, Number 10 admitted today.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson said the final 2022 report was “not acted on by the last government” so this one is “working at pace” and “will provide any updates in due course”.

Prof Jay earlier told the BBC that victims “clearly want action” and do not need a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, as she too hit out at the “politicisation of child sexual exploitation”.

And on Monday Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer accused Mr Musk and others of “spreading lies and misinformation”, about grooming gangs, saying “a line has been crossed” with the attacks on Ms Phillips, who has received threats.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/jess-phillips-hits-back-at-elon-musk-and-says-he-should-crack-on-with-getting-to-mars-13285103

US president-elect Donald Trump has refused to rule out military or economic action to seize the Panama Canal and Greenland – as he said he believes NATO spending should be increased to 5% per member state.

Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Mr Trump made a series of sweeping claims on what his policies could look like when he takes office on 20 January.

He said he believes NATO spending should be increased to 5% per member state, while he also declared US control of Greenland and the Panama Canal as vital to American national security.

The 78-year-old Republican also spoke of relations with Canada, as well as addressing his position on the Middle East and the war in Ukraine.

Sky News takes a look at some of the key claims brought up during the conference.

NATO

Mr Trump claimed “nobody knows more about NATO than I do”, before adding: “If it weren’t for me, NATO wouldn’t exist right now.

“I raised from countries that weren’t paying their bills, over $680bn. I saved NATO, but NATO is taking advantage of us.”

The president-elect also said members of NATO should be contributing 5% of their GDPs (gross domestic product) to defence spending – the previous target has been 2%.

Greenland and Panama Canal

Asked if he can reassure the world he won’t resort to military action or economic coercion in trying to get control of the areas, he said: “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two.”

“But, I can say this, we need them for economic security.”

He didn’t add any further detail around Greenland – which he has recently suggested the US should own or control – but he said the Panama Canal “was built for our military”.

He said the canal was “vital” to the country and China was “operating” it.

Mr Trump criticised the late Jimmy Carter for his role in signing over the Panama Canal to Panama during his presidency, saying it’s “a disgrace what took place” and “Jimmy Carter gave it to them for one dollar.”

Canada

A day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was stepping down, Mr Trump said he believed the US’ northern neighbour should become the 51st US state, even posting maps on social media showing Canada as part of the US.

He mocked Mr Trudeau by calling him “governor” rather than prime minister.

He argued the US and Canada combined would amount to an “economic force” that would “really be something”.

“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Mr Trudeau responded.

Israel-Hamas war

Israel has been waging a 15-month war on the militant group ruling Gaza, Hamas, since they launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October which saw 1,200 people massacred and about 250 taken hostage, many of whom remain in captivity.

Mr Trump said: “If those hostages aren’t back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East.”

Nearly 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to Hamas-run health officials in the enclave.

A state of emergency has been declared by the governor of California as wildfires, fuelled by high winds, sweep through the suburbs of Los Angeles.

Firefighters are battling the fast-moving blaze which is sweeping an exclusive LA hillside dotted with celebrity homes.

Posting on X, Governor Gavin Newsome said: “I’ve proclaimed a state of emergency to support the communities impacted by the #PalisadesFire.

“Southern California residents: stay vigilant, take all necessary precautions, and follow local emergency guidance.”

Officials say the wildfire is being fanned by “life-threatening” and “destructive” winds hitting southern California.

Around 30,000 residents have been ordered to leave because of the fire, which is tearing through the foothills of the upmarket Pacific Palisades, located between Santa Monica and Malibu.

The smoke cloud from the flames is so high, it can be seen from LA’s famous Venice Beach, more than six miles away.

Actor James Woods has shared footage of flames burning through bushes and past palm trees on a hill near his Pacific Palisades home.

He said on the X social media platform that he had been evacuated, adding: “I do not know at this moment if our home is still standing, but sadly houses on our little street are not.”

The award-winning actor, 77, later wrote that he had been told that his neighbour’s house had caught fire, but that “fortunately, they were safely evacuated”.

Meanwhile, actor Steve Guttenberg, who also lives in the area, has been helping to move parked cars to make way for fire engines.

“This is not a parking lot,” he told local media.

“I have friends up there and they can’t evacuate… I’m walking up there as far as I can moving cars.”

Kristin Crowley, fire chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said the area is experiencing “extreme fire weather conditions” and that more than 250 firefighters are currently attempting to battle the blaze.

She said the fire was initially reported as a 10-acre fire, but, fanned by 40mph winds, had since spread to more than 1,200 acres “and growing”.

Ms Crowley says the job of firefighters tackling the blaze is being made “extremely challenging” due to “strong winds and surrounding topography”.

No injuries have so far been reported, but the service has received “multiple reports” of damage to buildings in the area.

The US National Weather Service says what could be the strongest Santa Ana wind storm for more than a decade is expected to begin in the afternoon across Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

It is expected to peak in the early hours of Wednesday, when gusts could reach 80mph, and up to 100mph in the mountains and foothills.

The area where the fire has struck, Pacific Palisades, has long been a celebrity hideaway.

To the south, the area boasts a three-mile stretch of beach that featured in the 1963 Beach Boys hit, Surfin’ U.S.A, as well as craggy cliffs and popular hiking trails to the north.

Source : https://news.sky.com/story/film-star-helps-firefighters-battle-la-wildfire-sweeping-exclusive-hillside-dotted-with-celebrity-homes-13285270

More than 400 people in Tibet trapped by a deadly earthquake in the foothills of the Himalayas have been rescued, Chinese officials said on Wednesday, but an unknown number remained unaccounted for in severe cold weather.
The epicentre of Tuesday’s magnitude 6.8 quake, one of the region’s most powerful tremors in recent years, was located in Tingri in China’s Tibet, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. It also shook buildings in neighbouring Nepal, Bhutan and India.

Twenty-four hours after the temblor struck, those trapped under rubble would have endured a night in sub-zero temperatures, adding to the pressure on rescuers looking for survivors in an area the size of Cambodia.
Temperatures in the high-altitude region dropped as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight. People trapped or those without shelter are at risk of rapid hypothermia and may only be able to live for five to 10 hours even if uninjured, experts say.

At least 126 people were known to have been killed and 188 injured on the Tibetan side, state broadcaster CCTV reported. No deaths have been reported in Nepal or elsewhere.
Chinese authorities have yet to announce how many people are still missing. In Nepal, an official told Reuters the quake destroyed a school building in a village near Mount Everest, which straddles the Nepali-Tibetan border, but no one was inside at the time.

Jost Kobusch, a German climber, said he was just above the Everest base camp on the Nepali side when the quake struck. His tent shook violently and he said he saw several avalanches crash down, although he was unscathed.
“I’m climbing Everest in the winter by myself and…looks like basically I’m the only mountaineer there, in the base camp there’s nobody,” he told Reuters in a video call.
His expedition organising company, Satori Adventure, said Kobusch had left the base camp and was descending to Namche Bazaar on Wednesday on the way to Kathmandu.

An initial survey showed 3,609 homes had been destroyed in Tibet’s Shigatse region, home to 800,000 people, state media reported late on Tuesday, citing local officials. Over 1,800 emergency rescue personnel and 1,600 soldiers had been dispatched to the region.
Footage broadcast on CCTV showed families huddled in rows of blue and green tents quickly erected by soldiers and aid workers in settlements surrounding the epicentre, where hundreds of aftershocks have been recorded.
State media said over 30,000 people affected by the quake had been relocated.
Home to some 60,000 people, Tingri is Tibet’s most populous county on China’s border with Nepal and is administered from the city of Shigatse, the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism.
No damage has been reported to Shigatse’s Tashilhunpo monastery, state media reported, which was founded in 1447 by the first Dalai Lama.
The 14th and current Dalai Lama, along with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Taiwan President Lai Ching-te, have expressed condolences to the earthquake’s victims.

500 AFTERSHOCKS

Southwestern parts of China, Nepal and northern India are often hit by earthquakes caused by the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which are pushing up an ancient sea that is now the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau.
More than 500 aftershocks with magnitudes of up to 4.4 had followed the quake as of 8 a.m. (0000 GMT) on Wednesday, the China Earthquake Networks Centre said.
Over the past five years, there have been 29 earthquakes with magnitudes of 3 or above within 200 km (120 miles) of the epicentre of Tuesday’s temblor, according to local earthquake bureau data .

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/rescue-efforts-under-way-after-earthquake-tibet-kills-more-than-120-2025-01-08/

Electric vehicle producer BYD (002594.SZ), brought hundreds of Chinese workers on irregular visas to build a factory in Brazil, a key labor inspector told Reuters on Tuesday, adding the company has pledged to comply with local labor laws for the workers remaining in the country.
A total of 163 of those workers, hired by BYD contractor Jinjiang, were found last month to be working in what Brazilian authorities said were “slavery-like conditions.”

The 163 workers who were rescued by labor authorities in December are leaving or have already left Brazil, said Liane Durao, who has spearheaded the probe announced in late December by the labor authorities in Bahia state.
“All of this was irregular,” said Durao, adding that BYD would be fined for each worker found in this situation, without elaborating on the total amount to be paid. Durao is a labor inspector with a team that monitors workplace safety for Brazil’s Ministry of Labor.

She said the firm agreed to adjust the conditions of the hundreds of workers who will remain in the country, to comply with Brazilian labor laws. About 500 Chinese workers were brought to work in the Brazilian factory, she said.
BYD and Jinjiang did not immediately reply to a request for comment. BYD has previously said it cut ties with Jinjiang, which disputes the charges by Brazilian authorities.

A person close to BYD told Reuters that the Chinese company believes that the visas were issued properly and that all employees came voluntarily to work in Brazil.
The factory has become a symbol of China’s growing influence in Brazil and an example of a closer relationship between both countries.
Labor authorities and representatives from BYD and its contractors working in Bahia met on Tuesday to negotiate how to protect the rights of all workers employed in the factory.

KEY TO BYD’S GLOBAL EXPANSION

BYD has been building the factory to produce 150,000 cars initially as part of plans to start production in Brazil, its biggest market outside China, in the beginning of this year. It is unclear whether construction will be delayed by the investigation into working conditions at the factory.
It has invested $620 million to set up the Bahia factory complex alone. Nearly one in five cars BYD sold outside China in the first 11 months of 2024 was in Brazil.
In December, the labor prosecutor’s office described the workers, who had been hired by Chinese construction firm Jinjiang Group, as human trafficking victims. The firm had withheld the passports of 107 of the workers, investigators said.
Investigations into slavery can carry powerful consequences for employers in Brazil, including a restriction on their access to bank loans.
Since the workers were found in slavery-like conditions, the Brazilian government has suspended temporary visa issuance to BYD.
The reports of irregularities in Bahia could prove to be a major sticking point in bilateral relations.
Brazil has long sought more Chinese investment. But Beijing’s model of taking Chinese workers to the countries where it invests presents a challenge to local job creation, a priority for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/byd-brought-hundreds-chinese-workers-brazil-irregular-visas-inspector-2025-01-08/

Fast food giant McDonald’s has been rocked by fresh claims that young staff in the UK were subjected to sexual and other forms of harassment by restaurant managers

More than 700 current and ex McDonald’s staff are suing the firm over ­allegations bosses sexually abused them as teenagers.

The burger giant has been hit by new claims just a year after UK chief Alistair Macrow apologised over sordid accusations.

The include allegations of “sex for shifts”. In the Commons today, McDonald’s was accused of becoming a “predators’ paradise”.

More than a year ago ­McDonald’s vowed to tackle claims of sex abuse and ­harassment, but shocking behaviour towards ­teenage staff ­allegedly continues.

It’s said that 700 current and former employers are now taking legal action against the burger giant – including accusations one manager offered a worker extra shifts for sex.

There are also ­discrimination, homophobia, and racism claims. And staff allege bosses asked youngsters how may people they had slept with or touched them inappropriately.

Around 90% are on zero-hour contracts and believe their position makes them vulnerable.

In November 2023, Mr Macrow issued an apology after similar claims were levelled at it and admitted he had received around 400 complaints.

But giving evidence to the Commons Business and Trade Committee today, he revealed just 75 allegations had been investigated, with only 29 staff dismissed.

Chairman Liam Byrne asked him: “Has McDonald’s become a predators’ paradise?” Mr Macrow, 54, insisted he put in a “programme of significant change” which “is working”.

But the BBC reported staff are still facing sexual abuse and torment – more than a year after it investigated the claims in July 2023.

One, Claire – not her real name – alleged a shift manager in his 30s asked her for sex in return for extra shifts when she was just 17 at a branch in the Midlands in 2023. She refused and told the programme: “You don’t expect that to happen. It was totally inappropriate.”

Another worker claimed she was touched by managers and customers sexually harassed her before ­quitting her job in the West Midlands at the end of 2023.

When she raised it, she was allegedly told to “suck it up”. A female worker, 20, also described how a male manager sent her topless pictures.

Another, Rachel got her first job at the chain aged 17. But she said: “It was soon clear the environment was really toxic.

“I saw older male staff making bets on who could sleep with the new starters and had older guys making comments about my body. On one occasion I bent down and the manager slapped me on the bottom.”

One staff member still working for McDonald’s said: “I’ve had to deal with homophobic abuse. My manager said if I can’t deal with it, I should just leave. I’ve been called names like ‘f**got’.” Law firm Leigh Day is acting for those taking legal action. It involves 450 of the 1,400 UK McDonald’s outlets.

Partner Paula Lee said: “Since the original BBC investigation, more than 700 young employees have contacted Leigh Day and joined the claim. These continue to grow.” Mr Macrow, said to have earned £900,000 in 2023, told the Commons there was “no place” in the firm for the “abhorrent and unacceptable” allegations.

He insisted the claims were “not widespread, they are isolated”.

But Mr Byrne told him: “It doesn’t sound like isolated incidents. It sounds like there is a pattern of abuse in what has become a hotbed for harassment”. Mr Macrow also came under fire for claiming bosses were the “first line of defence against bad behaviour”.

Mr Byrne replied: “Many of the allegations are about managers.” Labour MP Antonia Bance said zero hours contracts “open the door to favouritism, bullying and sexual harassment. She told Mr Macrow: “We have heard about sex for shifts in one of your restaurants, and if it has happened once, it will have happened more than once.”

Source : https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/more-700-current-former-mcdonalds-34433070

AN arctic blast has left death and devastation in its path, with at least six people killed by frozen roads and frigid temperatures.

One victim was found frozen to death at a bus stop while desperately seeking shelter from Winter Storm Blair as another bout of weather fury is set to blow through the US.

On Monday, Blair swept from the south and Midwest into the mid-Atlantic, dumping several inches of snow on cities like Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington DC.

The severe storm had traveled from areas in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, which suffered through piercing temperatures and layers of deadly frost on Sunday.

As of Tuesday morning, 200,000 homes and businesses from Missouri to Virginia were still without power due to the most devastating storm of the season, according to PowerOutage.us.

Those left in Blair’s path have been warned to stay off the roads and seek shelter as officials report a growing number of weather-related deaths.

DEADLY STORM

On Sunday, a man died at a bus stop in Houston on a night when the feels-like temperatures dropped as low as 18 degrees, ABC affiliate KTRK reported.

The details about the victim’s background are unknown, but the tragedy sparked fear for homeless populations across the country.

“We gave away over a hundred coats and hundred blankets, so we plan for that ahead of time,” Scott Arthur, a volunteer at the Star of Hope organization, said.

“We also plan for the fact that we don’t have a lot of room in the shelter.”

Meanwhile, in nearby Missouri, a disturbing flurry of traffic deaths has driven up Blair fatalities.

In Jackson County outside Kansas City on Sunday, a 61-year-old man died after he got out of a dump truck and was struck by a truck that was sliding down the icy road, the Missouri State Highway Patrol said.

On Saturday, a 33-year-old man was killed by a parked semi-truck that slid down a hill and struck him as he was crossing a street in Holt County, north of Kansas City, officials said.

And that same day, a semi-truck skidded out of control on a snow-covered road and hit a driver coming the opposite way on US Route 56 in Kansas.

The 28-year-old citizen was killed in the crash, and the truck driver was uninjured, according to Kansas Highway Patrol.

In Wichita, Kansas, two more young people died in a horror crash on Sunday.

Elon Musk’s dad has said that people should ‘ignore’ his son if they disagree with his views as the tech billionaire continues to attack Britain’s Labour party via his X platform.

Errol Musk responded to the tycoon’s withering assault on Sir Keir Starmer and other senior figures in the party over their record on tackling the child sexual exploitation grooming gangs.

Musk Jnr has called for far-right leader Tommy Robinson to be released from jail, described Sir Keir as ‘evil’ and asked whether the genocide inflicted on the Yazidi people by ISIS could happen in Europe.

In a thinly veiled reference to the SpaceX founder, the prime minister responded by saying that those who are ‘spreading lies and misinformation’ are only ‘interested in themselves’.

Errol Musk said: ‘I mean, he’s just a person. The fact that he has money or something, he’s a billionaire or something to that effect.

‘I mean, hundreds of thousands of people are tweeting the same things or saying the same things as he is.

‘So I wouldn’t just because he’s a person that stands out more that they can knock him or just don’t listen to him, that’s all. I’d say don’t worry about it. Tell him to get lost.’

In a barrage of unsubstantiated claims, Musk Jnr has also targeted safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, describing her as a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and demanding that she be thrown out of parliament.

Having previously backed Nigel Farage, the tycoon changed tack after the Reform leader distanced himself from Robinson, claiming that he ‘does not have what it takes’ to lead the right-wing party.

Musk Snr, an engineer and businessman from South Africa, also shed some light as to why his son is so interested in British politics.

He recalled taking his son there for the first time aged six and Elon renting a castle in the UK to celebrate his 30th birthday.

Speaking to Tom Swarbrick on LBC, Errol took aim at the ‘draconian’ political and justice system in the UK.

He said: ‘If you’re a student of history, and I am a student of history, you would look at history and you would realise what’s going on there.’

Errol, 78, referenced the disorder after the Southport murders, claiming that people had been jailed ‘for making posts that any of us, would have done the same thing if our own countries had been in the same position’.

He described Robinson, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court, as a ‘political prisoner’ and a potential future prime minister who is the ‘strong man’ that the UK needs.

Errol has had a strained relationship with his son. Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, has previously told the BBC that their child ‘grew up in a very violent home’ and described experiencing domestic abuse.

Errol has denied the allegations.

The X owner today retweeted a call by Rupert Lowe MP, viewed as an alternative Reform leader, calling for ‘swift and brutal justice’ for the grooming gangs.

Responding to the onslaught, Sir Keir said yesterday: ‘Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and wide as possible, they’re not interested in victims.

‘They’re interested in themselves. I enjoy the thrust of politics, the robust debate that we must have.

‘But that’s got to be based on facts and truth, not on lies.

Source : https://metro.co.uk/2025/01/07/elon-musks-dad-brings-a-peg-urges-people-ignore-him-22310080/

Donald Trump Jr. is heading to Greenland, visiting the Danish territory as his father has continued to stoke seemingly far-fetched suggestions that the U.S. could take control of it.

The younger Trump is going for a day trip to shoot video content for podcasting and will not be meeting with any government officials or political figures, according to a person familiar with the plans who was not authorized to speak publicly.

“I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA.’ My son, Don Jr, and various representatives, will be traveling there to visit some of the most magnificent areas and sights,” President-elect Donald Trump posted on his social media site on Monday night, referring to his “Make America Great Again” movement

“Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation,” the president-elect wrote. “We will protect it, and cherish it, from a very vicious outside World. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”

Danish broadcaster DR cited the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Mininnguaq Kleist, in reporting that Trump Jr. would be arriving Tuesday for a private visit, and there are no inquiries about a meeting with the Greenland government.

Greenland’s prime minister, Múte B. Egede, hasn’t commented. The island is an autonomous territory that’s part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Trump has had designs on Greenland before. In a statement last month as he announced his pick for U.S. ambassador to Denmark, he wrote, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

Trump’s eldest son has become a prominent player in his father’s political movement and has served on his presidential transition team, helping to select the people who will staff the incoming White House.

But Trump Jr. has said he has no plans to join his father’s administration, instead intending to stay a key supporter of his father and his agenda from the outside. He’s especially vocal online, where he often indulges in trolling and sharing memes and hosts his own twice-a-week podcast, “Triggered With Don Jr.”

Greenland media reported that Trump Jr. may meet with Erik Jensen, the chairman of the governing party Siumut and the island’s equivalent to finance minister. But the person familiar with his plans said that Trump Jr. wouldn’t meet with Jensen.

Also Monday, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and a close advisor to the president-elect, said on X, the social media site he owns, that “The People of Greenland should decide their future and I think they want to be part of America!”

During his first term, Trump mused about purchasing Greenland, which gained home rule from Denmark in 1979. He even canceled a scheduled trip to Denmark in August 2019 after its prime minister dismissed the idea.

The world’s largest island, Greenland sits between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans and is 80% covered by an ice sheet and is home to a large U.S. military base.

Source : https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-junior-greenland-renewed-calls-us-control-7a235a1e756c48ffdb4a3158ced35514

Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.

The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.

The tech giant is facing calls to pull the technology after its flawed performance.

The BBC complained last month after an AI-generated summary of its headline falsely told some readers that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.

On Friday, Apple’s AI inaccurately summarised BBC app notifications to claim that Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship hours before it began – and that the Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

This marks the first time Apple has formally responded to the concerns voiced by the BBC about the errors, which appear as if they are coming from within the organisation’s app.

“These AI summarisations by Apple do not reflect – and in some cases completely contradict – the original BBC content,” the BBC said on Monday.

“It is critical that Apple urgently addresses these issues as the accuracy of our news is essential in maintaining trust.”

What is AI and how does it work?
A simple guide to help you understand AI

Apple said its update would arrive “in the coming weeks”.

It has previously said its notification summaries – which group together and rewrite previews of multiple recent app notifications into a single alert on users’ lock screens – aim to allow users to “scan for key details”.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional.

“A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.”

The feature, along with others released as part of its broader suite of AI tools was rolled out in the UK in December. It is only available on its iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max handsets running iOS 18.1 and above, as well as on some iPads and Macs.

Several instances of the technology appearing to interpret messages in a highly blunt, literal way have gone viral on social media.

In November, a ProPublica journalist highlighted erroneous Apple AI summaries of alerts from the New York Times app suggesting it had reported that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o

North Korea has claimed it fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead which “will reliably contain any rivals in the Pacific region”.

The launch on Monday – Pyongyang’s first in two months – came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Seoul for talks with some of South Korea’s key leaders.

Hypersonic weapons are more difficult to track and shoot down, as they are able to travel at more than five times the speed of sound.

North Korea is claiming their missile flew 12 times the speed of sound, for about 1,500km.

South Korea’s military earlier said the missile flew 1,100km before falling into the sea, adding that it “strongly condemns” this “clear act of provocation”.

North Korea has previously test-fired hypersonic missiles. Pictures published by KCNA showed that Monday’s missile resembled one that was launched in April last year.

But Pyongyang claims its new hypersonic missile features a new “flight and guidance control system” and a new engine made of carbon fibre.

The country’s leader Kim Jong Un said Monday’s launch “clearly showed the rivals what we are doing and that we are fully ready to use even any means to defend our legitimate interests”, state news agency KCNA said on Tuesday.

Ankit Panda, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the launch of a new weapon is “unsurprising”.

“We’ve known that North Korea has been working with composite materials for use in missiles for a number of years now.

“The appeal of these materials is to broadly improve the performance and reliability of the payload… Better materials can increase the odds of their survival to the target,” he told the BBC.

While hypersonic weaponry has existed for decades, in recent years new missiles have been developed that are much more agile, can re-enter the atmosphere much quicker and conduct evasive manoeuvres, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation.

Hypersonic missiles can be detected by space-based sensors. Various reports suggest there is existing technology that can intercept hypersonic missiles despite their unpredictable trajectories. These are most likely to be deployed at the final phase of their flight, where they would be flying at a lower speed after a long flight through the atmosphere.

While in Seoul on Monday, Blinken had said the US believes Russia plans to share advanced space and satellite technology with North Korea.

He added that Moscow “may be close to reversing” its decades-long commitment to denuclearising the Korean peninsula by recognising Pyongyang as a nuclear power.

During his visit, the US Secretary of State met South Korea’s acting president Choi Sang-mok, where he described the alliance between Washington and Seoul as a “cornerstone of peace and stability on the Korean peninsula”.

South Korea’s military said it has strengthened surveillance for the North’s future missile launches and is “closely sharing information” on the launch with the US and Japan.

The launch took place amid political chaos in South Korea, which has embroiled the country for weeks after suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived martial law attempt in December.

Yoon, who was stripped of his presidential powers after lawmakers voted to impeach him, now faces arrest. The constitutional court is also deliberating whether he should be removed from office.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrwyv75g5xo

At least five people have died in a winter storm that has seized a swathe of the US in its icy grip, leading to mass school closures, travel chaos and power cuts.

Seven US states declared emergencies: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky and Arkansas.

More than 2,300 flights have been cancelled, with nearly 9,000 delays also reported owing to the extreme weather caused by the polar vortex of icy cold air that usually circles the North Pole.

Around 190,000 people had no power early on Tuesday across states in the storm’s path, according to Poweroutage.us. Snow and sleet is forecast to continue through the day in much of the north-eastern US, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

While the precipitation will then dissipate, cold Arctic air is expected to keep conditions icy across a chunk of the country for several more weeks.

In Washington DC – where lawmakers met on Monday to certify Donald Trump’s win in November’s election – about 5-9in (13-23cm) of snow fell, with up to a foot recorded in parts of nearby Maryland and Virginia.

Updates: Major winter storm brings heavy snow and travel disruption
In front of the Washington Monument, hundreds of local residents gathered at a local park for a snowball fight, a now 15-year-old tradition.

“Just having fun,” one local man told the BBC. “Never done a snowball fight before.”

Former US Olympic skier Clare Egan was found cross-country skiing on the National Mall, the central thoroughfare of the US capital city.

She told the Associated Press she had thought “my skiing days were maybe behind me”, after moving to the city.

Washington DC’s weather emergency is declared until the early hours of Tuesday as a result of the system, which was named Winter Storm Blair by the Weather Channel.

Children who had been due to go back to classes on Monday after the winter holiday break were instead enjoying a snow day as school districts closed from Maryland to Kansas.

In other parts of the US, the winter storm brought with it dangerous road conditions.

In Missouri, the state’s highway patrol said at least 365 people had crashed on Sunday, leaving dozens injured and at least one dead.

In nearby Kansas, one of the worst-hit states, local news reported that two people were killed in a car crash during the storm.

In Houston, Texas, a person was found dead from cold weather in front of a bus stop on Monday morning, authorities said.

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy9q7lvj34ro

Warning: This story contains distressing details.

Just before New Year, 21-year-old Shatha al-Sabbagh was out buying chocolate for her family’s children from a shop in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank.

The “fearless” journalism student – who wanted to shed light on the suffering of the Palestinians – was with her mother, two young nephews and another relative.

“She was laughing and saying we’ll be up all night tonight,” her mother recalls.

Then she was shot in the head.

For Shatha’s mother Umm al-Motassem, the pain is still raw. She stops to take a breath.

“Shatha’s eyes were wide open. It looked like she was staring at me while lying on her back with blood gushing from her head.

“I started screaming, ‘Stop shooting! My daughter is dead. My daughter is dead.'”

But the shooting lasted for around 10 minutes. Shatha died in a pool of her own blood.

Shatha’s family holds the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security forces fully responsible for her killing, saying their area is controlled by the PA.

“It couldn’t have been anyone other than PA… because they have such a heavy presence in our neighbourhood – no-one else could come or go.”

But the PA blames “outlaws” – the term they use for members of the Jenin Battalion, made up of fighters from armed groups including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas.

The PA exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

It launched a major security operation in the refugee camp in Jenin last month targeting the armed groups based there, which they see as a challenge to their authority. Nearly four weeks on, it continues.

The Jenin Battalion is accused of blowing up a car in the camp and carrying out other “illegal activities”.

“We have confiscated large numbers of weapons and explosive materials,” says the PA’s Brig Gen Anwar Rajab.

“The aim is to clear the camp from the explosive devices that have been planted in different streets and alleyways… These outlaws have crossed all red lines and have spread chaos.”

Gen Rajab also accuses Iran of backing and funding the armed groups in the camp.

The Jenin Battalion denies links to Iran. In a recent video posted on social media, spokesman Nour al-Bitar said the PA was trying to “demonise” them and “tarnish their image”, adding that fighters would not give up their weapons.

“To the PA and President Mahmoud Abbas, why has it come to this?” he asked, holding shrapnel from what he claimed was a rocket-propelled grenade fired at the camp by security forces.

The PA, led by President Abbas, was already unpopular among Palestinians dissatisfied by its rejection of armed struggle and its security co-ordination with Israel.

This anger intensified with the PA’s crackdown on the armed groups in the camp, which has been unprecedented in its ferocity and length.

Israel sees those groups as terrorists, but many Jenin locals consider them to be a form of resistance to the occupation.

“These ‘outlaws’ that the PA is referring to – these are the young men who stand up for us when the Israeli army raids our camp,” says Umm al-Motassem.

At least 14 people have been killed in the crackdown, including a 14-year-old, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Now many Jenin locals say they fear the PA as much as they fear Israel’s military raids. Shatha al-Sabbagh’s death has only renewed their contempt.

Before she was killed, Shatha shared several posts on social media showing the destruction from the PA operation in Jenin – as well as Israeli raids on the camp last year.

Other posts showed pictures of armed young men who were killed in the fighting, including her brother.

Her killing was condemned by Hamas, which identified her brother as a slain member of the group’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

The group described her “murder… in cold blood” as part of an “oppressive policy targeting the Jenin camp, which has become a symbol of steadfastness and resistance”.

Mustafa Barghouti, who leads the political party Palestinian National Initiative, sees the fighting in Jenin as a consequence of the divisions between the main Palestinian factions – Fatah, which makes up most of the PA, and Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007.

“The last thing Palestinians need is to see Palestinians shooting each other while Israel crushes everyone,” he says.

Inside the camp, residents say daily life has ground to a halt.

Water and electricity supplies have been cut off and families suffer from a lack of food, bitterly cold weather and relentless gun battles.

Locals who spoke to us asked for their names to be changed, saying they feared reprisals by the PA.

“Things are dire here. We can’t move freely in the camp,” says Mohamed.

“All the bakeries, the restaurants and shops are closed. The restaurant I work in opens for a day and closes for 10. When it is open, no-one comes.

“We need milk for the children, we need bread. Some people can’t open their doors because of the continuous shooting.”

The UN humanitarian agency, the OCHA, has called for an investigation into what it describes as human rights violations by the PA forces.

Gen Rajab said some of the “outlaws” who had “hijacked” the Jenin camp had been arrested and that others with pending cases would be brought to justice.

But Mohamed describes the PA’s operation – with innocent people caught in the crossfire – as “collective punishment”.

“If they want to go after outlaws, that doesn’t mean they should punish the whole camp. We want our lives back.”

Even going out to get food or water is a risk, says 20-year-old Sadaf.

“When we go out, we say our final prayers. We prepare ourselves mentally that we may not come back.

“It’s very cold. We’ve taken down the doors in our home to use as firewood just to keep warm.”

The BBC has heard similar accounts from four residents in the camp.

My conversation with Sadaf is interrupted by the sound of gunfire. It is unclear where it is from or who is firing. It starts and stops several times.

“Warning shots maybe,” she suggests, adding it happens sometimes when PA forces are changing shifts.

Sadaf continues describing the camp, with “rubbish filling the streets and almost going into homes”. More gunfire can be heard.

Sadaf’s mother joins the call. “Listen to this… Can anyone sleep with this sound in the background?

“We sleep in shifts now. We’re so scared they might raid our homes. We’re as scared of this operation as we are when the Israeli soldiers are here.”

People say security forces have deliberately hit electricity grids and generators, leaving the camp in a blackout.

The PA again blames “outlaws” – and insists it has brought in workers to fix the grid.

The armed groups want to “use the people’s suffering to pressure the PA to stop the operation”, says Gen Rajab. He says the security operation will continue until its objectives are met.

Gen Rajab says the PA’s goal is to establish control over the Jenin camp and ensure safety and stability.

He believes stripping the armed groups of control would take away Israel’s excuse to attack the camp.

In late August, the Israeli army conducted a major nine-day “counter-terrorism” operation in several cities in the northern West Bank, including Jenin and the camp, which resulted in severe destruction.

At least 36 Palestinians were killed – 21 from Jenin governorate – according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Analysts say that the PA is trying to reassert its authority in the West Bank and show the US it is capable of taking a role in the future governance of Gaza.

“What would be the harm in that?” says Gen Rajab.

“Gaza is part of the Palestinian state. Gaza and the West Bank are not separate entities. There’s no Palestinian state without Gaza. The president [Mahmoud Abbas] has said that and that is our strategy.”

Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv3rl9prp6o

After a year of actual normalcy (one without strikes or a pandemic), Hollywood is back to its regularly scheduled programming, which includes a fun and frenzied Golden Globes. The enjoyable but unserious cousin of the awards shows has finally found its stride, post-Hollywood Foreign Press Association scandals. Following an absolute dud of a ceremony last January, the Golden Globes righted its wrongs by offering nominees and viewers something both wholly different and beautifully familiar.

Comedian Nikki Glaser, the first solo female host in the show’s history, dived right in with a strong and quippy opening monologue. The ex-“FBoy Island” host covered a wide range of topics, including the 2024 Presidential election results and the #MeToo movement, and was vibrant and zingy from the moment she opened her mouth. Glaser quickly pressed on everything from Timothée Chalamet’s sparse mustache to “Wicked” stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s viral holding space interview. Glaser’s overarching topics and several laugh-out-loud moments enabled her to reset the Globes to its former delightful glory.

Something new and fun this year was the addition of on-screen facts and tidbits about winners and presenters, which were displayed as they walked to the stage. The graphic displays were a way to keep viewers at home engaged and eliminate the dead space, which can make award shows feel painfully endless. They were also weirdly informative: Audiences learned Ariana DeBose once competed on “So You Think You Can Dance,” Colman Domingo used to perform on stilts in the circus and Demi Moore has a massive vintage doll collection.

With plenty of tequila (according to Kieran Culkin), a cringe-worthy moment between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, Nobu sushi and a more immersive and aesthetically pleasing production experience, including angled cameras and a Google Maps-type overview of the ballroom, showcasing where each nominee is seated, the Golden Globes has found a way forward. Glaser playfully poked fun using a Pope’s miter as a prop, a not-so-awful parody of the “Wicked’ song “Popular” and kept a leaderboard to display the score of who winners were thanking in their speeches. Though Ariana Grande didn’t quite get Glaser’s weed crack at Harrison Ford, and the banter between Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara went on much longer than it should have, the proceedings never felt sludgy or, worse, off-putting.

There weren’t a lot of surprises this year (though we did find some): Jeremy Allen White didn’t even bother showing up to collect yet another award for his role in “The Bear.” But most of those who won seemed to be genuinely thrilled. During first-time winner Demi Moore moving speech after she was awarded actress in a musical or comedy for “The Substance,” she said, “I’ve been doing this a long time, like over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor.” It was one of the moments of the night.

As with the Emmys this past September, “Shōgun” was deservedly the standout TV show, winning four awards. Tadanobu Asano and Anna Sawai received awards for their performances along with Hiroyuki Sanada, and the FX show also won drama series. On the film side of things, perhaps the night’s biggest shocker was Fernanda Torres’ well-deserved win for actress in a drama for “I’m Still Here.” “The Brutalist” is now officially the Oscars’ frontrunner.

Source : https://variety.com/2025/tv/reviews/golden-globes-2025-review-1236266176/

It’s been less than 24 hours since the Golden Globes ceremony, but the producers behind the Jan. 5 kudocast are already looking at bringing back host Nikki Glaser for an encore next year. “We absolutely had a great experience with her, and think that she would be great at this in the long term,” executive producer Glenn Weiss told Variety.

So, has she already been asked back? “Perhaps!” Weiss said. “I can’t talk officially for anything. I will say, as someone who produces and directs award shows, she really found her niche here, and I think it really worked out beautifully on this show. And I would love to see it continue.” (It’s believed that under her deal with Dick Clark Prods. and CBS, Glaser was already contracted to do another year if things went well — and they clearly did.)

Weiss and fellow White Cherry Entertainment partner/exec producer Ricky Kirshner lauded Glaser for providing the proper mood for the show (a huge turnaround after last year’s host, Jo Koy, struggled to find that line). “Nikki, in my mind, home run,” Weiss said. “She really prepared. She did her homework. She’s been practicing material at a clubs, sometimes four or five shows a night for a couple of weeks straight, working on this pretty hard since November. And when you have a host that’s that prepared and that dedicated and also not tone deaf, listening to what’s going on in our business and even in the room on the fly, she’s really good at this. And she proved herself to be a really good host.

“Part of what the Globes are is it’s a party atmosphere,” he added. “It’s not a traditional, stuffyish kind of environment. We do want to be loose, people in the audience do have access to alcohol, and it’s meant to be fun and a party. And Nikki, her whole tone and and her way of being is really in line with what this show is. And I think she really scored very well last night.”

Variety spoke on Monday morning with an exhausted Weiss and Kirshner, who had also just worked with Globes producer Dick Clark Prods. (which Variety parent company PMC owns in a joint venture with Eldridge) on “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” just a few days earlier. The duo shared the backstory on some of this year’s unique elements on the telecast — including the use of fun facts, the Beverly Hilton ballroom map pin drops of nominees, and yes, those wild camera angles.

The show’s fun facts came out of trying to figure out how to add more details without affecting the Golden Globes’ run time.

This wasn’t the first awards show to include nominee trivia at the bottom of the screen, but this year’s Globes took it to a turbo-charged level. “How could we add value to the show without eating more time when the presenters walk out?” Weiss said to describe their thinking. “We saw this as an opportunity to give the viewers at home a little bit more to digest, a little bit more to know about the people. I think we came in with an attitude of, how can we enhance the value to the viewer within the time frame?”

Kirshner said the team came up with hundreds and hundreds of factoids — many of which, of course, never got to air. “The hard part about that is we don’t know who’s going to win,” he said. “So if you take over 150 nominees times three or four facts each, we collected over 500 or 600 facts — only to use two or three per winner.”

Pin drops showing where nominees were sitting in the ballroom were inspired by technology used in sporting events.

Weiss said the idea behind the concept came from doing a little research with a sports-augmented reality company. Inspired by the computer-generated first down lines in football games, or how swimmers’ lanes were identified during the Summer Olympics, the White Cherry team began brainstorming. “It was birthed from, how do we use technology like this in an award show? Could there be something here?” he said. “When the thought about the unique seating at the Globes and the tightness of the room, that’s where those two ideas came together. If we do some kind of sports-like augmented reality in our event, and if people always talk about where they’re coming from and what the audience layout is, let’s try to put these things together.”

Of course, that made its own challenges, since people are constantly moving seats or tables. “There are changes,” Weiss said. “Someone’s coming, someone’s not coming. This person has to sit with the studio. This person has to sit with the network. There’s always a little bit of a chess game being played with seating that made it even more interesting — which is a kind word to our production process. We were literally creating where the pins dropped, and if they weren’t at the table, could we move them? The cumbersome combining these elements into the flow of a live award show turned out to be really challenging. It was really inspiring when we got to the finish line, and fun to execute. But damn, it was not easy.”

Those camera angles were meant to give viewers a more immersive experience — and perhaps there’s a specific reason why Seth Rogen was surprised by it all.

During his moment as a presenter, Rogen roasted the show’s experimental camera angles, which showed winners and presenters from various vantage points, often with the audience seen behind them. “It’s inelegant, it’s strange, this whole half of the room can see my bald spot,” Rogen said in his remarks. “I would have filled that in.”

Weiss said: “I’ll tell you, not everybody is gonna love everything. We wanted to bring a TV show home where people felt they were a little bit more immersed in the party, and not just watching it where the stage is here, the cameras are here, and we’re shooting it across the room.”

Instead of having the audience “feel like we’re an outsider getting coverage, we wanted the people at home to feel they’re a part of it,” he said. “Most of the presenters came through rehearsal and then understood it. If they didn’t come through rehearsal, perhaps they didn’t understand it quite as much, which might lead to a comment on the air by someone.”

Glenn Weiss, are you throwing a little shade? “Maybe just a little!” he joked. “I will say that, at the end of the day, I wish the room were a little bigger, I wish the ceiling were a little higher,” he said, referencing the limitations that come from shooting in a hotel ballroom. “There’s all sorts of things as a director you’d want to do a little differently. But the confines of this room is the reality that we’re in. I’d love the concept to have allowed us to have the camera a little bit further back from them. I’d love for us to have been able to have a higher ceiling, and do the pin drop a little differently, but we’re embracing the reality that we’re in. And trying to figure out the best way. For me, the immersiveness of putting the viewer in the party, as opposed to just covering it from the outside, was the tactical decision there.”

Speaking of Rogen and fellow presenter Catherine O’Hara, yes, it’s safe to say their riffing about Canadian porn went a little off-script.

That included Rogen’s crack about a “Mickey Mouse handjob,” which America didn’t get to hear — but the folks in the audience and the press room got to. “Yeah, some scripts come through us, and we’re prepared, and some kind of changes backstage as we’re going on,” Weiss said. “I’ll say that everything at the end of the day, it comes on, and censors do what they do, and we just continue being immersed in the party.”

Sofia Vergara heckling Jodie Foster didn’t throw the producers for a loop, but Vin Diesel’s shout-out to The Rock sure did.

“For me, it was just kind of playful,” Kirshner said of the moment Vergara shouted as Foster hit the stage to collect her win as best TV limited series actress. “I don’t think there was any moment where I was like, ‘Oh shit, something’s going wrong.’”

But when Diesel took the stage to present the prize for cinematic and box office achievement and before his speech said, “Hey, Dwayne,” there was a moment where the producers wondered if beef was about to unfold. “It kind of keeps you gripped, and even you in the press room, us in the truck, are going, ‘Wait, what? What’s happening?’” Weiss said. “At that point, there’s a live event taking place, and our job is to bring it to you and let you decipher it. What is the exchange going on between them? I think it’s really important to show what’s happening in the room.”

Glaser’s “Pope-ular” bit came together in less than 24 hours.

The song, in which Glaser teases a crossover between the films “Wicked” (with its song “Popular”) and “Conclave” (about the election of a new pope), was created in the writers’ room late Saturday.

“Throwing that together, which included a music cue, which included lighting cues and all sorts of stuff besides the comedy, that was real challenging,” Weiss said. “Where do you think you can find a scepter on a Saturday night at midnight?”

The secret weapon was the show’s 250-member production team. The art department and props team managed to secure and create all the materials for the bit by 11 a.m. on Sunday, after rehearsals had already started.

“You’re talking to Ricky and I here, but there’s 250 professionals who are really good at their jobs,” Weiss said. “And when things like that come up, last minute, we got the ace team finding it and bringing it in… And then Nikki nailed it. She absolutely crushed it. And it was a really big highlight for me in the show.”

The Cecil B. de Mille and Carol Burnett Awards were moved to a Friday ceremony, but more elements may return to future Globes broadcasts.

The decision to move the two honors to their own event freed up some time on Sunday’s show, but it meant that viewers didn’t get to see Viola Davis’ acceptance speech for the de Mille, or Ted Danson’s for the Burnett.

“I think the Globes people have made a decision that Friday night is the night they want to expand that dinner and make it an important event, which it was,” Kirschner said. “Glenn and I stopped by and just stuck our heads in, and it was beautifully done. The speeches were great. Maybe in the future, there’ll be a little more time to put the speeches on. It was the first year that was done that way. So we were just trying to get our footing.”

Source : https://variety.com/2025/tv/awards/golden-globes-producers-show-behind-the-scenes-nikki-glaser-1236267212/

A recent outbreak of Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV) in China has sparked global concern, with Malaysia reporting hundreds of cases and India detecting two cases.

China has, meanwhile, downplayed the situation, claiming that the country remains safe for travelers.

Rising Cases in Malaysia

Malaysia has seen a significant increase in HMPV cases. In 2024, 327 cases were reported, marking a 45% rise compared to 2023, which had 225 cases.

The country’s Health Ministry confirmed on January 4 that HMPV is not a new disease, as it is part of the Pneumoviridae family, which also includes the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), The Straits Times reported.

Health officials explain that a rise in respiratory infections is typical around this time of year, especially in countries with cooler seasons.

Two Cases Detected in India

In India, two cases of HMPV were confirmed in the city of Bengaluru, Karnataka, including one involving an eight-month-old child who is currently receiving treatment. The patients did not have a history of foreign travel.

The Indian Union Health Ministry is monitoring the situation closely after a recent rise in cases in China.

On January 4, a meeting was held by the Indian Ministry of Health, with experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), and other health organizations.

Despite the growing concern, authorities have reassured the public that there is no cause for panic, as there has been no surge in respiratory illnesses in the country.

HMPV Peaks From Winter to Spring in the U.S

In the U.S., HMPV spreads during specific seasons, starting in winter and continuing through spring. Health authorities emphasize the importance of early detection and monitoring, especially for vulnerable groups.

What Is Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV)?

HMPV, identified in 2001, is a respiratory virus belonging to the Pneumoviridae family. Similar to RSV, it causes both upper and lower respiratory infections, with symptoms resembling a cold or flu.

While it can affect people of all ages, it is especially dangerous for young children, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Recognizing the Symptoms

The common symptoms of HMPV include:

• Coughing
• Runny or stuffy nose
• Fever
• Sore throat
• In severe cases, the virus can cause wheezing, difficulty breathing, or progress to bronchitis, pneumonia, or worsening asthma.

The virus typically has an incubation period of 3 to 6 days, with illness lasting a few days to over a week, depending on severity.

How Does HMPV Spread?

In temperate climates, the virus is most active during late winter and spring, and it often circulates alongside other respiratory viruses like influenza and RSV.

HMPV spreads in similar ways to other respiratory viruses, primarily through:

• Respiratory droplets from coughing or sneezing
• Close personal contact (e.g., shaking hands)
• Touching contaminated surfaces and then touching the mouth, nose, or eyes

Testing and Diagnosis

Though HMPV is a relatively new virus, healthcare providers may test for it, especially during the peak winter and spring seasons. Diagnosis involves:

• Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAAT) to detect the virus’ genetic material
• Immunofluorescence or enzyme immunoassay to detect viral antigens in respiratory secretions

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/hmpv-outbreak-escalates-malaysia-logs-hundreds-cases-india-confirms-two-3757981

Elon Musk is facing a whirlwind of criticism after using a slur against an X user on Monday, just days after demanding that users post more positive content.

The incident came about when Joni Askola, a Finnish doctoral candidate, tweeted, “Elon Musk is rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history, hijacking political debates in the process. The EU must take action!”

In response to the user’s criticism, Musk replied, “F u retard.”

A storm of outrage on the platform ensued as users are called out the contradiction between Musk’s behavior and his recent call for “positive, beautiful, or informative content” in a Dec. 29 tweet.

One user said, “So that’s what you meant by saying let’s share nicer content here?” Another added, “Your hypocrisy is endless.”

Musk’s plea for civility, made in the late December tweet, was already met with skepticism. Critics pointed to his divisive posts, including endorsements of far-right political movements and profanity-laced arguments.

Musk’s appeal for positivity came just weeks after he joked about assassination attempts on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as reported by The Independent.

Source : https://www.latintimes.com/elon-musk-calls-random-x-user-r-word-just-days-after-demanding-more-positive-beautiful-tweets-571269

Louisiana health authorities on Monday reported the first human death in the United States linked to bird flu, while noting the patient had underlying medical conditions and that general risks to the public remained “low.”

The patient, aged over 65, had been hospitalized in the southern state since at least mid-December, when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced it as the country’s first serious case of human infection from the H5N1 virus.

“While the current public health risk for the general public remains low, people who work with birds, poultry or cows, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk,” the Louisiana Department of Health said in a statement announcing the death.

It said the patient had “contracted H5N1 after exposure to a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds,” but had detected no further H5N1 infections nor evidence person-to-person transmission in the state.

The news comes just days after the federal government awarded an additional $306 million to bolster H5N1 surveillance programs and research, amid some criticism for President Joe Biden’s administration over its response to the simmering issue.

The amount of bird flu circulating among animals and humans has alarmed scientists over concerns it could mutate into a more transmissible form — potentially triggering a deadly pandemic.

“While the risk to humans remains low, we are always preparing for any possible scenario that could arise,” Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement announcing the funding on Friday.

The CDC said in December that genetic sequencing of the H5N1 virus from the Louisiana patient was different from the version detected in many dairy herds around the country.

And a small part of the virus in the patient had genetic modifications that suggested it could have mutated inside the body to adapt to the human respiratory tract.

However, such mutations are not the only thing that could make the virus more contagious or transmissible between humans, according to researchers interviewed by AFP.

H5N1 was first detected in 1996, but since 2020, the number of outbreaks among bird flocks has exploded, while a growing number of mammal species have been affected.

Since the beginning the 2024, the CDC has recorded 66 cases of bird flu in humans in the United States.

“While tragic, a death from H5N1 bird flu in the United States is not unexpected because of the known potential for infection with these viruses to cause severe illness and death,” the agency said.

Source : https://www.ibtimes.com/us-records-its-first-human-death-bird-flu-3758061