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Police release new photos as they search for the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO NEW YORK (AP) — Two law enforcement officials say a masked gunman who stalked and killed the leader of one of the largest U.S. health insurance companies on a Manhattan sidewalk used ammunition emblazoned with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose." The official were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke Thursday to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Police also released photos of a person they say is wanted for questioning in the ambush the day before of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The words on the ammunition may have been a reference to tactics insurance companies use to avoid paying claims. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are bringing Trump's DOGE to Capitol Hill WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s DOGE time at the U.S. Capitol. Billionaire Elon Musk and fellow business titan Vivek Ramaswamy arrived on Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers. The two are heading up President-elect Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with its plans to “dismantle” the federal government. Trump tapped the duo to come up with ways for firing federal workers, cutting government programs and slashing federal regulations — all part of Trump's agenda for a second-term at the White House. House Speaker Mike Johnson said there's going to be “a lot of change” in Washington. Hegseth faces senators' concerns not only about his behavior but also his views on women in combat WASHINGTON (AP) — Pete Hegseth has spent the week on Capitol Hill trying to reassure Republican senators that he is fit to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Defense in the wake of high-profile allegations about excessive drinking and sexual assault. But senators in both parties have also expressed concern about another issue — Hegseth’s frequent comments that women should not serve in frontline military combat jobs. As he meets with senators for a fourth day Thursday, his professional views on women troops are coming under deeper scrutiny. Hegseth said this week that “we have amazing women who serve our military.” Pressed if they should serve in combat, Hegseth said they already do. Hamas official says Gaza ceasefire talks have resumed after weekslong hiatus ISTANBUL (AP) — A Hamas official says that after a weekslong hiatus international mediators have resumed negotiating with the militant group and Israel over a ceasefire in Gaza, and that he was hopeful a deal to end the 14-month war was within reach. Ceasefire negotiations were halted last month when Qatar suspended its talks with mediators from Egypt and the United States over frustration with a lack of progress between Israel and Hamas. But Bassem Naim, an official in Hamas’ political wing, said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press that there has been a “reactivation” of efforts to end the fighting, release hostages from Gaza and free Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Why the rebel capture of Syria's Hama, a city with a dark history, matters BEIRUT (AP) — One of the darkest moments in the modern history of the Arab world happened more than four decades ago, when then-Syrian President Hafez Assad launched what came to be known as the Hama Massacre. The slaughter was named for the Syrian city where 10,000 to 40,000 people were killed or disappeared in a government attack that began on Feb. 2, 1982, and lasted for nearly a month. Hama was turned into ruins. The memory of the assault and the monthlong siege on the city remains visceral in Syrian and Arab minds. Now Islamist insurgents have captured the city in a moment many Syrians have awaited for over 40 years. France's Macron vows to stay in office till end of term, says he'll name a new prime minister soon PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to stay in office until the end of his term in 2027 and announced that he will name a new prime minister within days. In his address to the nation on Thursday, Macron came out fighting, laying blame at the door of his opponents on the far right for bringing down the government of Michel Barnier. He said they chose “not to do but to undo” and that they “chose disorder.” The president also said the far right and the far left had united in what he called “an anti-Republican front.” He said he’ll name a new prime minister within days but gave no hints who that might be. 7.0 earthquake off Northern California prompts brief tsunami warning SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The National Weather Service has canceled its tsunami warning for the U.S. West Coast after there was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. According to the U.S. Geological Survey on Thursday, at least 5.3 million people in California were under a tsunami warning after the earthquake struck. It was felt as far south as San Francisco, where residents felt a rolling motion for several seconds. It was followed by multiple smaller aftershocks. There were no immediate reports of major damage or injury. Yoon replaces the defense minister as South Korea's parliament moves to vote on their impeachments SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s president has replaced his defense minister as opposition parties moved to impeach both men over the stunning-but-brief imposition of martial law that brought armed troops into Seoul streets. Opposition parties are pushing for a vote on motion to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday evening. They hold 192 seats but need 200 votes for the motion to pass. Yoon’s office said he decided to replace Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun with Choi Byung Hyuk, a retired general who is South Korea’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Kim earlier apologized and said he ordered troops to carry out duties related to martial law. The Foreign Ministry also worked to mitigate the backlash and concern over South Korea's democracy. The US government is closing a women's prison and other facilities after years of abuse and decay WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press has learned that the federal Bureau of Prisons is permanently closing its “rape club” women’s prison in California and will idle six facilities in a sweeping realignment after years of abuse, decay and mismanagement. The agency informed employees and Congress on Thursday that it plans to shutter the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California, and its deactivate minimum-security prison camps in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. Staff and inmates are being moved to other facilities. The closures come amid an AP investigation that has uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons. From outsider to the Oval Office, bitcoin surges as a new administration embraces crypto NEW YORK (AP) — Bitcoin burst on the scene after trust had withered in the financial system and Washington’s ability to protect people from it. Now, it’s Washington’s embrace of bitcoin that’s sending it to records. Bitcoin briefly surged above $103,000 after President-elect Donald Trump said he will nominate Paul Atkins, who's seen as friendly to crypto, to be the Securities and Exchange Commission's next chair. The crypto industry, meanwhile, did its part to bring politicians friendly to digital currencies into Washington. It's a twist from bitcoin's early days, when it was lauded as a kind of electronic cash that wouldn’t be beholden to any government or financial institution.
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NoneLuka Doncic returns to Dallas Mavericks' lineup after missing two games with left heel contusion
DALLAS (AP) — Luka Doncic is returning to the Dallas lineup Monday night against the Portland Trail Blazers after missing the Mavericks’ two previous games with a left heel contusion. Doncic won last season’s scoring title with a career-best 33.9 points per game and is fifth in the NBA this season averaging 28.9, and seventh in assists, averaging 8.2. He had triple-doubles in three of his last four games, including his most recent appearance last Sunday with 45 points, 13 assists and 11 rebounds in a 143-133 win at Golden State. The defending Western Conference champions are 18-10, fourth in the West, and have won 13 of their last 16 games following their only losing streak of the season, a four-game skid from Nov. 8-14. ___ AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nbaArticle content OTTAWA — Three-hundred and twenty-four unique firearm makes and models of so-called “assault-style” firearms are now prohibited weapons in Canada, effective immediately. Recommended Videos But with an amnesty period that ends 10 days after the latest possible date for the next federal election, there’s little expectation the new measures will ever come into effect. An order-in-council tabled Thursday encompassing 104 families of firearms, a move made one day before the 35th anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre. Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc made the announcement Thursday afternoon, the latest in the Trudeau Liberals’ contentious and often troubled attempts to restrict access to firearms in Canada. “Our goal is to ensure that no community, no family is devastated by mass shootings in Canada again,” LeBlanc said during the news conference. “These 324 models of prohibited firearms will be added to the 1,500 models added in 2020, and have technical characteristics that are similar. They were made for battlefields, not for hunting.” These new models, he said, were determined through what he described as a “robust” consultation with RCMP firearms experts. An amnesty order is in place until Oct. 30, 2025 for licenced, legal firearms owners to deal with the new measures — 10 days after the mandated day for the next federal election. Only firearms disposed of through the government’s Assault-style Firearms Compensation Program will be eligible for compensation — firearms deactivated or turned over to police during the amnesty period will not be eligible. Talks are currently underway with the Ukrainian government to hand over seized firearms to their military for use against Russia, said Defence Minister Bill Blair. The announcement caused a mixed reaction in Canada’s legal firearms community. Tracey Wilson of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR) said the Liberals have learned nothing over their eight-year-long attempt to confiscate guns from their legal owners. “This is typical Liberal Party divide-and-conquer politics, they know they are out of time and Canadians are out of money,” she said. “They know the Tories will repeal it all in less than 10 months. They haven’t used an Order in Council to deal with the daily violence plaguing Canada, no action on repeat violent offenders, no response to the pleas of law enforcement. Nothing.” Wilson also criticized the government for summarily rolling out their gun bans via orders-in-council instead of legislation. “The Liberals have normalized the subversion of Canada’s democratic process for their own political maneuvering,” she said. Policy analyst and thegunblog.ca editor Nicolas Johnson said he doesn’t know of a single gun owner who has any intention — or incentive — to hand over their legally-purchased firearms. “The Liberals have no idea how to execute their confiscation fantasy, no money to pay for it, and no way to enforce it,” he told the Toronto Sun . “The Liberals are appearing increasingly weak, desperate, and extreme with this latest measure.” Previous attempts by the Trudeau Liberals to apply blanket bans on firearms proved so unpopular that even Liberal MPs spoke out against them. In 2022, the Liberals quietly tabled two amendments to their gun control bill C-21 — sweeping changes that would have outlawed legal rifles used daily by hunters and sport shooters. The Liberals withdrew those amendments after massive blowback from hunters, sports shooters and First Nations, a move described by the opposition Tories as a “humiliating climb-down” for the prime minister. A list of these newly-banned firearms has not yet been provided as of publication. RECOMMENDED VIDEO
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Children of the wealthy and connected get special admissions consideration at some elite U.S. universities, according to new filings in a class-action lawsuit originally brought against 17 schools. Georgetown’s then-president, for example, listed a prospective student on his “president’s list” after meeting her and her wealthy father at an Idaho conference known as “summer camp for billionaires,” according to Tuesday court filings in the price-fixing lawsuit filed in Chicago federal court in 2022. Although it’s always been assumed that such favoritism exists, the filings offer a rare peek at the often secret deliberations of university heads and admissions officials. They show how schools admit otherwise unqualified wealthy children because their parents have connections and could possibly donate large sums down the line, raising questions about fairness. Stuart Schmill, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a 2018 email that the university admitted four out of six applicants recommended by then-board chairman Robert Millard, including two who “we would really not have otherwise admitted.” The two others were not admitted because they were “not in the ball park, or the push from him was not as strong.” In the email, Schmill said Millard was careful to play down his influence on admissions decisions, but he said the chair also sent notes on all six students and later met with Schmill to share insight “into who he thought was more of a priority.” The filings are the latest salvo in a lawsuit that claims that 17 of the nation’s most prestigious colleges colluded to reduce the competition for prospective students and drive down the amount of financial aid they would offer, all while giving special preference to the children of wealthy donors. “That illegal collusion resulted in the defendants providing far less aid to students than would have been provided in a free market,” said Robert Gilbert, an attorney for the plaintiffs. Since the lawsuit was filed, 10 of the schools have reached settlements to pay out a total of $284 million, including payments of up to $2,000 to current or former students whose financial aid might have been shortchanged over a period of more than two decades. They are Brown, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale. Johns Hopkins is working on a settlement and the six schools still fighting the lawsuit are the California Institute of Technology, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania. MIT called the lawsuit and the claims about admissions favoritism baseless. “MIT has no history of wealth favoritism in its admissions; quite the opposite,” university spokesperson Kimberly Allen said. “After years of discovery in which millions of documents were produced that provide an overwhelming record of independence in our admissions process, plaintiffs could cite just a single instance in which the recommendation of a board member helped sway the decisions for two undergraduate applicants." In a statement, Penn also said the case is meritless that the evidence shows that it doesn't favor students whose families have donated or pledged money to the Ivy League school. “Plaintiffs’ whole case is an attempt to embarrass the University about its purported admission practices on issues totally unrelated to this case," the school said. Notre Dame officials also called the case baseless. “We are confident that every student admitted to Notre Dame is fully qualified and ready to succeed,” a university spokesperson said in a statement. The South Bend, Indiana, school, though, did apparently admit wealthy students with subpar academic backgrounds.Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin closed an emotional farewell to a 58-year political career that a Senate leader said “put substance over flash.”I'm really not sure where to begin with this one, so I'm just going to lay it out and then try to explain later: A recent update to Zenless Zone Zero made it impossible to get a good look at character's asses, and the blowback was so fierce developer MiHoYo reverted the change less than a day later. The whole thing began with the release of patch 1.4 , which included among its many updates this fairly innocuous sounding change: "Adjusts the Agents' display for certain angles: When viewed from specific angles, the Agent will appear faded." What that worked out to in practice, as noted by The Gamer , is a butt filter: When players try to zoom in for a good, up-close look at their avatar's caboose, the character in question disappears. This might seem extremely inconsequential to you (it certainly does to me) but a good chunk of the Zenless Zone Zero community felt very differently: 9/11 for gooners December 18, 2024 The situation wasn't any calmer on the Zenless Zone Zero subreddit . "Why is hoyo trying to stop me from seeing lycaon and lighter's dump trucks. like this gotta be some kinda crime," one redditor asked. "It feels very scummy to draw in a shit ton of players with some of the most sexualized characters ever with massive assets, then to conform to whatever order they knew they were gonna have to do only now that the most hyped up character for the game is finally out," another wrote. "What is the point of all that glorious walking jiggle if u cant even look at it," a third wanted to know, and hey, ridiculous this may be but that's a fair question. Some pointed the finger at the government of China, which they speculate mandated the apparent censorship for reasons unknown. "It is quite unfortunate that they put so much dev effort into making good jiggles but CCP cucked them," yet another redditor contributed, which isn't the most incisive bit of analysis I've ever read, but is pretty funny. But less than 24 hours after the update went live and the Zenless community lost its mind, MiHoYo walked it back. In a message posted on X , the studio said it was "closely monitoring feedback and suggestions from Proxies, striving to provide everyone with the best possible gaming experience," and has thus "promptly addressed and fixed several issues that appeared after the update as soon as we received feedback." The hotfix addresses a half-dozen issues, including one "where the fading effect of the 'Agent appears faded when viewed from specific angles' adjustment did not display correctly under certain circumstances." It's not clear what actually happened here—the patch notes imply the fadeout was the result of a bug, not intentional "censorship"—but players on X quickly confirmed that butts have been unobfuscated: The cake is once again plainly visible, and there was much rejoicing. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. The funniest thing that's happened to a gacha game in a long time is Zenless Zone Zero making it so if you try to angle your camera to look at your character's ass the model fades out, and the subsequent backlash at this change being so loud that the devs hotfixed it the same day December 18, 2024 As for me, I have no idea what the moral of the story is here, so I've reached out to MiHoYou to see what they have to say about it. I'lll update if they actually respond.
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Emmanuel Macron has rejected calls to stand down and says he will name a new prime minister – the fourth of his seven years as president – in the coming days. If France was in his biggest political crisis in a generation, Macron wasn’t feeling it. In the wake of his government’s collapse, he says it’s still in the national interest that he sees out his five-year presidential mandate, which ends in 2027. A bar shows the telecast of French President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation. Credit: AP The collapse of France’s centre-right coalition government has thrust Macron back into the spotlight and a growing chorus is questioning whether the divisive and at times impetuous leader is suited to resolve the country’s political crisis. The turmoil comes amid a rough patch in the French economy , as various factors take a toll on growth, including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, high interest rates and economic slowdowns in Germany and China, two of France’s trading partners. In a televised address, Macron said France could not constitutionally have new parliamentary elections for 10 months, following his decision to call a snap poll back in July. The result, he promised at the time, would offer the country some “clarification”. It led to the current chaos. Loading But for the first time, he conceded he was partly to blame for the situation the nation now faced. “Many have blamed me for it and I know, many continue to blame me. It’s a fact and it’s my responsibility,” he said. “The dissolution was not understood, that’s my responsibility, [but] I will never accept the irresponsibility of others.” He then went on to attack his political opponents on the “extreme right” and “extreme left”, accusing them of collaborating in an “anti-republican front”. “Some political groups have chosen chaos,” he said, referring to the no-confidence vote which led to Michel Barnier standing down just three months after he was appointed by Macron. “They don’t want to build, they want to dismantle.” Barnier’s government the shortest-tenured in modern French history, following the first successful no-confidence vote in France in more than 60 years. Sparking his downfall was his proposed financing bill, which included €60 billion ($98.4 billion) worth of tax hikes and spending cuts aimed at bringing the country’s budget deficit down to 5 per cent next year. Michel Barnier has resigned as France’s prime minister following a no-confidence vote. Credit: Bloomberg Macron must now appoint a new prime minister and task them with either passing a law that extends this year’s budget into the early months of 2025 or pushing a complete budget through parliament by the end of the year to avoid a government shutdown. Macron said the next prime minister would be charged with forming a “government of general interest” with a priority of passing a budget. Addressing voters directly, he said some of his political opponents were not thinking “about you, the voters”, suggesting that their interest was in the next presidential election. “My responsibility requires me to ensure the continuity of the state, the proper functioning of our institutions, the independence of our country, and the protection of all of you.” “Let’s be honest, they think about one thing: the presidential election,” Macron said of the party of his long-term, hard-right National Rally rival Marine Le Pen. He said the rival party’s “cynical” approach had brought “a sense of chaos” to the country. After Macron’s address, Le Pen wrote a “Gentle reminder to President Macron” in a post on X that no-confidence votes are “not anti-Republican, but provided for in our constitution”. National Rally leader Marine Le Pen says Macron will continue to feel the pressure. Credit: AP Le Pen, whose party holds the most seats in the French parliament, stopped short of calling for Macron’s resignation but warned that “the pressure on the president of the republic will get stronger and stronger”. The one thing to never forget is that Macron is hated in France with a vicious passion . The people of France see him as arrogant, elitist and unrelatable. Alain Minc, a political essayist and long-term informal adviser to French presidents, said on Thursday: “Macron is a victim of his own narcissism ... He was in denial of reality.” Barnier will stay on in a caretaker role for now, but Macron is under pressure to quickly name a new prime minister who might offer the country some stability. Candidates include Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and centrist former presidential candidate François Bayrou. Whoever is chosen, few believe a new government will manage to navigate the minefield of a bitterly divided parliament. France could be back in this position again soon enough. Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here . Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. License this article World elections Analysis France Emmanuel Macron Rob Harris is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Connect via email . Most Viewed in World LoadingMink Ventures Grants Stock OptionsGeorgetown ventures out of D.C. for first time to face West Virginia
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