‘Holy s***’: Man daydreaming about Lotto win receives call he’d won $60m
‘Holy s***’: Man daydreaming about Lotto win receives call he’d won $60m
A man received news he’d won $60m while he was in the middle of daydreaming about how life-changing a lottery win would be.
The father from Bribie Island in Queensland’s Moreton Bay region was in bed when he got the incredible call following Thursday’s 2449 Powerball draw.
“No way. It’s after 9pm but this calls for a bottle of champagne!” the man told Lott officials.
“Is that real? I can’t stop laughing. Holy s***! I’ve won $60 million?!”
The only division one winner of Thursday’s draw said he’d been daydreaming when he received the call.
“No joke, I was just drifting off to sleep dreaming about what it would be like to win the lotto – all the things I could do,” he said.
Camera IconA man has become Thursday’s only division one Powerball winner. NewsWire / Sarah Marshall Credit: News Corp Australia
However, the man nearly missed out on the draw entirely, having nearly forgotten to buy a ticket after becoming distracted.
“This is really strange but a few months back, I had a vivid dream that I had gone into a lottery draw with a mate, and that our entry had won $40 million,” he said.
“Ever since then, our friend has bought a ticket when the draw is over $40 million.
“I’ve been playing these numbers for 10 or 15 years. Funnily enough, I don’t always play them, sometimes I switch it up but luckily, I used them tonight!
He said the money will allow him to “help a lot of people”.
“I’ve got kids that I can help and plenty of friends doing it tough,” he said.
“My mum also used to have this vintage car that she loved to bits. She had to sell it one day and she cried all the way home.
Camera IconThe man had been daydreaming about winning when he received the life-changing call. NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers Credit: News Corp Australia
“I think I’m going to keep the tradition going by buying the same model again. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do!
“What an exciting night! How are we going to sleep now? We might call one of our children tonight and ask what colour chevy they want.
“Thank you so much.”
The winning ticket was purchased on The Lott app, with winning numbers 20, 23, 34, 19, 24, 31, and 10.
The Powerball number was 14.
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Wall Street analysts cheer greater clarity around MicroStrategy’s bitcoin acquisition methods
Wall Street analysts cheer greater clarity around MicroStrategy’s bitcoin acquisition methods
Bitcoin treasury pioneer MicroStrategy’ s upbeat financial results Wednesday night has invigorated Wall Street about the direction of its unique crypto bet. The fourth quarter was “one for the record books,” said Canaccord Genuity’s Joseph Vafi. The company, which will now be known as Strategy, announced its name and logo change along with the results. During the quarter, it made its largest-ever increase in bitcoin holdings, adding 195,250 bitcoins. The company reached a BTC yield of 48% in the fourth quarter, compared with 5.1% in the third quarter. It also got ahead of schedule on its three-year plan to raise $42 billion – $21 billion in equity and $21 billion in fixed income – and buy an equivalent amount in bitcoin. In the fourth quarter, it issued $16.7 billion in equity – about 80% of the $21 billion target – and $3.6 billion in fixed income securities. Management said that as a result, the company will emphasize fixed income issuance this year. “While some may see the company’s BTC acquisition strategy as risky, we see an emerging and rational cadence to acquisition activity here: exploiting periods of very high demand with heightened acquisition activity, while still consistently being buyers during periods of more normalized demand,” Vafi said. The company also introduced two new metrics to gauge its ability to acquire bitcoin in an accretive manner: BTC Gain, which is the number of bitcoins the company has at the beginning of a ******* multiplied by the BTC yield for the *******; and BTC $Gain, which takes the BTC Gain metric and translates its value into dollars based on the market price of bitcoin as 4 p.m. ET on the last day of the quarter. Strategy guided to $10 billion of BTC $Gain for 2025, compared with $13 billion last year. “Given the significant number of BTCs that MSTR holds, the BTC gain of $10bn is nominally very large,” said Mizuho’s Dan Dolev, who has an outperform rating on the stock. “This is evidence of MSTR’s first mover advantage and scale relative to other companies that may attempt to deploy similar BTC strategies.” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Brett Knoblauch noted the company would need to raise about $19 billion at a premium of 110%, which he said is doable. “With our view that 2025 will be a good year for bitcoin (both seasonality and regulatory/political tailwinds), we believe this is feasible,” he said. “If we treat BTC $Gain as earnings, MSTR would currently be trading at less than 10x earnings, which we argue is what a lot of the Street is missing about MSTR’s capital markets flywheel.” Knoblauch reiterating his overweight rating on the stock and raised his price target to $619 from $613. Cannacord’s Vafi maintained his buy rating but lowered his price target to $409 from $510. —CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed reporting.
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What Wall Street is looking for
What Wall Street is looking for
Fourth-quarter results from Amazon , due Thursday after the bell, are on traders’ radar as Wall Street awaits updates on the tech giant’s cloud and retail businesses. The e-commerce giant has been undergoing a series of cost-cutting initiatives since late 2022 while establishing itself as an artificial intelligence play. Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud unit, will also be in focus, particularly after Alphabet reported disappointing cloud revenue earlier this week. In addition, analysts are looking for any insights from Amazon as to what President Donald Trump ‘s tariff threats will mean for its businesses. Tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been placed on pause for one month, while a 10% duty remains on goods from China. Analysts surveyed by LSEG forecast Amazon to report earnings of $1.49 per share on $187.30 billion in revenue. In the third quarter, the company surpassed estimates for earnings and revenue , powered by growth in its cloud computing and advertising segments. Shares of Amazon have gained more than 8% in 2025, outpacing the S & P 500 ‘s 3.2% rise. Analysts are largely bullish on the e-commerce giant’s fourth-quarter earnings, which historically have been boosted by the holiday shopping *******. The majority of analysts covering the stock hold a buy or strong buy rating on shares, and the $250.66 price target implies 5% potential upside from current levels, per LSEG. AMZN YTD mountain Amazon shares in 2025 Analysts from Bank of America and Citi reiterated their buy ratings on Amazon ahead of its earnings release. They expect upside from strong holiday sales, as well as growth in AWS. Amazon is currently trading at historically expensive levels. However, “we think Amazon’s strong relative profit growth and strong AI positioning via AWS should support the stock’s multiple,” Bank of America analyst Justin Post wrote in a research note on Tuesday. He forecasts AWS revenue to have grown by 19% to 20%, citing a growing contribution from artificial intelligence. Post maintained his $255 price target on the stock, which suggests nearly 8% upside from Wednesday’s close. However, the analyst said he recently lowered his revenue estimate for the first quarter due to foreign exchange headwinds. Citi analyst Ronald Josey is also optimistic on Amazon’s holiday e-commerce performance and its cloud demand. He thinks the company can post a beat in the fourth quarter. “Given solid holiday sales, a healthy online advertising environment, and improving cloud demand, we believe results are likely to come in better than consensus expectations,” Josey said in a report to clients on Monday. He added, “Amazon is one of our top picks across the internet sector and with margins expanding, retail conversion improving, and demand for AWS ramping (despite FX headwinds, which we’ve adjusted for).” Trump’s tariffs on China may not necessarily be a headwind, Josey added. The analyst thinks the removal of the de minimis trade exemption on goods from China — which exempts packages valued less than $800 from import fees — could actually be a positive tailwind by putting outsized pressure on ******** e-commerce competitor Temu. Josey reiterated his $275 price target on the stock, implying 16% upside from Wednesday’s close. Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney also predicted “a beat and bracket quarter” from Amazon’s earnings announcement. He estimates North American retail revenue to have grown 8% year-over-year and AWS revenue to have surged 19%. “Even with greater FX headwinds, we think AMZN’s Q1 guide can bracket the Street overall,” Mahaney wrote in a research report on Sunday. For 2025, Mahaney is bullish on Amazon Pharmacy growth. The company has “aggressively” expanded its prescription delivery service, and interest around the segment has been growing, he noted. Prescriptions present a roughly $175 billion market opportunity for Amazon, the analyst said. —CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
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The perfect boiled egg takes more than half an hour to cook
The perfect boiled egg takes more than half an hour to cook
How do you cook your eggs?
The Daniel Heighton Food Collection/Alamy
Cooking a perfect boiled egg takes at least half an hour, physicists have claimed, as they say the best method for a tasty and nutritious breakfast involves switching repeatedly between pans of different temperatures.
As anyone who has ever struggled to get an egg to their liking will know, an even boil is difficult because the yolk and white cook at different temperatures. Cooking at a vigorous boil works for the white, which requires temperatures of 85°C (185°F) for optimum consistency, but can also result in a hard yolk, which only needs 65°C (149°F). Chefs have found immersing the egg in a water bath at a steady temperature of between 60°C and 70°C (140°F and 158°F) can lead to better cooked yolks, but this sous vide method also risks an undercooked white.
Now, Ernesto Di Maio at the University of Naples, Italy, and his colleagues have found a better way to evenly boil an egg, by swapping it between boiling water and 30°C (86°F) water every two minutes for eight cycles, taking a total of 32 minutes.
“Many people have tasted [the egg cooked in this way], and they were amazed by the taste and the texture,” says Di Maio. “Yes, it takes more time than usual cooking, but I think if you love someone, you should invest your time to do something properly. This is how to properly do an egg.”
To develop this method, Maio and his team first created a model of how an egg cooks by calculating the way energy spreads from the shell to the centre over time, using two equations to describe this process. By solving these equations, they found that the best way to evenly cook it would be to alternate between two different temperatures, which allows the two parts to cook separately.
The many ways to cook an egg
Pellegrino Musto and Ernesto Di Maio
After cooking eggs in this way, the team studied them using spectrometry and an MRI-like scanner. The researchers found that proteins in the egg yolk were less denatured and in the white they were more denatured, in each case meaning that part was better cooked, than in soft-boiled or sous vide eggs. They then asked people to try the eggs cooked with their method, and found that the egg white was slightly sweeter and the yolk was less sweet than in eggs cooked in other ways. They also found the white’s texture was similar to a soft-boiled egg, while the yolk was more like a sous vide egg.
The periodic egg also contained a higher amount of nutrients, such as antioxidants called polyphenols, compared with soft-boiled or sous vide eggs, though Di Maio and his team don’t know why.
“It’s fun and it’s good for a laugh,” says Peter Barham at the University of Bristol, ***. “Spending 30 minutes taking an egg in and out two different temperatures of water just to get it to cook slightly better than you would by others means where you can leave it alone is, shall we say, not very practical.”
Cooking food using alternately hot and cold environments isn’t a new idea, says Hervé This at AgroParisTech in France. “It is not original, as it was proposed about one century ago for meat.” It is also important to compare the eggs cooked in this way to eggs cooked sous vide at different temperatures, as this can dramatically change the cooked egg, he says.
Article amended on 6 February 2025
We have corrected the name of the journal
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Elon Musk barred from accessing US Treasury payments data – Financial Times
Elon Musk barred from accessing US Treasury payments data – Financial Times
Elon Musk barred from accessing US Treasury payments data Financial TimesMusk associates sought to use critical Treasury payment system to shut down USAID spending, emails show CNNTrump admin agrees to limit Musk’s DOGE access to Treasury data amid privacy lawsuit AxiosHouse Democrats push security probe of Elon Musk’s team ReutersTreasury Sought to Freeze Foreign Aid Payments, Emails Show The New York Times
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London Underground mutant mosquitoes have surprisingly ancient origins
London Underground mutant mosquitoes have surprisingly ancient origins
Culex pipiens f. molestus is a form of mosquito found in cities all over the world
blickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo
A form of mosquito associated with the London Underground evolved to live in human environments long before subterranean railways sprung up in the 19th century.
Culex pipiens f. molestus is found in cities all over the world, but it became widely known as the London Underground mosquito after the second world war, when it was the scourge of Londoners sheltering in tube stations during the Blitz.
It is closely related to a bird-biting form of the same species known as Culex pipiens f. pipiens, and biologists thought the molestus form had evolved in urban environments within the past few centuries.
To learn more about its origins, Lindy McBride at Princeton University and her colleagues analysed the DNA of 790 mosquitoes from 44 countries around the world, including the molestus and pipiens forms as well as some closely related species.
The results suggest that, rather than arising in London tube tunnels, the molestus mosquito probably evolved in the Middle East thousands of years ago. There are three main lines of evidence for this.
First, the molestus form is genetically closer to pipiens populations from the Mediterranean basin than it is to pipiens populations in northern Europe. They are like close cousins to these Mediterranean pipiens mosquitoes, says McBride, suggesting that one arose from the other.
Also, molestus mosquitoes from the eastern Mediterranean region are genetically more variable than molestus in underground habitats from northern Europe. “This suggests that they have been present in the eastern Mediterranean for a significantly longer ******* of time,” says McBride.
Finally, the pipiens form doesn’t exist in the Middle East. This makes it much easier to imagine how the ancestors of the molestus mosquitoes could have colonised the region and evolved to bite humans in isolation, without interbreeding with the bird-biting pipiens insects, says McBride.
Based on the team’s analysis of genetic mutations, it is almost certain that the molestus mosquitoes are far more ancient than previously thought, says McBride. “Our calculations tell us that it must have been at least 1000 years ago and more likely 2000 to 10,000 years ago [that they evolved]. This lines up perfectly with the development of agriculture in the Middle East.”
“Instead of evolving from scratch in urban underground spaces, molestus was already primed for city life thanks to much older adaptations,” she says. “Once established in cities, it has likely evolved further.”
The crowded environments of cities may lead to new hybrids between the bird-biting and human-biting forms, which would have public health implications, says McBride. “Even if hybridisation is rare, these mosquitoes may show intermediate behaviour and increased ability to transmit West Nile [virus] from birds to humans.”
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Spain’s Hermoso was ‘overwhelmed’ after World Cup kiss, court hears
Spain’s Hermoso was ‘overwhelmed’ after World Cup kiss, court hears
EPA
Spanish football players Alexia Putellas and Irene Paredes testified in court on Thursday
Teammates of Spanish footballer Jenni Hermoso have given testimony in support of her account of feeling overwhelmed after being allegedly forcibly kissed by Spain’s former football chief Luis Rubiales.
Her teammates Irene Paredes, Laia Codina, and Alexia Putellas appeared at the trial of Mr Rubiales at National Court in Madrid in on Thursday, where he is accused of ******* assault and coercion.
Ms Putellas said Ms Hermosa had felt “overwhelmed” after the incident, while Ms Codina said she was “sad” and “not enjoying herself”.
Mr Rubiales kissed Ms Hermoso on the lips during the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup medal ceremony in Australia, triggering protests and calls for his resignation. He denies any wrongdoing.
Jenni Hermoso told the court on Monday that she had never given permission to be kissed at the World Cup medal ceremony and felt “disrespected” as a woman.
Ms Putellas said she thought at the time that the incident had been something “fortuitous” and a “misunderstanding” but that later Ms Hermoso showed her a video and said she did not know how it occurred to Mr Rubiales to kiss her, according to local Spanish media.
The court heard from Ms Paredes that while on the bus to Sydney airport after the World Cup final, she told her teammates to stop making jokes about the incident, saying it was “serious”.
Ms Putellas said that Ms Hermoso was “overwhelmed” on the plane back to Spain.
“She started crying from exhaustion,” the Barcelona player added.
The 31-year-old said Ms Hermoso was asked to speak to Mr Rubiales on the plane and told her that she should “come out” and “deny that there was no consent” in the kiss.
“She was angry and she said that there was no need for him to explain the facts to her because she had experienced it, that she wasn’t going to do that,” Ms Putellas said.
Ms Codina told the trial that during the team celebration trip to the Spanish island of Ibiza, Ms Hermoso was “sad, she was not enjoying herself, far from it” even though it “should have been the best moment” of her life.
Hermoso ‘told teammate Rubiales asked her to lie about kiss’
Three colleagues of Mr Rubiales are also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion: Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the federation’s former head of marketing, and former sporting director, Albert Luque. They all deny the charges.
On Wednesday, the court heard that Mr Vilda spoke to Rafael Hermoso – brother of Jenni Hermoso – on the flight back to Spain, telling him that Mr Rubiales feared for his position, according to local Spanish media.
Mr Vilda asked him to speak to his sister about her making a video with Ms Rubiales that would downplay the kiss.
The coach warned that his sister could face “professional and personal consequences” if she did not cooperate, Rafael Hermoso said.
Speaking in court on Monday, Ms Hermoso said she and the then-president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation hugged and celebrated at the football event, saying that he then grabbed her “by the ears and kiss[ed] me on the mouth”.
“I didn’t hear or understand anything,” she said, adding that “a kiss on the lips is only given when I decide so”.
The footballer said she felt “completely abandoned by the federation”.
Prosecutors are calling for Mr Rubiales to receive a one-year prison sentence for ******* assault for the kiss. They are also calling for him to be given a sentence of a year-and-a-half for coercion, for allegedly trying to pressure Ms Hermoso into saying publicly that the kiss was consensual. Rubiales denies the charges.
The trial continues.
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Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language
Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language
Humpback whales in the South Pacific
Tony Wu/Nature Picture Library/Alamy
Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our sentences do, it hints that whales may learn their songs in a similar way to how human infants start to understand language.
Only male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing, and the behaviour is thought to be important for attracting mates. The songs are constantly evolving, with new elements appearing and spreading through the population until the old song is completely replaced with a new one.
“We think it’s a little bit like a standardised test, where everybody’s got to do the same task but you can make changes and embellishments to show that you’re better at the task than everybody else,” says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.
Instead of trying to find meaning in the songs, Allen and her colleagues were looking for innate structural patterns that may be similar to those seen in human language. They analysed eight years of whale songs recorded around New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.
The researchers started by by creating alphanumeric codes to represent every song from every recording, including around 150 unique sounds in total. “Basically it’s a different grouping of sounds, so one year they might do grunt grunt squeak, and so we’ll have AAB, and then another year they might have moan squeak grunt, and so that would be CBA,” says Allen.
Once all the songs had been encoded, a team of linguists had to figure out how best to analyse so much data. The breakthrough came when the researchers decided to use an analysis technique that applies to how infants discover words, called transitional probability.
“Speech is continuous and there are no pauses between words, so infants have to discover word boundaries,” says Inbal Arnon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “To do this, they use low-level statistical information: specifically, sounds are more likely to occur together if they are part of the same word. Infants use these dips in the probability that one sound follows another to discover word boundaries.”
For example, in the phrase “pretty flowers”, a child intuitively recognises that the syllables “pre” and “tty” are more likely to go together than “tty” and “flow”. “If whale song has a similar statistical structure, these cues should be useful for segmenting it as well,” says Arnon.
Using the alphanumeric versions of the whale songs, the team calculated the transitional probabilities between consecutive sound elements, making a cut when the next sound element was surprising given the previous one.
“Those cuts divide the song into segmented sub-sequences,” says Arnon. “We then looked at their distribution and found, amazingly, that they follow the same distribution found across all human languages.”
In this pattern, called a Zipfian distribution, the prevalence of less common words drops off in a predictable way. The other striking discovery is that the most common whale sounds tend to be short, just as the most common human words are – a rule known Zipf’s law of abbreviation.
Nick Enfield at the University of Sydney, who wasn’t involved in the study, says it is a novel way of analysing whale song. “What it means is that if you analyse War and Peace, the most frequent word will be twice as frequent as the next and so on – and the researchers have identified a similar pattern in whale songs,” he says.
Team member Simon Kirby at the University of Edinburgh, ***, says he didn’t think the method would work. “I’ll never forget the moment that graph appeared, looking just like the one we know so well from human language,” he says. “This made us realise that we’d uncovered a deep commonality between these two species, separated by tens of millions of years of evolution.”
However, the researchers emphasise that this statistical pattern doesn’t lead to the conclusion that whale song is a language that conveys meaning as we would understand it. They suggest that a possible reason for the commonality is that both whale song and human language are learned culturally.
“The physical distribution of words or sounds in language is a really fascinating feature, but there’s a million other things about language that are just entirely different from whale song,” says Enfield.
In a separate study published this week, Mason Youngblood at Stony Brook University in New York found that other marine mammals may also have structural similarities to human language in their communication.
Menzerath’s law, which predicts that sentences with more words should be composed of shorter words, was present in 11 out of 16 cetacean species studied. Zipf’s law of abbreviation was found in two out of five species where available data made it possible to detect.
“Taken together, our studies suggest that humpback whale song has evolved to be more efficient and easier to learn, and that these features can be found at the level of notes within phrases, and phrases within songs,” says Youngblood.
“Importantly, the evolution of these songs is both biological and cultural. Some features, like Menzerath’s law, may emerge through the biological evolution of the vocal apparatus, whereas other features, like Zipf’s rank-frequency law [the Zipfian distribution], may require the cultural transmission of songs between individuals,” he says.
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Judge halts Trump’s government worker buyout plan: US media
Judge halts Trump’s government worker buyout plan: US media
A federal judge has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s plan to offer a resignation package to federal employees.
The White House had said that tens of thousands of US government workers had accepted the offer to resign in exchange for pay through 30 September – though workers expressed confusion about the terms of the deal.
Federal Judge George O’Toole Jr said the plan would be paused until a hearing on Monday when he could hear the merits of a lawsuit filed by federal employeee unions who questioned the plan’s legality, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
The order came hours before Thursday’s 23:59 ET (04:59 GMT) deadline for federal workers to accept the deal.
A lawyer for the Justice Department said the Office of Personnel Management would notify federal employees that the deadline had been paused, CBS reported.
The White House, which previously said it hoped for as many as 200,000 people to accept its offer, told US media they expected a spike in participation just ahead of the deadline.
The resignation scheme’s announcement – delivered in the form of a late-night email with the subject line “Fork in the Road” – is part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of the federal bureaucracy and cut spending.
An analysis of the federal workforce by the non-profit Partnership for Public Service found that the annual attrition rate among federal employees is about 6%, suggesting that some workers may have been intended to leave government.
The worker union American Federation of Government Employees filed the lawsuit against the White House’s Office of Personnel Management, arguing it had violated the law as it did not have the funds to back the deal and have given conflicting guidance about its terms.
AFGE had previously warned its members “NOT to resign or respond” to the White House’s resignation package.
The union had said in an email to members that the offer was part of an “effort to dismantle the civil service and replace the skilled, professional workforce with unqualified political appointees and for-profit contractors”.
The union noted that Congress has not passed a budget past 14 March, meaning it was unclear whether agencies could pay workers through September.
“There is not yet any evidence the administration can or will uphold its end of the bargain, that Congress will go along with this unilateral massive restructuring, or that appropriated funds can be used this way, among other issues that have been raised,” AFGE said in the message.
On Tuesday, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became the first national security department to extend the offer to its staff, telling its entire workforce they could quit and receive about eight months of pay and benefits.
Former US intelligence officials and some lawmakers have raised concerns that this offer could undermine US national security priorities.
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A Simple UI Change in ****** Ops 6 Would Make Zombies More Immersive and Improve Gameplay Experience
A Simple UI Change in ****** Ops 6 Would Make Zombies More Immersive and Improve Gameplay Experience
Call of Duty ****** Ops 6 has a major problem with its user interface stylization, and appears quite a bit cluttered at times. This is quite a common complaint, and players have been clamoring for an updated UI for quite some time now.
Until Treyarch and Activision officially release any sort of updates to the HUD though, this problem is likely to persist, and fans will be forced to take up creative liberty and design their own interfaces – something which the community has already been up to.
Fan manages to create a better HUD for Call of Duty ****** Ops 6
A fan has managed to create a better HUD for ****** Ops 6 | Image Credit: Activision
A recent Reddit post on the r/CODZombies subreddit has gained traction, addressing Treyarch and Activision Blizzard’s inadequacy in tackling one of the most important aspects of a game – its HUD.
****** Ops 6 has an incredibly messy UI, which does a poor job of presenting information to players, often causing sensory overload with the bombardment of uncategorized information directed toward the player.
As such, this particular HUD brings with it the following improvements:
Colored Squad member names for easier visibility.
The Score Feed has been moved to an off-center position for a look that is more akin to the classic CoD titles.
For the Scoreboard, the GobbleGum Pack Widget has been suggested – which displays the number of Gums left.
The countdown timer has been shifted to the top left.
Player stats are now centered.
A way to tweak the Score Feed – and have it display either minimal or an extended amount of information (full vs only numbers).
A toggle to disable Quest Markers.
Comment byu/Negative-Nerve1626 from discussion inCODZombies
Comment byu/Negative-Nerve1626 from discussion inCODZombies
The user has clearly put in a lot of effort into the markup, which makes Treyarch’s current implementation look far worse. Treyarch could learn a thing or two from this user, to which many have agreed upon.
While impressive, there still is room for improvement | Image Credit: Activision
While a massive improvement, there is still some room for improvement. For starters, the UI could have a toggle for more advanced customization, allowing for things such as the removal of the GobbleGum HUD and adding in more shortcuts to commonly used moves.
Comment byu/Negative-Nerve1626 from discussion inCODZombies
Another area the modified HUD could perhaps improve upon would be to group notifications separately – and have everything displayed in grouped columns instead.
Comment byu/Negative-Nerve1626 from discussion inCODZombies
Either way, Treyarch would do well to implement these changes in some form or the other.
Call of Duty ****** Ops 6 has a lot more problems that need addressing
Call of Duty is facing a crisis | Image Credit: Activision
Of course, a cluttered HUD is the least of Call of Duty’s problems right now. From low player counts to an abundance of cheaters, the game is at its lowest right now, and things do not look to get better anytime soon.
Call of Duty has hit a serious point of stagnation, and many of its players have left the game for other titles, or have grown to develop a distaste for Activision’s policies. The lack of any concrete effort from the publisher does not help make things easier either.
The cheater problem is also of quite grave importance here, and Treyarch/Activision’s updates to their anti-cheat, Ricochet, has done nothing to help in this regard.
It is hoped that Activision manages to get their bearings together soon, and find a way to make Call of Duty a better series going forward.
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Egypt lobbies against Trump plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians as Israel makes preparations – The Associated Press
Egypt lobbies against Trump plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians as Israel makes preparations – The Associated Press
Egypt lobbies against Trump plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians as Israel makes preparations The Associated PressTrump’s Plan for Gaza Gives No Immediate Answers About the Hostages or the War The New York TimesThe End of ‘Palestine’ Tablet Magazine
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Elder Scrolls co-creator recalls the year-long nightmare of making Daggerfalls iconic box art
Elder Scrolls co-creator recalls the year-long nightmare of making Daggerfalls iconic box art
The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall’s awesome box art is one of gaming’s best, but bringing it to life was a massive hassle for Bethesda.
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Man fined for loudspeaker call at French station
Man fined for loudspeaker call at French station
A man says he was fined €200 (£166) for making a call on loudspeaker at a train station in France.
The man, named only as David, told French broadcaster BFM TV he was on a call with his sister at Nantes station on Sunday when an employee from SNCF, the French railway company, approached him.
David said he was told that he would be fined €150 if he did not turn off the loudspeaker – a fine which he claims was later increased to €200 because he did not pay it on the spot. He has since hired a lawyer to dispute the penalty.
SNFC has not yet responded to a BBC News request for comment.
The state-owned train company confirmed the fine to French outlet La Parisien, but disputed some details of the passenger’s account.
David, reported to be 54 years old, said he initially hung up the phone when he was told about the fine, thinking it was a joke, BFM TV reported.
SNCF described an escalating interaction between the passenger and its staff member before the fine was issued.
According to Ouest-France, the incident happened on Sunday.
While there is no national law in France prohibiting the use of mobile phones on loudspeaker in public places, there are noise control regulations.
According to the French Transport Code, those who use “sound devices or instruments” or “disturb the peace of others by noise” in areas used for public transport could face a fine.
Opinion surveys suggest speaking loudly in a public place is among the behaviours deemed most unacceptable when it comes to phone calls.
In a survey of 2,005 adults in Great Britain last year, pollster YouGov found 86% felt the use of speakerphone in a shared environment was unacceptable, while 88% felt the same for speaking loudly.
With such strong feelings, countries around the world have different approaches to policing the issue.
Some train operators in the *** offer “quiet coaches” or “quiet zones” – carriages where passengers are encouraged to keep the noise level down. For example, London North Eastern Railway asks passengers travelling in such coaches to make sure music they are listening to cannot be heard through their headphones and to move if they want to make or receive a call.
Italian train operator Trenitalia offers a similar service on the Frecciarossa train. Passengers “who wish to travel in complete relaxation and away from noise pollution from cell phones” can travel in a “silent area” in its business carriage.
In Japan, where there are strict cultural norms around public behaviour, talking on the phone while on a train is considered impolite and it is strongly discouraged.
Guidelines for train etiquette issued under the website for the West Japan Railway Company asks passengers to not speak loudly on the train and set their phones on silent mode, as well as refrain from making and accepting calls while on the train.
“Speaking loudly inside trains is an annoyance to nearby passengers,” it says.
Meanwhile, the Busan Transportation Corporation located in the city of Busan in South Korea, advises passengers to put their phone on vibration mode and “have conversations quietly” under a rail etiquette guide posted on its website.
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Amazon Prime Members Get These Free Games In February
Amazon Prime Members Get These Free Games In February
Amazon has revealed the free PC games coming to Prime Gaming in February, and the lineup includes games like Wolfenstein: Youngblood, BioShock Infinite Complete Edition, Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut, and many more.
The first set of freebies is available now, including BioShock Infinite Complete Edition, Surf World Series, AK-xolotl: Together, Sands of Auro, and The Talos Principle. More games will be added in batches debuting on February 13, February 20, and then concluding for the month on February 27.
As a reminder, all of the free games that you claim through Prime Gaming are yours to keep forever, even if your subscription expires. If you aren’t a member, you can sign up for Amazon Prime for as little as one month to take advantage of the subscription and the freebies offered through it.
Prime Gaming free games for February 2025
Available now
BioShock Infinite Complete Edition
Surf World Weries
AK-xolotl: Together
Sands of Aura
The Talos Principle: Gold Edition
February 13
Stunt Kite Party
The Smurfs 2 – The Prisoner of the Green Stone
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Lysfanga: The Time Swift Warrior
Dark Sky
Free is a nice price.
February 20
Wolfenstein: Youngblood
El Hijo – A Wild West Tale
Colt Canyon
Republic of Jungle
Royal Romances: Cursed Hearts Collector’s Edition
February 27
Night Reverie
Sine Mora EX
Redemption Reapoers
Yes, Your Grace
Prime subscribers will also be able to the following games in February via the Prime Gaming Luna channel:
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
Fallout New Vegas: Ultimate Edition
Fortnite
Lego Fortnite
Rocket Racing
Fortnite Festival
Trackmania
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England to play Afghanistan despite boycott calls
England to play Afghanistan despite boycott calls
England’s Champions Trophy match against Afghanistan will go ahead, despite calls for a boycott.
A cross-party letter, signed by nearly 200 *** politicians, was sent to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) asking for England to refuse to play in response to the Taliban’s human rights record.
Female participation in sport in Afghanistan has effectively been outlawed since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
The matter was discussed at an ECB board meeting on Thursday, after which the governing body confirmed the match in Lahore on 26 February will take place as scheduled.
In a statement, the ECB said the situation in Afghanistan “is nothing short of gender apartheid”, adding a co-ordinated international response by the cricketing community is the appropriate way forward.
“At a cricketing level, when women’s and girls’ cricket is growing rapidly around the world, it is heartbreaking that those growing up in Afghanistan are denied this opportunity, but the appalling oppression of women and girls by the Taliban goes so much further,” it read.
It added the ECB donated £100,000 to the Global Refugee Cricket Fund to help female cricketers in exile, and it will continue to press the ICC to take action, including supporting the women and girls of Afghanistan who want to play cricket.
England will also play Australia and South Africa in the Champions Trophy, which takes place in Pakistan and Dubai from 19 February.
England have played Afghanistan twice – at the 2022 T20 World Cup and the 2023 50-over World Cup – since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
Calls for a boycott of this fixture were led by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, who said England’s players should use their “power” to “make a difference”.
Her fellow Labour MP and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the game should go ahead, adding that boycotts were counter-productive.
When asked last month about the possibility of the players leading a boycott, similar to England’s refusal to play in Zimbabwe during the 2003 World Cup, captain Jos Buttler said: “I don’t think a boycott is the way to go about it.”
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The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies Expansion Adds Tattoo Artist Career And Ceramic Incense Burners
The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies Expansion Adds Tattoo Artist Career And Ceramic Incense Burners
As part of The Sims’ 25th anniversary celebrations, Maxis has announced the next expansion pack coming to The Sims 4, Businesses & Hobbies. After subtly teasing the upcoming release throughout its 25-hour livestream, the studio finally revealed an official trailer and release date earlier this morning. The expansion is currently set to release on March 6.
In a move that has been somewhat contentious with Sims fans–just check the video’s comments–Businesses & Hobbies seems to vastly expand and improve 2015’s Get to Work expansion, as well as incorporate elements of The Sims 2’s beloved Open for Business expansion into it. The expansion pack adds two new hobbies, tattooing and pottery-making, as well as the ability to completely own and manage various businesses and services. Though the trailer highlighted two businesses in particular–Branche Tattoo studio and a one-man pottery business–it looks as though there will be numerous goods and services sims can offer for a profit.
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Now Playing: The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies Expansion Pack | Official Reveal Trailer
While the pottery-making skill seems relatively straightforward and similar to skills such as painting, baking, and knitting, the tattooing skill allows players a great deal of artistic freedom thanks to its new Paint Mode. Once in Paint Mode, players can draw, place stencils, and fine-tune colors and patterns as they imbue their sims with some sick ink.
In addition to running a tattoo parlor and pottery studio, the trailer confirmed that sims will be able to manage their own gym, own a candy shop, and operate an art gallery. The video also highlighted sims’ ability to teach classes for profit, turning high-skill levels into cold, hard cash. Though a comprehensive list of businesses sims can run has yet to be announced, the variety of small business icons located in the Edit Small Business Menu seem to indicate they will be able to manage arcades, casinos, waterparks, animal shelters, bakeries, laundromats, beauty parlors, and more.
One of the most exciting aspects of Businesses & Hobbies take on running a business is that your sims will be able to do so from home. Rather than having to own a separate community lot, players will now get the option to designate certain areas of their home as residential, public, or employee-only. The trailer also makes it seem as though sims will be able to pass on both their knowledge and businesses to their offspring, creating a family trade.
A screenshot of Businesses & Hobbies Edit Small Businesses menu. Players are able to pick a logo, adjust prices, and select their target customers.
Gallery
Businesses & Hobbies marks the 18th full-size expansion for the game, which is poised to remain the series’ core title for the foreseeable future. Though Maxis is currently working on a new iteration of The Sims, Project Rene, the game is being pitched as an online, multiplayer experience–a statement that sounds eerily familiar and has us skeptical.
In other Sims news, Maxis made news last month when it finally released Legacy Collections of both The Sims 1 and The Sims 2, the former of which, pardon my language, kicked my ****. However, players have reported a slew of frustrating bugs that has made playing the nostalgia-inducing titles a bit frustrating.
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How to Complete Reckoning in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (Quest Guide)
How to Complete Reckoning in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (Quest Guide)
Warning: This guide contains endgame spoilers. Do not read on if you’re not at the ‘Reckoning’ mission that unfolds towards the very end of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
When you arrive at ‘Reckoning’, you’re incredibly close to finishing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, but you’ve got a massive hurdle to overcome. This is one of the toughest missions in the entire game, and you’ll be pulling your hair out without this quest guide. On this page, I’ll detail in full how to complete Reckoning in Kingdom Come.
Read on to conquer this challenging quest once and for all.
Where to Find Sam in Reckoning
Here’s a handy map showing you where to find everything you need to beat Reckoning in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2:
With this Reckoning map, you’re good as gold
When the mission starts, you’ll be at the north of the village after scaling down the walls of Suchdol Fortress. From there, you’ll want to skirt across the road into the bushes and foliage alongside the makeshift walls of Suchdol village.
This mission is nails because of the inherent threat – there are Praguers everywhere and they’re out for your blood. The entire zone is protected by a stop-on-sight rule, and you’re on your own. If you get into a fight, it’s mission over, and you can’t leave until you’ve ticked a few boxes.
First, you’ll want to perform a couple of steps that aren’t indicated by quest markers or tips. Head to the orange circle on the map, located just outside the walls of the village. Here, you’ll find two sets of two guards speaking in hushed towns. Get close enough to eavesdrop and you’ll learn two key points:
The password to the gate
The location of a disguise
If you want, you can head straight to the blue circle and open the unlocked box to acquire your disguise, with which you’re able to walk around the village relatively unchallenged.
Now, let’s find Sam in Reckoning.
As you’ve got the disguise, you can waltz straight through to the purple circle, heading up a ladder and into a barn to trigger a cutscene and find Sam.
If you opt to not use a disguise, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got plenty of Saviour Schnapps potions to save regularly.
How to Get von Aulitz in Reckoning
It’s here that you’ll learn that von Aulitz is still alive, leaving it up to you to deal with him and secure one of the game’s exclusive achievements. This sequence is incredibly tough if you haven’t picked up your disguise, but if you have it, you’ll need to walk to the red circle on the map to find von Aulitz’s quarters.
If you’re prompted for the password at the gate, you’ll have it – provided you eavesdropped on the earlier conversation. If not, you’ll need to skirt around the guards and find a back entrance, throwing rocks to lure guards away from the stop-and-search zone.
The door to von Aulitz’s quarters is locked with a Very Hard lock, but the guard sitting by the fire is alone and has the key in his pocket. Once you’ve killed him, you’ll need to hide his body in a nearby room, or pickpocket him and get away without any bloodshed.
Enter the building to deal with von Aulitz.
Where is the Horse in Reckoning?
It’s time to get the hell out of dodge – or Suchdol, in this case.
The horses are kept in the green circle on the map above, and it’s now a case of just walking over to them, picking one, and high-tailing it out of the village. It’s up to you if you want to take Samuel with you – I will be transparent and say that I didn’t take him, so I can’t say for sure what happens if you leave him behind.
Perhaps you’ll find that out for yourself.
That’s everything you need to know how to complete Reckoning in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, the penultimate quest that wraps things up quite nicely.
For more Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 content, find out my breakdown of the game’s post-launch roadmap.
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In Greenland, the Ice Doesn’t Just Flow, It Quivers and Quakes
In Greenland, the Ice Doesn’t Just Flow, It Quivers and Quakes
When Andreas Fichtner unspooled a fiber-optic cable into a deep hole in Greenland’s ice, he wasn’t expecting to discover a whole new way that glaciers move. Even when the cable started sending back data, his first reaction was skeptical.
“Rubbish,” Dr. Fichtner, a professor of seismology and wave physics at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, remembers thinking. “Just some electronic noise.”
This was August 2022. The field season in Greenland was almost over. The cold, the altitude, the long hours — all of it was wearing on Dr. Fichtner and his fellow researchers. But they’d been saving one of their cables for one last experiment, one that would let them measure tiny movements deep within the vast river of ice as it flowed toward the sea.
What they found raises questions about scientists’ assumptions about how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are moving and adding to sea levels worldwide.
That last cable picked up cascades of tiny “ice quakes,” some of them reverberating hundreds of feet, Dr. Fichtner and his colleagues reported on Thursday in the journal Science.
These quakes seemed to start near impurities in the ice that were deposited by volcanic eruptions, Dr. Fichtner said. Where these particles sit, the ice is weaker, more prone to cracking. Along these cracks, the ice sticks and slips and quivers as it moves, creating tiny seismic disturbances.
This isn’t what scientists usually imagine is going on inside the deep piles of ice that cover Earth’s polar regions. Typically, they think of this ice as flowing like syrup: slowly, smoothly, fluidly.
But if the ice were really moving like a uniform mass of honey, then Dr. Fichtner’s cable would have picked up “complete silence,” he said. Instead, it recorded these “really, really curious events,” he said. “That was the surprise here.”
By sending laser pulses through fiber-optic cable and measuring how they scatter, scientists can reconstruct fine movements along the cable’s entire length. This has proved useful for monitoring seismic activity, deep-sea currents, glacial ice and more.
In Greenland, Dr. Fichtner and a colleague lowered a cable by hand nearly a mile down a borehole, one that other scientists had drilled to extract an ice core. There the cable lay for 14 hours, picking up vibrations.
If winding and unwinding a cable doesn’t sound especially challenging, let Dr. Fichtner be the first to inform you: It was “serious physical work.” The borehole was filled with a special kind of vegetable oil to keep it from closing up, so the cable was slow to sink and heavy to lift back out. Plus, the subzero cold made the cable brittle, meaning they had to handle it with utmost care.
When Dr. Fichtner started looking at the readings that came back, he had to convince himself they weren’t “rubbish.” What if they showed vibrations coming from within the cable itself? Or from cracks forming in the borehole wall?
In time, he and his team concluded that they’d recorded something intrinsic to the ice. Still, Dr. Fichtner acknowledged that only by making more measurements in more places can scientists really say how commonly these quakes occur within ice sheets.
Getting enough measurements is a constant challenge for polar scientists, said Hélène Seroussi, an engineering professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who wasn’t involved in the new research. When oceanographers want to collect data, they can drop instruments into the deep sea in a matter of hours. Glacier researchers have to drill deep into the ice, which takes months, even years.
“That’s why we keep finding all these new principles and mechanisms that seem relatively fundamental,” Dr. Seroussi said. “Each time you have a new observation, a new ice core, a new way of measuring, you learn something new.”
Andy Aschwanden, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said Dr. Fichtner and his colleagues’ discovery offered an interesting glimpse into the intricacies of ice physics. But he said it was too early to know whether it can help scientists better predict how quickly the melting ice sheets will lift global sea levels. The ice still holds other mysteries that, if unraveled, are likely to improve the modeling much more, Dr. Aschwanden said.
The new findings could someday help scientists better understand the way ice sheets break apart at their edges, said Richard B. Alley, a professor of geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University.
Pre-existing flaws or damage in the ice can cause it to crack up rapidly once it flows off the land and out to sea, Dr. Alley said. It’s the same reason a fast-food ketchup packet is easy to open if you do it from the little notch, but very difficult if you try to tear it anywhere else, he said.
“All of us who study ice,” Dr. Alley said, “will be building on this new paper for a long time to come.”
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To Keep Aid Coming, Ukraine Appeals to Trump Allies: Conservative Christians
To Keep Aid Coming, Ukraine Appeals to Trump Allies: Conservative Christians
Ukraine is sending its largest-ever delegation to a gathering of politically influential Christian leaders in Washington this week, seeking to lay out an argument that protecting religious freedom is a strong reason for continuing U.S. aid to resist Russian aggression.
The Ukrainian pastors, members of Parliament and military chaplains who will be attending the National Prayer Breakfast say they hope the message of combating religious persecution will resonate with the Trump administration officials and members of Congress who are sure to also be there.
The prayer breakfast, a major event on Washington’s social calendar since 1953, presents an opportunity for business executives, religious leaders and diplomats to jockey for access to influential coreligionists in government to sway policies. While the meeting is open to all faiths, its purpose, according to its website, is ”gathering together in the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.”
The Ukrainians will argue to those gathered that further Russian advances would expand a zone of repression of several Christian denominations, as well as the destruction and looting of churches and the arrests of pastors and priests — actions that rights groups have documented in areas already under Russian occupation.
“Russia doesn’t just kill people, doesn’t just destroy our cities — Russia also destroys and bans religious communities” in areas under its control, said Roman Lozynskyi, a member of Parliament with the opposition Holos Party.
Mr. Lozynskyi is a member of the Greek Catholic Church, part of a branch known as Eastern Rite Catholicism that follows the ********, that is persecuted in Russian-held parts of Ukraine. He recalled the deportation of a friend and Greek Catholic priest in the Russian-held city of Melitopol as an example of the suppression of Catholic congregations under occupation.
More than 100 Ukrainian pastors, politicians, military chaplains and priests, including the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphanius I, are in Washington for the prayer breakfast on Thursday and related events through the week, said Pavlo Unguryan, a former Parliament member organizing the Ukrainian effort.
Ukrainian Orthodox priests and parishes are among the targets in eastern Ukraine. An estimated 50 priests in Russian-occupied territories — including the most senior church official in Kherson, who refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church — have been killed over the last three years, Metropolitan Epiphanius I said in an interview. Other priests have been forced to leave or to celebrate Mass in secret.
The Ukrainians also intend to highlight the plight of evangelicals, said Mr. Unguryan, who is ********. Within its borders, Russia has targeted evangelical Christians with investigations and has arrested Jehovah’s Witnesses. The repression extends to occupied Ukraine.
“Ukraine is the center of the ****** Belt of Europe,” said Mr. Unguryan, and expressions of evangelical faith there are now under threat. About one million Ukrainians attend evangelical services weekly, he said.
Russia occupies about 19 percent of Ukrainian territory and is making slow but steady gains. Ukraine is defending itself in fierce trench fighting along an about 600-mile front.
“A part of this war is spiritual,” Mr. Unguryan said. “It is important for America to know about this.”
The Ukrainians attending the prayer breakfast want to showcase the vitality of Christian churches in the country, where about 70 percent of the population say in surveys they are religious.
The effort is aimed at swaying supporters of Mr. Trump, who has voiced skepticism about the Biden administration’s heavy military and financial aid to Ukraine. This week Mr. Trump said continued aid could be exchanged for U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals.
Previous religious outreaches in the United States have already yielded results for Ukraine.
Last summer, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, gave a video address to a Christian gathering in Ukraine. Ukrainian Baptists have appealed to him for military and diplomatic support for their country. Mr. Johnson is a Southern ******** who has put his conservative Christian faith at the center of his political career.
Ukrainian churches and the country’s Parliament have sent delegations to the breakfast since the early 2000s, but in recent years have ramped up attendance, calling the annual visit “Ukraine Week” in Washington. In past years, several dozen religious and political leaders turned up. The larger delegation this year, Mr. Unguryan said, is in recognition of the importance of Christianity for many supporters of Mr. Trump.
“These are absolutely important issues which can unite Ukraine, a very conservative, Christian country, with a very conservative, Christian America,” said Mr. Unguryan, who has promoted conservative social policies in Ukraine.
Ukrainian protestant pastors have volunteered widely as military chaplains during the war, Liudmyla Filipovych, a Ukrainian scholar of religion, said in an interview. Ukrainian evangelicals have opened about 100 churches in other European countries to provide Ukrainian-language services to the country’s refugees, she said.
Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has sidelined or banned churches outside what the Kremlin has called the four “traditional” religions — Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Russia is on a U.S. government list of “countries of particular concern” for restricting freedom of religion.
In occupied territory in Ukraine’s east and south, Catholic and Protestant churches face “threats, interrogations and arbitrary arrests,” according to a report released in January by Mission Eurasia, a group promoting evangelical Christianity in former Soviet States.
“The Russian occupation authorities have also extensively engaged in ******** imprisonment and convictions on fabricated charges of extremism, torture and even *******,” the report said. It described instances of closing and looting churches, and removing their crosses. Overall, Russia’s invasion has destroyed, damaged or led to the looting of at least 630 religious sites, the report said.
Metropolitan Epiphanius’s visit to Washington is part of his efforts to win international recognition of his church and support from religious leaders for its stand against Russia. His church won independence in 2019 from the Russian Orthodox Church, but some congregations continued to follow the hierarchy in Moscow.
Last year, Ukraine banned the Orthodox branch aligned with the Russian Church, drawing criticism from the Kremlin and from Pope Francis. Ukrainian officials have said the restrictions were necessary, as some priests served as Russian spies or encouraged congregants to pray for the head of the Russian church, which has blessed the invasion.
“The Russian church has tried to block our activity abroad, and we are trying to unblock it, because the church is one of the most important elements for the future of the existence of the Ukrainian state,” Metropolitan Epiphanius, the Ukrainian church leader, said in an interview in December in Rome. “We are trying to destroy these blocks, speaking the truth, because truth destroys the walls.”
Recently, he has preached that message to as many religious leaders as he can reach. He says he talks regularly to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians.
With discussions swirling among Western officials over how to negotiate an end to the war, Metropolitan Epiphanius said the outcome for Ukraine was unpredictable, but he left little doubt of his hopes for Ukraine’s destiny.
“We believe that God could create the miracle, the same as he created a miracle for Syria, and Assad left Syria,” he said. “We ask everybody for the spiritual weapons, the prayers.”
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Latest Starship Explosion Trashes Poor Caribbean Island, Leaving The Locals To Clean It Up
Latest Starship Explosion Trashes Poor Caribbean Island, Leaving The Locals To Clean It Up
The explosion last month littered debris across the Caribbean. – Gif: The Independent via YouTube
A Space X test flight went spectacularly wrong last month when the Starship craft exploded in the skies above the Caribbean. The explosion littered the sky with debris and looked fresh from a Michael Bay film, but the fallout has been less glamorous for the residents of one tropical island nation who have been left clearing up the space junk that now litters their beaches.
At the time of the explosion, the debris that covered the sky forced flights in the area to delay or divert for safety, and now the impact of the test on Caribbean locals is becoming clear. On the British islands of Turks and Caicos, residents are clearing up spacecraft chunks and other debris that has turned up near homes, businesses and beaches, reports Futurism.
Residents of the archipelago, which comprises around 40 islands, report finding fallen wires, tiles from the Starship craft and all manner of space junk in the days following the explosion. Now, the nation is calling on Space X “to come pick this up,” as Futurism reports:
“I’m into the launches and what Musk is doing,” Amos Lucker, the owner of a Providenciales car rental service, told CNN, “but I think he should be liable for the cleanup, too.”
After the test flight explosion, SpaceX implored people to report debris and not to touch or pick up any pieces because they may be hazardous. According to Kaine, the Providenciales resident, that statement didn’t make its way to her until after she’d already begun cleaning up fragments.
Attempting to do the right thing, the woman called SpaceX’s hotline to report what she’d found. The company took a week to respond, she says, ultimately saying that it would be days before anyone could come check it out — and as of CNN’s press time, Kaine still had more than 200 pounds of Starship pieces stored in her garage.
SpaceX has met with representatives from Turks and Caicos, including the nation’s disaster management team and *** Air Accidents Investigation Branch, reports local news outlet the Sun. The outlet reported that the only advice to come out of the meeting was that residents should wear gloves when collecting SpaceX’s junk. Helpful, I know.
Story continues
Just a reminder, the folk who live on these islands make an average of under $30,000, and SpaceX, despite being headed by the richest man on Earth, expects them to clean up after its mess.
Turks and Caicos is made up of 40 islands. – Photo: NASA
The company’s response to the falling trash has irked residents, who say there wasn’t sufficient communication between Space X and the region about the risks of the flight, reports CNN. The Elon Musk-backed space company was asked by the Federal Aviation Administration to set up a potential hazard area should the launch go south, as CNN explains:
In its statement to CNN, the FAA said that the Turks and Caicos government was made aware prior to the Starship launch that the nation was located within a possible hazard area.
The agency also said that, before the test flight launched, it required SpaceX to map out “hazard areas sufficient to ensure that the probability of casualty to a member of the public on land or on board a maritime vessel does not exceed one in one million.”
“No Caribbean islands, including Turks and Caicos, exceeded this threshold,” the agency said.
The company’s calculations were at least correct, as no injuries were reported on the island as a result of the falling debris, but there is at least one report of property damage. There is, of course, the environmental impact of all this debris on delicate coastal ecosystems to consider, and there have been warnings about the impact the explosion could have had on the atmosphere.
This probably won’t be the last Starship to explode. – Photo: Jared Krahn via Wikimedia Commons
Space X follows a controversial “rapid iterative development” process, which sees it test new ideas in the field rather than the lab. This practice will no doubt continue until Musk’s company reaches Mars, which means this probably won’t be the last rocket to explode mid-air.
It is long past time for the company to face tougher scrutiny over its launch plans and the chances of disasters like this recurring. That’s probably not going to happen now that Musk basically owns the government and all of the regulatory bodies meant to keep him in check.
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Bank stocks pop after Fed releases ‘easier’ 2025 stress test
Bank stocks pop after Fed releases ‘easier’ 2025 stress test
Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, on May 1, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Bank shares rose Thursday after the Federal Reserve released parameters for its annual industry stress test showing smaller hypothetical shocks to the U.S. economy than in previous years.
While still challenging, with U.S. joblessness jumping to 10% and a 33% drop in home prices, the 2025 exam has smaller spikes in unemployment and smaller declines in stock and real estate values than previous versions, Jason Goldberg of Barclays said Thursday in a note titled “2025 Stress Test: Scenarios Easier than Past Two Years.”
The Fed will soon take steps to “reduce the volatility of stress test results and begin to improve model transparency” in the 2025 exam, the regulator said in a statement released Wednesday after the close of regular trading.
Shares of Citigroup jumped 2.9% in midday trading, while Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America each rose at least 1.5%. Big banks gained more than smaller lenders, with the KBW Bank Index rising 1.2% compared with the 0.9% gain of the S&P Regional Banking ETF.
The stress test changes bolster the case made by Wall Street analysts that big U.S. banks will face a friendlier regulatory regime under the Trump administration. Since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest U.S. banks have had to undergo annual exams that test their ability to withstand a severe recession while continuing to lend to consumers and businesses.
Banks have complained for years that the annual stress tests were opaque and unfairly administered, and industry trade groups sued the Fed in December over the exam.
By making the latest iteration of the test both less challenging and more predictable, banks could hold smaller capital cushions later this year, according to Bank of America analyst Ebrahim Poonawala.
“The 2025 stress test scenario, broadly better vs last year, increases our confidence that banks should begin to see relief on regulatory capital requirements, given our expectations for a shift to a balanced, transparent, and more predictable regulatory regime,” Poonawala wrote Thursday in a note.
CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
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Trump Trade Nominee Defends Plan to Reorder International Trade
Trump Trade Nominee Defends Plan to Reorder International Trade
Jamieson Greer, President Trump’s nominee to be the next U.S. trade representative, defended the president’s plan to impose sweeping tariffs on all imported products and told senators he would work to restructure international trading relationships during his confirmation hearing on Thursday.
Mr. Greer, a trade lawyer and former Trump administration official, told the Senate Finance Committee that he believed the United States “should be a country of producers” as well as consumers, and that he would work to open international markets for U.S. farmers and try to “reverse” the deindustrialization of the nation.
“I am convinced that we have a relatively short window of time to restructure the international trading system to better serve U.S. interests,” he added.
Mr. Greer is the former deputy of Robert E. Lighthizer, the trade representative in Mr. Trump’s first term. Mr. Greer negotiated with China, Canada, Mexico and other countries in that role, and supporters say he has an extensive knowledge of trade law.
His position could be an important one, given Mr. Trump’s proposals to upend global trading relationships with sweeping tariffs. The trade representative will likely help carry out Mr. Trump’s tariff wars, and potentially renegotiate the trade agreement the United States has signed with Canada and Mexico.
But it is unclear exactly how much autonomy the position will have in the current administration, given that Mr. Trump has said he will put Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, in charge of his trade policy. Mr. Trump himself also has strong views on trade and once remarked that if elected, he would be his own U.S.T.R.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats questioned that arrangement and denounced Mr. Trump’s trade moves over the past week, in which the president came within hours of imposing a 25 percent tariff on goods from America’s largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, as he sought concessions related to the border and drugs.
Mr. Trump ultimately chose to pause tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but put an additional 10 percent tariff on all imports from China — more than $400 billion of products — on Tuesday.
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said that tariffs would hurt Americans by driving up prices, and that he was concerned about other Trump officials using trade policy to pursue goals that had nothing to do with trade.
“If the U.S.T.R. has no role in decisions like that, I’m not even sure what their job is,” Mr. Wyden said. “International trade policy is just too important to American families, workers, small businesses, manufacturers and farmers to sacrifice to make headlines on unrelated issues.”
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat of Nevada, said a small business in her state had already reached out to her to say that its customer in Canada had canceled a project because of the uncertain trade relationship, costing them tens of thousands of dollars.
Mr. Greer responded that the president would work to expand other export markets, and that the United States needed “to stay the course when it comes to fentanyl.”
“There’s got to be answers for so many businesses that are actually being, unfortunately, victims of this trade war,” Ms. Cortez Masto responded. If the answer was that they had to be a victim, shut their doors and “***** it up for the greater good, I’m not sure that’s an answer I want to carry back to them,” she said.
Clete Willems, a partner at Akin Gump who worked on trade policy in the first Trump White House, said that Mr. Greer had similar views on trade as those of his former boss, Mr. Lighthizer: that the global trading system had evolved in a way that has not been beneficial or fair to the United States.
Mr. Lighthizer tried “to upend that order and remake a lot of the international trading rules in a way that was more equitable to the United States,” Mr. Willems said. “And I think Jamieson will continue that.”
Mr. Willems said that Mr. Greer would bring to the role years of practical experience and an intimate knowledge of what actions trade laws allow.
“He is going to be at the center of this because they need him,” Mr. Willems said.
The U.S. trade representative, a cabinet-level official with the rank of ambassador, leads a small agency of more than 200 people that has offices in Washington, Geneva and Brussels. The office is charged with carrying out trade negotiations and resolving economic disputes with other countries, as well as working with lawmakers, farmers and business owners to shape trade policy.
“Jamieson will focus the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on reining in the Country’s massive Trade Deficit, defending American Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Services, and opening up Export Markets everywhere,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on social media in November.
In contrast to some of Mr. Trump’s other nominees, who have a more antagonistic relationship with their own bureaucracy, Mr. Greer is liked by many of the staff he will be in charge of, current and former U.S.T.R. employees say.
Before his work at the trade representative’s office, Mr. Greer was a lawyer for the Air Force. He prosecuted and defended U.S. airmen in criminal investigations and was deployed to Iraq. Mr. Greer said Thursday that he had grown up in a mobile home with parents who regularly worked several jobs, and that he was “mindful of the struggles that Americans face when they’re cut out of economic growth.”
After the first Trump term, Mr. Greer became a partner in international trade at the law firm King & Spalding.
His financial disclosures showed that he worked for clients including steel firm Cleveland-Cliffs, agricultural organizations like the J.R. Simplot Company and the National Milk Producers Federation, oil and gas company Talos Energy, and a variety of chemical companies, including BASF. He has promised to resign his position at King & Spalding if confirmed.
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