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apex slotvip login philippines Bonnie Ryan has opened up about her 2024, admitting it was one of the ‘hardest’ years of her life as she struggled with the ‘ebb and flow’. To the naked eye, the the beauty influencer has had her fair share of big moments over the past twelve months, but she admitted that Instagram is little more than a highlights reel. Taking to social media, Bonnie opened up about the moments behind the scenes as she reflected on the year. Sharing a series of emotional snaps, including ones that show her crying or with swollen eyes, Bonnie wrote: ‘Just to show life is an ebb and flow. Just because one chapter is bad doesn’t mean the others can’t be amazing. The beauty influencer revealed how ‘some days getting out of bed was a massive win’. Although Bonnie said she always tries ‘to be as positive as I can be’, this year ‘truly kicked me up the ass’. ‘And for all the shiny moments we see, we are all going through moments a little less shiny too!’ ‘For all the highs I’ve posted there [were] also many lows. Every year has its ups and downs. It’s how you deal with them and keep going,’ the influencer admitted. ‘I would say 2024 was maybe one of the hardest years of my life. Some days getting out of bed was a massive win. I always try to be as positive as I can be, but this year truly kicked me up the ass.’ Paying tribute to her husband John Greenhalgh , Bonnie said: ‘I’m so grateful for my husband who is really the only person who knows what I’ve been through. But I know I’m also beyond lucky for the life I’m getting to live. I will always find the positive no matter what. ‘2025 will be a year of ups and downs for everyone, of course, but I’m going into [it] excited and determined. Be kind, work hard, enjoy the little things and remember life is fragile and you need to be present!’ ‘Everyone has their battles so give people grace!,’ Bonnie urged. ‘And if you’re going through something I’m sending you love. May 2025 be your year!!’

Frank Grillo Goes All-In on DC, Teases ‘Tulsa King’ Return and Addresses Hollywood’s ‘Fake Natty’ ProblemJones’ first appearance at Twickenham against the side he coached from 2015 to 2022 ended in a nine-try rout and the Australian’s afternoon was soured further by a verbal altercation with a supporter. When asked how he felt being back at the home of English rugby, he said: “It wasn’t bad until some clown abused me going down the stairs at half-time. “He said something, but I’m not going to repeat it here because I’ll get into trouble. Do you want me to get into trouble again? If there’s only one clown in 81,634 that’s not bad.” The Rugby Football Union reacted to the abuse of Jones by stating: “No coaches, players or match officials should be abused for doing their job.” Jones has come under intense scrutiny for his coaching methods as England boss after Care said in his autobiography ‘Everything Happens for a Reason’ that “everyone was bloody terrified of him”. Care added that Jones oversaw a “toxic” environment and acted like a “tyrant” and “despot”. Responding to the allegations for the first time, Jones said: “I’ll tell you mate, I’ve got a new book deal. I just signed it today. It’s going to be called ‘Caring about Care’ and you’ll get all the details in there. “I’ve got pre-order forms up here, you can come up and get a pre-order form. Get them hot. “I’m trying to do a deal with the Daily Mail, but we haven’t come to an agreement yet. If you want to read about it, there you go. It’ll be a good one. “I’m very serious. I’m very serious, mate. If you want to read about it, read it in my book. That’s how you get a headline, so I’ll put a whole chapter in there ‘Caring about Care’, just for you.” England finished their autumn on an upbeat note by sweeping aside Japan, ending their five-Test losing streak. But it has been a frustrating campaign after New Zealand, Australia and South Africa edged victories at Twickenham to place Borthwick under pressure. “The overriding feeling this autumn is one of frustration to have come so close to getting results but not actually being able to convert them,” Borthwick said. “But there is real positivity around how the team played. I want the team to be brave with the ball, I want them to play fast, and we’ve seen growth in that area over the last four weeks. “I’m really pleased with the way the players approached the game against Japan and the way they kept being disciplined to try and play the way they wanted to play for 80 minutes. You can see the identity they’re trying to build as a team. “In the last four weeks we’ve scored some really outstanding tries with the skill level that is in this group.”

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71 Fancy But Inexpensive Gifts For Everyone On Your ListKolkata, Nov 23 (PTI) The juggernaut of the BJP-led NDA, which triumphed in three of the four east and north-eastern states that went for assembly bypolls on Saturday, was halted yet again in West Bengal where Mamata Banerjee’s TMC registered a six-on-six clean sweep. In its process of continuing to deny the BJP its coveted foothold in the state’s political theatre, the TMC retained five of the six seats it had previously won during the 2021 polls, while wresting the key Madarihat seat from the saffron camp in north Bengal’s Alipurduar district, and opening its account in the segment for the first time. The scene was much brighter for the ruling NDA in neighbouring Bihar where it swept the bypolls to four assembly segments, retaining Imamganj and wresting from the INDIA bloc Tarari, Ramgarh and Belaganj, in a shot in the arm ahead of the assembly polls due next year. In Assam, the BJP and its allies retained four assembly seats and were leading in one, where the bypolls were held on November 13. The sole assembly segment of Gambegre in Meghalaya was won by the ruling National People's Party (NPP) nominee and chief minister's wife Mehtab Chandee Agitok Sangma, by a margin of over 4,500 votes. The NPP is a constituent of the NDA at the Centre. The TMC whitewash in Bengal included two of its candidates, Sangita Roy from the Sitai seat and Sk Rabiul Islam from Haroa, registering victories by margins of over one lakh votes. The bypolls in the state were also held in Naihati, Medinipur, Taldangra, and Madarihat (ST), after sitting MLAs vacated their seats after winning the Lok Sabha elections. These were the first set of elections in the state, held in select rural and suburban pockets, after the RG Kar hospital rape and murder incident, which took significant areas of Bengal by storm barely two months ago. Saturday’s results suggested that the anti-establishment edge in those agitations, confined largely to urban pockets, made little or no dent in the Trinamool Congress vote bank in the state's countryside, and the party romped home in continuation of its winning streak in the 2024 general elections. In Haroa, a constituency overwhelmingly dominated by minorities, the BJP was pushed to the third position with the All India Secular Front (ISF) candidate Piyarul Islam finishing a distant runner-up, behind TMC’s Rabiul. The saffron candidate forfeited his poll deposit in the seat, prompting party leader Suvendu Adhikari to state: “Minorities don’t vote for the BJP”. The poll results brought no joy to either the CPI(M)-led Left Front, which had hoped to capitalise on the RG Kar protests to revive its fortunes, or its erstwhile ally, the Congress. Both suffered crushing defeats in all the six segments and lost poll deposits. In Bihar, candidates of the Jan Suraaj floated recently by former political strategist Prashant Kishor with much fanfare, lost deposits in all but one seat, in a clear indication that the fledgling party, despite claims of taking the political landscape in the state by storm, needs to cover much ground. The biggest setback for the INDIA bloc, helmed by the RJD, came in Belaganj, a seat the party had been winning since its inception in the 1990s, but this time lost to the JD(U) headed by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the arch-rival of its founding president Lalu Prasad. The JD(U) candidate Manorama Devi, a former MLC, defeated RJD’s debutant nominee Vishwanath Kumar Singh by over 21,000 votes. The margin of victory was greater than the 17,285 votes polled by Mohd Amjad of the Jan Suraaj, whom the RJD may have liked to blame for its defeat by causing a split in Muslim votes. JD(U) national spokesman Rajiv Ranjan Prasad said, "The people of Bihar deserve kudos for rejecting the negativity of the opposition and reposing their trust in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Under his leadership, the NDA will win more than 200 seats of the 243-strong assembly in 2025." In Assam, while the BJP emerged victor in the Behali and Dholai (SC) segments and looked all set to win the Samaguri seat, its allies, the United Peoples' Party Liberal (UPPL) and the AGP comfortably bagged the Sidli and the Bongaiganon constituencies, respectively, humbling their nearest Congress rivals. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma termed the wins a testament of people's support to "good governance and development". Maintaining that the people of Gambegre voted along expected lines, Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma said, "Voters are intelligent. They know what is good for them and how they should vote. In this election, people voted specifically for change," he said. “I would like to thank and congratulate the 'Maa, Mati, and Manush' from the bottom of my heart. Your blessings will help us work for the people in the coming days,” West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on X. TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee congratulated the candidates, claiming they had “defied the narratives created by the Zamindars, the media, and a section of the Kol HC to defame Bengal for their vested interests.” BJP state president Sukanta Majumdar, however, downplayed the significance of the results. “Bypoll results cannot serve as a reliable indicator. Whether the people are with the TMC or against them will be reflected in the assembly elections,” he said. With this victory, TMC’s tally in the 294-member state assembly rose to 216, further consolidating its position. The BJP’s tally dropped to 69, from 77 in 2021. PTI PNT SCH PKD NAC DG JOP SMY RBT (This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)

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Nebraska's Malcolm Hartzog Jr. (7) and Donovan Jones (37) tackle Boston College’s John Montague (8) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. NEW YORK — The way the Nebraska football team lined up for its bowl game was always going to look different than the 12 other games it played this season. Transfers, injuries and bowl game opt-outs led to changes in personnel which gave many young Huskers a chance to shine. Defensive lineman Jordan Ochoa and running backs Kwinten Ives and Kenneth Williams were among the players who earned snaps in the bowl game after scarcely featuring in the fall — but one freshman stood above the rest. Defensive back Donovan Jones, who appeared in four games this season on special teams, provided consistent play at cornerback throughout the contest. “We played a lot of young players,” Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule said. “... Donovan Jones basically redshirted this year and he played corner for half of the game.” People are also reading... A true freshman out of Omaha North, Jones had worked at safety but began taking practice reps at cornerback in advance of NU’s bowl game. Rhule said the young defensive back has “really taken off” as a result of that move, and it showed in the way Jones played on Saturday. Jones recorded three tackles and rallied to the football, displaying the same level of aggressiveness and talent which his teammates have gotten to know on the practice field. “I think he’s the next wave of great corners to come through here,” quarterback Dylan Raiola said of Jones. “What makes him great is just his competitive spirit; he’s not going to take no for an answer and he’s going to go compete for what he wants. Normally when you put those two together, you get a damn good football player. He showed why he can play at this stage and this level.” Photos: Nebraska football vs. Boston College in Pinstripe Bowl — Dec. 28 Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule and Nebraska's Brian Buschini (13) embrace after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Brian Buschini (13) punts the ball during the second half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday. Nebraska's Rahmir Johnson speaks during a news conference after the Pinstripe Bowl on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Nebraska's Heinrich Haarberg (10) watches on as his teammates celebrate after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players celebrate after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule hoists the championship trophy after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players celebrate after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Malcolm Hartzog Jr. (7) and Donovan Jones (37) tackle Boston College’s John Montague (8) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Referees and players try to break up a fight during the second half of the Pinstripe Bowl between Nebraska and Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) hangs his head down after Boston College scored a touchdown during the second half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Boston College's KP Price (20) and Boston College's Omar Thornton (30) celebrate a fumble recovery during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Nebraska at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans cheer as Nebraska scores a touchdown during the second half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday. Members of the University of Nebraska Cornhusker Marching Band put on rain ponchos during the second half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Boston College's Grayson James (14) celebrates his first down during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule smiles while walking down the sidelines during the second half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Rahmir Johnson (14) runs the ball down the field during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday. Boston College's Grayson James (14) outruns Nebraska's Elijah Jeudy (16) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players stand on the stage covered in confetti after Nebraska’s victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. From left, Nebraska's Joey Mancino (67) celebrates with teammate Cayden Echternach (48) after Nebraska’s victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) walks off the field in celebration after Nebraska’s victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Nash Hutmacher (0) shakes confetti out of his hair after Nebraska’s victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) celebrates as the trophy is awarded after Nebraska’s victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Henry Lutovsky (left) hugs Bryce Benhart (54) after NU’s victory over Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Nebraska's Ty Robinson (9) places a hat on head coach Matt Rhule after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule celebrates after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) and Heinrich Haarberg (10) embrace after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) runs around the outfield fencing after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players celebrate after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players celebrate after defeating Boston College in the Pinstripe Bowl on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York. Nebraska's Ty Robinson (9) places a hat on head coach Matt Rhule after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) and Heinrich Haarberg (10) embrace after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) runs around the outfield fencing after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players celebrate after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska players celebrate after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule celebrates after defeating Boston College to win the Pinstripe Bowl, 20-15, at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. From right, Nebraska's Derek Branch (24) celebrates with Nebraska's Elijah Jeudy (16) after Jeudy’s tackle on the punt return during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Javin Wright (33) tackles Boston College's Jeremiah Franklin (17) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Nash Hutmacher (0) and Ty Robinson (9) celebrate after a good defensive play during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. University of Nebraska Cornhusker Marching Band cheers during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl between Nebraska and Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Rahmir Johnson (14) celebrates his touchdown with teammate Ben Scott (66) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Gage Stenger (47), left, and Vincent Genatone (30), right, celebrate with Elijah Jeudy (16) after Jeudy’s tackle on the punt return during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Javin Wright (33) tackles Boston College's Jeremiah Franklin (17) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Rahmir Johnson (14) celebrates his touchdown with teammate Ben Scott (66) during the Pinstripe Bowl vs. Boston College on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Nebraska's Ty Robinson (9) motions to the crowd after a stop against Boston College during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Ty Robinson (9) motions to the crowd after a stop against Boston College during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Boston College head coach Bill O'Brien watches on during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Evan Taylor (37) tackles Boston College's Lewis Bond (11) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Boston College's Grayson James (14) throws the ball during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Keona Davis (97) tackles Boston College's Grayson James (14) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Keona Davis (97) tackles Boston College's Grayson James (14) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Janiran Bonner (16) tackles Boston College's Cameron Martinez (29) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Kwinten Ives (28) celebrates after a touchdown against Boston College during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Rahmir Johnson (14) stretches out for the first down as he is tackled by Boston College's Ashton McShane (35) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Jahmal Banks (4) is tackled by Boston College's Ashton McShane (35) and KP Price (20) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) throws the ball as Nebraska's Ben Scott (66) blocks Boston College's Bryce Steele (2) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule looks on during the Pinstripe Bowl vs. Boston College on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York City. A look inside Yankee Stadium during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl between Nebraska and Boston College in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. A look inside Yankee Stadium during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl between Nebraska and Boston College in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. A look inside Yankee Stadium during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl between Nebraska and Boston College in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Bryce Benhart (54) lifts up teammate Kwinten Ives (28) after Ives’ touchdown during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Kwinten Ives (28) celebrates his touchdown with teammate Luke Lindenmeyer (44) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Nebraska's Kwinten Ives (28) celebrates his touchdown with teammate Justin Evans (51) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl against Boston College at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's John Hohl (90) kicks in an extra point during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans wave as the Nebraska bus pulls up to Yankee Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans gather in the Dugout BX bar on Friday ahead of the Pinstripe Bowl vs. Boston College in New York. Nebraska's Jacory Barney Jr. (17) runs the ball during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans watch on during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) throws the ball during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Jacory Barney Jr. (17) reaches out but misses the pass ahead of Boston College's Ashton McShane (35) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's MJ Sherman (48) attempts to tackle Boston College's Dino Tomlin (13) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Boston College's Reed Harris (4) makes a catch during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Marques Buford Jr. (3) and John Bullock (5) stop Boston College's Turbo Richard (27) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Vincent Shavers Jr. (1) celebrates after a stop against Boston College during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule talks to an official during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) throws the ball against Boston College's George Rooks (91) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Jacory Barney Jr. (17) runs the ball during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Emmett Johnson (21) runs the ball against Boston College's KP Price (20) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Jahmal Banks (4) makes a catch against Boston College's Max Tucker (13) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Jahmal Banks (4) makes a catch against Boston College's Max Tucker (13) during the first half of the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York City, on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans look on during the Pinstripe Bowl vs. Boston College on Saturday at Yankee Stadium in New York. Nebraska's Heinrich Haarberg (10) catches the ball during warmups before a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska football players stand together during warmups before a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Ceyair Wright (15) holds the ball during warmups before a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska's Dylan Raiola (15) throws the ball during warmups before a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles at Yankee Stadium in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans walk up to the gates at Yankee Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans take shelter from the rain outside of Yankee Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. The Nebraska bus pulls up to Yankee Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans wave as the Nebraska bus pulls up to Yankee Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Nebraska fans walk outside of Yankee Stadium prior to a college football game between the Nebraska Huskers and the Boston College Eagles in New York City on Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024. Subscribe for the best Husker news & commentary Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Husker football/baseball reporter {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.

Noise Detection And Monitoring Market size to increase by USD 7.19 Billion between 2023 to 2028, Market Segmentation by End-user, Component, Geography , TechnavioATLANTA (AP) — Jalen Johnson scored 28 points and the Atlanta Hawks closed out a four-game homestand, winning a third straight contest, 120-110 over the Miami Heat on Saturday. Trae Young added his 22nd double-double of the season, with 11 point and 15 assist, and De'Andre Hunter scored 26 points in his 14th consecutive game with at least 15 points coming off the bench. Tyler Herro scored 28 points and dished out 10 assists and Bam Adebayo added 17 points and 10 rebounds. It was the Heat's fourth game in a row without star Jimmy Butler , who sat out for what the team called “return to competition reconditioning.” Takeaways Heat: Miami lost despite five players finishing with double-digit point totals. The Heat shot 44.4% from the field, but it wasn't enough to overcome a Hawks team that hit over half of its shots, 51.2% from the field. Hawks: Johnson has been on an offensive tear in his last two games. He finished two points shy of his single-game career high of 30 points, set in his last game, on Thursday against the Chicago Bulls. Hunter also finished just one point shy of his single-game career high of 27 points. Key moment After a close first half that featured nine lead changes, Atlanta seized control early in the second half. With five minutes to go in the third quarter, Atlanta’s Garrison Mathews and Hunter hit back-to-back 3s to give Atlanta an 81-72 lead, their biggest of the night, and forcing a Miami timeout. Key stat Young finished one assist shy of a franchise single-game record for assists against the Miami Heat, set by Mookie Blaylock in 1993. Up next The Hawks begin a six-game road trip in Toronto on Sunday, while the Heat visits the Rockets on Sunday. AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBAJalen Johnson scores 28 to lead the Hawks over the Heat 120-110

“Married to Medicine” airs its 11th season premiere today, Sunday, Nov. 24 at 9 p.m. Eastern on Bravo. If you love this Bravo series, but cut ties with cable, you can still watch it with free trials from FuboTV and DirecTV Stream . You can also stream it on Sling which offers first-time users half off the first month. On the season 11 premiere, “Guess Who’s Coming to Whitnik,” Heavenly and Quad mend fences and Phaedra and Dr. G discuss a bombshell drop on social media by Heavenly. Meanwhile, Simone and Cecil have a Freaknik-inspire party where an uninvited guest crashes the party and an old friend makes a surprise appearance, Bravo says. In “Married to Medicine” the women put old rivalries to bed and look ahead to make a fresh start with new frienship dynamics, Bravo says. The show stars Jackie Walters , Heavenly Kimes , Quad Webb , Phaedra Parks , Toya Bush-Harris , Simone Whitmore , Alicia Egolum and Lateasha Lunceford . More information on streaming service options for “Married to Medicine:” FuboTV has a library of TV shows, live sports events and more. Right now, it’s offering $30 off your first month on top of the free trial. The service has live news and entertainment channels. You can get the Pro plan for $79.99; the Elite plan for $89.99; the Premier plan for $99.99; or the Latino plan for $32.99. DirecTV Stream has three packages you can choose from and enjoy a free trial. Right now, after you’ve enjoyed the free trial, you’ll get $15 off your first two months if you chose the Entertainment package. That package is $86.98 ($101.98 after promo). The streaming service is offering $20 off your first three months if you chose the Choice package ($94.99, then $114.99 after promo) or the Ultimate package ($109.99, then $129.99 after promo). It is a no-term commitment service where you can enjoy live TV and on-demand local and national channels without having to commit to a contract. Sling offers half off your first month of streaming. A Blue package is $20 ($40 after that) and an Orange package is the same price and deal. Both the Blue and Orange package is $27.50 for the first month ($55 after that). The service allows you to stream on-demand movies, live TV shows and live sports on all your preferred devices. More streaming content ‘A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving’ FREE STREAM today on Apple TV+ Nov. 24, 2024, 6:01a.m. ‘Love & Marriage: Huntsville’ season 9, episode 4: Watch for free today Nov. 23, 2024, 5:03p.m. ‘A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving’ FREE STREAM: Watch today on Apple TV+ Nov. 23, 2024, 5:08a.m. Jersey Shore: Family Vacation season 7, episode 28 free stream today Nov. 21, 2024, 5:07p.m. Tyler Perry’s ‘Sistas’ season 8, episode 6 FREE STREAM today Nov. 20, 2024, 6:01p.m. Kaylee Remington is the shopping and entertainment commerce reporter and metro reporter for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. Read her work online .

Kobe Sanders scores 27 points, Nevada never trails in 90-78 win over Oklahoma StateNBI-1065845 is a small molecule commercialized by , with a leading Phase II program in Major Depressive Disorder. According to Globaldata, it is involved in 5 clinical trials, of which 4 were completed, and 1 is planned. Smarter leaders trust GlobalData The gold standard of business intelligence. The revenue for NBI-1065845 is expected to reach an annual total of $135 mn by 2034 globally based off GlobalData’s Expiry Model. The drug’s revenue forecasts along with estimated costs are used to measure the value of an investment opportunity in that drug, otherwise known as net present value (NPV). Applying the drug’s phase transition success rate to remaining R&D costs and likelihood of approval (LoA) to sales related costs provides a risk-adjusted NPV model (rNPV). The rNPV model is a more conservative valuation measure that accounts for the risk of a drug in clinical development failing to progress. NBI-1065845 Overview NBI-1065845 (TAK-653) is under development for major depressive disorder (MDD), treatment-resistant depression (TRD). It is administered orally as a tablet. It acts by targeting AMPA receptor. It was also under development for the treatment of neurological diseases. The drug candidate is a new molecular entity. Neurocrine Biosciences Overview (Neurocrine) is a biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, and markets neurological drugs. The company’s lead product Ingrezza, is a vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2) inhibitor to treat adults with tardive dyskinesia and chorea associated with Huntington’s disease. It is developing a pipeline of drug candidates for various indications in neurology, neuroendocrinology, and neuropsychiatry. Neurocrine also conducts clinical trials and studies for diseases such as movement disorders, epilepsy, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, among others. The company works in collaboration with and for products distribution. Neurocrine is headquartered in San Diego, California, the US. The company reported revenues of (US Dollars) US$1,887.1 million for the fiscal year ended December 2023 (FY2023), an increase of 26.8% over FY2022. In FY2023, the company’s operating margin was 13.3%, compared to an operating margin of 12% in FY2022. In FY2023, the company recorded a net margin of 13.2%, compared to a net margin of 10.4% in FY2022. The company reported revenues of US$590.2 million for the second quarter ended June 2024, an increase of 14.5% over the previous quarter. For a complete picture of NBI-1065845’s valuation, This content was updated on 11 March 2024 From Blending expert knowledge with cutting-edge technology, GlobalData’s unrivalled proprietary data will enable you to decode what’s happening in your market. You can make better informed decisions and gain a future-proof advantage over your competitors. , the leading provider of industry intelligence, provided the underlying data, research, and analysis used to produce this article. To create this model, GlobalData takes into account factors including patent law, known and projected regulatory approval processes, cash flows, drug margins and company expenses. Combining these data points with GlobalData’s world class analysis creates high value models that companies can use to help in evaluation processes for each drug or company. The rNPV method integrates the probability of a drug reaching a clinical stage into the cash flow at that time, which provides a more accurate valuation, as it considers the probability that the drug never makes it through the clinical pathway to commercialization. GlobalData’s rNPV model uses proprietary likelihood of approval (LoA) and phase transition success rate (PTSR) data for the indication in the highest development stage, which can be found on GlobalData’s .BEIRUT — Syria’s embassy in Lebanon suspended consular services Saturday, a day after two relatives of deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad were arrested at the Beirut airport with allegedly forged passports. Also on Saturday, Lebanese authorities handed over dozens of Syrians — including former officers in the Syrian army under Assad — to the new Syrian authorities after they were caught illegally entering Lebanon, a war monitor and Lebanese officials said. The embassy announced on its Facebook page that consular work was suspended “until further notice” at the order of the Syrian foreign ministry. The announcement did not give a reason for the suspension. Two Lebanese security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the suspension was ordered because the passports belonging to Assad’s relatives — the wife and daughter of one of his cousins — were believed to have been forged at the embassy. Assad’s uncle, Rifaat Assad — who has been indicted in Switzerland on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity — had flown out the day before on his real passport and was not stopped, the officials said. The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Saturday that 70 Syrians, including former army officers, were handed over by a Lebanese security delegation to the security forces of the new Syrian government, led by the former insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. Three Lebanese judicial officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the report. Regional countries have been quick to establish ties with Syria’s new rulers. Delegations of Libyan and Bahraini officials arrived in Damascus on Saturday on official visits. HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, has largely succeeded in calming fears within and outside of Syria that his group would unleash collective punishment against communities that supported Assad’s rule or attempt to impose strict Islamic law on the country’s religious minorities. However, in recent days, sporadic clashes have broken out between the HTS-led security forces and pro-Assad armed groups. The country’s new security forces have launched a series of raids targeting officials affiliated with Assad and have set up checkpoints in areas with significant populations of the Alawite religious minority to which the former president belongs to search for weapons. There have also been ongoing tensions and clashes in northeastern Syria between Kurdish-led forces and armed groups backed by Turkey. Many Kurds have viewed the new order in Damascus, which appears to have strengthened Turkey’s hand in Syria, with anxiety. Ankara sees the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces — a key U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State group — as an affiliate of its sworn enemy, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which it classifies as a terrorist organization. The U.S. State Department said Saturday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had spoken with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to “discuss the latest developments in Syria.” “Secretary Blinken emphasized the need to support a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process that upholds human rights and prioritizes an inclusive and representative government,” the statement said, adding that they “also discussed the shared goal of preventing terrorism from endangering the security” of Turkey and Syria. On Saturday, hundreds of protesters convened by Kurdish women’s groups participated in a demonstration in the northeastern city of Hasaka to demand women’s rights in the new Syria. Perishan Ramadan, a participant from Hasaka, said the new government “is worse than Bashar” and that its leaders are Islamist extremists who “don’t accept any role for women.” While the country’s new leaders have not attempted to impose Islamic dress or other conventions, it remains to be seen what role women will have in the new order and whether they will hold political or government positions. “Women must be present in the new constitution for Syria,” said Rihan Loqo, spokeswoman for the Kongra Star women’s organization. “... Women’s rights should not be ignored.” Associated Press writers Hogir Abdo in Hasaka, Syria, and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

DHAKA: Squeezing rubber-covered robotic prosthetic hands, Bangladesh protesters wounded during the deadly revolution to topple autocratic leader Sheikh Hasina test out replacement arms for their lost limbs. “I’ll be able to do some everyday tasks with this artificial hand,” said student Hafeez Mohammad Hossain, 19, whose right hand was ripped off in gunfire on August 5. It was the same day protesters stormed Hasina’s palace as she fled to India by helicopter. In the middle of the chaos, Hossain said a police officer leveled a shotgun at him and fired. He described searing pain as gun pellets lacerated his back and leg. Surgeons picked out the gunshot, but were unable to save his hand. “I can’t write anymore,” Hossain said. “I’m struggling to learn how to write with my left hand.” On Thursday he was fitted with a prosthetic limb, alongside four other students who also lost their hands during the months-long protests in which at least 700 people were killed during a police crackdown. Robolife Technologies, a Bangladeshi organization manufacturing artificial hands, said the prosthetic limbs use sensors connected to the nerves to move. The company says it allows users to grasp objects, to type and use a phone. “If you ask me whether they work like organic hands, I’d say no,” said Antu Karim, who is working on the government-backed project to fit the limbs. “But these hands allow the boys to hold a glass if thirsty, or a spoon to eat,” he added. “At least, they won’t be looked down upon for not having hands.” ‘Rely on others’ Hasina’s 15-year tenure saw widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killings of her political opponents. Limbless protesters held a rally earlier this month demanding the interim government who took over after Hasina’s fall support those injured in the protests. Many say they have not received the aid they need. The four other former protesters who had arms fitted on Thursday included Mohammad Mamun Mia, 32, a father of two, whose hand was hacked off by a gang he said was loyal to Hasina’s Awami League party. The new arm is far from perfect, but it has made a huge difference. “I’ll be able to do some regular tasks with this hand,” he said, saying that while he cannot work driving a tractor in the fields again, he hopes now to open a small business. Arif Hossain Sagar, 19, had his hand amputated after it failed to heal from an injury he sustained during the protests, and doctors worried about gangrene. “I can’t do any regular activities now,” Sagar told AFP. “I rely on others for eating or bathing.” The new hand will return a degree of normality to his life, he said. Nayeem Hasan, wounded when attackers pounced on him as he went to donate blood to help those injured after a fire, broke into tears. The new arm would help him fulfill his simple dream. “I have a one-year-old daughter who wants me to hold her,” Hasan said. — AFPJalen Johnson scores 28 to lead the Hawks over the Heat 120-110

Authored by James Howard Kunstler, "A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above.” - Matt Taibbi, Racket News I would guess that you’re feeling as if anything might happen now. It’s hard to rule out even the possibility that we could all be vaporized before moving onto the next mundane chore of the day. The world order is dangerously in flux. America’s Woke-Jacobin “Joe Biden” regime was defeated in the 2024 election, but they were apparently just a front for the sinister entity we call the “blob” or the Deep State, which in recent years has consistently and garishly acted against our country’s interests. So, the blob abides, and it probably weaves schemes in the deep background of daily life even as a new government awaits. But if the Woke-Jacobin Biden-istas were tied-in with the so-called “globalist” enterprise centered around the EU bureaucracy, with assistance from the World Economic Forum’s network of zillionaires and bankers. . . well, that coalition looks rather broken now. It’s doing a hurt-dance. It’s on the run, a little bit. What is not broken for the moment — a tenuous moment — is the new Trump regime’s determination to correct the disorders of Western Civ, starting with the affairs of the USA, according to age-old reality-based norms of behavior and good-faith relations between the people and their government. Trust was broken and must be restored. The President-elect has assembled an extraordinary team of reformers, if they can get to their posts without subversion. And, of course, Mr. Trump himself has to evade further attempts to rub him out, to knock him off the game-board before he can take office, and then he must survive the months beyond his inauguration. So, you are correct to be nervous. Paradoxically, Mr. Trump has to initially manage the US government as if it deserves a sense of reassuring continuity, which, in many respects it does not deserve. So many institutions and relationships between them have been perverted and damaged. How do we pretend that the upper layers of management in any federal agency — the strata who really run things below the top “political” appointees — can continue in-place as if all that perversion never happened? The Department of Justice and the FBI are filled with lawyers and agents who abused their power egregiously and went to war against the American people. The agency’s work will just have to stop for a while. The nation can probably endure if investigations and prosecutions are suspended for sixty days while the personnel issues get sorted out — who goes and who stays. But what about the Defense Department and the CIA? The country must be able to defend itself. These departments are the lairs of the more dangerously entrenched blob actors. Both DOD and the CIA have come to be organized as racketeering operations. Both are involved in domestic money-laundering activities at the giant scale, and in rackets abroad — such as the many grifts around Ukraine, in which giant financial entities like BlackRock are partnered-in. (You know, for instance, don’t you, that BlackRock was poised to acquire control of Ukraine’s natural resource base, until Mr. Putin’s resolve ended that fantasy.) And the CIA is suspected of being deeply involved in the Mexican crime cartel operations, both around drugs and human trafficking. The imputations are sickening. The DOD and the CIA will fight desperately to preserve their perqs and projects, and to stay out of jail. But until now they have not really been challenged. The public health agencies, FDA, NIAID, CDC, NIH, and so on have become outright mafias, with labyrinths of money-laundering channels, government grant-grifting, and pharma phuckery, not least around the still-mysterious, homicidal Covid-19 prank, with the deadly mRNA vaccine program piggybacked onto it. Their nemesis, RFK, Jr., is coming on-board to oversee exactly what happened in these corrupt fiefdoms. If you have read his books about Dr. Anthony Fauci, you know that he is adequately prepared to discover what took US public health off-the-rails. Don’t forget, also, that the entire medical profession lies in a slough of dishonor for going along with the fake-and-deadly Covid-19 treatment protocols (intubation, remdesivir, midazolam, and morphine) that killed so many people needlessly. Plus, the doctors’ dishonest demonization of ivermectin and other viable treatments, plus the disgraceful, mendacious behavior of the medical journals in the whole filthy scam. Next, consider the rickety, cruel, Kafkaesque US health insurance system that is now all but running the doctors’ practices. It is an unholy mess. What can you do but wish Mr. Kennedy God-speed in beginning to unravel it all? Surely, a lot of people involved deserve to go to prison. For all you know, the heavyweights of blobdom might be plotting some sort of coup during the Holiday season to prevent Mr. Trump from taking power on January 20. Failure to mount a coup would actually signal some essential weakness in the blob’s own enterprise architecture. The blob has certainly tried everything so far up to an actual coup, that is, a sharp discontinuity in constitutional government — like, with tanks around the US Capitol and generals in the Oval Office. The blob’s other problem is that it has no powerful individual leader to rally behind, no one with charisma. It has only its multifarious tentacles — departments, agencies, offices, and operations — which Mr. Trump and his lieutenants can lop off in broad strokes. They can cashier generals, defund projects, shut-down offices and programs, send US Marshals into CIA headquarters in Langley, VA, to lockdown document archives while flushing out employees. Early on, the Trump team has got to assess the patriotism of individuals in these departments. Based on blob behavior of the past decade, no one’s fidelity to the constitution can be taken-for-granted. It will surely be necessary to begin open inquiries into the recent behavior of some prominent political figures in order to demonstrate a serious intent to reform. For just one example, Alejandro Mayorkas , the Homeland Security chief who threw the US Border wide open for four years, presents a probable cause case for treason. Perhaps the new Attorney General can convene a grand jury away from the blob-dominated DC federal court district, say in Texas where these crimes on the border were actually committed — crimes such as ordering the US Border Patrol to stand down while whole caravans waded the Rio Grande. Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to answer publicly for his coordination of a massive DOJ lawfare conspiracy. How exactly did Deputy US AG Matthew Colangelo end up in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office? Who green-lighted the harsh prosecutions of Jan 6 suspects by Matthew Graves, in particular their long pre-trial detentions in solitary confinement? Who in the White House confabbed with attorney Nathan Wade to manage the Fulton County case against Mr. Trump and eighteen other defendants? Why did Delaware federal attorney David Weiss allow the statute of limitations run out on Hunter Biden’s 2014 and 2015 tax evasion cases? Stuff like that. And, of course, FBI Director Christopher Wray needs to answer for the Jan 6 DNC / RNC pipe bomb caper, and the roles of “confidential human sources” in the Jan 6 Capitol riot — including the antics of the notorious Ray Epps. Plus, the three years of RussiaGate and his cavalier use of the FISA Courts. Please subpoena SC District Judge James Boasberg on that, too, while you’re at it. It will not take many inquiries like these to get the point across. The point will be that after many years of absence, consequence is back on the table for those who abuse power. During the transition — Nov 6 to Jan 20 — Mr. Trump has equivocated a bit about his intentions to bring back consequence in federal operations. On one hand he claims he’s “not interested in retribution,” while on the other hand he has named appointees such as Kash Patel at FBI and John Ratcliffe at CIA who are intimately acquainted with the illegal activities in those places and on-the-record as eager to set consequence in motion. It’s hard to imagine they will demur from getting answers about what has been going on and who is responsible, and take corrective measures. If he makes it through confirmation, it may be less difficult for a Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to straighten out the Pentagon. The military is much more explicitly hierarchical, and orders are orders. Generals and bureaucrats will be ordered out of the building. But then there are large dark pools of activity hidden from the public, things like DARPA and its many offshoots, that may be harder to penetrate. You must imagine that there are operations hidden even from the SecDef. We keep hearing that the Pentagon can’t pass an audit and can’t account for trillions of mis-spent dollars. Guess what? Someone (or many someones) can be court-martialed for that. Again: consequence returns. Suddenly things are done correctly. Perhaps even a lost sense of honor is restored. Who knows what Elon & Vivek’s DOGE group can accomplish? But there are hard limits in the fiscal whoppers like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and veterans benefits that won’t yield much. Blogger David Stockman, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that even firing three-quarters of all federal employees would only save about $700 billion in savings, which is not enough to avoid a debt death spiral. The carried debt alone could sink whatever else Mr. Trump seeks to accomplish, especially as it can morph into a lethal currency crisis at any time — a runaway inflation and / or collapse of the bond market that would put a lot of people and enterprises out of business, bringing on a new great depression. There’s always talk about “growing” our way out of debt. I doubt we will be able to do that in the proposed way, based on economic dynamics we’ll get to further below. In his first term, Mr. Trump made noises about defaulting on US debt. I think you will hear chatter about doing just that in the early days of 2025. Though it sounds horrendous, default will happen one way or another: either an honest repudiation of treasury paper ( Sorry, we just can’t make the payments anymore ), or by allowing currency collapse to do the dirty work for us ( Sorry, but our money is worthless . Here’s a billion dollars. . . enjoy the bagel you get for it ). Much of the rest of the world is in similar straits debt-wise, especially Europe and China. The Bretton Woods system for regulating world money has been brain-dead for many years. It’s not hard to imagine something replacing it, including the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency (with all its exorbitant privileges). It remains to be seen what role, if any, cryptocurrencies might play in world trade. Many people are wowed by Bitcoin’s journey above $100,000 lately. I’m still not persuaded that it’s anything but a classic bubble in a speculation that represents nothing — except maybe the electricity expended in processing the math attached to its “creation.” A blogger friend makes this interesting point: What will matter is that one Bitcoin transaction is equivalent to about a month of electricity for the average US household. As Bitcoin grows, energy “consumption” grows exponentially. Note, I said CONSUMPTION, NOT PRODUCTION. If you believe in infinite cheap energy fueled by infinite free money and debt, then all the power to you! No pun intended. . . . — Wendy Williamson For all the “wow,” Bitcoin still lacks the principal properties of true money. It’s not a practical medium of exchange (buying stuff), it’s not a useful store of value (with its periodic crashes and zooms), nor a reliable index of prices (ditto). To me, it looks like a fugazy that has made a small number of people very rich within a limited window of history. Naturally, the people who got rich, who converted their Bitcoins into villas, yachts, and shares of Nvidia, are infatuated with Bitcoin and the phenomenon of crypto. If there is one thing that might characterize the new times we are entering, it will be the recognition that real things have more value than fake things. We have been traumatized by fakery, and going forward great effort will go into identifying it. Our survival depends on being able to discern the fake from the real. Does the world really need a certified universal money agreement? Nothing like Bretton Woods existed until eighty years ago, and it came into being only because the USA so dominated the globe after a ruinous war in Europe and Asia it could command the world’s obedience — at least the parts that weren’t communist. Before that, currencies, monies, and commodities existed, of course, and people took calculated chances trading in them. Usually, but not always, one nation’s currency dominated for a while, as the pound sterling did before World War Two. But paper currencies are a relative novelty. The US only started using paper money in the 1860s. When “money” was mostly gold or silver coin, exchange rates were easy to determine by the purity and weight of a coin. When paper entered the scene, bankers, speculators, and merchants had to do their own due diligence to discover whether X-tons of iron ore, tons of coal, or wheat were worth trading for X-amount of yen, deutschmarks, pounds sterling, and dollars. Those quandaries birthed hedging in currency and commodity trades — a device now wildly perverted, deforming the dynamics of risk and price discovery in everything. We are probably headed back into that world of diverse monies with inherent risks, part and parcel with a multi-polar world of regional hegemons. The US dollar can no longer act as the universal collateral guaranteeing all transactions. Hence, the trade in debt, bonds, and borrowing re-acquires layers of risk absent for a long time. Government borrowing — issuance of sovereign bonds — necessarily declines in that milieu as moral hazard reappears in financial affairs and governments can no longer promiscuously float their spending on debt. Other countries have already discontinued their purchases of US Treasury paper. Where will the customers for US debt come from? (Answer: nowhere.) It’s just another way that nations and their people are forced to get real in a new disposition of things. For now, it has probably been demonstrated that central bank digital currencies are unlikely to work. (Nigeria’s eNaira program, the world’s first large-scale experiment in CBDCs flopped miserably.) Along with the tyrannical surveillance issues, too many citizens rely on transacting business in cash, and if the cash turns no-good, they will find other instruments for transacting, perhaps even things as crude and straightforward as gold and silver, with no counter-party risk, no leverage, and no bullshit attached. To me, though, reversion to hard currency would imply a devolution to far less-complex economies and much lower standards of living. All that runs counter to the current excitement about technological advances compensating for declining systems of modernity — derived from the 20th century religion of endless, limitless progress — creating evermore available (fake) capital. These are the expectations for Artificial Intelligence, advances in “green technology” (especially enhanced electric batteries), next-generation nuclear power, and energy tech not yet achieved but dreamed about such as atomic fusion and zero-point energy. For now, the primary resource of our economy remains oil. All other technologies, including nuclear and “green” tech, still require oil for the production of their hardware and maintenance. US oil production reached an all-time high in late 2024 at 13.6million barrels a day — way higher than the old, pre-fracking era “peak oil” figure of 10-million b/d from 1970, and superficially impressive. Fracking has made all the difference the past two decades, but it is not a permanent installation in the human condition. The continuing production increase has come from enhanced drilling techniques even while the supply of tier-one “sweet-spots” in the Permian Basin of West Texas has markedly declined — and the Permian Basin is the last redoubt of economic shale oil (oil economically worth recovering) in the USA. Mr. Trump has promised loudly and often to “Drill, baby, drill.” Aggressive drilling and opening remaining frontiers like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil production could extend America’s oil abundance on the short end, but there are no meaningful “exploration” prospects left in North America beyond that. We’ll be fooling ourselves. It’s been a nice ride, but the end is in sight. In the Permian Basin, the best drilling locations are increasingly rare as the more productive areas have been exploited. Production In the Permian has declined by 15-percent since 2020, according to data from Enverus . Break-even costs are rising. New well productivity per lateral foot is declining. ZIRP is bygone and the cost of capital (interest on borrowed money) is up with inflation. From 2009 to 2020 — the ZIRP years — investors flocked to shale oil stocks since they couldn’t make a buck on bonds. But the shale producers had trouble making money, even though they produced a lot of oil. Many went bankrupt. After that, investors grew shy about investing in shale oil. Going forward, the capital might not be there for these capital-intensive operations. With the old oil — say, conventional oil in Oklahoma, 1950, where you just banged a pipe in the ground and oil gushed out — the cost of drilling a well was around $500,000 per well (in today’s money). They produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. Shale oil wells cost between $6-million to $12-million per well, with horizontal drilling and fracking (utilizing vast amounts of water trucked-in, plus chemicals and fracking sand to keep the fractures open). The shale wells produce far less per day than the old conventional wells and they decline by over 50-percent in one year. After three or four years, they’re done. Do you see the difference? Higher oil prices are required to justify new capital expenditure. Yet day-by-day the declining American middle-class steadily loses its ability to pay more for oil and individuals and households go broke under the strain of higher prices. The overall dynamic of our economy starts to wobble. Fewer people can qualify for car loans, which is mainly the way American acquire cars. Car-makers are stuck with excess inventory. Eventually the car-makers’ business model fails. And, by the way, it ought to be clear by now that we will not transition from oil-based cars to all-electric cars — surely not at the same scale of mass ownership. Electric cars just cost too much. What happens when mass motoring becomes incrementally less mass, less democratic, something only for the well-off? Answer: It stops. It becomes a focus of resentment and rage. It loses its government subsidies (highway repair, etc). It also leads to the demise of America’s premier living arrangement: suburbia. I have written about this quandary for years. It has been hanging over America’s head, and we are unable to imagine how it plays out — mainly because of the titanic sunk-costs involved. We’ve invested so much of our historic cumulative wealth in building the infrastructure for this living arrangement that letting go of it is unthinkable. Yet, it is already becoming severely dysfunctional. And, of course, as that happens, its components — the tract houses, the strip malls, the office parks — will lose their value, meaning that it will become ever-harder for many people to successfully cash out of it and move elsewhere. And even so, where would that elsewhere be? That problem is exacerbated by the ruinous condition of American cities and their future trajectory. Many US cities have already failed outright — Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Buffalo etc. They are abysmally governed and falling to pieces. They are filled with purposeless humanity, lost souls, dangerous criminals, and ever-fewer places of employment. Even the arguably still-successful cities — New York, Boston, Miami — have attained a scale of operation that is not sustainable, not consistent with the resource and capital scarcities to come. They will have to contract, drop services, lose population — and the process will be very messy. Eventually, they’ll be smaller, but they still occupy some of the best geographical sites, so they will not disappear altogether. The contraction will take a long time to resolve. For the present, that leaves the thousands of small towns across America that have been drained of vitality and investment for decades. Despite the damage, they have two big virtues: they already exist at a scale more congenial to redevelopment in a resource-and-capital constrained time; and many of them are geographically proximate to places where food can be grown for their own support. We will discover that this is where the action will move to. This is where much of the remaining population will resettle as the giant cities and suburbia enter their epic decline. The “Golden Age” euphoria is palpable in these weeks before the Trump inauguration . Wall Street is in a rapture imagining a renaissance of corporate enterprise as a punitive regulatory regime lifts. But, just as gigantic cities tend to fail on the issue of scale, the economy as a whole is in need of reorganizing at a finer grain of enterprise. Gigantism itself, gigantic corporations with their tropism for monopoly, have become increasingly ruinous for communities, households, and individual lives in our time. Americans need more autonomy in their economic lives. The trouble is, we might have to get there the hard way — via a general crash of things organized at too large a scale, which would force the necessary rebuild at a smaller and more local scale. This implies a coming second great depression. It’s not hard to imagine such a crash occurring in the first year of a Trump regime. For one thing, there are surely nefarious parties and persons who would like to see it happen, who might even seek to engineer a financial train wreck for revenge against Mr. Trump and his followers. Anyway, a severely overvalued stock market is begging for correction. Ditto the housing market (and the over-valued collateral it represents) that so much of finance rests on. Too many banks are insolvent. The debt quagmire ensures that government can’t rush to the rescue as it has in past emergencies to bail out the banks without destroying the dollar. You might also wonder about the proposition laid out in David Rogers Webb’s book, The Great Taking , about the meticulously planned scheme for central bankers to seize much of the collateral in the world, meaning all your stuff. Sounds a little grandiose and preposterous, perhaps, but the fact is that the regulatory authorities of Western Civ have rewritten the banking rules stealthily over the years so that anyone with a bank account is now considered just a low-order creditor whose assets can be taken in the event of a banking emergency. Your savings are just labeled “collateral,” and your “ownership” of the assets is not what you thought it was. The scam seems fantastic, but the rules are in place, waiting to be sprung. Mr. Webb’s concise 99-page book is available free as a pdf HERE . Of course, a global implosion of equity and bond markets would be the end of financial life as we’ve known it, and none of the abstract chatter about banking rules takes sufficient account of the grotesque social disorder that would attend such an event, so any Great Taking might end up being beside the point — the point being that everyone is broke, no one can transact, and things get awfully dire. But we get a bit ahead of ourselves going up that path. So, let’s return to things we know about. Mr. Trump’s proposed economic reforms have inescapable overtones of contraction. Paring down the federal government workforce may have many benefits, but it would likely cause a depression in the DC Metro area as jobs are massively eliminated, and the economic damage would radiate through the rest of the country as departments are trimmed and shut down, and the money flowing out of them stops. The effect of a tariff campaign could hurt American business in the short term. Import replacement is a laudatory goal, but it’s liable to be a rough road getting there. Supply lines will break. People and businesses will not get the things they need to do produce goods. It takes time and capital to set up new factories. The tendency will be to run production with robots as far as possible — so, where will the people earn a living? Robots will not become consumers . You must also wonder more generally whether it’s really possible to reenact the industrial orgy of the mid-20th century. Detroit will not be what it was in 1962. “Joe Biden” leaves behind an economy already auguring-in, concealed by monumental federal spending of money created out of thin air in the months leading up to the 2024 election to cover-up the failing private US economy. Also, all of the official reporting about jobs in 2024 was fake in order to juice the election for the party in power. US Government outlays for the year were $6.752 trillion against revenue of $4.919 trillion. Government can’t solve the problem of mass joblessness by giving everybody government jobs, and Mr. Trump is not philosophically aligned to that sort 20th century Big Government action. Anyway, too many jobs today are crap jobs toiling for merciless companies who mistreat their workers, so the very meaning of work has been degraded to a new kind of slavery. Plus, too many Americans do not work at all, but subsist on government hand-outs or on crime. How does this change? First, it doesn’t change without the nation going through a period of disorder, discontinuity, and distress. When it does change, the change will be systemic and emergent. It will not come from any top-down government or managerial process. It emerges from the circumstances that reality presents — specifically, the need for people to support themselves, to make themselves useful to their fellow humans, which relationships form into networks of business and work that become a social ecology, a community. So, the second Trump term could usher in a period of deep economic hardship as we try to figure out how to remake an American economy and rebuild those local ecologies of business. Can Mr. Trump assume a role anything like Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s? A paternal voice speaking directly to the people and offering them reassurance in a troubled time? They are obviously very different personalities. Also, the lingering political opposition to Mr. Trump is far more noxious on the Left than anything FDR faced from the Right in 1933. Today’s Left is still functionally insane, sunk in Marxian-Woke delusions, race-and-gender animus, and an intemperate libido for power, all of it boding ill for political stability. Americans are used to relying on faceless, distant authorities to take care them, to solve their problems: Social Security, Disability, Medicaid, insurance companies, courts. It all works very poorly now, and before long a lot of it may not work at all. We will have to take care of each other. There have never been so many single-person households as there are now. Loneliness and anomie are epic. When the Boomers are gone, that will likely be the end of nursing home care and assisted living at the cost of many thousands of dollars-a-month. The Boomers’ replacement generations are not nearly as wealthy. They missed the window for being able to buy McMansions that could be liquidated for millions to support end-of-life care. We’ll probably see the rise of households made of unrelated people. But the default setting for humans is the family and the extended family. Some human relations that were common in earlier eras of history, and absent in our time, could return. A little over a century ago, ten percent of the people employed in America were household servants, including what were then middle-class households. Today, only the very wealthy have servants. What hasn’t changed is that people need a place and a purpose, and a purposeful place in a household is not necessarily a bad deal in a civilized society. We just haven’t experienced it in many decades and many Americans would probably find the proposition ridiculous. Yet too many have no place in society and nothing to do, including activities that might be considered duties to one another. Many towns in the 19th century had institutions called the Poor Farm. Sounds terrible, perhaps, but it was a way of providing a place and real duties for people who had nowhere else to go and nothing to occupy them. It was generally organized as a local charity. Residents were expected to work to their ability, raise their own food in gardens, take care of livestock, do laundry and cleaning chores. Today, that might be considered “cruel,” but really, is it as bad as just letting many thousands camp-out on the streets, sunk in drug addiction? What it requires is the political will to organize useful, properly-scaled institutions around these needs. To get there, we must drop a lot of ideological pretenses. We face very serious problems with agriculture organized at the gigantic scale, utilizing multi-million-dollar machines (usually mortgaged), giant loans to put in crops, huge “inputs” of chemicals and fertilizers. That is probably coming to an end, too, despite the current techno-narcissistic fantasies of Agribiz. We’re probably going to need more human beings working directly on farms, smaller farms, with fewer giant machines, less borrowed money for putting in crops, and fewer chemical inputs. Which is to say, we’re probably going to see a larger percentage of the population at work growing our food than has been the case for a long time. I suppose it’s hard to grok our society becoming reorganized so differently, of reviving ways of living and working together that are consistent with human nature, proven over time, but considered out-of-date now. Obviously resurrecting relations like these requires major changes in our national psychology. Today, it is impossible to persuade a lot of citizens that they need to do something useful for a living. Or, to look at it differently, that there might be activities to fill their days that would interesting, satisfying, and rewarded with pay — rather than just loafing, getting high, and watching canned entertainment. Today, we lack countless occupational niches in society that used to allow people of very different abilities to find a place and a purpose, especially, now, people of low ability. If I am correct that the macro trend is to re-scale our economy and re-localize it, those places and purposes can return. It will probably also require a return of the eternal verities, too, as a means of managing social relations: truth, beauty, liberty, brotherly love, trust, fairness. . . conditions and behavior that we should at least agree to aspire to in a common culture worthy of our allegiance. I doubt that the incoming Trump administration sees things developing in the direction of downscaling, decomplexifying, and localizing. Rather, they seem to expect ever more grandiose enterprise, at least in what’s known as the private sector, even while they pare down government. But, really, everything in the everyday life of this nation will have to scale down and happen differently. We’re going to need fewer giant entities like Walmart and more local commercial networks of small businesses geared to local communities. As you may have inferred, I believe that circumstances will deliver us to that new disposition of things in any case, whether political leaders agree or not. If Mr. Trump is wise, he will recognize the trend and go with the flow. As I write, governments are falling all over the place. Olaf Scholz cannot form a governing coalition in Germany. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s ruling faction lost bigly in snap elections last summer with no clear majority for any coalition, and also in the EU parliamentary elections. Both countries are using lawfare to defeat their opponents. Mr Scholz’s and his allies are trying to outlaw the rising opposition Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) party, especially after the AFD showed growing strength in state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia. The Paris prosecutor’s office is trying to nail Marine LePen on embezzling EU funds to pay staff salaries in her National Rally Party. Germany, the largest economy in the EU, has been busy committing suicide for the past decade. The country shut down its nuclear power reactor fleet entirely and went all-in for a “green” energy program (wind and solar) that has fallen far short of being able to supply its needs. It had just gotten ready to receive a reliable supply of cheap Russian natural gas in 2022 when somebody — probably the USA — blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines. Joe Biden declared in so many words that he was going to “stop” the Nord Streams months earlier, so why not believe him? The Germans just rolled over for what would normally be construed as an act-of-war against it, by a NATO ally no less. Consequently, overnight Germany’s advanced industrial economy, its automakers, chemical companies, machine tool-makers, became uncompetitive in global markets and the German economy entered a slow death spiral. Europe is now supposed to be happy to get American liquified natgas, which is much more costly to transport and offload than Russian pipeline gas would have been. France was only marginally better off with its robust nuclear energy production to supply electricity, but it, too, lost access to cheap Russian natgas needed for industry and home heating. Meanwhile, the other nations of the EU have all to one extent or another joined the European suicide pact. The EU has been at war against its own farmers for years for reasons that appear completely insane — perhaps driven by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum. The regulatory architecture of the European Commission is crushing business under its “green” energy and climate change mitigation agenda. Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV) unexpectedly won the most seats in the last election, but not an outright majority, and could not form a working coalition. Wilders did not become prime minister —the job was assigned instead to one Dick Schoof, a career bureaucrat who most recently ran the Netherlands’ Intel service. Canada, entered political limbo in mid-December when Deputy Prime Minister and Finance chief (and WEF board member) Chrystia Freeland suddenly resigned and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looked like he was fighting for his political life in parliament. Mr. Trudeau had only days before made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for talks with Donald Trump, who mocked him most severely down there, calling Canada “our fifty-first state” and referring to Mr. Trudeau as “governor.” The Canadian dollar has been tanking since then and stands at 69 cents to the US dollar as I write. Mr. Trudeau will be gone early in the new year at the latest. He’ll be replaced by the Conservative party leader, Pierre Poilievre, who demonstrates an ability to think straight. The European Union regulatory overlayment has become an intolerable burden for the EU member nations. The EU seemed like a good idea at the time, and for many years basic operating principles like a common currency (the Euro) and the Schengen Agreement (free movement of member state citizens and goods across national borders) made daily life easier. But in recent years the EU bureaucracy adopted a set of insane polices: the programmatic destruction of farms and farmers; mass unregulated immigration from third world failed states; and antipathy to petroleum resources for the sake of debatable climate change. Aggravating all this is the unelected EU Commissioners’ lack of accountability to the public. Other technical issues, such as the EU’s lack of fiscal control over individual members and the problems that causes for bond issuance appear irresolvable. Once before, in 2012, financial turmoil has threatened the EU’s existence. But that crisis — the collapse of Greece and its ramifications — got “papered over” with bail-outs and accounting fraud. Now, Europe enters an era not just of critical financial imbalances, but of severe dislocations in the on-the-ground economy of real production. The flood of migrants continues and their aggressive antagonism to age-old European culture is on the rise with calls for Sharia law and a European caliphate. It’s getting to look like a tragi-farcical reenactment of the Mohammedan conquests of the Middle Ages. It’s draining EU members’ treasuries while they go broke from de-industrializing. And countless humiliations are heaped on the people: mass murders, beheadings, constant insults, street violence all over and, just last week, the Christmas market murders in Magdeburg. It’s at a breaking point. As Europe watches Mr. Trump successfully commence deportations, Europe will eventually follow — but not before a tumultuous period in early 2025 when rebellion sweeps away Leftist governments. The European Union could be swept away with them. Borders will harden, national currencies might return, and drastic realignment awaits. The United Kingdom looks like a lost cause due to the utter collapse of the conservative party, leaving Labor temporarily alone on the field, with the monumentally incompetent PM Keir Starmer in charge and an all-out Orwellian regime severely abusing the indigenous British people while it coddles hostile immigrants. That will not last a whole lot longer. Starmer will be chased out in the first half of 2025, just as Liz Truss (remember her?) got dumped in 2022. Waiting to enter at stage-right is Nigel Farage, a genuinely charismatic leader who is destined to become Britain’s Trump. After successfully leading the Brexit charge, he sojourned in the political wilderness like Churchill did between 1929-39. Now he leads the Reform UK Party, which is in the process of utterly eclipsing the broken Tories. Look for Farage to make his move quickly in 2025. Then there is the woeful situation in Ukraine. I’ve written about it often and will recapitulate it as succinctly as possible: The Ukraine War was an American neocon project to destabilize Russia and probably an attempt to gain control of its resource assets. Mr. Putin refused to get rolled and fought back. It has been a hugely costly disaster for Ukraine in blood, capital, and infrastructure. Not a cake-walk for Russia, either. But Mr. Putin will probably attain his objectives, which are: annexation of Donbas and Crimea and establishment of what’s left of Ukraine as a neutral, non-member of NATO. Mr. Trump is eager to end what he calls “this stupid war.” The catch is, how can he settle it expeditiously without appearing to capitulate? Mr. Putin will not budge from retaining Crimea and the Donbas provinces (“oblasts”). That is the condition for even entering talks. The humiliation associated with this project should be all Joe Biden’s, and in some respects certainly will be when his family’s entanglements and machinations are fully exposed, as they are certain to be. Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will solve the puzzle by pretending to negotiate over the port of Odessa, which will eventually be awarded to the rump Ukraine so it can have access to the sea for its essential grain shipments. They’ll tussle for a while over that but it will be all for show. The war will end. Ukraine will finally hold elections and Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be cast out like a dog that has peed on the rug too many times. I doubt he will survive the year. Both America and Russia pony up money to rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, but not much more. The world will come to understand exactly what happened. NATO will be a shadow of what it was, if it does not collapse altogether due to the rising political upheavals all over Europe. I am not on the bus with the mob shouting about Israel as a perpetrator of “genocide.” Our own General Sherman put it succinctly 160 years ago: War is hell . Hamas should not have started one on October 7, 2023. For that, the Palestinians got hell. Hamas fighters should not have (literally) dug itself in amongst the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, with its labyrinth of war tunnels that the Israelis had to destroy if there would be any end to the strife emanating out of them. The essential problem in that corner of the world is that the region cannot support the huge and still-growing populations of most of the Arab states in it. It is mostly desert. The fantastic wealth of the oil age combined with other circumstances, such as the increase in grain production, to grow these populations. Tragically now, all that has reached a limit and things are going in the other direction: toward collapse. This slow-motion collapse expresses itself in political friction, mass migration, violence, and religious zealotry. The Jihadis are serious about murdering non-Muslims. Considering the action in Europe lately, the truculence of Muslim migrants towards their hosts there, it’s obvious that Jews and Christians are on equal footing as targets. The population Israel of Israel is 9.4 -million. The total population of Palestinians worldwide is estimated to be around 14.8 million as of mid-2024. This includes Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within Israel, and in the diaspora across various countries. The population of countries adjacent to — Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria — is 145-million. Much of that Arab population subscribes to annihilating the state of Israel, and declares as much publicly all the time. Is Israel not supposed to take those threats seriously? Considering these odds, are you shocked and offended that the United States is an ally of Israel? Do you think that the United States has no strategic interest in any counter-balance to opposing interests in the Middle East? Grow up. The American Woke-Marxists want you to think that this relationship is illicit, unjust. They want you to hate the Jews and hate Israel. You’d better ask yourself: who do these Woke-Marxists serve? Not our interests, not American interests. Israel has managed to make its tiny desert country blossom over the past seventy-five years while also building a manufacturing and tech economy. Due to the constant threats against it, much of the wealth generated by that economy must be directed into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). It is quite an accomplishment for this tiny state to stand-up against so many enemies. They have won two major wars against them in modern times as well as many periodic border clashes, intifadas, and skirmishes. Their enemies are deeply resentful and probably jealous of Israel’s economic success. The Oct 7, 2023, rape, torture, and murder attack by Hamas prompted Israel to mount an existential defense against an obdurately and garishly murderous enemy. Israel won the Gaza Strip territory from Egypt in the 1967 War. In 2005 it turned over governance of Gaza to the Palestinians. Among other things, the Palestinians could have turned Gaza’s twenty-five-mile-long beach-front into a premier Mediterranean resort. Instead, the Hamas government used the international aid funds they received to build miles and miles of war tunnels. Bad choice. They used Gaza as a launching pad for missile attacks and intifadas. More bad choices. 10/7/23 was a crossed red line. Now there is no more Gaza. The civilians will have to find somewhere else to go, and if their Arab neighbors won’t take them, then blame their Arab neighbors. They have been cast out for atrocious behavior. The Jihadis’ publicists want you to think that Israel has behaved badly. No doubt, the action by the IDF in Gaza was brutal. War is hell. In war, everywhere and always, soldiers act savagely. Americans did, at times, in Vietnam and Iraq. It is the reality of war. One lesson is that wars should not be started casually. Israel’s motive in this war is to put the war parties of its enemies out-of-business. It is close to succeeding now, with Hamas scattered, Hezbollah cut off from its sponsor, Iran, and Assad gone in Syria. Israel accomplished this with the “Joe Biden” regime pretending to support both sides in the conflict and finally having less influence than ever over the outcome. This is where things stand in December, 2025, but it is a very lively game-board, and there is much potential for new action and the entry of other players, which we’ll turn to now. Well, that was fast! Took twelve days (Nov 27 to Dec 8). Phhhhht!!! Assad, gone (to Russia). How’d that happen? Begin with the population problem I cited above: the region is poor. Expanding population against a contracting resource base will create great political and social stresses. Syria’s population grew dramatically from 7-million in 1972 to 22-million in 2022. Syria is a large country with distinct territories. Its easternmost region bordering Iraq and Turkey, Jazira, with the city of Raqqah, straddles the Euphrates River, a grain-growing corridor that used to feed the Syrian people. Many years of drought and botched irrigation projects have wrecked farming there. That was one factor in the mass migrations to Europe the past decade. Altogether, 6-million Syrians have fled the country since the Arab Spring in 2011. Jazira is also the location of Syria’s oil, which was grabbed by the US in 2019 when the country was racked by civil war. The region is a cultural crossroads, with a significant Kurdish population, bleeding over to Greater Kurdistan into Iraq and Turkey. Long story short: Assad’s Syria was badly weakened by food shortages, revenue shortage, and long-running civil war. He could barely pay his Army, and when the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel forces pushed across the country this fall, his soldiers melted away. HTS has its origins in al Qaeda, and al Qaeda has its origins in the US intel blob and its neocon strategists. You can be sure that the US was involved in rooting out Assad. As we have seen before, these kinds of operations tend to be double-edged swords, which end up stabbing America in the back later on. In this case, imagine that by chasing Assad out we may have succeeded in turning Syria into Jihad Central of the Middle East. As soon as HTS was in control of Damascus, the capital, Israel sent its air force in and destroyed every military target, airfield, tank park, munitions depot in Syria so that it would not fall into the hands of Hezbollah, Israel’s Iran-backed enemy. Israel controls a small area of southern Syria near the Golan Heights. Israel had already done severe damage to Hezbollah earlier this year by methodically killing off its leadership, one-by-one. The exploding pager op also did enormous operational damage to Hezbollah. For now, Israel benefits from broken Syria. Iran has lost its geographical conduit for arms supply to Hezbollah. The HTS forces are Sunni and Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, is Shia, with all the built-in conflict that implies. All of a sudden, Iran has lost its influence in this region adjacent to Israel, the enemy it declares it wants to “wipe off the map.” The Turks were involved in the Syrian regime change, too. Turkey currently hosts millions of Syrian refugees from the chaos of the Syrian civil war. The Kurds in Syria are also a problem, linked to the PKK, a terrorist terror group inside Turkey. Turkey’s pugnacious president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pivots between its alliance with NATO, its off-and-on strategic relations with Russia, and the Arab world with its cultural affinities. Turkey is a disgruntled NATO. For decades, it was openly and often derided by other nations in the west as “the sick man of Europe.” Yet, it controls the entrance to the Black Sea, which has always been a problem for Russia — they have gone to war several times — though Russia engages in development projects in Turkey these days. Don’t forget, Turkey’s Ottoman Empire controlled all of the Middle East and North Africa from the 16th into the early 20th century and its influence ranged into Europe as well. This was the time long before oil wealth juiced the Arab world. Populations were sparse then across what was then called The Holy Land. The indigenous Arabs still wandered the desert on camels and lived in tents. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in the First World War, and what you see on-the-ground over much of the region are artificial boundaries created by the British after the war for administrative efficiency. Mr. Erdoğan may harbor ambitions for Turkey to once again play a larger role in world affairs. It has the region’s largest standing army. For now, Turkey and Erdoğan enjoy somewhat enhanced regional influence. The counter to him has been the US’s penchant for creating failed states via CIA involvement with rebel and Jihad movements. Mr. Trump has dropped the hint that he’s inclined to keep the US involvement in Syria to a minimum. He begins his administration with a declared aversion to all the world’s current wars. I’d forecast the HTS government not being able to control much of the country and a continued arc toward failed nationhood, with friction and violence between many of the different groups still residing there. I doubt Israel wants to try to control it, since it is an obvious quagmire. Russia appears to be bowing out of direct involvement, too, but is rumored to be negotiating with HTS to maintain its presence at the Khmeimim Air Base and the Tartus Naval Base. The macro trend in many parts of the Middle East is a return to pre-modernity. The last hundred years of jet planes and Range Rovers will look like a strange, anomalous blip in history. Whatever is going on in China, her leaders like to play the long game, looking ahead decades, fifty and a hundred years, while everyone else struggles to strategize from month to month. It doesn’t mean that China comes out a winner, though. Some of that long game is just hubris and pretense. China has plenty of problems. It developed into an industrial colossus overnight, and now the global techno-industrial economy it found such a big role in is wobbling, especially in Europe, which puts a huge strain on China’s export-oriented system. Its financial architecture has always been janky because CCP is so entangled with the banks, bourses, and giant business enterprises — and if it doesn’t like how things are going, the Party just pretends that everything’s great. Nothing can be allowed to challenge the CCP’s dominance. Eventually things break, though, and the Party has to create some new narrative to explain the breakage. Lately there are rumors of mass layoffs, and of many young people leaving the cities to return to the countryside. The population is skewed to the elderly, due to the many years of China’s one-child policy. There is, of course, the disastrous real estate bubble which continues to destroy the savings of households, since many Chinese did not trust banks or stock and bond markets, and instead invested in enormous apartment complex property development projects have been failing one after another. The CCP’s response has been to screw down CCP control over the people and their activities ever-harder. The party fears its own people and no regime has a guarantee to go on forever. Expect turmoil there in 2025 as economic depression creeps across the global economy. America’s problems with China over trade and manufacturing are likely to be eclipsed in 2025 by the gross intrusions and subversions that China has been allowed to make in US institutions and our economy with the assistance of the “Joe Biden” administration . The Chinese have infiltrated America’s research universities, telecommunications (especially the hardware for cell phones and 5-G microwave transmission), US Intel, and the corporate sector, stealing intellectual property and our manufacturing secrets. And, of course, China has deeply involved itself in elected officialdom — the Biden family’s grifting operations and Rep Eric Swalwel’s romance with the spy Fang-Fang, among the most notorious. Senator Diane Feinstein employed a Chinese spy as her limo driver and go-fer for twenty years, including the years 2009 to 2015 when she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee. You can be sure that Congress is well-larded with Chinese money and the influence it buys. Expect to find out a lot more in 2025. It is one of the things that binds elected officials so tightly to the DC blob. Two other matters involving China require urgent attention and the waiting Trump admin is already talking about them. One is China’s large, recent purchases of US land, both prime farmland and real estate around US military bases. It looks like they are going to be ejected from these holdings, with or without compensation is not known yet. We might see inquiries as to how these purchases were allowed to happen. The second issue is the number of Chinese nationals, especially men of military age, who came across the border along with the millions of other illegal aliens that “Joe Biden” allowed into the country with zero vetting. In fiscal year 2023 — Oct 1, 2022 to Sept. 30, 2023 — that number was about 24,100. In fiscal year 2024 it was 24,400. You should assume that US intel knows something about some of them, but not most of them, and what they are up to here. Several Chinese “police stations” — that is, offices set up in US cities to control Chinese migrants in the US — have been discovered and busted the last several years. And then there was the case of the Chinese high-altitude “weather balloon” (actually suspected of being a military surveillance balloon) that the “Joe Biden” admin allowed to sail completely across the USA from the Pacific to the Atlantic before shooting it down offshore of the Carolinas. These Chinese activities around the USA in aggregate suggest a kind of stealth warfare aimed at eventually getting control of the North American continent and its resources. This would be consistent with fifty-to-a-hundred-year long-range strategic thinking. And it was apparently working pretty nicely until the elections of 2024. It should be pretty alarming, but somehow the alarm bells have not gone off until a couple of months ago. Questions, anyone? I’d forecast that the US and China will not go to war with China over Taiwan in 2025. It is too much of a losing proposition for all concerned. Both China and the USA will be preoccupied with domestic problems and trade negotiations in the year ahead. Keep your eye on Argentina and its president, Javier Milei. Argentina was the world’s seventh-wealthiest nation in the early 1900s, and from 1930s on, after many coups, the country slid into chronic decline, badly aggravated by the long-running dictatorships of Juan and Eva Peron, and followed buy decades more revolving military coups, Peronista governments, and neoliberal finance mischief that left the resource-rich nation broke. Enter Javier Milei (Mee-lay) in 2023 as Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” president, who ran the promise to “take a chain saw” to the parasitical bureaucracy. In year one of his admin (essentially 2024), Milei got rid of 35,000 government employees and balanced the budget for the first time in decades. Inflation is finally falling. The Argentine people have awakened from the successive Peronista / neoliberal zombie comas they have been in for decades. Prediction: in 2025 Argentina sets the pace for the revolution in Western Civ government. Melei has another successful year in downsizing oppressive, useless bureaucracy. He begins a pioneering national nuclear power program. Argentina begins to emerge as a major player on the world stage. El Salvador is ruled, shall we say, by the eccentric and very interesting President Nayib Bukele-Ortiz (known simply as Bukele), now in his second term. His campaign against gang violence that made El Salvador such a savage place has produced spectacular results. His new “Terrorism Confinement Center” is one of the largest and most modern prisons in the world. It was built to house 20,000 inmates. He has arrested an estimated 86,000 hardened gang-aligned criminals. El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world — which is what happens after allowing criminal gangs to hold the country hostage for decades. From 2022 to 2023, the murder rate fell by approximately 69-percent. (Data for 2024 is not complete.) Mr. Bukele enjoys a 91-percent favorable rating among voters. In 2021, El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal tender alongside the US dollar. Mr. Bukele’s “Bitcoin Law” requires businesses to accept Bitcoin in transactions. (As I said above, Bitcoin as “money” is deeply problematic.) The government itself has been purchasing Bitcoin as a long-term investment strategy. The verdict is out as to how Mr. Bukele’s fate might be chained to Bitcoin. For now, he has managed an epic turnaround in a country that had been lost to anarchy and crime for virtually all its previous existence. Forecast: El Salvador will continue to thrive due to Mr. Bukele’s Napoleonic organizational skills, even if Bitcoin falters. That is all I have for you in this end of year forecast for the year to come. I will be amazed to hear if any of you read this document to its bitter end. For each of you personally: do your best to lead purposeful, ethical lives in 2025. Refrain from trying to push other people around. Take care of your own bidness. . . And, above all, stay calm and cheerful!

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WASHINGTON — Nearly 100 former senior U.S. diplomats and intelligence and national security officials have urged Senate leaders to schedule closed-door hearings to allow for a full review of the government's files on former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard , Donald Trump's pick to be national intelligence director. The former officials, who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, said they were "alarmed" by the choice of Gabbard to oversee all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. They said her past actions "call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus." A spokesperson for Gabbard on the Trump transition team on Thursday denounced the appeal as an "unfounded" and "partisan" attack. Among those who signed the letter were former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, former national security adviser Anthony Lake, and numerous retired ambassadors and high-ranking military officers. They wrote to current Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and incoming Republican Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday to urge the closed briefings as part of the Senate's review of Trump's top appointments. They urged that Senate committees "consider in closed sessions all information available to the U.S. government when considering Ms. Gabbard's qualifications to manage our country's intelligence agencies, and more importantly, the protection of our intelligence sources and methods." The letter singles out Gabbard's 2017 meetings in Syria with President Bashar Assad, who is supported by Russian, Iranian and Iranian-allied forces in a now 13-year war against Syrian opposition forces seeking his overthrow. The U.S., which cut relations with Assad's government and imposed sanctions over his conduct of the war, maintains about 900 troops in opposition-controlled northeast Syria, saying they are needed to block a resurgence of extremist groups. Gabbard, a Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii at the time of her Syria trip, drew heavy criticism for her meetings with a U.S. adversary and brutal leader. As the letter notes, her statements on the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have aligned with Russian talking points, diverging from U.S. positions and policy. Gabbard, throughout her political career, has urged the U.S. to limit military engagement abroad other than combatting Islamic extremist groups. She has defended the Syria trip by saying it is necessary to engage with U.S. enemies. In postings on social media earlier this year, she confirmed that the U.S. had for a time placed her "on a secret terror watch list" as a "potential domestic terror threat." She blamed political retaliation. Neither she nor U.S. authorities have publicly detailed the circumstances involved. Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for Gabbard with the Trump team, called the letter sent to the Senate leaders "a perfect example" of why Trump chose Gabbard for this position. "These unfounded attacks are from the same geniuses who have blood on their hands from decades of faulty 'intelligence,'" and use classified government information as a "partisan weapon to smear and imply things about their political enemy," Henning said. A spokesperson for Thune did not immediately respond to questions about the request.

Thalia Set for ‘Christmas in Rockefeller Center’ & More Uplifting Moments in Latin MusicNew Delhi, Nov 23: As Donald Trump returns as the next US President, India could actually bolster its position in global supply chains, particularly in technology sectors like AI and semiconductors, due to previous investments and policy shifts such as the "China+1" strategy, according to a report on Saturday. The potential for higher US corporate tax cuts may enhance IT spending, benefiting Indian IT companies, according to the report by Motilal Oswal Private Wealth (MOPW). “Indian businesses in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and defence might also find new opportunities, especially if US-India collaboration strengthens in response to a more robust Indo-Pacific defence strategy,” the report mentioned. Trump's second term is filled with both promises of economic growth and challenges of global trade tensions. The strength of the US dollar and fiscal policies could significantly influence global markets, driving various strategic realignments. As policies unfold, countries and sectors must remain nimble to adapt to the evolving landscape fuelled by “Trump II.” According to the report, Trump's 'America First' policy could reshape international trade. His approach involves reducing imports, particularly from China, to bolster US manufacturing. Emerging markets face a mixed bag of challenges and opportunities. Some countries could see increased costs for exports due to a stronger dollar and higher tariffs, particularly affecting IT and pharmaceutical sectors. Conversely, nations like Mexico may benefit by diverting manufacturing operations from China. Geopolitically, Trump's policies are likely to intensify tensions with China and could alter alliances, as countries like Japan and South Korea reassess their strategies. According to the report, the EU may seek to become more self-reliant and potentially foster new alliances beyond the US sphere of influence. Meanwhile, Trump's protectionist trade policies and their impact on India need to be watched out for in the coming months, it noted.

Jerod Mayo on Patriots’ penalty woes against Dolphins: ‘It starts with me’LOS ANGELES — The longest winning streak in college basketball has come to an end with No. 6 UCLA taking down defending champion and No. 1 South Carolina in convincing fashion, 77-62 . For the past two seasons, Dawn Staley’s team has taken care of any team that crossed its path with a program-record 43 consecutive wins, with only four games being single-digit victories. But on Sunday afternoon inside Pauley Pavilion, the Gamecocks didn’t look anything like the most dominant team in the game. The Bruins were in control from start to finish, grabbing the first points of the game and holding onto a lead it never relinquished. UCLA started the contest on a 15-2 run and the lead was in double-digits for nearly the entire game. The Bruins led by 21 points at halftime and the closest South Carolina was able to get to in the second half was 15 points in the final minute. The win represents the program's first against a No. 1-ranked team. Staley said prior to Sunday’s contest she knew UCLA center Lauren Betts presented a big challenge. A likely first-round pick in the 2025 WNBA draft should she declare, Betts controlled the paint and made the Gamecocks earn anything they could get near the bucket. The Gamecocks shot a low 36.4% percentage (24-for-66) from the field while the Bruins made 47.5% (28-for-59) of their buckets. South Carolina had no alternative but to shoot from the perimeter, and it was very successful with a 8-for-11 mark from 3-point line. The only problem was the Bruins were able to match it with 10 made 3-pointers on 21 attempts. Anytime South Carolina appeared to be establishing any sort of rhythm, the Bruins would come right down the court and halt it to send the crowd into a frenzy. The result will be the latest to shake up the top 10 in women’s basketball, with the Bruins victory coming one day after No. 5 Notre Dame went into Los Angeles and took down No. 3 Southern California. It’s still the first month of the regular season, but Cori Close’s team now has a signature victory, something the Bruins have been looking for quite some time and will be a big boost for a team that is hunting to get to its first Final Four since the NCAA sponsored the game. Sunday also marked the first time South Carolina had lost a November game since 2019. The USA TODAY app gets you to the heart of the news fast. Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more .