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url www lodibet com NASSAU, Bahamas — Scottie Scheffler brought a new putting grip to the Hero World Challenge and felt enough improvement to be satisfied with the result, a 5-under 67 that left him three shots behind Cameron Young on Thursday. Young was playing for the first time since the BMW Championship more than three months ago and found great success on and around the greens of Albany Golf Club, chipping beautifully and holing four birdie putts from 15 feet or longer for his 64. He led by two shots over Justin Thomas in his first competition since his daughter was born a few weeks ago. Thomas ran off four straight birdies late in his round and was a fraction of an inch away with a fifth. The big surprise was Scheffler, the No. 1 player in golf who looked as good as he has all year in compiling eight victories, including an Olympic gold medal. His iron play has no equal. His putting at times has kept him from winning more or winning bigger. He decided to try to a "saw" putting grip from about 20 feet or closer — the putter rests between his right thumb and his fingers, with his left index finger pointed down the shaft. "I'm always looking for ways to improve," Scheffler said. Scheffler last year began working with renowned putting instructor Phil Kenyon, and he says Kenyon mentioned the alternative putting grip back then. "But it was really our first time working together and it's something that's different than what I've done in the past," Scheffler said. "This year I had thought about it from time to time, and it was something that we had just said let's table that for the end of the season, take a look at it. "Figured this is a good week to try stuff." He opened with a wedge to 2 feet and he missed a 7-foot birdie putt on the par-5 third. But he holed a birdie from about the same distance at the next par 5, No. 6, and holed a sliding 6-footer on the ninth to save par. His longest putt was his last hole, from 12 feet for a closing birdie. "I really enjoyed the way it felt," he said. "I felt like I'm seeing some improvements in my stroke." Young, regarded as the best active player without a PGA Tour victory, is treating this holiday tournament as the start of a new season. He worked on getting stronger and got back to the basics in his powerful golf swing. And on this day, he was dialed in with his short game. He only struggled to save par twice and kept piling up birdies in his bogey-free round on an ideal day in the Bahamas. "The wind wasn't blowing much so it was relatively stress-free," Young said. Patrick Cantlay, along with Scheffler playing for the first time since the Presidents Cup, also was at 67 with Ludvig Aberg, Akshay Bhatia and Sahith Theegala. Thomas also took this occasion to do a little experimenting against a 20-man field. He has using a 46-inch driver at home — a little more than an inch longer than his regular driver — in a bid to gain more speed. On a day with little wind, on a golf course with some room off the tee, he decided to put it in play. "Just with it being a little bit longer, I just kind of have to get the club out in front of me and get on top of it a little bit more," Thomas said. "I drove the hell out of it on the back, so that was nice to try something different and have it go a little bit better on the back." Thomas said the longer driver gives him 2 or 3 mph in ball speed and 10 extra yards in the air. "It's very specific for courses, but gave it a try," he said. Conditions were easy enough that only four players in field failed to break par, with Jason Day bringing up the rear with a 75. Get local news delivered to your inbox!BMO Capital downgraded Prologis ( PLD ) to Underperform from Market Perform with a price target of $104, down from $120. Prologis is a “world-class company with a moat business,” but its valuation screens expensive, the analyst tells investors in a research note. The firm says the company’s s embedded growth is set to moderate back to pre-COVID levels by 2026. Industrial leasing demand is down 56% year-over-year, and BMO does not see a near-term rebound with Amazon expanding modestly and shifting toward higher warehouse ownership. The Trump tariffs adds further uncertainty, the firm adds. Pick the best stocks and maximize your portfolio: Discover top-rated stocks from highly ranked analysts with Analyst Top Stocks! Easily identify outperforming stocks and invest smarter with Top Smart Score Stocks Published first on TheFly – the ultimate source for real-time, market-moving breaking financial news. Try Now>> See Insiders’ Hot Stocks on TipRanks >> Read More on PLD: Prologis price target lowered to $132 from $137 at Truist Prologis price target lowered to $134 from $136 at Scotiabank Prologis price target raised to $132 from $131 at Barclays Prologis price target lowered to $136 from $142 at Scotiabank Prologis CEO: Things are very good, our future is bright

Israeli drone strikes hit Kamal Adwan Hospital on Tuesday, wounding three medical staff at one of the few hospitals still partially operating in the northernmost part of Gaza , the facility’s director said. Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya said the drones were dropping bombs, spraying shrapnel at the hospital. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. In Lebanon, a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has held despite Israeli forces carrying out several new drone and artillery strikes on Tuesday, killing a shepherd in the country's south. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed keep striking “with an iron fist” against perceived Hezbollah violations of the ceasefire. Hezbollah began launching rockets, drones and missiles into Israel last year in solidarity with Hamas militants who are fighting in the Gaza Strip. The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 people hostage . Israel’s blistering retaliatory offensive has killed at least 44,500 Palestinians , more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were combatants. Israel says it has killed over 17,000 militants, without providing evidence. The war in Gaza has destroyed vast areas of the coastal enclave and displaced 90% of the population of 2.3 million, often multiple times . Here's the Latest: WASHINGTON — U.S. forces conducted a self-defense strike Tuesday in the vicinity of Mission Support Site Euphrates, a U.S. base in eastern Syria, against three truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers, a T-64 tank and mortars that Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said presented “a clear and imminent threat” to U.S. troops. The self-defense strike occurred after rockets and mortars were fired that landed in the vicinity of the base, Ryder said. The Pentagon is still assessing who was responsible for the attacks — that there are both Iranian-backed militias and Syrian military forces that operate in the area. Ryder said the attack was not connected to the offensive that is ongoing in Aleppo, where Syrian jihadi-led rebels taken over the country’s largest city. The U.S. has about 900 troops in Syria to conduct missions to counter the Islamic Stage group. CAIRO — Israeli drone strikes hit the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday, wounding three medical personnel, the facility’s director said. Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya said the drones were dropping bombs, spraying shrapnel at the hospital, located in the town of Beit Lahiya. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. In comments released by Gaza’s Health Ministry, Abu Safiya said one of the injured was in critical condition and was undergoing a complex surgery. “The situation has become extremely dangerous,” he said. “We are exhausted by the ongoing violence and atrocities.” Kamal Adwan Hospital has been struck multiple times over the past two months as Israeli forces have waged a fierce offensive in the area, saying they are rooting out Hamas militants who regrouped there. In October, Israeli forces raided the hospital, saying that militants were sheltering inside and arrested a number of people, including some staff. Hospital officials denied the claim. Abu Safiya was wounded in his thigh and back by an Israeli drone strike on the hospital last month. TEL AVIV, Israel — An Israeli court has ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take the stand next week in his long-running corruption trial, ending a long series of delays. Netanyahu’s lawyers had filed multiple requests to put off the testimony, arguing first that the war in Gaza prevented him from properly preparing for his testimony, and later that his security could not be guaranteed in the court chamber. In Tuesday’s decision, judges in the Jerusalem district court said that following a security assessment, his testimony will be moved to the Tel Aviv district court. Israeli media said the session would take place in an underground chamber. His testimony in the trial, which began in 2020, is expected to begin on Dec. 10 and to last at least several weeks. Netanyahu is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate scandals involving powerful media moguls and wealthy associates. He denies wrongdoing. NABATIYEH, Lebanon — In destroyed areas of southern Lebanon, residents clearing away rubble on Tuesday said they didn’t trust Israel to abide by the week-old ceasefire with Hezbollah. “The Israelis are breaching the ceasefire whenever they can because they are not committed,” said Hussein Badreddin, a vegetable seller in the southern city of Nabatiyeh, which was pummeled by Israeli airstrikes over several weeks. “This means that they (can) breach any resolution at any time.” Since it began last Wednesday, the U.S.- and French-brokered 60-day ceasefire has been rattled by near daily Israeli strikes, although Israel has been vague about the purported Hezbollah violations that prompted them. Imad Yassin, a trader who owns a clothing shop in Nabatiyeh, said Israel was constantly breaching the ceasefire because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to continue the displacement of residents of southern Lebanon. “The Israeli enemy was defeated and the truth is that he is trying to get revenge. Netanyahu is trying to displace us as citizens of southern Lebanon,” Yassin said. They spoke as bulldozers cleared streets strewn with rubble and debris from destroyed buildings. Electricians worked to fix power lines in an effort to restore electricity to the city. Both men were displaced by the war and returned to Nabatiyeh on Wednesday, the day the ceasefire went into effect. Yassin found his clothing shop had been destroyed. He said he would wait to see if the state will dispense compensation funds so that he can repair and reopen his business. GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Two separate Israeli airstrikes killed at least nine people in Gaza City on Tuesday, Palestinian medical authorities said. Six people, including two children, who were killed when an Israeli strike hit a school sheltering displaced people Tuesday afternoon in the Zaytoun neighborhood, according to the Health Ministry’s emergency services. A second strike hit a residential building in the Sabra neighborhood, killing at least three people, the services said. Israeli forces have almost completely isolated northernmost Gaza since early October, saying they’re fighting regrouped Hamas militants there. That has pushed some families south to Gaza City, while hundreds of thousands more live in the territory's center and south in squalid tent camps, where they rely on international aid. JERUSALEM — Israel's military confirmed it killed a senior member of Hezbollah responsible for coordinating with Syria's army on rearming and resupplying the Lebanese militant group. Syrian state media said a drone strike on Tuesday hit a car in a suburb of the capital Damascus, killing one person, without saying who was killed. Israel's military said he was Salman Nemer Jomaa, describing him as “Hezbollah’s representative to the Syrian military,” and that killing him “degrades both Hezbollah’s presence in Syria and Hezbollah’s ongoing force-building efforts.” Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years. Israel rarely acknowledges its actions in Syria, but it has said that it targets bases of Iran-allied militant groups. Iran supports both Hezbollah and the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, which is currently fighting to push back jihadi-led insurgents who seized the country’s largest city of Aleppo . TUBAS, West Bank — Israeli soldiers opened fire inside a hospital in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday during a raid to seize the bodies of alleged militants targeted in earlier airstrikes, a Palestinian doctor working at the hospital told The Associated Press. Soldiers entered the Turkish Hospital complex in Tubas after the bodies of two Palestinians killed and one wounded in airstrikes in the northern West Bank on Tuesday were brought there, said Dr. Mahmoud Ghanam, who works in the hospital’s emergency department. The troops briefly handcuffed and arrested Ghanam and another doctor. “The army entered in a brutal way, and they were shooting inside the emergency department,” said Ghanam. “They handcuffed us and took me and my colleague.” The military confirmed that its troops were operating around the hospital searching for those targeted in the airstrikes, which they said had hit a militant cell near the Palestinian town of Al-Aqaba in the Jordan Valley. It denied that troops had entered the hospital building or fired gunshots inside. The soldiers left after learning that the wounded man had been transferred to another hospital, Ghanam said. The soldiers wanted to take the bodies of the two men killed in the strike, but the hospital’s manager refused to hand over the bodies, Ghanam said. Israeli raids on hospitals in the West Bank are rare but have grown more common since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. In Gaza, Israeli troops have systematically besieged, raided and damaged many hospitals. About 800 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza ignited the war there. Israel has carried out near-daily military raids in the West Bank that it says are aimed at preventing attacks on Israelis — attacks which have also been on the rise. Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek all three territories for an independent state. CAIRO — Palestinian officials say Fatah and Hamas are closing in on an agreement to appoint a committee of politically independent technocrats to administer the Gaza Strip after the war . It would effectively end Hamas’ rule and could help advance ceasefire talks with Israel. The rival factions have made several failed attempts to reconcile since Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007. Israel has meanwhile ruled out any postwar role in Gaza for either Hamas or Fatah, which dominates the Western-backed Palestinian Authority . A Palestinian Authority official on Tuesday confirmed that a preliminary agreement had been reached following weeks of negotiations in Cairo. The official said the committee would have 12-15 members, most of them from Gaza. It would report to the Palestinian Authority, which is headquartered in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and work with local and international parties to facilitate humanitarian assistance and reconstruction. A Hamas official said that Hamas and Fatah had agreed on the general terms but were still negotiating over some details and the individuals who would serve on the committee. The official said an agreement would be announced after a meeting of all Palestinian factions in Cairo, without providing a timeline. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media on the talks. There was no immediate comment from Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is dismantled and scores of hostages are returned. He says Israel will maintain open-ended security control over Gaza , with civilian affairs administered by local Palestinians unaffiliated with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. No Palestinians have publicly volunteered for such a role, and Hamas has threatened anyone who cooperates with the Israeli military. The United States has called for a revitalized Palestinian Authority to govern both the West Bank and Gaza ahead of eventual statehood. The Israeli government is opposed to Palestinian statehood. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed. NUSEIRAT REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip — Palestinians lined up for bags of flour distributed by the U.N. in central Gaza on Tuesday morning, some of them for the first time in months amid a drop in food aid entering the territory. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, gave out one 25-kilogram flour bag (55 pounds) to each family of 10 at a warehouse in the Nuseirat refugee camp, as well as further south in the city of Khan Younis. Jalal al-Shaer, among the dozens receiving flour at the Nuseirat warehouse, said the bag would last his family of 12 for only two or three days. “The situation for us is very difficult,” said another man in line, Hammad Moawad. “There is no flour, there is no food, prices are high ... We eat bread crumbs.” He said his family hadn’t received a flour allotment in five or six months. COGAT, the Israeli army body in charge of humanitarian affairs, said it facilitated entry of a shipment of 600 tons of flour on Sunday for the World Food Program. Still, the amount of aid Israel has allowed into Gaza since the beginning of October has been at nearly the lowest levels of the 15-month-old war. UNRWA’s senior emergency officer Louise Wateridge told The Associated Press that the flour bags being distributed Tuesday were not enough. “People are getting one bag of flour between an entire family and there is no certainty when they’ll receive the next food,” she said. Wateridge added that UNRWA has been struggling like other humanitarian agencies to provide much needed supplies across the Gaza Strip. The agency this week announced it was stopping delivering aid entering through the main crossing from Israel, Kerem Shalom, because its convoys were being robbed by gangs. UNRWA has blamed Israel in large part for the spread of lawlessness in Gaza. The International Criminal Court is seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister over accusations of using “starvation as a method of warfare” by restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel rejects the allegations and says it has been working hard to improve entry of aid. JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war isn't over against Hezbollah and vowed to use "an iron fist" against the Lebanese militant group for any perceived violations of a week-old ceasefire. “At the moment we are in a ceasefire, I note — a ceasefire, not the end of the war," Netanyahu said at the start of the government meeting Tuesday. He said the military would retaliate for “any violation — minor or major.” Netanyahu also thanked U.S. President-elect Donald Trump for his recent demands for Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Trump posted on social media Monday that if the hostages are not freed before he takes office in January there would be “HELL TO PAY.” Netanyahu convened Tuesday's meeting in northern Israel, where around 45,000 Israelis had been displaced by the war as of last week, according to the prime minister’s office. Netanyahu said the government was focused on getting them back in their homes and rehabilitating the area. BERLIN — German authorities have arrested a Lebanese man accused of being a member of Hezbollah and working for groups controlled by the militant organization in Germany. Federal prosecutors said the suspect, identified only as Fadel R. in line with German privacy rules, was arrested in the Hannover region on Tuesday. The man is suspected of membership in a foreign terrorist organization and is not accused of direct involvement in any violence. Prosecutors said he joined Hezbollah in the summer of 2008 or earlier and took part in leadership training courses in Lebanon. From 2009, he allegedly had leadership duties in two groups controlled by Hezbollah in the Hannover area, organizing appearances by preachers close to the militants. According to prosecutors, he was briefly a correspondent for a Hezbollah media outlet in 2017 and was tasked with coordinating building work at a mosque. Germany is a staunch ally of Israel. It is also home to a Lebanese immigrant community of more than 100,000. BEIRUT — The Lebanese army is looking for more recruits as it beefs up its presence in southern Lebanon after the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire. Lebanon’s army is a respected national institution that kept to the sidelines during the nearly 14-month conflict. During an initial 60-day truce, thousands of Lebanese troops are supposed to deploy in southern Lebanon, where U.N. peacekeepers also have a presence. Hezbollah militants are to pull back from areas near the border as Israel withdraws its ground forces. The army said those interested in joining up have a one-month period to apply, starting Tuesday. The Lebanese army has about 80,000 troops, with around 5,000 of them deployed in the south. DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s state news agency says a drone strike hit a car in a suburb of the capital, Damascus, killing one person. The agency did not give further details or say who was killed. It said the attack occurred Tuesday on the road leading to the Damascus International Airport south of the city. The area is known to be home to members of Iran-backed militant groups. Israel is believed to have carried out a number of strikes in the area in recent months as it has battled Iran-backed Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon. Israeli officials rarely acknowledge such strikes. JERUSALEM — Israel’s defense minister warned that if the shaky ceasefire with Hezbollah collapses, Israel will widen its strikes and target the Lebanese state itself. He spoke the day after Israel carried out a wave of airstrikes that killed nearly a dozen people. Those strikes came after the Lebanese militant group fired a volley of projectiles as a warning over what it said were previous Israeli violations. Speaking to troops on the northern border Tuesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said any violations of the agreement would be met with “a maximum response and zero tolerance.” He said if the war resumes, Israel will widen its strikes beyond the areas where Hezbollah’s activities are concentrated, and “there will no longer be an exemption for the state of Lebanon.” During the 14-month conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which came to an end last week with a ceasefire brokered by the United States and France, Israel largely refrained from striking critical infrastructure or the Lebanese armed forces, who kept to the sidelines . When Israeli strikes killed or wounded Lebanese soldiers, the Israeli military said it was accidental . The ceasefire agreement that took effect last week gives 60 days for Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and for Hezbollah militants to relocate north of the Litani River. The buffer zone is to be patrolled by Lebanese armed forces and U.N. peacekeepers. Israel has carried out multiple strikes in recent days in response to what it says are violations by Hezbollah. Lebanon’s parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, accused Israel of violating the truce more than 50 times in recent days by launching airstrikes, demolishing homes near the border and violating Lebanon’s airspace. Berri, a Hezbollah ally, had helped mediate the ceasefire. JERUSALEM — Palestinian officials say an Israeli airstrike in the northern West Bank has killed two Palestinians. Israel’s military said it struck a militant cell near the town of Al-Aqaba, in the Jordan Valley. It did not immediately give more details. The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed the two deaths and said a third person was moderately wounded. About 800 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza ignited the war there. Israel has carried out near-daily military raids in the West Bank that it says are aimed at preventing attacks on Israelis, which have also been on the rise. Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for an independent state. BEIRUT — Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon made his first public appearance in Beirut since he was wounded in an attack involving exploding pagers in mid-September. Mojtaba Amani, who returned to Lebanon over the weekend after undergoing treatment in Iran, visited on Tuesday the scene south of Beirut where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Sept. 27. Speaking about the airstrike that destroyed six buildings and killed Nasrallah and others, Amani said Israel should get for its act “the highest medal for sabotage, terrorism, blood and killing civilians.” Amani suffered serious injuries in his face and hands when a pager he was holding exploded in mid-September. The device was one of about 3,000 pagers that exploded simultaneously, killing and wounding many Hezbollah members. A day after the pager attack, a similar attack struck walkie-talkies. In total, the explosions killed at least 37 people and wounded more than 3,000, many of them civilians. Last month, a spokesperson for the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the pager attack was approved by Netanyahu.ANN ARBOR, Mich. (WXYZ) — The University of Michigan says offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Kirk Campbell has been 'relieved' of his coaching duties. The move was announced by head coach Sherrone Moore announced Tuesday. “After a thorough assessment of our offense, I made the decision to relieve Kirk Campbell of his duties and move in a different direction,” said Moore in a news release. “This was a decision that I felt was in the best interest of our football program. I want to thank Kirk for his hard work and dedication to the university, Michigan Football and our student-athletes. I wish him well in his future coaching endeavors.” According to the school, Tight Ends Coach Steve Casula will serve as the program’s offensive coordinator on an interim basis, and Moore will conduct a national search for a new offensive coordinator. The move comes after the National Champion Wolverines ended a 7-5 season on a high note, beating Ohio State on Sunday. However, the season featured a revolving quarterback lineup, with David Warren, Jack Tuttle, and Alex Orji all lining up under center. The Wolverines are bowl-eligible. They will learn where they are headed after the conference championship games are played this weekend.

NoneThough I am an atheist, I have built my life and career around religion. First I spent five years pursuing ordination as a secular humanist rabbi, including 18 months living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, studying ancient and modern Jewish sacred texts I believed—and continue to believe—are human creations, reflective not of divine inspiration but our own projections and needs. From there I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve spent almost 20 years now as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Advising atheists, agnostics, and allies on ethical and , my work has taken , including writing about and building a diversely nonreligious . But as we approached the end of the past decade, I’d begun to wonder whether the congregation, as a form of organizing, was really how I wanted to spend my energy. Yes, congregations can help “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” as is roughly how I’d imagined them in my rabbinical seminary and . The problem is, that isn’t my language—it’s a quote from Facebook’s mission statement, as Mark Zuckerberg relaunched it in 2017. When I was invited to join MIT as its humanist chaplain in 2018, alongside my work at Harvard, it first occurred to me: Silicon Valley, or “Big Tech,” had superseded religion as the largest force in the world, not only economically, but in terms of our views and experiences of what it means to be human. As historian of technology Mar Hicks told me in 2023, “we’re in a period where tech has expanded to take over nearly every aspect of our lives, economically, socially, and politically.” I then asked Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served President Barack Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to what extent he agreed with Hicks. One could attempt to quantify such a statement in any number of potentially valid ways, but ultimately, Furman said, it simply “seems true.” As someone who genuflects before his own a couple hundred times a day, as many of us do, I would have to agree. My first revelation, then, was that , as leading technology critics have , The leading “ideas” in tech today—which I think are better understood as the “theology” and religious “doctrines” of contemporary Silicon Valley—are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious. My book is filled with examples of tech products, services, and marketing missives that are based in religious thinking, like: and ; ; ; AI Jesus; ; Robo Priests, a kind of “rapture” or end-times known as “The Singularity”; from AI utopia; fervent and even proudly “fanatical” calls to ; and so much more. In my book I spell out why there are frighteningly close parallels between mainstream beliefs about AI and religious visions of Heaven, Hell, and the “Chosen People.” But all of that was written mainly over the course of 2021-23. Which is, of course, now ancient history. Since tech religion is all about the now, let’s also look briefly at examples from this year. Like the viral Friend.com necklace, the glowing AI pendant that surveils everything you say and hear, feeding the input through Chat GPT to make recommendations as a “friend.” This company’s founder Avi Schiffmann says the app aims to provide a digital/AI alternative to “a relationship people used to have with God but is ,” by providing a constant, all-knowing companion and guide. The leading “ideas” in tech today are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious. Then there is Character.AI: It features dozens if not hundreds of chat-ready Gods and deities, explicitly labeled as such, starting conversations with comments like, “I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.” Character.AI is a massive, unregulated, unprecedented experiment: Its founder, Noam Shazeer, left Google to create the company a few years ago, after the tech giant refused to release a new chatbot he’d been working on. Google later to hire Shazeer back. And as Shazeer has told , his “ultimate vision” is to build artificial general intelligence—which, as many have pointed out, is a lot like building . Shazeer’s inventions are “a cool first use case for” such tech, he says. With more and more kids as the AI’s target audience, what could go wrong, right? Though I work as a “professional atheist” in my day job as a Humanist Chaplain, in the “tech religion” I’m just an agnostic, because despite all the strangeness and often destructive absurdity in the ideas I hinted at above, I often can’t say for whether a given form of Silicon Valley tech might have a meaningfully positive impact on humanity. Surely some of these technologies are worthy of our faith, in the secular sense, it can just be very hard to know which ones. Still, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch such an influential set of companies and industries influence so many people (not to mention government institutions and policies) in the wrong direction because of the problematic beliefs of so many of their individual leaders—optimization as a commandment and inefficiency as a sin; profits (and their prophets) over people; over more earthly concerns like the climate or social justice now. That’s why my third revelation was that a massive effort to reform the tech religion is already underway. “I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.” When I talk about a tech “Reformation,” I’m thinking of the kinds of movements led by modern religious reformers: people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and his transformative influence on American Christianity; or the organization Rabbis for Human Rights, in which rabbis from across the Jewish spectrum work to protect Palestinian rights; or my friend Lama Rod Owens, a self-described “Black Buddhist Southern Queen” who was originally ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and who is working to reinvent Buddhism as a more radically inclusive religious tradition. These aren’t people who’ve walked away from their religions, muttering loudly on the way out about how “deluded” those they’re leaving behind are. They’re examples of individuals who believe in the potential their religious communities have to do good, but who are honest and clear-eyed about the communities’ failings and injustices, and who devote themselves to improving them. tells many stories about people who are the equivalents to people like these, for the tech world—tech heretics, apostates, skeptics, mystics, Cassandras, and whistleblowers who range from seminal scholars to labor activists to everyday gig workers to social workers, psychotherapists, pastors, and beyond. One of the youngest and most gifted of the reformers I spoke to, a recent Princeton University graduate in African American studies and computer science named Payton Croskey, gave me hope with her call for the creation of an “augmented undercommons”: “a parallel location where all who refuse to submit to technology’s watchful eye may freely reside while reconfiguring the world’s understanding of freedom and security.” It’s not that Croskey is attempting to build some physical tech utopia in a somewhere; rather, what impressed me was her ability to envision, as an undergraduate, a kind of mythological or even spiritual alternative to the mythological place known as “Silicon Valley” (which perhaps began as a reference to a geographical territory in California, but surely now is an idea, an imagined community, more than a space with discernable borders). When I was feeling most hopeless about the future of technology, to be reminded by a young student of the possibility of something more equitable and uplifting was as surprising as it was encouraging. And actually, the alternative digital world Croskey describes very much reminds me of right now: a place where those of us who have been feeling marooned from healthy online conversations can connect, without algorithmic manipulation. Don’t get me wrong, no website or app is perfect. But an online space where thoughtful people can discuss ideas, current events, and the little details of life, bringing together different aspects of humanity without being actively manipulated by billionaires? That, for the moment, sounds like, if not a revolution, then at the very least, a revelation. Posted on Greg M. Epstein serves as humanist chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was ‘s first “ethicist in residence” and has been called “a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion.” He is the author of the -bestselling book and has also written for , , , and . His latest book is Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers.

CONCORD — Concord Hospital Health System recently received ISO 9001 Quality Management System certification by DNV Healthcare USA, Inc. ISO 9001 is the most widely accepted quality management system in use around the world and is quickly gaining acceptance among U.S. healthcare providers. “Concord Hospital Health System is dedicated to providing the safest and most effective healthcare services possible,” said President and CEO Robert P. Steigmeyer. “ISO 9001 certification not only reflects that mission, but helps to empower it. The effort required to achieve it fundamentally transforms the way we do business as a preferred and trusted health system.” ISO 9001 brings science to the art of caregiving; it helps to standardize processes around things that are proven to work, by the people doing the work. The ultimate impact of ISO 9001 within hospitals is the reduction or elimination of variation, so critical work processes are done consistently and the “best ideas” aren’t held by one person or one department, but are ingrained in the organization. “Concord Hospital Health System has worked hard to achieve this certification, and they have done so with unwavering commitment from their top leadership to make their health system the best it can be,” said President of DNV Kelly Proctor. “ISO 9001 certification isn’t just an award or trophy for something you’ve done, it’s public evidence that you are at the top of your game with an obvious plan to make excellence an everyday objective.” For more information about DNV, visit dnv.com/healthcare .The price of bitcoin soared past the long-awaited $100,000 benchmark for the first time ever late Wednesday evening. By Thursday afternoon, the flagship cryptocurrency pulled back from the milestone. It was recently higher by 0.28% at $99,140.00, according to Coin Metrics, trading at the lows of Thursday’s trading following some profit taking by investors. On Wednesday night, it rose as high as $103,844.05. The move came after President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate Paul Atkins as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The appointment could fulfill Trump’s most important campaign promise to the crypto industry: to replace Gary Gensler, who has become something of a villain in crypto for the agency’s regulation-by-enforcement approach to the industry under his leadership. Trump congratulated bitcoiners in a Truth Social post Thursday morning, saying “you’re welcome” for his part in helping send bitcoin to $100,000 and that “together, we will make America great again.” It’s a day of celebration for longtime bitcoin investors, who have held on for dear life, or “HODL’d” through several of the cryptocurrency’s boom-and-bust cycles, during which government and financial institutions remained dismissive — and even hostile — toward the asset class. That’s largely because of the cryptocurrency’s anti-establishment roots. The original idea for bitcoin was proposed at the height of the 2008 financial crisis: a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote in the Bitcoin Whitepaper . In recent years, however, the industry has demonstrated the value of bitcoin to much of the institutional investing world. BlackRock , Fidelity, Invesco and others launched the first spot bitcoin ETFs at the beginning of this year — bitcoin’s “IPO” moment — and the growing demand for them by institutions has helped drive the price higher. In November, Rick Wurster, the incoming CEO of Charles Schwab , said the firm is preparing to enter spot crypto trading , pending regulatory changes expected in the next Trump administration. On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said bitcoin is “just like gold, only it’s virtual, it’s digital,” speaking at the DealBook conference . He further clarified that “people are not using it as a form of payment, or as a store of value” and that “it’s not a competitor for the dollar, it’s really a competitor for gold.” “We’re witnessing a paradigm shift. After four years of political purgatory, bitcoin and the entire digital asset ecosystem are on the brink of entering the financial mainstream,” Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, told CNBC. Bitcoin had been widely expected to reach the landmark $100,000 level since the U.S. presidential election. However, excited investors sent bitcoin closer to this mark much sooner than initially anticipated; it rose as high as $99,849.99 on Nov. 22. There is much hope that Trump will deliver on several pro-crypto initiatives in the year ahead — including the establishment of a national strategic bitcoin reserve or stockpile, no taxes on crypto transactions and opening up the crypto public equity markets with more IPOs. “Over the long term, I’m bullish,” Novogratz added. “It won’t be a straight line up, and investors should always consider taking gains off the table. But, with a pro-crypto administration about to take charge in the U.S., it’ll be hard for the rest of the world not to take notice.” Bitcoin is now up more than 133% in 2024 and 42% since the election.