The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:... [ Read it >> ]

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The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.

But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.

But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that "many" of his colleagues in physics "have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human." And it's a mystery that:

- "Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries"... [ Read it >> ]

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On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Taiwan's iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: "This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June.

The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected from fuel taxes, and at state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spending. Drivers currently pay to access just 6,300 miles of America's roughly 160,000 miles of highway. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil's Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell to the ground after something went wrong 30 seconds into its flight, Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong said in a letter to shareholders. ... [ Read it >> ]

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After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.

Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can now securely join the same mesh network -- an Amazon Echo Show and an Apple HomePod mini in the same house will both be able to control the same Nanoleaf lightbulb. This marks a significant departure from Thread 1.3, released in 2022, where each brand's mesh network connected only to devices from that same brand. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in November and began offering robotaxi passenger rides on Uber's platform in Dubai the following month. Amazon's Zoox started offering free rides to select early users in parts of San Francisco in November after launching its autonomous ride-hailing service on the Las Vegas Strip in September. Alphabet's Waymo now operates services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles -- the latter two having launched in June and November 2024 respectively. ... [ Read it >> ]

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump's second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump's recommitment to lunar exploration key to unlocking what he described as an "orbital economy." He said: "We want to have that opportunity to explore and realize the scientific, economic and national security potential on the moon," he said. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users' mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: "Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taking office, and that includes protecting our kids from the potential harms of social media features that encourage excessive use," Hochul said in a statement. ... [ Read it >> ]

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GitHub has disabled Rockchip's Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec library -- including decoders for H.265, AV1, and VP9 formats -- stripped the original copyright notices, falsely claimed authorship and redistributed the code under Apache's permissive license rather than the original LGPL. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India's $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, according to investment bank UBS, and Indian IT firms are positioning themselves to capture the preparatory work -- data cleanup, cloud migration, system integration -- that channel checks suggest could take two to three years before enterprise-wide AI becomes feasible. ... [ Read it >> ]

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While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon -- roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated across several deals. ... [ Read it >> ]

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While America's largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Western carmakers retreating from electric vehicles amid softening government mandates could find themselves in a precarious position as Chinese rivals continue gaining ground in the EV market they're choosing to de-prioritize. The EU on December 16th dropped its earlier plan to ban petrol car sales outright from 2035, instead requiring carmakers to cut emissions from new vehicles by 90% from 2021 levels. The day before, Ford announced a $19.5 billion asset writedown as it rethinks its EV strategy and ends sales of the all-electric F-150 pickup. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have pivoted their limited cleanroom space toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, restricting supply of the conventional DRAM and NAND used in phones and laptops. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in "hard technology" areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primarily invest in early-stage startups and the targets should be valued at less than 500 million yuan, an official said on Friday, adding that no single investment would amount to more than 50 million yuan.... [ Read it >> ]

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The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom's insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of RAM just to display system information, compared to the original's 85KB footprint. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Michael Truell, the 25-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cursor, is drawing a sharp distinction between careful AI-assisted development and the more hands-off approach commonly known as "vibe coding." Speaking at a conference, Truell described vibe coding as a method where users "close your eyes and you don't look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you." He compared it to constructing a house by putting up four walls and a roof without understanding the underlying wiring or floorboards. The approach might work for quickly mocking up a game or website, but more advanced projects face real risks. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple's Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week.

The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an estimated $20,000 per student -- nearly twice what state and local governments budget for community colleges. About 600 students have completed the 10-month course at Michigan State University. Academy officials say 71% of graduates from the past two years found full-time jobs across various industries. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will "gradually begin to see this option." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil's antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple's tightly controlled App Store model is being pried open by government action. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A typosquatted domain impersonating the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) tool was used to distribute malicious PowerShell scripts that infect Windows systems with the 'Cosmali Loader'. BleepingComputer has found that multiple MAS users began reporting on Reddit yesterday that they received pop-up warnings on their systems about a Cosmali Loader infection. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies' earnings reports and stock market data, concluding that stocks dropped by an average of 2% following such announcements, and companies citing restructurings faced even harsher punishment. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited "extreme memory shortages and price volatility" as the reason for the hike, noting that 32GB modules and smaller currently cost around $10 per gigabyte while 48GB modules run approximately $13 per gigabyte. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Waymo's fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar -- prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to three such jobs a week for Waymo, sometimes freeing vehicles by removing seat belts caught in doors. Another Los Angeles tow operator said locating stuck robotaxis can take 10 minutes to an hour because the precise location isn't always provided, forcing workers to search on foot through narrow streets too narrow for flatbed rigs. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup's latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, said: "The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers." ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It's harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That's because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the artificial-intelligence boom. Some companies are figuring out how to remake themselves as vital suppliers to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and other "hyperscalers" bent on AI dominance.... [ Read it >> ]

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alternative_right shares a report from Euronews: France's President Emmanuel Macron discovered news of his own supposed overthrow, after he received a message of concern, along with a link to a Facebook video. "On Sunday (14 December) one of my African counterparts got in touch, writing 'Dear president, what's happening to you? I'm very worried,'" Macron told readers of French local newspaper La Provence on December 16.... [ Read it >> ]

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With NASA's Mars Sample Return mission delayed into the 2030s, engineers are certifying the Perseverance rover to keep operating for many more years while it continues collecting and safeguarding Martian rock samples. Ars Technica reports: The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars," Lee said in a press briefing Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's annual fall meeting. "Perseverance is really in excellent shape. All the systems onboard are operational and performing very, very well. All the redundant systems onboard are available still, and the rover is capable of supporting this mission for many, many years to come."... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: A Texas power developer is proposing to repurpose nuclear reactors from Navy warships to power the United States grid as the Trump administration pushes to secure massive amounts of energy for the artificial intelligence boom. HGP Intelligent Energy LLC filed an application to the Energy Department to redirect two retired reactors to a data center project proposed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to a letter submitted to the agency's Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The project, filed for the White House's Genesis Mission, would produce about 450-520 megawatts of around-the-clock electricity, or enough to power roughly 360,000 homes. The proposal would rewire reactors from naval vessels, originally built by Westinghouse Electric Company and General Electric, at a fraction of the cost of new builds.... [ Read it >> ]

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"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple will allow alternative iOS app stores and external payment systems in Brazil after settling an antitrust case with the country's competition authority, following a lawsuit brought by MercadoLibre back in 2022. Thurrott reports: Yesterday, Brazil's Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica (CADE) explained in its press release that it has approved a Term of Commitment to Cease (TCC) submitted by Apple. To settle the lawsuit, the iPhone maker has agreed to allow third-party iOS app stores in Brazil and to let developers use external payment systems. The company will also use neutral wording in the warning messages about third-party app stores and external payment systems that iOS users in Brazil will see.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, Lizmary Fernandez took a detour from studying to be an immigration attorney to join a free Apple course for making iPhone apps. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit launched as part of the company's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the country's poorest big city. But Fernandez found the program's cost-of-living stipend lacking -- "A lot of us got on food stamps," she says -- and the coursework insufficient for landing a coding job. "I didn't have the experience or portfolio," says the 25-year-old, who is now a flight attendant and preparing to apply to law school. "Coding is not something I got back to."... [ Read it >> ]

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Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel has dubbed "phone-based retirement." A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens. Nielsen reported this year that adults 65 and up watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did two years ago. 40% of adults aged 59 to 77 reported feeling anxious without device access in a 2,000-person survey. ... [ Read it >> ]

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After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping."... [ Read it >> ]

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Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030."

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" and outlined a strategy to "combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." The repeated use of "our" in the post led many to interpret it as an official company direction rather than a personal research ambition. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Italy's antitrust regulator Italian Competition Authority ordered Meta to suspend a policy that blocks rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp's business APIs, citing potential abuse of market dominance. "Meta's conduct appears to constitute an abuse, since it may limit production, market access, or technical developments in the AI Chatbot services market, to the detriment of consumers," the Authority wrote. "Moreover, while the investigation is ongoing, Meta's conduct may cause serious and irreparable harm to competition in the affected market, undermining contestability." TechCrunch reports: The AGCM in November had broadened the scope of an existing investigation into Meta, after the company changed its business API policy in October to ban general-purpose chatbots from being offered on the chat app via the API. Meta has argued that its API isn't designed to be a platform for the distribution of chatbots and that people have more avenues beyond WhatsApp to use AI bots from other companies. The policy change, which goes into effect in January, would affect the availability of AI chatbots from the likes of OpenAI, Perplexity, and Poke on the app.... [ Read it >> ]

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Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47 bots including those from all major AI companies. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup's Comet browser that can make purchases on users' behalf, alleging the company concealed its agents to continue scraping Amazon's site. But Amazon's stance appears to be shifting, CNBC reports. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule.... [ Read it >> ]

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Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was "a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression," a military psychiatrist had concluded. ... [ Read it >> ]

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European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of "coercion and intimidation," after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, including two in Germany and two in the UK. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as a leading power in space exploration, but in recent decades it has fallen behind the United States and, increasingly, China. Russia's ambitions suffered a massive blow in August 2023 when its unmanned Luna-25 mission smashed into the surface of the moon while attempting to land, and Elon Musk has revolutionised the launch of space vehicles - once a Russian speciality. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos. ... [ Read it >> ]

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