Police investigating former Neighbours star Damien Richardson over Nazi salute performed at event  ABC News

1. Catch up on the Future of Warcraft with the Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct!  Blizzard News
2. Get the Drop on New Rewards During the Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct  Blizzard News
3. The Latest World Of Warcraft: Midnight Teaser Implies That Housing Is Coming To The Game  Press Start Australia
4. All The Major Announcements From The Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct  Press Start Australia
5. Warcraft celebrates 30th anniversary by keeping old promises  VentureBeat

Ramandeep Singh makes his India debut, gets cap and speech from Hardik Pandya: Here's his story  Hindustan TimesView Full coverage on Google News

1. Toptalent van Real zet op amper 19-jarige leeftijd punt achter carrière: "6 september 2022 veranderde mijn leven"  sporza.be
2. Real Madrid-talent (19) moet nu al stoppen met voetballen: ‘Ik ben bevoorrecht geweest’  AD
3. Zeer treurig nieuws uit Spanje: Real-talent (19) moet noodgedwongen stoppen  VoetbalPrimeur.be
4. Real Madrid-talent (19) gedwongen te stoppen: 'Ik heb alles gegeven'  Voetbal International

“Dit wordt echt het pretpark van oom Dagobert”: kritiek alom nu kerstparade in Disneyland Parijs plots (deels) betalend wordt  Het Laatste Nieuws

1. Kosten energie-eiland in Noordzee lopen op tot 630 miljoen euro per jaar  De Tijd
2. Prijsstijging energie-eiland voor kust kan huishoudens jaarlijks "20 euro" extra kosten  VRT.be
3. Kamerleden willen uitstel van miljardencontract voor energie-eiland  De Standaard
4. Kamerleden willen uitstel voor toewijzing duur contract energie-eiland  Knack.be
5. Van der Straeten: “Voorbarig om stekker uit energie-eiland te trekken”  Gazet van Antwerpen

“Extreemrechtse samenzweringstheorieën worden er gepromoot”: Britse krant ‘The Guardian’ plaatst geen info meer op X  Het Laatste NieuwsHele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Peperdure schoenenroof: ex-werkneemster Louboutin zou voor 1,5 miljoen euro artikelen illegaal hebben verkocht  Het Laatste Nieuws

1. Antwerpen hoopt op kerstakkoord voor nieuw bestuur  VRT.be
2. “De Wever was nog niet terug van het paleis of Rousseau liet zijn spierballen al rollen”  Gazet van Antwerpen
3. Onderhandelingen in Antwerpen gaan tweede maand in: federale gesprekken remmen lokale doorbraak tussen N-VA en Vooruit af  Het Nieuwsblad
4. ANALYSE. Filip Dewinter heeft zijn symbolische trofee, het is nu weer helemaal aan N-VA en Vooruit: wanneer krijgt Antwerpen nieuw stadsbestuur?  Het Laatste Nieuws
5. Gesprekken tussen N-VA en Vooruit over bestuursakkoord provincie Antwerpen van start gegaan  Gazet van Antwerpen

1. Vlaams Belang krijgt initiatiefrecht in 4 gemeenten, maar staat het cordon hier ook echt onder druk?  Het Laatste Nieuws
2. 1 maand na de verkiezingen: nog geen nieuwe burgemeester in 11 Vlaamse en 3 Brusselse gemeenten  VRT.be
3. Politieke soap met Vlaams Belang in Izegem duurt voort: breekt cordon alsnog?  Het Laatste Nieuws
4. Vlaams Belang komt vandaag in vier gemeenten aan zet, maar lijkt slechts in één gemeente écht kans te maken om te besturen  Het Nieuwsblad
5. Nog geen offi­ci­eel akkoord, maar 70 % kans dat we in zee gaan met Vlaams Belang” ( STIP  Focus en WTV

1. Persoon schiet pakketjes over Brugse gevangenismuur met katapult  De Standaard
2. Man schiet pakketjes over gevangenismuur in Brugge met grote katapult  VRT.be
3. KIJK. Zelfs terwijl fietser passeert, doet hij onverminderd voort: man schiet met katapult pakketjes over gevangenismuur in Brugge  Het Laatste Nieuws
4. Onbe­ken­de schiet pak­ket­je over gevan­ge­nis­muur met kata­pult: vaak gebruik­te techniek”  Focus en WTV
5. Opmerkelijk beeld: man schiet pakketjes over gevangenismuur  Telegraaf.nl

1. Parket onderzoekt gewelddadig overlijden van vrouw in Zwijndrecht  De Standaard
2. Moeder (51) van drie vermoord op oprit in Zwijndrecht, dader onbekend: “Ik dacht dat ik huilende katten hoorde, maar toen zag ik de politie...”  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Ongeloof nadat stervende Marijke (51) wordt aangetroffen op oprit: “Ze was een fantastische mama. Wie heeft haar dit aangedaan?”  Het Nieuwsblad
4. Gewelddadig overlijden in Zwijndrecht: lichaam van vrouw (51) aangetroffen op oprit van woning  VRT.be
5. Vrouw vermoord voor woning in Zwijndrecht  De Morgen

1. "Ongezien": straten staan blank in Malaga, opnieuw code rood in geteisterd Valencia  Het Laatste Nieuws
2. Opnieuw overstromingen in Spanje: straten, metro en luchthaven onder water in Málaga, weer code rood voor Valencia  VRT.be
3. LIVE NOODWEER SPANJE. Brug weggespoeld bij nieuwe overstromingen in Spanje - Alarmniveau naar rood in delen van regio Valencia  Het Nieuwsblad
4. Inwoners filmen spectaculaire waterhoos in Marbella tijdens stormweer  Het Belang van Limburg
5. Spanje bereidt zich voor op nieuw noodweer: code rood in Malaga en Tarragona, weerdienst waarschuwt voor ‘extreem gevaar’  De Morgen

The Trump team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel *cough*Mike Flynn*cough* with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. What could possibly go wrong? Via the Wall St. Journal:

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.

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The knives have come out. CNN is hosting many of these right wing Democrats who make millions off the party and its members and then use right wing rhetoric to take it down after their own failures.

I put up the entire transcript of his sleepwalking nonsense of what the Democratic party is. Reiness' version of what what he perceives the party is comes right out of the the dead hands of Roger Ailes.

It's ludicrous. Every "woke" complaint he has comes right out of the mouth of Christopher Rufo. Anus Reiness has taken Kellyanne Conway's alternative facts nonsense to the extreme. How CNN believes this man speaks for the party is beyond me.

REINESS: Either way, here's the problem, I'm not concerned right now what the right thinks about the Democratic Party.

I'm concerned about what I think about the Democratic Party. I don't like to echo the congressmen, all three of them, I don't like the fact that a small portion of our party is pretty much dictating where we are. That they are pretty much, we are being branded as the most extreme of us. It is not only politically problematic, as we just saw, because none of this stuff helped the other day.

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Fox News legal editor Kerri Urbahn told 'The Story with Martha McCallum that Trump could force a pardon from Gov. Hochul by threatening to withhold federal funds to New York unless she pardons his 34 felonies.

This shouldn't come as a surprise since Urbahn was the Director of Public Affairs for the Department of Justice under Attorney General Bill Barr during the first Trump administration.

This segment was prompted by the judge delaying a decision on Trump's 34 felony convictions for another week.

MACCALLUM: Governor Hochul could also pardon President Trump on these charges because it is a state charge, right?

URBAHN: Yeah that's right and look she needs to really be thinking through this because New York state needs federal money and they get a lot of it.

And there is a lot that the federal government could do in terms of pulling funding from both the city and the state of New York. There's a bunch of ways to do it through the Justice Department and other places, and you know, at the end of the day it's all politics.

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U.S. COAST GUARD Motor-Boating Instructor

CES is one of the biggest tech events of the year. It’s when everyone convinces you that you need to buy a terrifying robot Einstein for some reason.

But Nick Offerman aka Ron Swanson and American Greetings — yeah, the greeting card company — trolled all of them.

Promising “a device like none other,” Offerman and America Greetings delivered just that. Offerman took to the stage to present… a regular greeting card that looks like:



via Mashable

Offerman, who was there to present the product had this to say:

"When I started dating my wife — her name is Megan Mullally, she's a very beautiful actress and singer and goddess — she and I loved giving each other cards," he told a crowd at the press event. "It's a very important part of our relationship, and so we've continued that practice.

"Even though there are times when it's more appropriate, of course, to send a text or an email ... when you really want to get a sentiment across, there's nothing like the artifact of the handwritten card." 

D'awwww... now go buy one for you mother or something.

H/T Mashable

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GUINESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS The whitest people in the world.

Ye Olde Wardrobe Malfunction

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OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The IOC needs to improve rules on transgender athletes to protect "female sport", says World Athletics president Lord Coe.

Filed under: Food and Drink, North America, United States

• Regardless of the area's suitability for growing grapes, plop down a vineyard or winery and travelers will come for a taste and buy a sympathy bottle (pro tip: go for the ice wine as it's harder to mess up)
• Ski resorts looking to attract off-season dollars or stale attractions looking to draw media coverage and visitors hook up a zipline

Continue reading Vineyard and Zipline Trends Collide at the Pinot Express

Vineyard and Zipline Trends Collide at the Pinot Express originally appeared on Gadling on Wed, 11 Dec 2013 16:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado said Thursday he won't make Opening Day a hard deadline for negotiations on a possible multiyear contract.

Rockies manager Bud Black said the team prefers that longtime center fielder Charlie Blackmon move to right field, rather than left.

The Blue Jays officially added another veteran to their bullpen Saturday morning by signing right-hander John Axford to a Minor League deal with an invitation to Spring Training. Axford hasn't received any guarantees with the short-term contract, but he is a strong candidate to make Toronto's 25-man roster and head north at the end of camp.

The current system for delivering NHS cardiovascular disease (CVD) health checks is not working effectively and must be reviewed to ensure that it reaches people with the highest risk, the National Audit Office has said.1In a review of the commissioning, delivery, and performance of CVD health checks the watchdog found that just over one in 12 people (8.8%) who were eligible attended a health check in 2023-24—which, if maintained, would equate to a five year coverage of 44%.Health checks were first introduced in 2009, with the aim of reducing ill health from CVD by offering everyone aged 40-74 without a pre-existing heart condition a check-up every five years. However, problems have arisen since the responsibility for commissioning these checks was transferred to local authorities in 2013, said the National Audit Office.The move led to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) losing its ability to influence local authority performance,...

Basolateral amygdala (BLA) neurons are engaged by emotionally salient stimuli. An area of increasing interest is how BLA dynamics relate to evolving reward-seeking behavior, especially under situations of uncertainty or ambiguity. Here, we recorded the activity of individual BLA neurons in male rats across the acquisition and extinction of conditioned reward seeking. We assessed ongoing neural dynamics in a task where long reward cue presentations preceded an unpredictable, variably time reward delivery. We found that, with training, BLA neurons discriminated the CS+ and CS– cues with sustained cue-evoked activity that correlated with behavior and terminated only after reward receipt. BLA neurons were bidirectionally modulated, with a majority showing prolonged inhibition during cued reward seeking. Strikingly, population-level analyses revealed that neurons showing cue-evoked inhibitions and those showing excitations similarly represented the CS+ and behavioral state. This sustained population code rapidly extinguished in parallel with conditioned behavior. We next assessed the contribution of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a major reciprocal partner to the BLA. Inactivation of the OFC while simultaneously recording in the BLA revealed a blunting of sustained cue-evoked activity in the BLA that accompanied reduced reward seeking. Optogenetic disruption of BLA activity and OFC terminals in the BLA also reduced reward seeking. Our data indicate that the BLA represents reward-seeking states via sustained, bidirectional cue-driven neural encoding. This code is regulated by cortical input and is important for the maintenance of vigilant reward-seeking behavior.

Missions Discipleship Training in South Africa is not a wasted six months--it's a springboard into your calling, preparing and equipping you for the real deal.

OM Russia’s Business for Transformation ministry supports eight projects that empower locals through employment, while impacting the kingdom.

OM Philippines-Cebu conducts critical incident stress debriefing training with partner organisations and churches in Cebu City, Northern Cebu and Bohol Island.

Subic Bay, Philippines :: Local volunteers share their stories and experiences on Logos Hope.

God opens doors for an international team to minister in Urfa, Turkey, an ancient city with no Christian church and only a handful of believers.

When an OM Lifehope team, partnering with On the Move International, held their annual community barbeque, they did something a little different.

Community encounter teams seek to serve their local communities and bring Jesus to their neighbourhoods.

Yande learns to walk with the aid of crutches and splints provided by Bethesda Mercy Ministries.

A community of believers from across the world come together to establish houses of prayer along what has been called the Isaiah 19 Highway.

Amidst ongoing unrest, OM supports IDP communities by sponsoring food distribution through local partners.

Syrian Kurdish refugee families profess faith in Jesus Christ.

Tim and Sophie, an Australian couple with OM in Paris, experienced life in North Africa, and its many different needs and difficulties, through Transform 2012.

To counter negative effects caused by lack of jobs and activities in the local area, OM Italy now offers free football games.