- The top 25 stories curated by editors and fellow readers!
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| Work Large drones are flying over New Jersey at night and no one knows why  For over a week, New Jersey residents have spotted unidentified aircraft in the northern part of the state, including Morris County and near Newark -- and now the authorities are urging people to remain calm. |
| Work Mysterious New Jersey Drones 'Change Time' on Clocks, Eyewitness Claims  A swarm of mysterious drone sightings near President-Elect Donald Trump's New Jersey Bedminster golf club continue to baffle local residents, with some now reporting strange changes to their clocks. |
| Work Why top internet sleuths say they won't help find the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer  Investigators have not identified a suspect, although the investigation is ongoing, a senior law enforcement official briefed on the matter said Friday. Police have found dozens of images from surveillance cameras of the suspect from tracking his timeline in Manhattan, the official said. |
| Work IAEA chief: Iran is poised to 'quite dramatically' increase stockpile of near weapons-grade uranium  Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has been signaling he wants to negotiate with the West over sanctions, has yet to offer a strategy when it comes to Iran’s ambitions in space. The Simorgh launch represented the first for his administration from the country’s civil space program. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard conducted a successful launch of its parallel program in September. |
| Work Atlanta Hawks and Trae Young defeat the Los Angeles Lakers at the buzzer 134-132  The Atlanta Hawks had the ball with 19.6 seconds remaining and was down by a point when Trae Young capped a big night with a three-pointer that gave the home team its sixth straight victory, 134-132. Seven Hawks players finished the game with double-digits in scoring led by Young with 31 points to go along [...] |
| Work Missing Lakewood girl, 15, last seen Tuesday  Raquel is described as white; 5 feet, 6 inches tall; and 240 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing dark-colored blue jeans, black Nike Air Force shoes and a black hooded sweatshirt with the word “Cali” in white. |
| Work Lost pet scammers posing as Denver Animal Shelter staff  “It is disgusting that anyone would take advantage of someone who has lost a pet, who is very emotional and desperate to find their furry family member,” Denver Animal Shelter Director Melanie Sobel said in a statement. |
| Work Mountain Vista's Austyn Modrzewski named Gatorade Colorado Player of the Year again  “I really think Austyn is the best quarterback ever to come out of Colorado,” Valor Christian coach Bret McGatlin said in a news release announcing the selection. “Not only can he beat you through the air, but he can use his legs and extend plays. They are virtually unstoppable with Austyn on the field.” |
| Work Today in History: December 7, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor  The Empire of Japan launched an air raid on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The United States declared war against Japan the following day. |
| Work Oceanside trash rates to rise in 2025 & '26  Waste Management is the largest trash hauler in the United States, with origins dating to a Dutch immigrant working in Chicago in the 1890s. The second-largest, Republic Services, also operates in San Diego County. |
| Work Trolley, people mover, better bus service to San Diego airport? All still in the running but years away  San Diego’s elected leaders get a status report on planning efforts, but there’s little consensus on what’s the right solution for the region. |
| Work Jogger killed in Point Loma hit and run ID'd as 30-year-old man  According to police, Ellis was running east on West Point Loma Boulevard and began to cross Nimitz Boulevard against a red light when he was struck by a driver in a black BMW sedan around 5 a.m. Thursday. |
| Work San Diego police sergeant marks one year since being shot in head. 'My wish came true.'  Still, the family has worked at regaining a sense of normalcy, with Elliott noting that the daily routines of parenthood — changing diapers, playing on the floor — have been some of the best recovery methods. |
| Work Wildfire season isn't over in SoCal. Warm weekend followed by Santa Ana winds elevates danger  Clara Harter is a breaking news reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she covered politics and education for the L.A. Daily News. While at the Daily News, she published a series on fentanyl addiction that won a first-place investigative journalism award from the L.A. Press Club. Harter majored in political science and Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. She loves surfing and, when not reporting, can most likely be found in the ocean. |
| Work Women once held in California 'rape club' prison reach historic settlement to protect inmates  Clara Harter is a breaking news reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she covered politics and education for the L.A. Daily News. While at the Daily News, she published a series on fentanyl addiction that won a first-place investigative journalism award from the L.A. Press Club. Harter majored in political science and Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. She loves surfing and, when not reporting, can most likely be found in the ocean. |
| Work How Catherine Russell, of 'Perfect Crime,' Spends Her Sundays  Ms. Russell is also the general manager of the Theater Center in Times Square, which hosts “Perfect Crime” and three other Off Broadway shows, and teaches college English and acting classes six days a week. |
| Work UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting: Detectives Scour Video Record of Suspect's Movements  At 10:11 p.m. on Nov. 24, he arrives at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on a Greyhound whose route started in Atlanta. He smiles for a desk clerk at a hostel on the Upper West Side. Around 6 a.m. on Wednesday, he stops at Starbucks to buy water and snacks. After Mr. Thompson is shot by the entrance of the New York Hilton Midtown hotel at 6:44, the man flees on a bicycle, enters Central Park at 6:48, exits it a mile away at 6:56, strolls along the Upper West Side at 6:58 and catches a cab heading uptown precisely at 7 a.m. It’s all on video. |
| Work Special Education Services With a Catch: Parents Are Asked Not to Sue  “I think it’s outrageous,” said Councilman Keith Powers, who attended the meeting with the Education Department. He added, “It feels wrong, and the whole process has been a mess from the very beginning.” |
| Work The Police Offer a Detailed Timeline of the Gunman's Movements  On Wednesday, the day of the shooting, the gunman left the hostel at 5:30 a.m. and likely rode a bicycle toward Midtown, Chief Kenny said. Though investigators do not have video of him taking the bike to the scene of the shooting, they are speculating that he did because it took him only 10 minutes to get from the hostel on 103rd Street to West 54th Street. The police are “still looking into” the possibility that he could have stolen the bike, he said. |
| Work Dozens of the world's most cited scientists stop falsely claiming to work in Saudi Arabia  This newspaper unveiled that Saudi universities were paying up to EUR70,000 a year to prestigious researchers to artificially pump up Arab institutions in international academic rankings The great Saudi university farce is coming to an end. |
| Work The Debanking Craze Reveals Everything Wrong with the Administrative State  After an appearance by financier Marc Andreessen on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Elon Musk's X exploded with indignation that tech entrepreneurs were being debanked owing to government pressure. Progressives pounced, saying that the story was exaggerated, and agencies had been trying to stop debanking. |
| Work Self-eating rocket could help UK take a big bite of space industry  New developments on a nearly century-old concept for a 'self-eating' rocket engine capable of flight beyond the Earth's atmosphere could help the UK take a bigger bite of the space industry. |
| Work The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky  For most of human history, understanding the behaviours of objects in the sky was neither a curiosity nor an academic pursuit, as it is throughout much of the world today. |
| Work Global AI Power Rankings: Stanford HAI Tool Ranks 36 Countries in AI  From patents to private funding, Stanford's Global Vibrancy Tool aggregates 42 indicators to reveal which countries lead in AI - and why the U.S. holds a significant edge over other nations. |
| Work Boomers are grieving not becoming grandparents - but child-free Millennials have little sympathy  Amid falling birth rates and growing numbers of U.S. adults opting to remain child-free, boomer and Generation X grandparents are mourning the prospect of ever becoming grandparents. |
| Work Elon Musk is not Americas new king. But he might be its new Thomas Cromwell  Picture, if you will, the scene in Mar-a-Lago on election night at the moment when it's become clear that Trump has won. The atmosphere is hysterical. Trump is in expansive form. He stands surrounded by his ghastly tribe of dependants, plus AN Other. |
| Work Ayn Rand's model of "living money"; and an upside of burnout -- LessWrong  Epistemic status: Toy model. Oversimplified, but has been anecdotally useful to at least a couple people, and I like it as a metaphor. |
| Work Look Deep Into the Mind's Eye One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind's eye had suddenly gone blind. The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. |
| Work How to trademark a sound, according to Zippo  The aural status, which is often referred to as a 'soundmark', has only been granted to a select few brands. |
| Work Exact burial spot of St. Nicholas, inspiration for Santa Claus, discovered in Turkish church  Archaeologists in southern Turkey have just uncovered the original burial place of Father Christmas himself, formally known as St. Nicholas, but whose modern nicknames of Santa Claus, Saint Nick and Kris Kringle are known by children the world over. |
| Work Why has an additive called Bovaer sparked controversy online?  Some UK social media users have been pouring milk down their sinks and toilets in protest at the trial of a new feed additive that claims to significantly reduce the emission of methane gas in dairy cows. |
| Work Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California  In China, it's illegal for unmarried women to freeze their eggs. |
| Work The Interview: From Amazon to Space -- Jeff Bezos Talks Innovation, Progress and What's Next  Jeff Bezos sits down with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the 2024 New York Times DealBook Summit to discuss what's next for Amazon, Blue Origin and his vision for humanity's future in space. |
| Work How a Mom Managed to Thru-Hike the Appalachian Trail With 13 Kids  Hiking the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail is a monumental achievement for anyone. Now imagine doing it with 13 kids in tow - it sounds almost impossible. But that's exactly what Nikki Bettis set out to do. |
| Work A Kid Made $50,000 Dumping Crypto He'd Created. Then Came the Backlash  In less than 10 minutes, a US teen made a small fortune selling off a memecoin he'd made on a lark. Traders, feeling swindled, sought revenge. |
| Work LA thinks AI could help decide which homeless people get scarce housing -- and which don't  Without enough houses for its growing homeless population, the city is using machine learning to make its process fairer. Reba Stevens held her breath as she walked up the steps to the apartment, her then-6-month-old son perched on her hip. |
| Work Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware A Russian programmer defied the Federal Security Service (FSB) by publicizing the fact his phone was infected with spyware after being confiscated by authorities. |
| Work Fighting Discrimination Does Not Entail Defending Shitty Social Behavior  I've written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. |
| Work DraftKings sued after father-of-two gambles away $1 million of his wife's money  Lisa D'Alessando says her husband funded his habit by maxing out her credit cards and draining their young childrens' savings accounts, which were funded entirely by gifts they had gotten for Christmas, their birthdays, and their baptisms, according to the federal lawsuit filed Thursday and obta |
| Work Why Wouldn't ChatGPT Say This Dead Professor's Name?  Across the final years of his life, David Mayer, a theater professor living in Manchester, England, faced the cascading consequences of an unfortunate coincidence: A dead Chechen rebel on a terror watch list had once used Mr. Mayer's name as an alias. The real Mr. |
| Work The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2024  Of the many great books I read this year, the following 10 have stayed with me, undergirded my thoughts as I go about my days and provoked excellent, chewy conversations about craft and pleasure, empire and resistance. |
| Work Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model  Meta has announced the newest addition to its Llama family of generative AI models: Llama 3.3 70B. In a post on X, Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of generative AI at Meta, said that the text-only Llama 3.3 70B delivers the performance of Meta's largest Llama model, Llama 3.1 405B, at lower cost. |
| Work GOP FTC Commissioners Abuse "Free Speech" Rhetoric To Push For Government Control Over Online Speech In a disturbing (if unsurprising) trend, Republican FCC and FTC commissioners are deliberately misusing "free speech" rhetoric in an Orwellian attempt to justify government intervention to control and suppress online speech. |
| Work FBI Warns iPhone And Android Users--Stop Sending Texts  Republished on December 6 as new cybersecurity regulations are proposed, and with further warnings following the FBI's encrypted communications push. Timing is everything. |
| Work Apple And Google Scramble To Face Their Role As TikTok Ban Enforcers  The DC Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld the constitutionality of a law that requires Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores by January 19, or face fines into the hundreds of billions of dollars for failing to do so. |
| Work Imogen Heap's AI revolution: how one British musician is shaping the future of music  Imogen Heap is not your average musician. Her innovative approach to music-making has persistently embraced technology. From her Grammy award-winning production work to her use of vocoders and Mi.Mu electronic gloves, Heap continues to push the boundaries of how music is created and experienced. |
| Work 'Hawk Tuah Girl' Hailey Welch's Crypto Launch Draws Scrutiny  In an X post, Welch said she and the people behind the coin have not sold any of their holdings. |
| Work A company that turned homeowners into renters abruptly shuts down  EasyKnock, a real estate company offering controversial sale-leaseback deals to financially strapped homeowners, announced abruptly on Thursday that it is going out of business. |
| Work Former flight director who reviewed Orion heat shield data says there was no dissent  When he worked at the agency, Hill played a leading role during the investigation into the cause of the loss of space shuttle Columbia, in 2003. |
| Work If you can make this AI bot fall in love, you could win thousands of dollars  Ever wondered if you could get an AI bot to fall in love with you? Now you have the chance. Freysa.ai is a team of anonymous developers building a series of increasingly meta challenges, designed to influence how humans think about AI safety. |
| Work The Silicon Valley Billionaires Steering Trump's Transition The week after the November election, President-elect Donald J. Trump gathered his top advisers in the tearoom at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the transition to his second-term government. Mr. |
| Work Telemarketer Sentenced for $67M Health Care Fraud and Money Laundering Scheme A Florida man was sentenced today to 15 years in prison for his role in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud Medicare by billing over $67 million for medically unnecessary genetic testing. |
| Work Chatbots vs AI Chatbots vs Agents: What are they? In this article, I am going to discuss what chatbots are, their different kinds, and how to differentiate between a simple chatbot, an AI chatbot, and a virtual agent. In the next article, I am going to talk about AI-enabled chatbots and show how we can use botpress.com to create one. |
| Work Brexit Problem UK Tap Water Safety at Risk After Testing Labs Shut Down  Exclusive: EU countries will share laboratory capacity but UK rules mean products cannot be tested abroad. |
| Work A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas  This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the old ranchlands of South Texas, dormant uranium mines are coming back online. |
| Work Super Micro Computer gets extension to file delayed annual report  Last month, Super Micro named BDO USA as its auditor and submitted a compliance plan to the stock exchange to file its annual and quarterly reports, after its listing came under threat when it failed to file its annual report in August. |
| Work 3 Warren Buffett Stocks to Buy Hand Over Fist in December  Reuben Gregg Brewer has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Berkshire Hathaway, Chevron, and Visa. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. |
| Work Is Philosophy the Next LLM Training Frontier?  IDE: Most will agree that ethical, responsible AI is a touchstone for developers. Yet, you are proposing an even higher goal -- philosophical AI. How do these concepts meld and overlap? Why do you see philosophy as the ultimate aim for AI success? |
| Work Billionaire David Tepper Has 14% of His Portfolio Invested in These 2 Brilliant Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks  John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Prosper Junior Bakiny has positions in Amazon and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. |
| Work Think Dutch Bros Stock Is Expensive? This Chart Might Change Your Mind.  On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a “Double Down” stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you’re worried you’ve already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it’s too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: |
| Work Abcarian: UnitedHealthcare's chief executive was shot dead. Why did thousands react with glee?  No wonder there is so little empathy for Brian Thompson, who was by many accounts a lovely human being. In death, he has become an unwitting symbol of the terrible things health insurance companies do to people for money. |
| Work Why he chose Japan over America for life  Get your eSIM with Jetpac here: https://www.jetpacglobal.com/ |