Voters in Ireland were more than usually busy in 2024, casting their ballot in five different polls – for two referenda in March, local and European ballots in June and a general election in November. The country’s political comings and goings were further punctuated by an emotional announcement in March from former premier Leo Varadkar that he was resigning as taoiseach and Fine Gael leader. He was succeeded the following month in both roles by Simon Harris. But the year had so much more to offer than just politics, and PA news agency photographers were on hand to capture some of the highlights.
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$1000 Invested In Intuitive Surgical 15 Years Ago Would Be Worth This Much TodayMAPUTO, Mozambique. (AP) — At least 6,000 inmates escaped from a high-security prison in Mozambique’s capital on Christmas Day after a rebellion, the country's police chief said, as widespread post-election riots and violence are roiling the country. Police chief Bernardino Rafael said 33 prisoners died and 15 others were injured during a confrontation with the security forces. The prisoners fled during violent protests that have seen police cars, stations and infrastructure destroyed after the country’s Constitutional Council confirmed the ruling Frelimo party as the winner of the Oct. 9 elections. The escape from the Maputo Central Prison, located 14 kilometers (9 miles) southwest of the capital, started around midday on Wednesday after “agitation” by a “group of subversive protesters” nearby, Rafael said. Some of the prisoners at the facility snatched weapons from the guards and started freeing other detainees. “A curious fact is that in that prison we had 29 convicted terrorists, who they released. We are worried, as a country, as Mozambicans, as members of the defense and security forces,” said Rafael. “They (protesters) were making noise, demanding that they be able to remove the prisoners who are there serving their sentences”, said Rafael, adding that the protests led to the collapse of a wall, allowing the prisoners to flee. Story continues below video He called on the escaped prisoners to surrender to authorities and for the population to be informed about the fugitives. Videos circulating on social media show the moment inmates left the prison, while other recordings reveal captures made by military personnel and prison guards. Many prisoners tried to hide in homes, but some were unsuccessful and ended up being detained again. In one video, a prisoner still with handcuffs on his right wrist says he was held n the disciplinary section of the prison and was released by other inmates. Violence has engulfed Mozambique since the country’s highest court confirmed ruling Frelimo party presidential candidate Daniel Chapo as the winner of disputed Oct. 9 elections on Monday. Mozambique's Interior Minister Pascoal Ronda told a news conference in Maputo late Tuesday that the violence was led by mostly youthful supporters of losing candidate Venancio Mondlane, who received 24% of the vote, second to Chapo, who got 65%. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is concerned at the violence and urges all political leaders and relevant parties “to defuse tensions including through meaningful dialogue (and) legal redress,” U.N. associate spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay said Thursday. The U.N. chief also calls for a halt to the violence and redoubled efforts “to seek a peaceful resolution to the ongoing crisis,” she said.
Celtic pundits blown away by Club Brugge but Arne Engels leaves former stars looking for moreMaybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough. Start with the specious lawsuits brought against President-elect Donald Trump, to the great glee of many of his “Never Trump” and Democratic detractors. Some of them, especially Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s March 2023 indictment charging that Trump’s signing off on allegedly false business records in 2017 somehow swindled the electorate in 2016, had an immediate turnabout effect. Michael Barone Within a few weeks, what had looked like a close Republican primary race between Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) became a runaway romp for Trump. Bragg got a Manhattan jury to vote for conviction, but Trump has had the last laugh. But in the meantime, he has filed a couple of antic lawsuits of his own. And, contrary to many observers’ expectations, none has been dismissed. His targets are the political press. But just as flimsy prosecutions such as Bragg’s threatened to limit free speech by a political candidate, Trump’s — how should one put it? — creative lawsuits threaten to limit political speech all around. The first lawsuit is brought against the Des Moines Register’s well-known pollster Ann Selzer, whose Oct. 28-31 poll showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by 47% to 44% in a state he had carried 53% to 45% in 2020. The result was all the more startling because Selzer had a record of accurately gauging late shifts of opinion in the state. The instant reaction of many analysts, professional and amateur, was to wonder whether the bottom was falling out of Trump’s campaign in Iowa and nationally. Turns out, it wasn’t. Other polls showed nothing like such a shift from 2020, and Trump carried Iowa 56% to 43%. Selzer’s postelection analysis, as former Washington Post poll analyst David Byler wrote, showed that if she had adjusted her raw results in ways most pollsters do in this post-landline-telephone era, she would have shown Trump ahead. Her methods, which had spotlighted last-minute shifts in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses, failed in a race in which opinion was more deeply rooted. Trump’s preposterous claim is that Selzer presented fake numbers to harm his campaign. I can’t imagine a jury would agree. More importantly, political campaigns are full of sound and fury, dubious claims and downright lies. Elections are adversary processes, with both sides having a say. Trump’s other creative lawsuit, as Ben Smith reports in Semafor, was brought in 2022 against the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation, for issuing and refusing to rescind awards to journalists who wrote stories about what Trump calls, picturesquely but accurately, “the Russia, Russia, Russia” collusion hoax. Trump’s lawyers attack the board for issuing awards “particularly when many of the key assertions and premises of the Russia Collusion Hoax that permeated the Awarded Articles had been revealed by the Mueller Report and congressional investigations as false.” That, aside from the eccentric capitalization, is a fair comment. As Smith admits, much reporting on supposed Russia collusion, “with its breathless cable news and social media cheerleading, did not seriously bear out,” and “some of that reporting ... was powered by a delusion.” Smith also admits, at least via hyperlink, that he, as then-editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, first published the specious and always dubious Steele dossier. Trump has a legitimate grievance against the Democrats who concocted that document and peddled the Russia collusion canard in an effort to force him from office — an enterprise that weakened the credibility of their legitimate criticisms of him for not accepting the result of the 2020 election. It would be desirable for both Democrats and Republicans, and for the press, to return to the norm of recognizing as legitimate the results of elections, however distasteful. Enough turnabout. It would be desirable as well for Trump to drop his creative lawsuits, however gratifying it might be to submit his journalistic tormenters to the ordeal of depositions. As Eli Lake writes in the Free Press, he “should take the win and move on.” It would be desirable, thirdly, for the press to admit error, as Selzer and Smith, perhaps a little less forthrightly, have done. It is better to get into the habit of doing so voluntarily rather than risk lawsuits that may establish restrictions. The Russia collusion hoax did great harm to a duly elected president and, therefore, to the country, and it was always based on a dubious theory and on exceedingly thin, if not nonexistent, evidence. The press owe, not to Trump but to the public, a full accounting. Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available. © 2024, Creators.com
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California math educators this fall have been locked in a vigorous debate: Will the implementation of a new law help more community college STEM students by skipping prerequisites and placing them directly into calculus, or will it set up the state’s least-prepared students for failure? Critics recently scored something of a victory. In a move that already faces legal scrutiny, the chancellor’s office for the state’s community colleges issued a memo making clear that, when the law takes effect next fall, students in science, technology, engineering and math majors who haven’t passed courses like trigonometry in high school will still have the option to start college math with up to two semesters of courses that are considered preparation for calculus. Previous guidance instructed colleges to enroll those students directly into calculus — sometimes with a simultaneous 1- or 2-unit support class — or place them in new semester-long preparatory classes offered on a trial basis. The changes were made after some math faculty across the state criticized the original guidance, including during an EdSource roundtable on the topic hosted last month . They worried that students without a solid math foundation would struggle if forced to start right away in calculus and said the original guidance went beyond what is required by the law, Assembly Bill 1705. Other math faculty joined advocacy groups in defending the initial rollout plan, citing research that students perform better when they can go straight into calculus regardless of their high school math preparation. Critics, though, say some of that research is flawed. The chancellor’s office issued the Dec. 10 memo after gathering feedback from faculty, administrators and students about whether the state’s least experienced math students, such as those who didn’t take a class higher than geometry in high school, would be ready for calculus without taking prerequisites, said Melissa Villarin, a spokesperson for the office. “We’ve been listening to folks, examining the evidence that colleges are bringing to us, and we got to the point that we needed to make a decision,” added John Hetts, the college system’s executive vice chancellor for the Office of Innovation, Data, Evidence and Analytics. “If we didn’t make a decision now, it would not leave colleges enough time to prepare for fall 2025.” Calculus is often a required course for many science, technology and engineering majors. In the past, research has shown that some students never get to calculus because they fail to complete necessary prerequisite courses like trigonometry or precalculus, effectively blocking those students from pursuing their degrees. AB 1705, signed into law in 2022, requires the college system to evaluate the impact of enrolling students in prerequisites to calculus and, if they can’t prove students benefit from those classes, to stop requiring or even recommending them. Some backers of the law interpret it as mandating a shift as much as possible to enrolling all STEM students directly into calculus. They cite a section that states students “shall be directly placed into” the transfer-level class that satisfies the requirement for their degree. Chancellor’s office officials, however, maintain that the latest guidance is consistent with the law. “The guidance is fully within the parameters of AB 1705,” Paul Feist, a spokesperson for the system, said in an email. Under the new guidance, students who didn’t pass Algebra II or its equivalent in high school will be allowed to take two semesters worth of calculus prerequisites, which could include some combination of college algebra, trigonometry or precalculus. Students who did pass that course but not trigonometry or precalculus will be allowed to enroll in a one-semester prerequisite course, typically precalculus. The new guidance is a compromise, said Pamela Burdman, executive director of Just Equations, a nonprofit organization focused on the role of math in education equity. “I think the chancellor’s office is trying to strike a balance here,” she added. “I do think there has been a tendency to place students in more prerequisites than they may need, but we don’t know enough from the research exactly what the optimal placement system is and how to identify which students need which levels of support.” The guidance won’t be the final word on the issue. It could face a future legal challenge. Jetaun Stevens, an attorney with the civil rights law firm Public Advocates, said the chancellor’s new directive urges colleges “to violate the law.” Stevens said the firm is still “assessing what we can do” and did not rule out a lawsuit. “This guidance gives colleges permission to completely ignore students’ rights to be placed in calculus. It creates exceptions in the law that don’t exist,” Stevens said. “This is illegal and beyond the chancellor’s office’s authority. They don’t get to pick what part of the law they want to enforce.” Faculty, meanwhile, still plan to pursue legislation next year that would permanently clarify that colleges can offer “standalone foundational pre-transfer courses,” according to a memo being circulated by the Faculty Association for California Community Colleges, a faculty advocacy organization. Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the association, said the draft is being “shared widely with system partners and legislators.” In the meantime, starting next year, the chancellor’s office plans to collect data from each college and examine how students are accessing calculus. Colleges will have to prove that students are at least as likely to get to and complete calculus when they start in prerequisites as when they start right away in calculus. If the prerequisite path shows worse results, guidance says those prerequisites will need to be eliminated for STEM majors by 2027. The updated guidance is “simple and based in common sense,” said Tina Akers-Porter, a math professor at Modesto Junior College and one of the leading critics of the original guidance. “If you’ve taken the preparatory courses, then go into calculus. But if you haven’t, then still offer the preparatory courses. That’s what we wanted.” We have launched our year-end campaign. Our goal: Raise $50,000 by Dec. 31. Help us get there. Times of San Diego is devoted to producing timely, comprehensive news about San Diego County. Your donation helps keep our work free-to-read, funds reporters who cover local issues and allows us to write stories that hold public officials accountable. Join the growing list of donors investing in our community's long-term future. Tammi Marshall, dean of math, science and engineering at Cuyamaca College, was disappointed in the chancellor’s office’s new direction. She said the chancellor’s office has previously “done a great job of holding the colleges accountable” to evidence suggesting students perform better when placed directly into calculus with a companion support course than in longer sequences of preparatory courses. Her college has been highlighted as an early adopter of AB 1705 and has reported improved calculus completion rates across racial groups. “I felt like they were pressured into making a decision that isn’t completely based on the data,” she said of the new guidance. Some math faculty said the new guidance leaves departments little time to adapt and may sap energy from attempts to reimagine math courses ahead of next fall. Many departments have designed new classes to prepare students for calculus in anticipation of AB 1705, but it’s unclear whether colleges will choose to offer those courses next fall, as they initially planned, or fall back on older courses. “We just don’t know where to focus our energy right now,” said Rena Weiss, a math professor at Moorpark College, adding that she’s glad the chancellor’s office listened to faculty members’ concerns and is grateful for the option to place STEM students into courses like trigonometry. Other faculty are hoping for more information about exactly which students they can now place into precalculus courses. Forecasts of what the guidance means for access to STEM education varied. Marshall predicted greater inequity at colleges that opt to continue calculus prerequisite sequences with high attrition rates, which she said have a “disproportionate impact on our Black and brown STEM students.” On the other side, Southwestern College math professor Kimberly Eclar said the guidance gives more options to students whose high schools do not offer higher math classes. James Sullivan, a math professor at Sierra College, said the updated rules will benefit students who transition into a STEM career later in life but haven’t yet learned the concepts they’ll need for calculus. Hetts, the executive vice chancellor, said the current evidence is simply “not strong enough” to prohibit colleges from offering prerequisites next year. The chancellor’s office, in consultation with the RP Group, a nonprofit that conducts research on behalf of the college system, plans to conduct additional research starting in 2025 “to more thoroughly understand” how students access calculus. The RP Group is also deciding whether to conduct a follow-up study that would compare the longer-term outcomes of students who enroll directly in calculus to those who do not, according to Alyssa T. Nguyen, the organization’s senior director of research and evaluation. Such a study could examine how often each group of students completes associate degrees or transfers. Nguyen wrote in an email that RP Group will continue to draw from student records in its analysis and may also survey, interview or conduct focus groups with students. Amy DiPierro and Michael Burke cover higher education for EdSource . Get Our Free Daily Email Newsletter Get the latest local and California news from Times of San Diego delivered to your inbox at 8 a.m. daily. 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Lautaro Martinez ended a near two-month goal drought as Inter Milan closed to within one point of Serie A leaders Atalanta by sweeping aside Cagliari 3-0. Martinez had gone eight matches since last finding the back of the net against Venezia on November 3 but after Alessandro Bastoni opened the scoring in the 54th minute, the Argentina international struck in Sardinia. The Inter captain took his tally against Cagliari to 10 goals in as many games after 71 minutes before Hakan Calhanoglu capped an excellent night for the visitors from the penalty spot a few moments later. This moment >>> #ForzaInter #CagliariInter pic.twitter.com/aZwbAZvRVI — Inter ⭐⭐ (@Inter_en) December 28, 2024 Inter’s fifth-successive league victory led to them temporarily leapfrogging Atalanta, who reclaimed top spot but saw their lead cut to a single point following a 1-1 draw at Lazio. Gian Piero Gasperini’s side were grateful for a point in the end after falling behind to Fisayo Dele-Bashiru’s first-half strike, only drawing level with two minutes remaining thanks to Marco Brescianini. Lautaro Valenti’s last-gasp strike condemned rock-bottom Monza to a 10th defeat in 18 matches as Parma edged a 2-1 victory, while Genoa defeated Empoli by the same scoreline. We do not moderate comments, but we expect readers to adhere to certain rules in the interests of open and accountable debate.ASML Stockholders with Large Losses Should Contact Shareholder Rights Law Firm Robbins LLP for Information About the ASML Holding N.V. Class Action
See what best graduating law student has to say about the secret to successThe government has promoted Deputy Inspectors General (DIGs) of Nepal Police, Durga Singh and Bharat Bahadur Bohara, to the rank of Additional Inspectors General (AIG). Singh will oversee the Human Resources Development Department, while Bohara will lead the Province Coordination Department at Police Headquarters, Kathmandu. Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Prithvi Subba Gurung, disclosed the decisions during a press briefing. The Cabinet also resolved to designate Nepal Rastra Bank as the regulatory body for loans related to public vehicle purchases and the Social Security Fund, the Transport Management Department for business vehicle acquisitions, and the Securities Board of Nepal for investment companies. Additionally, the agreement between Nepal and India governing passenger traffic has been extended until November 24 next year, along with the protocol provisions. The Cabinet approved the use of national forest land in various districts, including Sankhuwasabha, Udayapur, Dolakha, Dailekh, Kalikot, and Jumla, for constructing transmission line towers. In another decision, the government amended regulations concerning pedestrian trails within Shivapuri National Park. The Mulkharka to Chisapani trail, via Jhule, will be extended by 3.5 kilometers. The revised implementation details of the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (OPMCM) were endorsed. The government also decided to table the Nepal Aviation Service Authority Bill, 2081 in the federal parliament and approved the upgrade of Pokhariya Hospital, Parsa, to a 50-bed facility under Madhes Province Hospital. Furthermore, the Cabinet granted permission to table amendments to the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal Act, 2081 and authorized the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology to present the sixth annual report of the Medical Education Commission before the Federal Parliament's Education, Health, and Information Technology Committee. The study report on securities market operations will be forwarded to the Ministry of Finance for further action. Land acquisition approvals were also granted, including: Kalaiya Sub-Metropolis, Bara: Four dhurs of land; Budhanilkantha Municipality, Kathmandu: Over four ropanis; Barpak Sulikot Rural Municipality, Gorkha: More than four ropanis; Punarbas Municipality, Kanchanpur: 15 katthas; Ekdara Rural Municipality, Mahottari: Over 11 katthas. These decisions aim to facilitate infrastructure development, governance, and regulatory oversight across various sectors.