Here’s what we can see Russia’s warships and planes doing in new satellite images of Syria amid regime change
Demi Moore revealed how actor Bruce Willis almost two years after he was revealed his dementia diagnosis . Ex-wife Moore answered questions on CNN about his ongoing health battle, saying that he “in a very stable place at the moment.” “I’ve shared this before, but I really mean this so sincerely,” Moore said. “It’s so important for anybody who’s dealing with this, to really meet them where they’re at, and from that place, there is such loving and joy.” In 2022, Willis' family announced his aphasia diagnosis, a language disorder that makes it hard for those to communicate or understand others. In 2023, they learned the aphasia was a result of frontotemporal dementia. “I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time. It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss,” his daughter Tallulah Willis wrote in Vogue in 2023. “I find that I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn’t there to remind me of him and of us.” His second wife, Emma Heming Willis, currently is the actor’s caretaker. Moore emphasized that Willis' condition is “very difficult,” and said that she wouldn’t wish it on anyone. “There is great loss,” Moore said. “but there is also great beauty.” Soap opera star Thom Christopher died on Dec. 5 at the age of 84. Christopher starred as villain Carlo Hessler on the long-running soap One Life to Live . Former co-star Anthony Crivello announced his death in a Facebook with a heartfelt message. “He was always a gentleman, always supportive, and he and his wife Judith who proceeded him in death, where always gracious to me and welcoming,” Crivello, who played Christopher’s son, wrote. Christopher’s wife Judith died in 2019. “May Thom fly on Wings of Angels to be beside his beloved Judith, and may they enjoy each other’s company once again, beside the ‘Pearly Gates’ of heaven.” Christopher appeared on the series from 1991 to 2008. One Life to Live ran from 1956 until 2013. In 1992, he won a daytime Emmy for best supporting actor for his work on the show. The name TASER is already synonymous with public safety, with professionals everywhere relying on them for unparalleled protection in all kinds of situations. If you want to get the same sense of security and peace of mind, the TASER Pulse 2 is here to meet your needs. The TASER Pulse 2 is the ultimate compact solution for less-lethal self-defense. Like all TASER devices, the Pulse 2 is designed to empower you to take control of your safety with confidence and clarity while lessening the risk of accidentally hurting yourself (or worse). The TASER Pulse 2 has a traditional compact gun design, making it concealable, easy to carry, and perfect for incorporating into your everyday life , so you can feel fully prepared for any situation that may arise. As the saying goes: if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. The TASER Pulse 2 also makes the perfect gift to share with a loved one during this holiday season. After all, you can’t put a price on feeling protected! Whether you’re buying for yourself or someone you care about, now is the perfect time to invest in security by grabbing this reliable tool. If you buy something from this post, we may earn a small commission. Randy Moss, former wide receiver, Hall of Famer and current ESPN pundit for “Sunday NFL Countdown,” is stepping back from the show due to heath issues, according to the network. The hiatus, announced on Friday, comes after an Instagram post by Moss on Sunday asking for prayers. In the video, he said he has been battling “something internal,” and that he has a “great team of doctors.” The star then referred to viewers mentioning his seemingly yellow eyes last week, and put on a pair of sunglasses. “Your boy is going to get through it,” Moss said. “So if you see me with my... glasses on, y’all know what I’m battling,” ESPN said Moss had the network’s “full support’ and that they “look forward to welcoming him back when he is ready.” In the Instagram video, Moss, 47, told men to get their check-ups and bloodwork done. “I just ask for all the prayer warriors to put their blessing hands on me and my family through these hard times,” Moss said. A post shared by Randygmoss (@randygmoss) Britney Spears didn’t move to Mexico— despite the video of Spears saying she did, a source told The Hollywood Reporter . The singer originally told fans that she moved to Mexico to escape the “incredibly cruel” paparazzi. “It really kind of hurts my feelings that the paparazzi make my face look like I’m wearing like a white Jason mask, and it doesn’t even look like me,” Spears said on Tuesday. “They’ve always been incredibly cruel to me, the paparazzi and pictures and the way they’ve illustrated me to be in some of it. I know I’m not perfect at all, by any means, but some of it is extremely mean and cruel, and that’s why I’ve moved to Mexico.” The clip was part of a longer video marking Spears’ 43rd birthday on Monday, which was also the day her divorce with Sam Asghari was finalized, according to TMZ . Scouted selects products independently. If you purchase something from our posts, we may earn a small commission. If you’re looking to revamp your at-home fitness lineup ahead of 2025 and don’t have hours to commit to exercising each day, allow us to introduce you to the CAROL Bike . The science-backed and AI-powered fitness bike is engineered to give you maximum results in the shortest time possible—and by the shortest time, we mean as little as five minutes. In fact, according to the brand, the CAROL bike is “proven to deliver double the health and fitness benefits in 90 percent less time compared to regular cardio.” Free Returns | Free Shipping Not only is it a huge time-saver, but the CAROL Bike is also designed to be personalized to the rider’s individual fitness levels, goals, and preferences, making the workouts easy to follow, time-efficient, and super effective. CAROL’s AI and Reduced Exertion HIIT (REHIT) technology optimizes the workout to your ability and fitness level, so every second matters. The personalized, optimal resistance levels are automatically adjusted as you work out—at exactly the right time—making the most efficient workouts easy to follow. “ CAROL Bike is designed to maximize training efficiency, with the shortest, most effective workouts, backed by science. And new rider-inspired features that give riders more flexibility to exercise their way,” says Ulrich Dempfle, CEO & Co-Founder at CAROL. You can try the CAROL Bike for yourself risk-free for 100 days, and the brand offers free shipping (7-10 business days) in the U.S. A federal court upheld a law stating that TikTok needs to cut ties with its parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance, or be banned in the U.S. on Jan. 19, 2025. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s appeal to overturn the law. The company argued that it violated the First Amendment. “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” TikTok and ByteDance are expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, though it’s unclear if the Court would hear the case. The ban was signed into law by Joe Biden in April, capping off a years-long fight against the popular app, which lawmakers view as a threat to national security. Two hikers reportedly stumbled upon a woman tied to a tree and crying in Monterey County, California, on Wednesday. According to SF Gate , she was walking a trail in Pebble Beach around 7:30 that morning when she noticed a “suspicious male” behind her, holding a gun. The man did not take anything from her or assault her or injure her, just left her tied up for two hours before the passersby found her. With the help of another hiker, he untied the woman and called the police. The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office subsequently launched a search for the suspect, described as being in his 30s with a neck tattoo involving the letter Z. SFGate reports that while authorities haven’t identified anyone matching that description yet, they say there is “no active threat to the community.” Confusing celebrity update: Paris Jackson, daughter of late musician Michael Jackson , is engaged to Justin Long. Not the Justin Long I think you’re thinking of (he’s married to Kate Bosworth) but another Justin Long; the Justin Long who Jackson has been dating for about two years. He works as a music producer, sound engineer, and mixer, according to The Daily Mail , and first appeared on Jackson’s Instagram in Nov. 2022. The next time he showed up on her grid was Friday, in a carousel she posted to celebrate Long’s birthday, which also included photos of the proposal. “Happy birthday, my sweet blue,” she captioned the post, using her nickname for her fiancé. “Doing life with you these last years has been an indescribable whirlwind and I couldn’t dream of anyone more perfect for me to do it all with.” As for when the pair became engaged, Jackson was photographed wearing a big diamond ring during Paris Fashion Week this past September. Consider this the hard launch? The jury in Daniel Penny’s manslaughter case signaled Friday that they’re struggling to reach a verdict on the case. They must decide if Penny “recklessly” caused the death of Jordan Neely by putting him in a six-minute chokehold on the subway in May 2023. Penny’s attorneys argued that the former Marine was justified in putting Neely in a chokehold because witnesses say he told passengers, “Somebody’s going to die today,” and that he was ready to go to jail. Prosecutors argue that no witnesses testified that Neely brandished a weapon or touched anybody, and that Penny kept Neely in the chokehold long after other passengers left the train. The jury has been deliberating since Tuesday. The jury could also convict him of the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. If the jury can’t reach a verdict then Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley would issue an “Allen” charge, which urges them to reach a unanimous verdict. Penny faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted on the manslaughter charge, or up to four years if convicted of a lesser count. Scouted selects products independently. If you purchase something from our posts, we may earn a small commission. It’s not every day that you can score a deal on a high-quality printer at a lower cost. Investing in a quality printer for your home or office is a game-changer, and while it’s not the most fun purchase, it’ll pay for itself in a couple of months. Fortunately, you don’t have to pay full price for a solid printer, thanks to HP’s current sale . Right now, you can score the HP Envy Inspire 7955e , the brand’s premium at-home photo printer for $70 off. If you’re looking for a solid holiday gift that they’ll actually use, the deluxe multi-purpose printer is a great choice—especially for photographers and anyone who works from home. The all-in-one printer is also designed with HP’s Wolf Essential Security system to keep your information secure and keep hackers out. Plus, unlike other printers that require you to get your hands dirty to replenish the ink, this one offers a 15-second mess-free ink refill experience with bottles that can be plugged into the tank. Say goodbye to messes and hello to your new printer . Best of all? For a limited time, score three months of Instant Ink with HP+. Donald Trump on Friday fired off an unequivocal message of support for his defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth in the wake of several damaging reports about the Fox News star’s alleged behavior. “Pete Hegseth is doing very well. His support is strong and deep, much more so than the Fake News would have you believe,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social. “He was a great student—Princeton/Harvard educated—with a Military state of mind. He will be a fantastic, high energy, Secretary of Defense Defense, one who leads with charisma and skill. Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!” Trump’s post came the morning after Hegseth spent the day meeting with senators whose votes he’ll need to be confirmed as the next Pentagon chief. Speaking to reporters Thursday, Hegseth insisted he’d had a “ great week ”—despite multiple bombshell reports emerging in recent days about his alleged drunken antics, which he denies, along with rumors that Trump is considering replacing him with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as his nominee for defense secretary. “As long as Donald Trump wants me in this fight, I’m going to be standing right here in this fight,” Hegseth said. A top Romanian court alleged Friday that Russia conducted an elaborate TikTok psy op to get a pro-Putin political newcomer elected president. The European Union member state’s Constitutional Court made the unprecedented decision to annul the results after the first round of its election votes, with Sunday’s second round of voting canceled, too. A raft of now-released intelligence reports allege that front-runner Calin Georgescu soared into the lead backed by 25,000 TikTok accounts based in Moscow. The Euro skeptic and anti-NATO Georgescu, who has professed his admiration of Romania’s fascist past, was a relative nobody before the election and was polling at around 5 percent. The U.S. State Department said earlier this week that it was concerned by the Romanian Supreme Council of National Defense’s “report of Russian involvement in malign cyber activity designed to influence the integrity of the Romanian electoral process.”
If you’re thinking of buying a “smart” TV for the holidays, you ought to know that your new device is constantly capturing snapshots of what’s on screen and sending them back to the manufacturer — even if you are using the device as a computer monitor and not watching TV at all. The findings come from a recent study by computer scientists at UC Davis; University College London; and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, published in Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference . Smart TVs can do all the things “dumb” or linear televisions do, plus providing a wide range of internet services and additional channels offered by the manufacturers. You can also cast content from other devices, such as laptops and phones, either wirelessly or with an HDMI connection. Tech companies collect information about our internet use and use it to sell targeted advertising. Zubair Shafiq, associate professor of computer science at UC Davis, and graduate student Yash Vekaria wanted to know how advertisers track you between devices. For example, you might be watching television in the living room, then go into another room to work on your laptop and see ads related to the shows you were just watching come up on your feeds. “To understand cross-device tracking, we wanted to first understand how these TV manufacturers or advertisers know what the user might be interested in. When we started looking into it, we came across technology referred to as ACR, which stands for automatic content recognition. And we found that that’s the main component which is responsible for generating audience segments on a smart TV,” Vekaria said. ACR can recognize content based on small snippets, similar to the Shazam app that can identify song and artist if you play it a piece of music. This ACR code is built into the operating system of smart TVs. The researchers looked at TVs made by two leading manufacturers, Samsung and LG. Vekaria set up an intermediary server to capture traffic coming from a TV set in the lab and discover where it might be going on the internet. He also dug into the code running on the devices. They found that the smart TVs captured snapshots of audio or video as often as every 10 milliseconds, batched them and used an algorithm to generate a “fingerprint” representing all the content over a time interval, such as the past minute. This fingerprint was sent to a company server and matched against a database of all the content available through the TV service. “They do a match against the database to figure out what exact piece of content that user is streaming at this point in time. When they do this over a period of time, they can infer that, say, this person watches NFL from 9 to 12 p.m., but they generally watch news in the afternoon,” Vekaria said. The TV companies can then use this information to sell targeted advertising on their platform. “These smart TV ad platforms have this vast profile of every single TV customer, and the ads on every TV get personalized based on that profile,” Shafiq said. The researchers looked at five types of content: “linear” TV, a single TV channel broadcast by antenna; FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV), essentially a broadcast TV channel delivered over the internet; OTT (over the top), streaming apps such as Netflix or Prime, delivered over the internet; content from a laptop or gaming console connected by HDMI cable; and screencast content mirrored from a nearby laptop or phone. They found that ACR on TVs sold in the United States was capturing linear TV, FAST channels and content shared over HDMI connections, but not screencasts and OTT content. The latter is likely because of agreements with those companies, which collect their own data on users. The researchers also compared ACR in the same brands of smart TVs in the United Kingdom with the U.S. They found that information was being collected and shared at about the same rate in the British models, but there were some more restrictions on ACR data collection on FAST content, probably due to differences in agreements between manufacturers and copyright owners. The documentation that comes with these TV sets does mention data collection and ACR, but the descriptions are vague and high-level, Shafiq said. By default, you have to opt in to ACR to set up your new TV. It is possible to go back in and turn off these settings, but it is not straightforward. “As a user, you might not know all the possible options that exist that you need to turn off,” Shafiq said. “It’s very easy to opt in, but to opt out, it’s an extensive process.” Smart TVs are only the start, Shafiq said. Companies are working on technology such as Microsoft Recall, which records everything you do on the screen of your device and analyzes it with AI. “Basically it's ACR supercharged by AI that is going to be in all of our other devices in the near future. So things are trending in the wrong direction, it seems, from a privacy perspective,” Shafiq said. As for this holiday shopping season, Shafiq said he’s looking for a dumb TV. “Let me know if you can find one,” he said. Additional authors on the paper are Gianluca Anselmi and Anna Maria Mandalari, University College London, and Patricia Callejo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (U.K.) and the European Union. — UC Davis NewsClick, chat, cheat: Online friendship costs man 1.3cr
25 Tsunami memes taking the internet by stormRuben Amorim's arrival at Manchester United has brought a new sense of optimism to the club and its fan base that has been sorely lacking in recent memory. With that said, there is one key area that supporters agree needs to be improved under the Portuguese coach's stewardship and that's their ability to defend set-pieces. After going unbeaten in his first three matches in charge of United, Amorim was handed his first defeat during their trip to Arsenal in a mid-week fixture. The Gunners put them to the sword with a 2-0 victory and both goals came from corners. Mikel Arteta's men have earned a reputation for their effective work attacking from set-pieces, so conceding to two of them against Arsenal wasn't too shocking. Next time out, though, they also fell behind to Nottingham Forest in just the second minute of their Premier League match via another corner. It's brought to attention a worrying trend for the club when defending set-pieces and fans have taken to social media to share their opinions on the matter. Ruben Amorim is extremely pleased with the Man United ace. United Fans Agree They Need to Improve Defending Corners While they've been happy with what they've seen from their new manager for the most part, United fans agree that the team has one key area that needs to improve under the coach and that's defending set-pieces. After Forest scored early from a corner against the club, they looked threatening from another shortly after and some United fans took to X (Twitter) to highlight the problem. One supporter said: "We might have a problem with set pieces under Amorim," while another posted: "We are poor at defending corners." A third fan called on Amorim to find a solution to their issues defending set-pieces, saying: "Poor set piece defending. Amorim should find a solution." The former Sporting CP man is considered one of the best coaches in the world , but interestingly, a different United fan thinks the club has gotten worse at defending set-pieces under the new manager. They said: "We got worse under Amorim unless I'm mistaken." Finally, one fan has demanded that the club follow in Arsenal's footsteps and actually hire a set-piece coach to improve, saying: "Hire a set-piece coach. This is embarrassing."
76ers' star Paul George sidelined the next 2 games with bone bruise in left knee
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