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In a chaotic Thursday session at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) postponed a scheduled vote on changes to the hepatitis B vaccine recommendation until Friday morning. The meeting, held in the CDC’s broadcast studio under bright lights and cameras, featured disputed presentations and confusion over … Read more

An 88-year-old Army veteran in Brighton, Michigan, who was working full time at a Meijer grocery store to cover living and medical expenses is set to receive more than $1.5 million after a GoFundMe campaign went viral this week. Australian influencer Samuel Weidenhofer posted a short video of Ed Bambas describing lost pension benefits and … Read more

Lead As the 2026 World Cup pots were confirmed ahead of March’s final playoffs, England, Scotland, the United States and Australia face plausible “worst-case” group draws that would sharply raise the difficulty of progressing. The draw rules — including a maximum of two European teams per group and exceptions for hosts — shape which matchups … Read more

Lead On Dec. 4, 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services updated its Policy Manual to shorten maximum validity periods for certain Employment Authorization Documents (EADs), tightening the frequency of eligibility checks for noncitizen workers in the United States. The change returns some categories from a five-year maximum to an 18-month term and implements one-year limits … Read more

Lead Law enforcement officials confirmed the arrest of a suspect in the pipe-bomb placements near the Republican and Democratic National Committee offices that were left on 5 January 2021, nearly five years after the devices were found and safely deactivated. Authorities identified 30-year-old Brian Cole of Woodbridge, Virginia, after re‑examining existing evidence; officials say the … Read more

Spotify’s year-end Wrapped rolled out in early December 2025 with a new, attention-grabbing metric: a user’s “listening age,” an estimate of which historical era of music a listener engaged with more than their peers. The feature identifies a five-year span of songs that a person played disproportionately and converts that period into an implied age, … Read more

On Dec. 4, 2025 (updated 2:10 p.m. ET), the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) postponed a decisive vote on whether to change the long-standing recommendation that newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth. Committee members raised sharp objections to the evidence presented, accusing some speakers of selective use of … Read more

Lead: U.S. equity benchmarks traded with little net change on Thursday as investors positioned for the Federal Reserve’s policy decision on Dec. 10 in Washington, D.C. Recent labor-market signals — a surprising slide in private payrolls from ADP and an unexpectedly low weekly initial jobless claims reading of 191,000 for the week ending Nov. 29 … Read more

Lead An independent inquiry concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin was morally responsible for the 2018 Novichok poisoning that led to Dawn Sturgess’s death. Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three, died in July 2018 after being exposed in June 2018 to a nerve agent concealed as a perfume bottle. The substance had been discarded following … Read more

Dec. 4, 2025 — Several European public broadcasters announced on Thursday that they will not participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest after the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) decided not to suspend Israel’s entry. Spain’s RTVE, Ireland’s RTÉ, the Netherlands’ AVROTROS and Slovenia’s public broadcaster said they will withdraw from the Vienna contest in May, … Read more

Lead The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has accepted a congressional request to investigate Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte after a November letter from top Senate Democrats asked for a review of his recent referrals of several officials to the Department of Justice. The referrals named New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam … Read more

National Signing Day concluded this week, and most programs finalized the bulk of their classes on Wednesday. Several high-profile prospects in the Midlands region remain unsigned, with a mix of delayed decisions and planned signings stretching into the days after the official deadline. One of the major storylines was LSU’s heralded defensive-line group, which drew … Read more

Lead: A research team published in Science Advances (2025) that they fashioned working 3D-printing nozzles from mosquito proboscises, removed from euthanized insects under a microscope and bonded into plastic tips with UV-curable resin. Tests in the lab produced prints with line resolution between 18 and 22 microns and included 600-micron honeycomb lattices, a microscale maple … Read more

Lead: Cyclone Ditwah left a trail of flooding and destruction across Sri Lanka in early December 2025, with officials reporting more than 480 confirmed deaths as waters recede. Initial government estimates place reconstruction costs between $6 billion and $7 billion, an onerous burden for a nation still recovering from a 2022 economic collapse and decades … Read more

Paramount Skydance lawyers sent a Dec. 3, 2025 letter to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav alleging the company’s sale process is unfair and ‘‘tainted,’’ and that it appears to favor Netflix. The dispute follows second-round bids submitted on Dec. 1, 2025 from Paramount Skydance (an all-cash offer for the whole company), Netflix and Comcast … Read more