A six-year-old boy in Wyoming, US, is being hailed a hero after his family said he was injured while protecting his sister from a dog attack.
Bridger Walker, the boy in question, was injured when he jumped in front of a dog that was chasing his sister last week, according to his aunt, Nikki Walker, who posted on Instagram.
Despite being bitten multiple times on the cheek by an unidentified dog, the boy grabbed his sister’s hand and led her to safety. “If anyone had to die, I thought it would be me,” he told his aunt.
According to the NY Post, the boy required 90 stitches, with serious injuries to his mouth, left cheek and eye. Nikki said the boy is recovering quickly at home and the wounds are healing. “He is in good spirits and his wonderful personality is still intact,” Nikki posted on Instagram.
Nikki also said the family had no ill will or resentment towards the dog’s owners, who had been “very kind and caring to Bridger and his family”.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, recently became the first person in history to reach a net worth of $400 billion. But that’s not the only headline he’s making. According to The New York Times, Musk has rented a cottage on the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate of president-elect Donald Trump, placing him just steps away from Trump’s residence.
Elon Musk has reportedly rented a cottage, named Banyan, on the Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. Located just a few hundred feet from Donald Trump’s main residence, the cottage offers him proximity to the former president’s estate.
A source told The New York Times, the Banyan cottage previously had been rented for at least $2,000 a night. However, as guests typically settle their bills at the end of their stay, it remains unclear how much Musk will be charged or if Trump will cover part or all of the costs.
Musk moved into the cottage around Election Day and watched the results at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump. He left the property just before Christmas and is expected to return in the coming days. The Tesla chief is known for his frequent travels and often stays at properties owned by his friends. In San Francisco, he has been known to stay at the home of venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Donald Trump recently appointed as an adviser on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. While in Hawaii, Musk has stayed at properties owned by billionaire Larry Ellison on the island of Lanai, The New York Times reported.
You may have heard that the Oxford dictionary’s “word of the year” this year was “brain rot.”
I found that interesting for two reasons. The first is that it is clearly two words. The second is that unlike prior words of the year — like 2013’s “selfie” or last year’s “rizz” — “brain rot” is neither new nor changed from its original intended meaning. Its first use was recorded in 1854 and said to be “indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort” — which, well, yeah.
Since the selection for Oxford’s yearly word is done by public poll, this leads me to my first prediction in this column of observations for tech in 2025: The brain rot economy will show signs of weakness as people grow more wary of what is being served up to them by algorithms as they scroll endlessly. In the past year, the flood of AI slop content has made looking at Facebook even more pointless — and eyeballs will go elsewhere.
Along the same lines, we can expect more anti-social media and anti-smartphone legislation from governments and local authorities around the world following the drastic action taken by Australia to ban users younger than 16 from social media and more and more bans on smartphones in US schools. Momentum is growing, and I expect more sweeping directives will follow — along with more spirited debate over whether such bans are justified or effective.
The biggest jolt to the social media landscape could come from a US ban on TikTok. The January 19 deadline for its divestiture is fast-approaching, but before then, on January 10, the Supreme Court will hear arguments from each side — TikTok and the Justice Department — on the whether the ban is constitutional. Many legal observers have deemed it unlikely the court will overturn the lower court’s ruling, which sided with the government on its somewhat vague concerns of national security. But in recent days the pendulum has shown signs of a swing. Trump, after weeks of will-he, won’t-he, has sought to pause the law until he is in office. A delay would allow “breathing space for the court to consider the questions on a more measured schedule,” he argued in an amicus brief. Many on the left and right agree with him.
Gaffigan lashed out at Trump in a series of tweets back in 2020, when X was still Twitter and Trump was running for re-election. In one, he wrote, “Look Trumpers I get it. As a kid I was a cubs fan and I know you stick by your team no matter what but he’s a traitor and a con man who doesn’t care about you. Deep down you know it. I’m sure you enjoy pissing people off but you know Trump is a liar and a criminal.”
In another, he bashed Trump for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing, “You know Trump just creates enemies. You know you can’t trust him. You know he been incompetent during this crisis. You know all those people didn’t need to die. Trump talks about the Space Program and you can’t safely go to a movie. Wake up.”
Four years later, Gaffigan told the outlet his regrets about how the posts were taken by some people, but insisted he doesn’t regret posting them.
A federal judge in California has rejected an effort by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to overturn a jury verdict that awarded $7.8 million to six former employees who were fired for refusing to comply with the agency’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on religious grounds.
In a Dec. 30 order, Judge William A. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California acknowledged minor “imperfections” in the jury trial—including flawed instructions to the jurors—and determined they were not severe enough to invalidate the jury’s October decision requiring BART to pay each of the six former workers between $1.2 million and $1.5 million. Alsup denied BART’s post-trial motions to overturn the verdict and seek a new trial, saying that the agency failed to demonstrate that accommodating the employees’ religious objections would have posed an undue hardship. “Simply put, on the instructions given and evidence received, a reasonable jury could have found that BART had not carried its burden of proving its affirmative defense,” Alsup wrote, referring to the fact that, in order to prevail in the case, BART had to prove that granting accommodations such as masking, testing, or remote work in lieu of vaccination would have imposed an undue burden on the agency.
BART’s defense relied heavily on expert testimony to argue that no alternative measures were as effective as vaccination against COVID-19, with the judge noting that the agency claimed it had presented “‘unrebutted’ scientific expert testimony” to that effect. However, Alsup noted that the jury was entitled to weigh the credibility of the experts, particularly given their financial ties to the agency.
“In light of the large sums paid to the experts by BART, our jury was entitled to find that they were ‘bought and paid for,’ were merely parroting the ‘company line,’ and were not credible in light of their bias, common sense, and other evidence,” the judge wrote. “An expert witness is like any other witness, and it is up to the jury to decide how much weight their testimony deserves.” Alsup also highlighted inconsistencies in BART’s evidence. For instance, he pointed to one BART supervisor’s admission under cross-examination that pre-vaccine precautions such as masking and social distancing had been effective, contradicting the testimony of BART’s own experts. Additionally, BART failed to present clear documentation of the evidence it relied upon when implementing its vaccine mandate.
“Curiously, BART presented zero evidence of the information actually relied upon by the BART board in adopting its mandatory vaccine requirement,” the judge wrote. “We saw no decision memorandum presented to the board. We saw no resolution adopted by the board reciting any evidence. We heard no testimony from anyone who presented scientific evidence to the BART board or who made the decision.” Despite rejecting BART’s motions to overturn the verdict and seek a new trial, the judge acknowledged minor flaws in the trial. One issue involved a gap in the jury instructions, which failed to explicitly rule out unpaid leave as a legally acceptable accommodation. However, the judge noted that BART had ample opportunity to address this issue during the trial but failed to do so.
Another issue noted by the judge was when the plaintiffs’ counsel violated a pretrial order by referencing other employees’ denied religious exemptions. Alsup described the violation as intentional but noted that it occurred during the second phase of the trial, after the jury had already ruled on BART’s undue hardship defense. The judge concluded that the misconduct did not prejudice the verdict.
“The judge regrets these flaws but they, even in combination, did not result in a miscarriage of justice,” Alsup wrote. “The trial was still fair enough to stand.”
Alsup’s ruling upholds the jury trial’s finding that BART had failed to prove that it would have suffered undue hardship by granting the vaccine exemptions, and that the six former employees met the burden of showing that there was a conflict between their religious beliefs and the vaccine mandate. This means that the jury’s award of $7,825,859 in damages to the six former employees stands.
BART spokesman James Allison told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the agency had no comment on the verdict.
Christmas Island in Kiribati, an island country in the central Pacific Ocean, is the first to celebrate every year. Hawaii, American Samoa and many of the US outlying islands are among the last places.
A couple kisses as they celebrate the new year in Vilnius, Lithuania. Mindaugas Kulbis/AP
Fireworks light up the night sky at the pyramids in Giza, Egypt. Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu/Getty Images
Syrians celebrate New Year’s in Damascus, Syria. Emin Sansar/Anadolu/Getty Images
A light show and fireworks illuminate the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, during New Year’s celebrations in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images
People flash lights from their cell phones as they attend New Year’s celebrations in Mumbai, India. Hemanshi Kamani/Reuters
Locals watch fireworks at Ancol Beach in Jakarta, Indonesia. Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
A couple shares a tender moment as they walk with their child in Donetsk, Ukraine. Alexei Alexandrov/AP
Balloons are released in Wuhan, China, to celebrate the new year. Getty Images
Fireworks light up the midnight sky over Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong. May James/AFP/Getty Images
People take video of fireworks from the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan. I-Hwa Cheng/AFP/Getty Images
A New Year’s message is projected onto the surface of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Women wear 2025 headbands as they attend celebrations in Jakarta. Willy Kurniawan/Reuters
Fireworks explode over the Sydney Opera House. Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images
People cheer during a New Year’s celebration in Taipei. Chiang Ying-ying/AP
Children light firecrackers on a street in Mandaluyong, Philippines. Eloisa Lopez/Reuters
A person poses in front of a decoration in Cairo. Amr Nabil/AP
People in Seoul, South Korea, take pictures as they observe the last sunset of the year. Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images
Bitter in-fighting has broken out between the tech billionaire Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s hardline Make America great again (Maga) base after the US president-elect chose an Indian-born entrepreneur to be his adviser on artificial intelligence.
The row has pitted Musk and his fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy against diehard supporters including the far-right activist Laura Loomer and Matt Gaetz, the former Congress member and abortive nominee for attorney general. The spat threatens to open up a chasm among Trump’s supporters over immigration, a key issue in his election victory.
Presaging what has been called a “Maga civil war”, Musk went on the offensive after Loomer attacked the choice of Sriram Krishnan, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as the nascent administration’s AI policy adviser as “deeply disturbing”.
Loomer, a renowned anti-immigration provocateur widely credited for persuading Trump to highlight false rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets in last September’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris, criticised Krishnan on social media for supporting the extension of visas and green cards for skilled workers. She said it was in “direct opposition” to Trump’s agenda.
Hail the broligarchy: why 2024 was the year of the bro Arwa Mahdawi Arwa Mahdawi Read more Her comments provoked a riposte from Musk, the Space X and Tesla billionaire who is Trump’s most influential supporter and himself an immigrant from South Africa.
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Christmas Day.
In a later post, he wrote: “It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”
Musk’s stance was supported by Ramaswamy, his partner in the fledgling “department of government efficiency” (Doge), an informal agency Trump claims he will create, under which the two men will be charged with the task of cutting government spending.
In a lengthy social media post, Ramaswamy – the son of immigrants from India – argued that the US was doomed to decline without high-skilled foreign workers and suggested American culture had become geared towards “mediocrity”.
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit,” he wrote.
“A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long. That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. ‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
The arguments were met by a fierce backlash from Maga exponents, led by Loomer, who delved into racist arguments.
“@VivekGRamaswamy knows that the Great Replacement is real,” she wrote. “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H1B visas. Not an extension.
“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate.
In a message that appeared to be intended as a private communication to Elon Musk, President-elect Donald Trump said in a social media post Friday that Microsoft founder Bill Gates had asked to meet with him.
“Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT,” Trump wrote in the Truth Social post.
Gates has reached out to the Trump transition about a possible meeting with Trump, a person familiar with the talks told CNN, but as of now it’s unclear whether the two will meet. Trump has met with several tech CEOs and business leaders at his home since winning November’s election. CNN has reached out to Gates for comment.
The message appears to include a reference to Musk’s son, X Æ A-Xii, whom Musk colloquially refers to as X. The post comes as Musk, whom Trump named as co-leader of his government efficiency initiative, has drawn fresh criticism from loyal Trump supporters over his support of the visa program that allows highly skilled foreign workers to immigrate to the US.
Trump and Gates first met in December 2016 as Trump was preparing to take office for the first time.
Since Trump’s election victory last month, a number of tech CEOs have either spoken with Trump or visited him in Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to curry favor with the president-elect. Several Fortune 500 companies and other corporate interests have committed millions to his inauguration as well.
The CEOs who have met with Trump have come in with a clear strategy, people familiar with the meetings have previously told CNN. That includes discussing issues they know Trump will like — such as bringing manufacturing and jobs back to the US — while also sneaking in potential policy concerns they have with his new administration. Many of these CEOs are seeking the meetings as an opportunity to “start on the right page,” a source familiar with the matter previously told CNN.
Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy may be advising President-elect Donald Trump on cutting federal spending but they also have some advice for him about the U.S. workforce, urging his next administration to bring in more foreign tech workers.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s views have sparked an online spat between factions of Trump’s supporters over immigration and the tech industry, whose businesses rely on the H-1B visa to bring in thousands of foreign engineers and other skilled workers each year from India, China and other nations.
The tech industry has long called for more H-1B visas to attract highly skilled workers to the U.S., although Trump’s first administration restricted the program in 2020, arguing that it allows businesses to replace Americans with lower-paid foreign workers.
That debate has again erupted after Musk, himself once on an H-1B visa and whose electric vehicle company Tesla has hired workers using the program, defended the tech industry’s need to bring in foreign workers. Ramaswamy, for his part, wrote in an X post that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” leading to a nation that does “not produce the best engineers.”
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk wrote on Dec. 25 on X, his social media app.
MoneyWatch Musk and Ramaswamy are sparking a debate over the H-1B visa. Here’s what to know about the visa. moneywatch By Aimee Picchi
Edited By Lucia Suarez Sang
Updated on: December 28, 2024 / 9:30 AM EST / CBS News
Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy may be advising President-elect Donald Trump on cutting federal spending but they also have some advice for him about the U.S. workforce, urging his next administration to bring in more foreign tech workers.
Musk and Ramaswamy’s views have sparked an online spat between factions of Trump’s supporters over immigration and the tech industry, whose businesses rely on the H-1B visa to bring in thousands of foreign engineers and other skilled workers each year from India, China and other nations.
The tech industry has long called for more H-1B visas to attract highly skilled workers to the U.S., although Trump’s first administration restricted the program in 2020, arguing that it allows businesses to replace Americans with lower-paid foreign workers.
That debate has again erupted after Musk, himself once on an H-1B visa and whose electric vehicle company Tesla has hired workers using the program, defended the tech industry’s need to bring in foreign workers. Ramaswamy, for his part, wrote in an X post that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” leading to a nation that does “not produce the best engineers.”
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk wrote on Dec. 25 on X, his social media app.
Here’s what to know about the debate and the H-1B visa.
How did the most recent H-1B debate begin? The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S.
Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves.
Loomer’s comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government, defended the tech industry’s need to bring in foreign workers.
It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump’s world and what his political movement stands for.
Billionaire Trump adviser said his ‘significant investments’ in the country justified his wading into German politics
The tech entrepreneur and close adviser to Donald Trump Elon Musk has taken a stunning new public step in his support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), publishing a supportive guest opinion piece for the country’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper that has prompted the commentary editor to resign in protest.
The commentary piece in German was launched online on Saturday ahead of being published on Sunday in the flagship paper of the Axel Springer media group, which also owns the US politics news site Politico.
Musk uses populist and personal language to try to deny AfD’s extremist bent and the piece expands on his post on the social media platform X that he owns, on which he last week claimed that “only the AfD can save Germany”.
A side by side image showing a woman holding up a Mass Deportation Now sign and the other a image of Elon Musk Maga v Musk: Trump camp divided in bitter fight over immigration policy Read more Translated, Musk’s piece said: “The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified the AfD at the national level as a suspected extremism case since 2021.
Shortly after the piece was published online, the editor of the opinion section, Eva Marie Kogel, used the US tech mogul’s own platform to post on X that she had submitted her resignation.
“I always enjoyed heading the opinion department at Welt and Wams. Today a text by Elon Musk appeared in Welt am Sonntag. Yesterday I submitted my resignation after printing,” she posted.
The AfD has a strong anti-immigration stance and, like incoming president Donald Trump in relation to the US, is calling for mass deportations from Germany. Earlier in December, Musk not only posted in favor of AfD but the party’s hard line on immigration appeared to resonate with the incoming US vice-president, JD Vance, MSNBC reported.
Senior Welt Group figures weighed in on Saturday.
“Democracy and journalism thrive on freedom of expression. This includes dealing with polarising positions and classifying them journalistically,” the newspaper’s editor-in-chief designate, Jan Philipp Burgard, and Ulf Poschardt, who takes over as publisher on 1 January, told Reuters.
They said discussion about Musk’s piece, which had about 340 comments several hours after it was published, was “very revealing”.
Underneath Musk’s commentary, the newspaper published a response by Burgard.
“Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach, that only the AfD can save Germany, is fatally false,” he wrote, referencing the AfD’s desire to leave the European Union and seek rapprochement with Russia as well as appease China.
The AfD backing from Musk, who also defended his right to weigh in on German politics due to his “significant investments”, comes as Germans are set to vote on 23 February after a coalition government led by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, collapsed late this fall.
The AfD is running second in opinion polls and might be able to thwart either a centre-right or centre-left majority, but Germany’s mainstream, more centrist parties have pledged to shun any support from the AfD at the national level.
