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China is pushing ahead on plans to regulate humanlike artificial intelligence, including by forcing AI companies to ensure that users know they are interacting with a bot online.

Under a proposal released on Saturday by China’s cyberspace regulator, people would have to be informed if they were using an AI-powered service—both when they logged in and again every two hours. Humanlike AI systems, such as chatbots and agents, would also need to espouse “core socialist values” and have guardrails in place to maintain national security, according to the proposal.

Additionally, AI companies would have to undergo security reviews and inform local government agencies if they rolled out any new humanlike AI tools. And chatbots that tried to engage users on an emotional level would be banned from generating any content that would encourage suicide or self-harm, or that could be deemed damaging to mental health. They would also be barred from generating outputs related to gambling, obscene, or violent content.

A mounting body of research shows that AI chatbots are incredibly persuasive, and there are growing concerns around the technology’s addictiveness and its ability to sway people toward harmful actions.

China’s plans could change—the draft proposal is open to comment until January 25, 2026. But the effort underscores Beijing’s push to advance the nation’s domestic AI industry ahead of that of the U.S., including through the shaping of global AI regulation. The proposal also stands in contrast to Washington, D.C.’s stuttering approach to regulating the technology. This past January, President Donald Trump scrapped a Biden-era safety proposal for regulating the AI industry. And earlier this month, Trump targeted state-level rules designed to govern AI, threatening legal action against states with laws that the federal government deems to interfere with AI progress.

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Israeli Prime Minister said he will award Trump with Israel prize, highest civilian honor, while visiting Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump has warned that Hamas will have “hell to pay” if it fails to disarm while offering full-throated support to Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting with the Israeli prime minister in Florida.

In a bravura display of mutual admiration, Netanyahu announced that the US president would be awarded the Israel prize, the country’s highest civilian honour, which, since its inception in the 1950s, has never before been given to a non-Israeli person.

The trip by Netanyahu to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence came amid a new push by officials in Washington to force concessions from Israel to allow progress towards the second phase of a Gaza peace plan, which in October halted the devastating two-year-long war.

Asked if he and Netanyahu had discussed Israel pulling back troops before Hamas fully disarmed, Trump told reporters: “If they don’t disarm as they agreed to do – they agreed to it – then there’ll be hell to pay for them, and we don’t want that, we’re not looking for that. But they have to disarm within a fairly short period of time.”

He described the question of Israel withdrawing its forces as “a separate subject”, adding only: “We’ll talk about that.”

Last week, the US news outlet Axios reported that the Trump administration wanted to announce a Palestinian technocratic government for Gaza and an international stabilisation force as soon as possible, and that senior Trump officials were growing exasperated “as Netanyahu has taken steps to undermine the fragile ceasefire and stall the peace process”.

But Trump himself appeared to show no such qualms after Monday’s meeting. He said he was “not concerned about anything that Israel is doing” and “Israel has lived up to the plan, 100%”.

He repeatedly pointed the finger at Hamas, saying, “it’ll be horrible for them” if they failed to disarm. “It’s going to be really, really bad for them, and I don’t want that to happen. But they made an agreement that they were going to disarm. And you couldn’t blame Israel,” he said.

Hamas retains large quantities of small arms but only a fraction of the heavy weapons that enabled its surprise attack into southern Israel in 2023, during which 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 abducted.

More than 70,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed in the ensuing Israeli offensive, and vast swathes of Gaza reduced to ruins. About 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the October ceasefire.

In recent weeks, Hamas has successfully established its authority over the parts of Gaza it controls with a series of executions, raids and beatings targeting rival power brokers, collaborators with Israel and criminal gangs. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is said to now live in the Hamas-controlled zone.

The Islamist militant organisation has proposed some solutions to allow some of its weapons to be put into storage but has refused to accept full disarmament.

Hamas’s armed wing reiterated on Monday that it would not surrender its weapons.

“Our people are defending themselves and will not give up their weapons as long as the occupation remains,” the new spokesperson for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, who has adopted the name of his late predecessor Abu Obeida, said in a video statement.

Trump claimed that other countries that supported the peace deal would “go in and wipe out Hamas” if it fails to hold up its end of the bargain.

Trump and Netanyahu earlier held a lunch meeting inside Mar-a-Lago along with their delegations. Netanyahu was expected to tell Trump that Hamas must return the remains of the last Israeli hostage left in Gaza before the next stages of the stalled ceasefire can be implemented, Israeli officials and analysts said.

Speaking to reporters before the meeting, Trump falsely said “just about” every hostage was released because of him and his team, whereas “none” were released during the Joe Biden administration. In fact, Hamas released a total of 138 hostages as a result of deals that the Biden administration helped broker, according to the Snopes fact-checking site.

The family of the last person whose remains have not been returned, Ran Gvili, has joined the Israeli prime minister’s visiting entourage and will meet officials in Washington later this week.

n Israeli official in Netanyahu’s circle told Reuters that the prime minister would demand that Hamas return the remains of all hostages in Gaza, as required under the ceasefire deal, before moving to the next stages of Trump’s plan.

A second phase of the peace plan calls for an interim authority made up of non-aligned Palestinian technocrats to govern the Palestinian territory, and an international stabilisation force of thousands of troops to be deployed. Israel has significant concerns about both.

Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer, was badly wounded and then abducted during the October 2023 Hamas raid into Israel that triggered the conflict. It is unclear if he died of his wounds during the raid or in Gaza. Hundreds gathered on Saturday night in Tel Aviv to demand that Israel make no concession to advance the ceasefire deal until his remains are returned.

Lianne Pollak-David, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and peace negotiator in the prime minister’s office, said the failure to return the remains of Gvili was a serious issue. “Netanyahu and the Israelis as a people are simply not going to accept this,” she said.

Hamas has freed 20 living hostages and returned the bodies of 27 dead hostages since October, and some observers see the insistence on Gvili’s remains being returned as a delaying tactic to allow Israel’s military forces to remain in the 53% of Gaza they currently control.

Daniel Levy, a UK-based analyst and former Israeli peace negotiator, said Netanyahu had no intention of withdrawing further from Gaza or allowing any international force that would deter Israeli military action.

“He feels he has a number of cards to play yet, and the remains of Gvili is the easiest one to play now, but there are others,” Levy said.

For Netanyahu, who faces an election within 10 months, the prospect of Iran repairing the damage inflicted on its nuclear programme in its short war with Israel and the US this summer and building up its ballistic missile capabilities is another priority.

Trump had previously insisted that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “completely and fully obliterated”. But on Monday, he said: “I hope they’re not trying to build up again because, if they are, we’re going to have no choice but very quickly to eradicate that buildup.”

The president added, “Iran may be behaving badly. It hasn’t been confirmed. But if it’s confirmed, look, they know the consequences will be very powerful, maybe more powerful than the last time.” Pressed for evidence, he said: “This is just what we hear, but usually where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

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Trump says there will be ‘hell to pay’ if Hamas refuse to disarm – video

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In Brigitte Bardot’s death, I see the passing of a generation: the Frenchwomen who tried to find a path to autonomy in the 1950s and ’60s. One of the last things Ms. Bardot did was write a book, published this year in French, an abecedarium titled “Mon BBcédaire.” The book, a not very chic compendium of thoughts scrawled in her own handwriting, received a tepid reaction from the French press, which was mostly disappointed by her portrayal of France. (“F is for … France, dear country of my youth! She has grown dull, sad, submissive, ailing — damaged, ravaged, banal, vulgar.”)

Young Brigitte Bardot, the actress, was a vessel for the imagination. Her sun-drenched, instinctual sexuality onscreen thrilled France, and then the whole world. She seemed to be without artifice, feral and physical. Men projected onto her, but she could not be possessed. She was the very idea of postwar Frenchwomen: provocative, apparently in control. They liked men, and were convinced that they could manipulate them to their whims.

As a girl, Ms. Bardot left her strict, bourgeois, Catholic industrialist family for the life of a bohemian; at 39, she gave up being a film actress and retreated from the public’s adulation (and later foreclosed any potential return to it). She pursued animal liberation with intensity. “Animals saved me,” she once said. “Without them, I would have committed suicide.”

As her life progressed, Ms. Bardot provoked in new, often bigoted ways. She tarnished her legacy with her frequent racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and anti-trans comments and by mocking the #MeToo movement. I grew up around strong Frenchwomen of Ms. Bardot’s type, beautiful and independent, yes, but often cutting and cruel. They said horrendous, retrograde things with a mischievous twinkle in their eye.

I admit I loved those women, even as I strongly disagreed with their beliefs. They were not sweet; they were formidable. My grandmother lived alone on a houseboat on the Seine after divorcing my grandfather in the early 1970s. She gave me advice about men: “You must keep them like a pretty puppy on a leash, nice to show off but never to be taken seriously.” And to my surprise, she was completely accepting when I told her I dated women. She told me that she, too, had been in love with a woman once — a famous tennis player who drove a racecar, owned a pet cheetah, and looked a bit like my grandfather. She would never date a woman again, she said. It was far too painful.

Brigitte Bard

t died on Sunday. Let her memorialize herself in her own words.

Reading them, I laugh, often despite myself.

A comme ABANDON (A IS FOR ABANDON)

Absolute distress.

D comme Désir (D is for desire)

An erotic compulsion for another, which can go as far as murder!

E comme Enfer (E is for hell)

It exists on Earth.

F comme Fumer (F is for smoking)

It’s marvelous! It’s forbidden! Everything that does us good is forbidden. I’m sick of it!

I love smoking, I’ve always smoked, and I always will. I like to defy the forbidden; it is my passion!

G comme Grossesse (G is for pregnancy)

A degrading punishment imposed on women’s bodies after they have given themselves to the love of a man … it transforms the lover into a disfigured progenitor who no longer inspires mad desire. It is the beginning of the deterioration of a couple’s relationship.

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Brigitte Bardot in 1962. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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The holiday season is often painted as an idyllic vision of rest, conjuring images of warm beverages and bountiful time with loved ones. But many people have trouble unwinding at this time of year. Why do the December holidays offer the promise of respite but never seem to deliver? And is more restorative rest possible during this busy season?

I am a psychologist who studies how rest supports learning, creativity, and well-being. Sleep is often the first thing that many people associate with rest, but humans also require restorative downtime when awake. These active rest periods include physical, social, and creative experiences that can occur throughout the day – not just while mindlessly scrolling on the couch.

When holiday stresses begin to snowball, rest periods replenish depleted psychological resources, reduce stress, and promote well-being. But reaping the full benefits of rest and leisure requires more than a slow morning or a mug of hot cocoa. It’s also about intentionally scheduling active recovery periods that energize us and leave us feeling restored.

That’s because good rest needs to be anticipated, planned, and refined.

Holiday stress

The winter holiday season can take a toll on well-being. Financial stress increases, and daily routines are disrupted. Add the stress of travel, plus a dash of challenging family dynamics, and it’s not surprising that emotional well-being declines during the holiday season.

Quality rest and leisure periods can buffer these stressors, promoting recovery and well-being. They also can help reduce psychological strain and prolong positive emotions as people return to work.

Effective rest comes in many forms, from going outdoors for a walk to socializing, listening to music or engaging in creative hobbies. These activities may feel like distractions, but they serve important mental health functions.

For instance, research finds that walking in nature results in diminished activation in the area of the brain associated with sadness and ruminating thoughts. Walks in nature are also associated with reduced anxiety and stress.

Other studies have shown that activities such as playing the piano or doing calligraphy significantly lower cortisol, a stress hormone. In fact, some of the most promising interventions for depression involve participation in pleasant leisure activities.

Not all idle time is restorative

So why does it feel so hard to get good rest during the holidays?

One of the most robust findings from psychologists and researchers who study leisure is that the effectiveness of rest periods depends on how satisfying they feel to the individual. This might sound obvious, but people often spend their free time doing things that are not satisfying.

For example, a famous 2002 study of how people spent their time found that the most popular form of leisure was watching television. But participants also rated TV time as their least enjoyable activity. Those who watched more than four hours of TV a day rated it as even less enjoyable than those who watched less than two hours a day.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I collected data from college students and found that students reported turning to mindless distractions, such as social media, at the end of the day, but that it usually did not leave them feeling reenergized or restored. Although this study was specifically about college students, when I presented the findings to the larger research team, one of my collaborators said, “It really makes you think about yourself, doesn’t it?” There were silent nods around the room.

Planning for good rest

To combat the pitfall of poor rest cycles, science suggests planning for active rest and pleasant activities, and carrying through with those plans. A large body of research shows that designing, scheduling, and engaging in enjoyable activities is effective at lowering symptoms of depressionand anxiety.

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Twelve years ago, when my daughter was born, my parents were there in the hospital room with me to welcome her. My mother cut the cord, and my father announced, “It’s a girl!” The three of us exclaimed over her incredible size — over 9 pounds — and off-the-charts length — 23 astounding inches. It was everything I’d been dreaming of since I’d first set out to become a single mother by choice.

But not too far away, waiting patiently by the phone for news, was another person, my sometimes-live-in girlfriend, Sarah.

She wasn’t at the birth because I hadn’t invited her to be. In fact, I had expressly told her that she was not invited. I didn’t even want her waiting at home for us. I had embarked on my path toward motherhood on my own, and I was determined to see it through that way, even if the solitude of the journey had become something I had to enforce.

My girlfriend and I had first dated in college, and had spent those years of our early 20s madly in love. But our relationship had ended when she broke my heart by refusing to come with me when I headed off to the West Coast for graduate school. We’d stayed in touch for a while, and then she’d stopped answering my calls. I cried into my whiskey and referred to her among my new friends as “the one who got away.”

I spent the next seven years in and out of disastrous relationships with men who were mostly all wrong for me, commitment-phobic bad boys who couldn’t have been further from wanting what I did: a child. I was approaching 30 and desperate to settle down and start a family. One day, I asked my mother why it was taking so long to find someone who wanted to make a life with me.

“Maybe you’re not someone who’s meant to have just one great love. Maybe your great loves will be many,” she said. This from a woman who’d been married to the same man for nearly 40 years.

But if this was true, I reasoned, then why not have a child on my own right now? I could always fall in love at 50, but I couldn’t have a baby at that age. The more time I spent making the case to everyone around me, the more attached I became to the vision of myself as a single mother by choice. Why would anyone do this with a partner, I thought, when it’s so much less complicated to do it on your own?

So I asked an old ex-boyfriend — smart, attractive, and completely off the rails — if he’d be the donor. He breezily said yes, and I began to make plans to draw up paperwork with a lawyer. And that’s when Sarah stepped back into my life.

First she sent me an email on New Year’s Eve, wishing me an early happy birthday and asking if we could talk on the phone sometime. I was furious. Who did she think she was to show up in my life now, crashing my pre-baby bliss and being a downer on both New Year’s and my birthday? I said sure, she could call me — but she better have a good reason for it.

I wasn’t going to let another relationship head off my dreams of starting a family.

As it turned out, she did: She had cut off contact all those years before because she hadn’t been able to get over our romance. And that’s why she was back in touch now. We still lived on opposite sides of the country, and neither of us had jobs we were ready to walk away from, but how could I say no to the most romantic proposal of my life? She wanted me back.

After that, we spent hours on the phone each day, relearning each other with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. We knew that we belonged together, but “together” was a complicated prospect. At first, she seemed understanding about my continued determination to become a single mother by choice. I made it clear that any relationship with her wasn’t going to change that for me, and she said she wouldn’t mind dating a pregnant lady. In these conversations, we chose to ignore the obvious fact that pregnancy only lasts nine months.

As the weeks passed, she began to ask for me to postpone the paperwork, to wait until our relationship had had more time so that we could embark on this journey of parenthood together, as partners, and without the conspicuous intrusion of my ex-boyfriend’s sperm. But I felt I’d waited long enough. I wasn’t going to let another relationship head off my dreams of starting a family.

Not surprisingly, like so many things having to do with getting pregnant, this was entirely out of my control. Days before Sarah’s first visit to spend a weekend with me at my place in San Francisco, I went to the emergency room for a burst appendix. I had surgery and was officially out of commission for several weeks as I recovered.

By that time, I’d accepted a one-year teaching position in Pennsylvania, only an eight-hour drive from her home in Boston, and I decided it was no longer convenient to use the West Coast ex-boyfriend’s sperm. I spent the next few months moving cross-country, researching clinics, picking an anonymous donor, and downing prenatal vitamins. Then I gave myself a shot of hormones and drove my Subaru to the insemination. I was doing this on my own, just like I’d promised myself.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I had come a long way on our path back to partnership. And, up until the morning sickness kicked in, I continued to give her every indication that we were walking it together. Then came months of physical and emotional agony, our lives moving forward against the backdrop of my severe nausea and vomiting, with a propulsion that felt out of my control. I took a permanent job in a small college town in Alabama. She found a new job in Atlanta and followed me south. We bought the house that I lived in mostly without her, and she rented an apartment in the city for herself. My family was thousands of miles away, and I knew no one in my new hometown. On weekends, she’d drive the two hours from Atlanta to buy my groceries and listen from the other room while I threw up. I couldn’t have gotten through it alone, but at the time, alone was exactly what I wanted to be.

While she was doing everything she could to make our dreams come true, I had turned inward. I stopped talking about our future together and started thinking about my own. My all-day, eight-month morning sickness was exacerbated by smell and touch, and I couldn’t stand for her to be near me. The only person I could imagine sharing a space with was the baby, and my tunnel vision of life as a single mom narrowed again.

But though my vision for the future felt like it was gaining new focus, everyone around me seemed to grow more confused. Sarah’s parents called with well-wishes and inquiries about baby gifts, which I accepted with a mixture of scorn and appreciation. Not surprisingly, my new co-workers didn’t understand the situation either, clearly longing to turn our story into one of a happy, little queer nuclear family — something I vehemently objected to, even as Sarah rubbed my swollen feet. It’s a stretch to say that anyone was convinced by the explanation I gave — we’re dating, and I’m having a baby on my own — but I stuck to it. At the baby shower my new friends threw for me, I gleefully unwrapped a baby book and declared, “I hope this one doesn’t have a family tree in it because our family tree only has one side!” My girlfriend sat an armchair away.

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Doug Varone and Dancers said it was withdrawing from a two-night stand in April that had been intended to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. Varone, the head of the company, said it would lose $40,000 by pulling out.

“It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating,” he said in an email.

The artists who have protested in recent weeks include Kristy Lee, a folk singer from Alabama, who announced she was pulling out from a free concert on Jan. 14. “I won’t lie to you, canceling shows hurts,” she said in a social media post. “This is how I keep the lights on. But losing my integrity would cost me more than any paycheck.”

The center has responded aggressively to some of the cancellations. Richard Grenell, the chairman of the center, threatened a $1 million lawsuit against Mr. Redd after he canceled the Christmas Eve concert.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday about the artist withdrawals. In his letter to Mr. Redd, Mr. Grenell said, “Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance.”

The cancellations underscore the difficulties that Mr. Grenell and Mr. Trump have faced in trying to remake the center in the president’s name. Those who canceled performances or resigned advisory roles in February included the Pulitzer winner Rhiannon Giddens, the so

prano Renée Fleming and the singer-songwriter Ben Folds.

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The head of Doug Varone and Dancers called the decision to cancel two performances at the Kennedy Center “financially devastating but morally exhilarating. ”Credit…Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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You might find these videos enlightening!

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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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Deep down in the Arctic Ocean, life becomes bizarre. One might suppose that at its greatest depths, the icy, dark water would be inhospitable to much, but a new discovery reminds us that that is far from the case.

Off the coast of Greenland, the deep seafloor is littered with towering mounds made of crystallized methane and other gases. Known as the Freya hydrate mounds, these structures act like a “frozen reef,” a haven for creatures that have evolved to live in environments unlike any other on Earth.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, scientists document the deepest ever found of these mounds, at 3,640 meters—or some 2.26 miles—below the surface. The discovery was made as part of the Ocean Census Arctic Deep–EXTREME24 expedition to explore and research the Arctic environment and document ocean life using tools such as underwater robots.

Incredibly, the mounds, which are also known as gas hydrate cold seeps, release methane gas flares some 3,300 meters up into the water—the tallest such flares ever recorded. Over time, the mounds collapse and reform, a dynamic process that the researchers say gives insights into the Arctic’s various ecosystems.

“These are not static deposits,” Giuliana Panieri, a study co-author and a professor at the Arctic University of Norway, said in a statement about the new research. “They are living geological features, responding to tectonics, deep heat flow, and environmental change.”

Gathered at the mounds are chemosynthetic creatures—life that has evolved to depend not on sun-powered photosynthesis for food but on chemical reactions instead. Some of the creatures seen at the Freya mounds are also found at hydrothermal vents, or fissures in the seafloor through which hot, chemical-laden water erupts, the researchers said, suggesting these ecosystems may be more intertwined than previously thought.

“The links that we have found between life at this seep and hydrothermal vents in the Arctic indicate that these island-like habitats on the ocean floor will need to be protected from any future impacts of deep-sea mining in the region,” said Jon Copley, a study co-author and a professor at the University of Southampton in England, in the same statement.

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UiT / Ocean Census / REV Ocean

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