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To those “who view this administration with distrust or disdain,” Mr. Mamdani said, “I promise you this. If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you and never, not for a second, hide from you.”

The star-studded ceremony at City Hall featured two avatars of the progressive wing of American politics who had helped propel Mr. Mamdani to the mayoralty: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow Democrat representing parts of Queens and the Bronx, delivered opening remarks, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont administered the oath of office, with Mr. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, resting his hand on two Qurans held by his wife, Rama Duwaji.

The message from the stage was unmistakable: In New York City, the left is ascendant. And to national Democratic leaders struggling to regain the party’s footing, Mr. Mamdani’s victory and the excitement surrounding it may suggest a path forward.

“New York, thank you for inspiring our nation,” Mr. Sanders said. “Thank you for giving us, from coast to coast, the hope and the vision that we can create government that works for all, not just the wealthy and the few.”

The event took place before thousands of well-wishers who flooded the plaza in front of City Hall and poured into a section of Broadway more typically closed off for parades down the Canyon of Heroes, but this time for the inauguration of a self-described champion of the underrepresented.

Amid the sea of knit caps, there were union emblems, Democratic Socialists of America apparel and the occasional kaffiyeh. Attendees stuffed hand warmers into gloves and shifted from foot to foot to warm their toes.

The midday event followed a significantly more modest and subdued swearing-in ceremony just after midnight, during which Mr. Mamdani legally became mayor of New York City.

The subsequent public ceremony and adjoining block party captured how many New Yorkers have hungered for a more earnest-seeming, more hopeful alternative to 21st-century American politics, and have been eager to turn the page on the cronyism and self-regarding swagger of the Eric Adams mayoralty.

After much equivocation, Mr. Adams, who once called himself the future of the Democratic Party, attended Thursday’s ceremony, and Mr. Mamdani spoke kindly of his ascent from an impoverished background to mayor of New York City. But when Mr. Mamdani nodded to mayors he admired from the past, Mr. Adams was not among them.

Shortly after the ceremony ended, Mr. Mamdani traveled to Brooklyn to announce that he had enacted several executive orders, including one that revoked all prior executive orders issued after Sept. 26, 2024, the date of Mr. Adams’s indictment.

“That was a date that marked a moment when many New Yorkers decided politics held nothing for them,” Mr. Mamdani said at a news conference in the borough.

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Mamdani New York Maor 2026

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The new year has arrived, and so have the Quadrantids. The first meteor shower of 2026 is known for its bright fireballs and bolides—large meteors that explode in the atmosphere in dramatic fashion, sometimes raining meteorites onto Earth below.

The Quadrantids are an annual shower running from November through early January. This year, the Quadrantids will peak on the night of January 3 through the early hours of January 4. Best viewed from the Northern Hemisphere, the ideal time to get outside and try to spot some of these luminous fireballs is in the predawn hours on January 4, according to NASA. Unfortunately, a full moon rises the night before, so the moon’s light may interfere with your ability to see these shooting stars.

To have the best chance of spotting a meteor, look for the Quadrantids’ radiant—the point of the sky where they appear to originate. First observed in 1825, the meteor shower radiates from an obsolete constellation called Quadrans Muralis—named by a French astronomer in 1795, it was left out of the International Astronomical Union’s list of official constellations in 1922. Instead, look for Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper, and gaze toward the end of its handle.

he Quadrantids don’t come from the stars, however. Unlike other meteor showers, which tend to be caused by debris falling from comets, the Quadrantids are produced by an asteroid, 2003 EH1. Discovered in 2003, the asteroid may actually be a dead comet, NASA notes. Some astronomers think there may also be a second object that contributes to the meteor shower, a comet called 96P/Machholz.

If you can get outside in the early hours of January 4, move as far as you safely can from bright light sources, such as street lamps and buildings. Give your eyes 30 minutes to adjust to the dark, and look toward the northern sky. Then just be patient!

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Galaxies in our universe seem to be achieving an impossible feat. They are rotating with such speed that the gravity generated by their observable matter could not possibly hold them together; they should have torn themselves apart long ago. The same is true of galaxies in clusters, which leads scientists to believe that something we cannot see is at work. They think something we have yet to detect directly is giving these galaxies extra mass, generating the extra gravity they need to stay intact. This strange and unknown matter was called “dark matter” since it is not visible.

Dark matter

Unlike normal matter, dark matter does not interact with the electromagnetic force. This means it does not absorb, reflect or emit light, making it extremely hard to spot. In fact, researchers have been able to infer the existence of dark matter only from the gravitational effect it seems to have on visible matter. Dark matter seems to outweigh visible matter roughly six to one, making up about 27% of the universe. Here’s a sobering fact: The matter we know and that makes up all stars and galaxies only accounts for 5% of the content of the universe! But what is dark matter? One idea is that it could contain “supersymmetric particles” – hypothesized particles that are partners to those already known in the Standard Model. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may provide more direct clues about dark matter.

Many theories say the dark matter particles would be light enough to be produced at the LHC. If they were created at the LHC, they would escape through the detectors unnoticed. However, they would carry away energy and momentum, so physicists could infer their existence from the amount of energy and momentum “missing” after a collision. Dark matter candidates arise frequently in theories that suggest physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry and extra dimensions. One theory suggests the existence of a “Hidden Valley”, a parallel world made of dark matter having very little in common with matter we know. If one of these theories proved to be true, it could help scientists gain a better understanding of the composition of our universe and, in particular, how galaxies hold together.

Dark energy

Dark energy makes up approximately 68% of the universe and appears to be associated with the vacuum in space. It is distributed evenly throughout the universe, not only in space but also in time – in other words, its effect is not diluted as the universe expands. The even distribution means that dark energy does not have any local gravitational effects, but rather a global effect on the universe as a whole. This leads to a repulsive force, which tends to accelerate the expansion of the universe. The rate of expansion and its acceleration can be measured by observations based on the Hubble law. These measurements, together with other scientific data, have confirmed the existence of dark energy and provide an estimate of just how much of this mysterious substance exists.

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What is it?

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• Inauguration Day: The public inauguration ceremony featuring Mr. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, is taking place hours after he was officially sworn in during a brief private event held shortly after midnight.

• Other oaths: The city’s comptroller, Mark Levine, and public advocate, Jumaane Williams, were also sworn in.

• Special guests: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York spoke of New Yorkers’ “courage” and “ambition” during opening remarks, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will administer a ceremonial oath of office to Mr. Mamdani.

 

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani

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The recent surge in the use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has propelled addiction-adjacent terms such as “food noise” and “food cravings” into common vernacular. But can food actually be addictive? Now some neuroscientists and food behavior researchers are trying to understand if food—particularly ultraprocessed foods—can be addictive in the same way as other known substances, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and cocaine.

For foods to be potentially addictive, “they’re created in a way that is most palatable and most delicious,” says Alex DiFeliceantonio, an appetitive neuroscientist at Virginia Tech. “When you look at the food environment, those tend to be ultraprocessed.”

Scientific American spoke with DiFeliceantonio about research unpacking whether food addiction is real, whether certain types of foods might have more addictive qualities, and how related eating disorders can be addressed.

What does it mean to have a “food addiction”?

When we’re thinking about food addiction and looking qualitatively at what people are eating when they are saying that they can’t stop eating, we have to put it in the framework of a substance use disorder. These disorders affect life in an untenable way. Food addiction isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) like substance use disorder is, but there is a proposal to have it put in the DSM.

We typically look to the Yale Food Addiction Scale for clinical evaluation. The scale was designed to assess the same criteria as the substance use disorder criteria in the DSM. The scale also contains what we call clinical indicators that a person is experiencing symptoms of an addiction, and those symptoms are poorly affecting life, such as the ability to engage in social situations or engage in aspects of work or life. If we accept that food addiction exists—if you give the Yale Food Addiction Scale to large population-level studies and do it across multiple countries internationally—we generally find that around 12 percent of people [experience] it.

A combination of factors can lead to an addictive behavior. And the most common is the addictive potential of the substance combined with the vulnerability of the person. We think about both of those things with food, too: ingredients that could have addictive potential and the people who could be most vulnerable. We also look at food attributes, such as high refined carbohydrate content, which is known to trigger reward pathways in the brain

Other aspects of substance-use-disorder criteria include loss of control over intake and highly patterned intake. That’s what we see in binge-eating disorder. Binge-eating disorder and food addiction are not the same thing, but they share similarities. If we look at the foods people report consuming when they binge eat, they tend to be things that would be classified as ultraprocessed—things like pizza, ice cream, candy, chips. They’re very rarely things like fruit, nuts, beans.

What do you consider an ultraprocessed food?

There are multiple definitions. I would say the one most studied and what we use in my lab is the NOVA [“new” in Portuguese] definition; it has four levels, and the fourth is ultraprocessed foods.

The NOVA level-four foods contain ingredients or processing methods that are not available to the home cook. You can think about additives like stabilizers, cosmetic additives that enhance color or flavor, or emulsifiers to maintain texture. If you add vitamin D or calcium—types of nutritional fortification—that doesn’t make a food a NOVA ultraprocessed food by itself. Ultraprocessed might also refer to foods produced with an industrial method, like making starch slurries that are then extruded, puffed, subjected to high heat, or molded in ways that you really wouldn’t be able to make in your kitchen.

Why might ultraprocessed foods in particular fire up reward pathways in the brain?

The current scientific thinking is we have one reward system and lots of different things that can be rewarding. All addictive drugs increase dopamine in the striatum [a brain region beneath the cerebral cortex that is involved in motor and reward processing]. This has been the dogma since 1988 with [a paper by pharmacologists Gaetano Di Chiara and Assunta Imperato]. It’s the same thing [with certain foods]. If you infuse sugar and fat into the oral cavity of an animal, you see an increase in dopamine. If you infuse these things directly into the gut [of animals], you also see increases in dopamine. There is no agreed-upon threshold in which we say a substance that is addictive must increase dopamine in the striatum by x amount.

Modern ultraprocessed foods started to become widespread in the U.S. around the 1950s. Those foods are acting on a reward system that evolved to deal with natural rewards from the environment.

When we’re thinking about food addiction, we know that there are certain levers or ways to highly activate the reward system, and ultraprocessed foods seem to access the most levers. They elevate levels of sodium, fat, and refined carbohydrates in the body. And this is aided in various ways—with emulsifiers, with texture changes, with flavor changes—ultraprocessed foods are made to be the most palatable, the most delicious. We don’t think about broccoli as an addictive substance; we think about foods that contain enough of these potentially addictive nutrients in combination to be addictive substances.

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Hmmmm … Trump is trying to get in on Nuclear Fusion for $6 billion.

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ITER installs third sector module, marking major progress in vacuum vessel assembly.

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The ensuing period of talks between U.S. and Venezuelan officials resulted in the release of 17 American citizens and permanent residents held in Venezuela.

But the Trump administration’s decision to suspend those talks in favor of a military and economic pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro put an end to prisoner releases. The number of detained Americans in Venezuela began to rise again in the fall, according to the U.S. official. That rise coincided with the deployment of a U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean and the start of airstrikes against boats that Washington says transport drugs on Mr. Maduro’s orders.

The United States further escalated its pressure campaign this month, targeting tankers carrying Venezuelan oil and paralyzing the country’s biggest source of exports.

The U.S. Embassy in Colombia, which deals with Venezuelan affairs, declined to comment on American detainees in Venezuela, and referred questions to the U.S. State Department.

The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Venezuela’s Communication Ministry, which handles the government’s press requests, did not respond to a request for comment.

The identities of most of the Americans detained in Venezuela in recent months are unknown.

The family of a traveler named James Luckey-Lange of Staten Island in New York City, reported him missing soon after he crossed Venezuela’s volatile southern border in early December.

The U.S. official said Mr. Luckey-Lange, 28, is among the recently imprisoned and is one of the two Americans who may be designated as wrongfully detained.

Mr. Luckey-Lange is the son of the musician Diane Luckey, who performed as Q Lazzarus and is best known for her 1988 single “Goodbye Horses.” A travel enthusiast and amateur martial arts fighter, Mr. Luckey-Lange worked in commercial fishing in Alaska after graduating from college, according to friends and family.

He embarked on a long trip across Latin America in 2022 after the death of his mother. His father died this year.

“He has been traveling around, figuring out what to do with his life,” said Eva Aridjis Fuentes, a filmmaker who worked with Mr. Luckey-Lange for a documentary about Q Lazzarus. “He has had so much loss.”

Mr. Luckey-Lange wrote on his blog in early December that he was doing research on gold mining in the Amazon region of Guyana, which borders Venezuela. On Dec. 7, he wrote a friend that he was at an unspecified location in Venezuela, and he last spoke to his family the following day. He said he was heading to the capital, Caracas, where he was planning to catch a flight on Dec. 12 that would eventually bring him home to New York.

It is unclear if Mr. Luckey-Lange had a visa to enter Venezuela, as the country’s law requires of American citizens.

His aunt and next of kin, Abbie Luckey, said in a phone interview that she has not been contacted by U.S. officials and is seeking any information about his whereabouts.

Some American citizens who have been released from prison in Venezuela earlier this year have described abusive conditions and lack of due process. Many were not charged with any crimes, and few were convicted.

A Peruvian-American named Renzo Huamanchumo Castillo said he was detained last year after traveling to Venezuela to meet his wife’s family, and charged with terrorism and conspiring to kill Mr. Maduro.

He said the charges made no sense. “We realized afterward, I was just a token,” he added.

Mr. Huamanchumo, 48, said he was frequently beaten and received one liter of muddy water each day while detained in a notorious Venezuelan prison called Rodeo I. “It was the worst thing you can imagine,” he said.

He was freed in a prisoner swap in July.

At least two other people with U.S. ties remain imprisoned in Venezuela, according to their families: Aidel Suarez, a U.S. permanent resident born in Cuba, and Jonathan Torres Duque, a Venezuelan-American.

Mr. Torres’s mother, Rhoda Torres, said her son, who is now 26, had returned to Venezuela after the family had been living in the United States for around a decade. She believed he was detained based on his athletic build and American accent, she said.

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President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela at a rally in Caracas, the capital, earlier this month. Credit…Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

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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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