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The U.S. decision to authorise long-range Ukrainian strikes could help Kyiv defend the foothold in Russia's Kursk region that it seized as leverage in any war talks, but may come too late to change the course of the war, analysts said.

Two months before leaving office, President Joe Biden lifted some restrictions that have blocked Kyiv from using U.S.-supplied weapons for strikes deeper into Russian territory, in a major policy change, Reuters reported on Sunday.

Military analysts said the impact on the battlefield, where Ukraine has been on the back foot for months, would depend on what limits remained. But while the shift may shore up the Kursk operation, it was unlikely to be a gamechanger overall.

"The decision comes late, and like other decisions in this vein, it may be too late to substantially change the course of the fighting," said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

The findings, drawn from a survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults and an analysis of social media posts posted this summer by influencers, provide an indication of how Americans consumed the news during the height of the U.S. presidential campaign that President-elect Donald Trump ultimately won.

The study examined accounts run by people who post and talk regularly about current events - including through podcasts and newsletters - and have more than 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X or TikTok. They include people across the political spectrum, such as the progressive podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen and conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, as well as non-partisan personalities like Chris Cillizza, a former CNN analyst who now runs his own newsletter.

The report found that news influencers posted mostly about politics and the election, followed by social issues like race and abortion and international events, such as the Israel-Hamas war. Most of them – 63% - are men and the majority – 77% - have no affiliation, or background, with a media organization. Pew said about half of the influencers it sampled did not express a clear political orientation. From the ones that did, slightly more of them identified as conservative than as liberal.

The former Fox News commentator has made it clear, in his own book and in interviews, that he believes men and women should not serve together in combat units. If Hegseth is confirmed by the Senate, he could try to end the Pentagon’s nearly decade-old practice of making all combat jobs open to women.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he said in a podcast hosted by Shawn Ryan on Nov. 7. Women have a place in the military, he said, just not in special operations, artillery, infantry and armor units.

“Who’s going to replace them? Men? And we’re having trouble recruiting men into the Army right now,” said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who works with the Service Women’s Action Network.

Despite a snubbing by government officials unlike any she has seen, Francesca Albanese says she was “uplifted” by her visit to Canada.

Over the course of a week, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories attended several community events, and did not hold back from scathing criticisms of Israel’s 13-month assault on Gaza.

Albanese, an Italian academic and lawyer who has held the voluntary UN position since 2022, had been invited to meet with government officials, as well as make a scheduled appearance at a parliamentary foreign affairs committee. Both events were cancelled a week before her arrival.

But Albanese still spoke to large gatherings of workers, academics, and students in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. She identified Canada as part of a small group of countries who have “continued to allow and nurture the arrogance that is at the origins of Israeli behaviour today.”

A young vineyard worker accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot on six occasions over four years when she had been drugged by her husband also proposed drugging and raping his own mother, a court has heard.

Charly A, a vineyard worker who later packed lorries for a cement company, is accused of driving to the Pelicots’ home on six occasions between 2016 and 2020 to rape Gisèle Pelicot in her bedroom alongside Dominique Pelicot, who had drugged her into a comatose state.

Video evidence showed a whispered conversation in Gisèle Pelicot’s bedroom between the two men, in which they discuss a plan to drug and rape Charly A’s mother in the same way. In the footage, Charly A says he will give an address and date for this to take place. Both men told the court this conversation took place, but said they did not rape Charly A’s mother.

Trump will not be president for another two months but he is already dominating the Washington agenda again. This week a flurry of controversial and extremist picks for his cabinet and other high-ranking administration positions came at a hectic pace and with a level of provocation that made heads spin.

The choices included a Fox News host, a tech billionaire, an anti-vaccine activist, an alleged apologist for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a congressman once embroiled in a sex-trafficking investigation. The lineup raised fears of authoritarianism or chaos – or both – once Trump and his allies are back in the Oval Office.

Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Their entire political brand is shock and awe. Prior to Trump’s re-election it was notional. Now they have the power to execute all of their depravity with the full backing of American government power virtually unchecked. I don’t think the people who voted for Donald Trump, allegedly because of economic angst, have a full appreciation for what that means.”

You know the Bank of Mum and Dad when you see it: it’s your friend who seems broke, but always has a safety net, or who suddenly (but discreetly) acquires the deposit for a home. It’s those who stayed with their parents while they saved for a flat, or stuck it out in a profession they were passionate about even though the wages are chronically low. It’s those who do not need to consider the financial costs of having children. It’s those whose grandparents are covering nursery or university fees, with the Bank of Grandma and Grandad already driving an economic wedge between different cohorts in generations Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024) and Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2000s).

This is the picture we know, but the Bank of Mum and Dad is not just a luxury confined to the 1% – it is also evident in families like mine. I grew up in a working-class household and was the first person in my family to get a degree, but it was the fact my parents had scrimped in the 1980s to purchase properties in London (and allowed me to crash in one throughout my 20s) that has arguably been the true source of opportunities in my life.

In recent years, we have rightly widened the conversation about privilege in society. And yet how honest are we about one of the most obvious forces shaping anyone under 45: the presence or absence of a parental safety net? The truth is that we live in an inheritocracy. If you’ve grown up in the 21st century, your opportunities are increasingly determined by your access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, rather than by what you earn or learn. The economic roots of this story go back to the 1980s, but it accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, as private wealth soared and wage growth stalled. In the 2020s, rather than a meritocracy – where hard work pays off – we have evolved into an inheritocracy, based on family wealth.

The former head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has said that the UK should side with the European Union over trade and economic policies rather than a Donald Trump-led US, as fears grow over a possible global trade war.

Pascal Lamy, who was head of the WTO from 2005 to 2013, said it was clear that the UK’s interests lay in staying close to the EU on trade, rather than allying with Trump, not least because it does three times more trade with Europe than the US.

His comments came after a key Trump supporter, Stephen Moore, said on Friday that the UK should reject the EU’s “socialist model” if it wanted to have any realistic chance of doing a free trade deal with the US under Trump and, as a result, avoid the 20% tariffs on exports that the president-elect has promised.

A Russian spy ship has been escorted out of the Irish Sea after it entered Irish-controlled waters and patrolled an area containing critical energy and internet submarine pipelines and cables.

It was spotted on Thursday east of Dublin and south-west of the Isle of Man but Norwegian, US, French and British navy and air defence services initially observed it accompanying a Russian warship, the Admiral Golovko, through the English channel last weekend.

The Irish navy ship the LÉ James Joyce escorted it out of the Irish exclusive economic zone (EEZ) at about 3am on Friday with the air corps continuing to monitor its movements as it headed south.

Its presence has raised fresh concerns about the security of the interconnector cables that run between Ireland and the UK carrying global internet traffic from huge datacentres operated by tech companies including Google and Microsoft, which have their EU headquarters sited in Ireland.

As the gambling industry continues to grow globally with the rise of online gambling, a recent report from the medical journal The Lancet's commission on gambling calls is calling on governments to approach gambling as a public health issue.

Malcolm Sparrow, one of the authors of the report, says this will put gambling in the same category as alcohol and tobacco, which are identified by the World Health Organization as issues of the public interest.

Statistics Canada estimates that in 2018, nearly two-thirds of Canadians gambled in the past year. The data estimates that about 300,000 Canadians were at moderate-to-severe risk of developing a gambling problem, where gambling starts to negatively affect a person's life.

The discovery of 27 cases of scurvy in a northern Saskatchewan community is raising concerns about grocery prices and access to fresh food as income inequality worsens.

Earlier this year, a doctor in La Ronge had a hunch that a patient was suffering from scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. The test came back positive and it raised questions about the prevalence of scurvy in the community.

The Lac La Ronge Indian Band partnered with Dr. Jeff Irvine and the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority to investigate. Irvine is a physician in La Ronge and works with Northern Medical Services, an off-shoot of the University of Saskatchewan college of medicine.

They tested 51 blood samples — all but one taken in 2023 or 2024 — and found 27 cases of low or undetectable levels of vitamin C. These results were followed with a physical exam, which confirmed a scurvy diagnosis in all 27 cases. Patient ages range from 20-80, and 79 per cent are Indigenous.

When Meredith Moore moved from Toronto to New York, she was astonished by the amount of home renovation happening in the city — and by the full construction waste bins.

"I would see these dumpsters just filled with wood and trim and doors and all these things that I knew were not waste," said Moore, who has always looked for ways things could be reused in her previous work as an interior designer.

Deconstruction may seem slow, inefficient and potentially costly compared to just knocking something down. But there's growing interest from building owners and the construction industry alike in taking a more careful approach, which cuts waste and emissions by giving new life to old materials.