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A key committee in the Turkish parliament on Tuesday approved Sweden's bid to join NATO after months of delays, clearing another hurdle in the Nordic country's accession process in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year.

If the market for initial public offerings recovers in the new year, one company that aims to go public early on is Reddit. An IPO will put the spotlight on the prospects for Reddit’s advertising business, which has fallen short of ambitious growth targets outlined by executives two years ago.

Reddit expects to finish this year with ad revenue up more than 20% to slightly over $800 million, two people familiar with the matter said. While that’s a faster growth rate than firms like Snap and Pinterest reported, Reddit had said two years ago it aimed to exceed $1 billion in ad revenue by 2023, up from around $350 million in 2021. Ad executives say one reason Reddit fell short was the weakness in the ad market starting early last year, when rising interest rates caused marketers to pull back.

Lawmakers fear the NIST will have to rely on companies developing the technology.

Several thousand people protested in front of the central election commission building in Belgrade over an election that international monitors said was unfair.

Ethiopia became Africa's third default in as many years on Tuesday after it failed to make a $33 million "coupon" payment on its only international government bond.

Africa's second most populous country announced earlier this month that it intended to formally go into default, having been under severe financial strain in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a two-year civil war that ended in November 2022.

It had been supposed to make the payment on Dec. 11, but technically had up until Tuesday to provide the money due to a 14-day 'grace period' clause written into the $1 billion bond.

According to two sources familiar with the situation, bondholders had not been paid the coupon as of the end of Friday Dec. 22, the last international banking working day before the grace period expires.

Ethiopian government officials did not respond to requests for comment on Friday or over the weekend, but the widely-expected default will see it join two other African nations, Zambia and Ghana, in a full-scale "Common Framework" restructuring.

Do you use Mint Mobile and did you receive a warning about a data breach? You are not alone and sadly, they are real notifications about a data breach that exposed customers’ personal information.

According to Mint Mobile, customer information that was exposed in the breach includes:

Name
Telephone number
Email address
SIM serial number and IMEI number (a device identifier similar to a serial number)
A brief description of service plan purchased

The Pentagon statement said this was the “seventh Iranian attack on commercial shipping since 2021.”

More than 20,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas, health officials said Friday.

Cuba becomes part of a handful of countries that allow the practice, which some equate with murder.

Google is wrapping its head around the idea of being a generative AI company. The "code red" called in response to ChatGPT has had Googlers scrambling to come up with AI features and ideas. Once all the dust settles on that work, Google might turn inward and try to "optimize" the company with some of its new AI capabilities. With artificial intelligence being the hot new thing, how much of Google's, uh, natural intelligence needs to be there?

A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people's jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to "consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers." According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google's new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.

The new propulsion system is powered by supersonic technology and can be used for spacecraft journeying from the Moon to Mars.

A Nicaragua-bound plane, carrying over 303 Indian passengers, has been grounded by France over suspected 'human trafficking', said the authorities on Friday (Dec 22). As per the Paris prosecutors, on Thursday (Dec 21) the aircraft was detained after an anonymous tipoff. The local officials, in the eastern Marne region on Friday, said that a judicial investigation has been launched into the trip's conditions and purposes.