Religious

Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu was a star, even mentioned as a potential future pope. He is now an accused criminal. Vatican magistrates alleged Becciu had embezzled more than $100,000 through a nonprofit group run by his brother. Since the summer of 2021, the 75-year-old Becciu has been on trial for embezzlement, abuse of office and witness tampering. He is the first cardinal to be tried in Vatican City’s criminal court. Nine others face charges concerning the alleged theft of money intended to free a kidnapped nun. — Wall Street Journal,12/13/2023

Since the October 7 massacre, when Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped some 240, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed in the United States and around the world, according to data published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL reported that the number of incidents tripled versus last year, the highest number recorded in a two-month period since it began keeping track of US anti-Semitism in 1979. — Times of Israel, 12/15/2023

Among the top Ten Archeological finds of 2023 reported by Bible History Daily, 12/29/2023
● Archaeological evidence of Solomon and Sheba
● Second Temple period receipt found in City of David
● Translation of a fragmentary second-century papyrus that contains sayings of Jesus. The sayings are very similar to sayings found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; excavated in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt
● Two tablets containing a bilingual inscription written in both Sumerian and Amorite.

The rupture of the United Methodist Church (UMC) is nearly complete. As the window closes on a temporary plan allowing disaffiliations, nearly 1 out of 4 of the denomination’s 30,000 congregations decided to split over issues of sexuality and authority. When regional conferences ratified the last batch of disaffiliations, the tally came to 5,642 congregations departing in 2023 and a total of 7,659 over the past four years, according to United Methodist News. This is the largest denominational divide in the United States since the Civil War. — Christianitytoday.com, 12/18/23

The Vatican ruled that Roman Catholic priests can administer blessings to same-sex couples as long as they are not part of regular Church rituals or liturgies. A document from the Vatican’s doctrinal office, which effectively reversed a declaration the same body had issued in 2021, said such blessings would not legitimize irregular situations but be a sign that God welcomes all. — Reuters, 12/18/23

Social

Los Angeles has the largest number of homeless veterans, nearly 4,000 according to the annual count. LA also has a unique asset to help them: A 387-acre facility on some of the country’s most expensive real estate: Brentwood, in West Los Angeles. The sprawling campus was donated as a home for Civil War veterans in 1887. In this century veterans’ groups have sued the VA for leasing parts of the campus out for things that had nothing to do with vets, like UCLA’s baseball stadium, the private Brentwood School and other deals, some of which turned out to be criminal. — NPR, 11/16/2023

Contrary to popular belief, retail theft has not spiked nationwide in the past several years. The most up-to-date source is the shoplifting report published by the Council on Criminal Justice, which uses police data through the first half of 2023. The council tracks 24 major U.S. cities. Overall, shoplifting incidents were 16 percent higher in the first half of 2023 than the first half of 2019. When New York City is excluded, however, reported shoplifting incidents fell over the same time period. Out of the 24 cities, 17 reported decreases in shoplifting. — NY Times, 11/29/2023

A recent meta-analysis published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia has found a connection between certain personality traits and the risk of developing dementia. The analysis, which included data from eight smaller studies totaling 44,531 people, found that individuals with high levels of neuroticism and negative affect (such as anger and fear) had a higher risk of developing dementia over the long term. Additionally, those with low levels of conscientiousness, extroversion, and positive affect also had an increased risk. However, it’s important to note that the study did not find a clear link between personality type and evidence of underlying disease. — The Press Rundown, 12/14/2023

People are cutting back on tipping, frustrated by ubiquitous requests for gratuities. As of November, service-sector workers in non- restaurant leisure and hospitality jobs made $1.28 an hour in tips, on average, down 7% from the $1.38 an hour they made a year prior. The data is according to an analysis of 300,000 small and medium-size businesses by payroll provider Gusto. It reflects a broad frustration with the proliferation of tip requests at dry cleaners and bridal boutiques and even self-checkout machines that have sprung up since the pandemic. — Wall Street Journal, 12/13/2023

Channel 1, a national news channel set to launch in 2024, has announced that it will be replacing human anchors with hyper-realistic AI-generated avatars. These avatars, created using artificial intelligence technology, are designed to look, talk and move like real humans. They will read the news with a digitally generated voice. Some of the avatars are “digital doubles,” created from scans of actual people. Founder of Channel 1, Adam Mosam, says the company plans to be transparent with viewers about what footage is original and which is AI-generated. — The Press Rundown, 12/15/2023

Political

Despite being an agricultural powerhouse with massive lithium and energy deposits, Argentina is in its worst economic crisis in a generation. Two of five people live in poverty. The peso has lost 90% of its value. President-elect Javier Milei, known by the nickname “El Loco” since he was a kid, rose from university professor to social-media celebrity, making his mark as an economic libertarian and social libertine. He won by a landslide promising to slash government spending by roughly 40% to help bring down Argentina’s triple-digit inflation. Milei wielded a chain saw in appearances to make his point. — Wall Street Journal, 12/6/2023

Russia’s prison population has dropped from 420,000 before the war with Ukraine to about 266,000, according to Deputy Justice Minister Vsevolod Vukolov. The practice of recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine was first started by the now-deceased leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The total number of recruits from prisons, with the promise of pardons if they survive, is believed to be around 100,000. — The Press Rundown, 12/10/2023

China can replace lost ships far more quickly than the U.S. In the past two years, its navy has grown by 17 cruisers and destroyers; it would take the U.S. six years to build the same number under current conditions. — Wall Street Journal, 12/6/2023

A recently declassified U.S. intelligence report has revealed the devastating toll that the Ukraine war has taken on Russia. According to the report, Russia has lost approximately 315,000 troops, which accounts for nearly 90% of its personnel at the start of the conflict. These losses include both deaths and injuries. Additionally, the report states that Russia’s military modernization has been set back by 18 years due to the losses in personnel and armored vehicles to Ukraine’s military. Russia now controls almost 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, including the Crimea peninsula, which it seized in 2014. — The Press Rundown, 12/13/2023

Travelers in countries representing nearly a quarter of the world’s population face a heightened risk of arrest and of becoming pawns in a geopolitical struggle. The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to multiple countries. Nine of those nations are classified “D” for the risk of detention in an increasingly piratical global system where taking and trading of foreign citizens has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states. — Wall Street Journal, 12/27/2023

Financial

News that baby-boomers weren’t saving enough for retirement were wrong. As of 2018, the adjusted median household income of seniors equaled that of younger households. Most notably, over the past four decades, incomes of the poorest 25% of senior households grew faster than those of middle-income senior households. Also, the inflation-adjusted median income of senior households headed by people 75 and older increased by 140%. The increase in income from investing household savings and higher earnings from working past 65 account for 80% of the growth in the average senior household’s income. — Wall Street Journal, 11/10/2023

Twelve years ago, former Wall Street banker Randall Atkins bought an old coal mine outside Sheridan, Wyoming, sight unseen, for about $2 million. Several years after Atkins bought the Brook Mine, government researchers came around asking if they could run some tests to see if the ground contained something called “rare-earth elements.” His sleepy mine contains what might be the largest so-called unconventional rare-earth deposit in the U.S., according to government researchers. At current market prices, it could be worth around $37 billion. If the project proceeds as intended, it would be the first new rare-earths mine in the U.S. since 1952. — Wall Street Journal, 11/10/2023

The first commercial airliner to cross the Atlantic on a purely high-fat, low-emissions fuel flew from London to New York in a step toward achieving what supporters called “jet zero. “The Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787 flight was powered without using fossil fuels, relying on so-called sustainable aviation fuel made up largely of tallow and other waste fats. The U.K. Transport Department, which provided 1 million pounds ($1.27 million) to plan and operate the flight, called the test a “huge step towards jet zero” to make air travel more environmentally friendly, though large hurdles remain in making the fuel widely available. — AP, 111/29/2023

L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers has become the first woman to amass a $100 billion (£78.5 billion, €90.1 billion) fortune, according to a ranking of the richest people in the world. The French beauty empire founded by her grandfather has seen its sales rebound after the pandemic, when people under lockdown used less makeup. The net worth of Ms Bettencourt Meyers, aged 70, crossed $100 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making her the 12th richest person in the world. — BBC News, 12/28/23

Google has agreed to settle a $5 billion privacy lawsuit alleging that it spied on people who used the “incognito” mode in its Chrome browser — along with similar “private” modes in other browsers — to track their internet use. The class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 said Google misled users into believing that it wouldn’t track their internet activities while using incognito mode. — AP, 12/29/23

Home and Auto insurers are coming off some of their worst years in history. Catastrophic damage from storms and wildfires is one big reason. The past decade of global natural catastrophes has been the costliest ever. Too many new homes were built in areas of risk of fire. In some places, the only options for consumers are bare bones coverage or none at all. In California, there has been a mass retreat of both home and auto insurers. In some states, 30 percent increases have deterred sales of new homes and autos. — Wall Street Journal, 1/8/2024

Israel and the Middle East

Among images of the bombed-out homes and ravaged streets of Gaza, some stood out for the utter horror: Bloodied, abandoned infants. Viewed millions of times online since the war began, these images are deepfakes created using artificial intelligence. If you look closely, you can see clues: fingers that curl oddly, or eyes that shimmer with an unnatural light — all telltale signs of digital deception. The outrage the images were created to provoke, however, is all too real. Pictures from the Israel- Hamas war have vividly and painfully illustrated AI’s potential as a propaganda tool, used to create lifelike images of carnage. Since the war began, digitally altered ones spread on social media have been used to make false claims about responsibility for casualties or to deceive people about atrocities that never happened. — AP, 11/28/2023

Benjamin Netanyahu: “Oslo was the mother of all sins. The difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is only that Hamas wants to destroy us here and now, whereas the PA wants to do it in stages. We cooperate with them against Hamas when it serves both their interest and ours, and up to a certain limit. We decided several months ago that we do not want them to collapse so that Hamas does not rise up in Judea and Samaria as well.” — Israel National News, 12/13/2023

The U.S. has said it eventually wants to see the West Bank and Gaza under a unified Palestinian government, as a precursor to Palestinian statehood — an idea soundly rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who seeks to maintain an open-ended security presence there. — AP, 12/15/2023

Nearly three in four Palestinians believe that Hamas was right in launching its October 7 cross-border attack, in which terrorists savagely murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel and wounded thousands, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). The Ramallah-based institute polled 1,231 Palestinian adults in the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria between November 22 and December 2. (The margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points, the PSR said.). The authoritative survey — the second of its kind since October 7 — found that 72% of respondents think Hamas was “correct” in carrying out its mass slaughter, while 22% characterized the terrorist group’s decision to attack as “incorrect.” — Bridges for Peace, 12/15/2023

The Kremlin continues to express an increasingly anti-Israel position in the Israel-Hamas war. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a telephone conversation in which Putin reportedly noted that there is a “disastrous humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip” and stressed that avoiding consequences for the civilian population while countering terrorist threats is just as important as rejecting and condemning terrorism. Putin’s comments are noteworthy in light of the devastation the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought to the civilian population there and Russia’s deliberate efforts to inflict suffering on Ukrainian civilians by attacking energy infrastructure going into winter. — ISW, 12/10/23