In a televised speech on Sunday, Iran's Supreme Leader #Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on Syrian youth to "stand with firm determination against those who have orchestrated and brought about this insecurity."

"We predict that a strong and honorable group will also emerge in Syria because today Syrian youth have nothing to lose. Their schools, universities, homes, and streets are unsafe," Khameini said.

He added: "Therefore, they must stand firmly with determination against the planners and executors of insecurity and prevail over them."

Syrian rebels ousted President Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 after a 13-year civil war.

Iran spent billions of dollars propping up Assad during the war and deployed its Revolutionary Guards to Syria to keep its ally in power.

Assad's overthrow is widely seen as a major blow to the Iran-led "Axis of Resistance" political and military alliance that opposes Israeli and U.S. influence in the Middle East.

Clashes between #Islamists now in power in Syria and Assad's supporters leave casualties.

This year, scientists were able to pull back the curtain on mysteries surrounding figures across history, both known and unknown, to reveal more about their unique stories.

In some cases, analysis of ancient #DNA helped fill knowledge gaps and change preconceived notions. A prime example is how aDNA research is reframing the way people understand the archaeological site of Pompeii, which remains trapped beneath a layer of ash thousands of years after Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in AD 79 doomed the Roman town.

Genetic traces collected from the bones of victims showed that what was once considered to be a mother holding her son in their final moments was an unrelated adult male who likely offered comfort to a child before they perished, and they challenged other long-held assumptions.

Unmasking the unknown

A detailed analysis of tooth enamel, tartar and bone collagen helped researchers uncover details about “Vittrup Man,” a Stone Age migrant who died violently in a swamp in northwest Denmark about 5,200 years ago.

His remains, recovered from a peat bog in Vittrup, Denmark, in 1915, were found alongside a wooden club that was likely used to beat him over the head. But little else was known about him.

Using cutting-edge analytical methods, Anders Fischer, project researcher in the department of historical studies at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and his colleagues set out to “find the individual behind the bone” and tell the story of the oldest known immigrant in Denmark’s history.

Vittrup Man grew up along the Scandinavian coast and belonged to a hunter-gatherer community, enjoying a diet of fish, seals and whales. But his life changed drastically in his late teens when he made the move to Denmark and shifted to a farmer’s diet, eating sheep and goat. He died between the ages of 30 and 40.

Vittrup Man may have been killed as a sacrifice, or perhaps he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Fischer found the use of multiple techniques to uncover aspects of his identity gratifying.

“In the Vittrup case we meet a genuine first-generation immigrant and can follow his remarkable geographic and dietary transition from northern to southern Scandinavia and from a fisher-hunter-gatherer to a farmer way of life,” he said.

Ex-OpenAI #engineer who raised legal concerns about the #technology he helped build has died, Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind #ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.

Balaji worked at #OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI's strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said a statement from OpenAI.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The city's chief medical examiner's office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved to hike and recently returned from a trip with friends.

Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.

“Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him,” said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to notice subtle bugs or logical errors.

“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He’d think through the details of things carefully and rigorously.”

Balaji later shifted to organizing the huge datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI's flagship large language model and a basis for the company's famous chatbot. It was that work that eventually caused Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.

He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported them in an October profile of Balaji.

He later told The Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and considered a lawsuit brought by The New York Times last year to be the “most serious.” Times lawyers named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who might have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI's willful copyright infringement.

His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including the comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.

“It doesn’t feel right to be training on people’s data and then competing with them in the marketplace,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you should be able to do that. I don’t think you are able to do that legally.”

He told the AP that he gradually grew more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after the internal turmoil that led its board of directors to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was broadly concerned about how its commercial products were rolling out, including their propensity for spouting false information known as hallucinations.

But of the “bag of issues” he was concerned about, he said he was focusing on copyright as the one it was “actually possible to do something about.”

He acknowledged that it was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is accustomed to pulling data from the internet, but said “they will have to change and it’s a matter of time.”

#MOSCOW, December 24. Russian President Vladimir #Putin has left for St. #Petersburg, where he will hold meetings with #CIS heads of state and government in the coming days.

The multilateral program is expected to take place mainly on Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday, Putin is scheduled to meet with President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon.

The leaders are expected to discuss key areas of cooperation in the political, trade and economic, military-technical, cultural, and humanitarian spheres. Special attention will be paid to current regional issues, including the situation in Afghanistan.

As announced by the Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov, "acute problems in the field of migration will be discussed". The heads of state will also consider joint work in the CIS, where Russia will chair in 2024 and in 2025 this post will be transferred to Tajikistan.

Putin and Rakhmon last met at the summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Astana in November. They meet regularly, both one-on-one and in multilateral settings. In addition, the leaders have regular telephone conversations.

Russia is the leading trade partner of Tajikistan. In January-September of 2024, the volume of mutual trade increased by 10.1% over the same period last year to $1.08 bln. Russia is the second largest investor in Tajikistan's economy after China. Its volume is $1.6 bln. Russia supplies about 90% of the needs of the local economy for oil products. More than 36,000 students and postgraduates from Tajikistan study in Russian #universities.

UNITED NATIONS, December 21. #Russia’s response to the latest Ukrainian crime will not keep itself waiting, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said, commenting on Friday’s missile attack on the town of Rylsk in the bordering Russian region of #Kursk.

"Our response to this deliberate criminal attack on Russian civilians will come shortly," the diplomat warned as he denounced the attack as yet another unambiguous step by the Kiev regime toward escalation.

Six people, including a child, were killed in the attack and 10 others were hospitalized.

The Russian Investigative Committee is investigating the attack as an act of terrorism.

#Scientists think they know why Stonehenge was rebuilt thousands of years ago, Scientists made a major discovery this year linked to Stonehenge — one of humanity’s biggest mysteries — and the revelations keep coming.

A team of researchers shared evidence in August suggesting that the Altar Stone, an iconic monolith at the heart of Stonehenge, was transported hundreds of miles to the site in southern #England nearly 5,000 years ago from what’s now northeastern Scotland. Just a month later, a report led by the same experts ruled out the possibility that the stone came from Orkney, an archipelago off Scotland’s northeastern coast that’s home to Neolithic sites from that time frame, and the search for the monolith’s point of origin continues.

A #mysterious monument

Construction on Stonehenge began as early as 3000 BC and occurred over several phases in an area first inhabited as early as 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, according to the researchers.

Previous analysis has shown that bluestones, a type of fine-grained sandstone, and larger silicified sandstone blocks called sarsens were used in the monument’s construction. The bluestones were brought from 140 miles (225 kilometres) away at the Preseli Hills area in west Wales and are thought to have been the first stones placed at the site. The sarsens, used later, came from the West Woods near Marlborough, located about 15 miles (25 kilometres) away.

Researchers believe the Altar Stone was placed within the central horseshoe during a rebuilding phase. While the exact date is unknown, the study authors believe the stone arrived between 2500 and 2020 BC.

It’s during that rebuilding phase, according to the research, that Stonehenge’s builders erected the large sarsen stones to form an outer circle and an inner horseshoe made of trilithons, or paired upright stones connected by horizontal stone beams, which remain part of the monument to this day.

The Altar Stone is the largest of the bluestones used to build Stonehenge. Today, the Altar Stone lies recumbent at the foot of the largest trilithon and is barely visible peeking through the grass.

Many questions remain about the exact purpose for Stonehenge and the Altar Stone. But the monument aligns with the sun during the winter and summer solstices.

“There’s good evidence to suggest that these large stone monoliths have ancestral significance, representing and even embodying the ancestors of the people who placed them,” Parker Pearson said. “(The Altar Stone’s) location within Stonehenge is important as if you stand at the center of the stone circle, the midwinter solstice sun sets over its middle.”

During the winter, Neolithic people would gather near Stonehenge at the village of Durrington Walls, bringing pigs and cattle with them for a feast, Parker Pearson said. Stonehenge was also the largest burial ground of its time, lending support to the idea that the site may have been used as a religious temple, a solar calendar and an ancient observatory all in one.

And nearly half the Neolithic people buried near Stonehenge came from somewhere other than Salisbury Plain.

The new research adds a political twist to the backstory of a rebuilt Stonehenge.

“The fact that all of its stones originated from distant regions, making it unique among over 900 stone circles in Britain, suggests that the stone circle may have had a political as well as a religious purpose — as a monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos,” Parker Pearson said.
Bridging distant communities

This show of unity — transporting giant stones long distances — would not have been easy for Neolithic people. The study authors don’t think boats at the time would have been strong enough to carry anything like the Altar Stone across coastal waters.

“Though the wheel had been invented elsewhere, it hadn’t quite reached Britain yet, so the massive stone blocks would likely have had to be dragged by wooden sledge sliding atop wooden rails that could be continuously lifted and re-laid,” Parker Pearson said.

The wooden sledge could have had shock absorbers made from vegetation to cushion the stone, which would have been susceptible to cracking on the long journey, the study authors said.

Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people would have been needed to help move the stone over land, and the journey may have taken about eight months, the researchers noted in the paper.

“Travel by land would have provided much better opportunities for spectacle, pageantry, feasting and celebration that would have drawn people in (the) thousands to witness and take part in this extraordinary venture,” according to the study.

Moving the massive stone from Scotland to southern England suggests there was a network between two distant groups fostered by collaboration and cooperation — something the researchers think existed due to striking cultural similarities in both locations.

“They would have taken significant coordination across Britain — people were literally pulling together — in a time before telephones and email to organize such an effort,” Parker Pearson said.

The Altar Stone is similar in both size and placement to other large horizontal blocks in stone circles found in northeast Scotland, the study authors said. These recumbent stone circles have only been found in that part of Scotland, rather than the rest of England, which suggests that the Altar Stone may have been a gift from the community in northern Scotland to signify a type of alliance.

Russian #bombardment targets #Kyiv after #Ukraine fires U.S.-made #missiles across the border.

#KYIV, #Ukraine -A Russian #ballistic #missile attack on Ukraine's capital #Kyiv early Friday killed at least one person and injured 12 others, officials said. Moscow claimed it was in response to a Ukrainian strike on Russian soil using American-made weapons.

At least three loud blasts were heard in Kyiv shortly before sunrise. Ukraine's air force said it intercepted five #Iskander short-range #ballistic #missiles fired at the city. The attack knocked out heating to 630 residential buildings, 16 medical facilities, and 30 schools and kindergartens, the city administration said, and falling missile debris caused damage and sparked fires in three districts.

"We ask citizens to immediately respond to reports of ballistic attack threats, because there is very little time to find shelter," the air force said.

During the almost three years since the war began Russia has regularly bombarded civilian areas of Ukraine, often in an attempt to cripple the power grid and unnerve Ukrainians. Meanwhile Ukraine, struggling to hold back Russia's bigger army on the front line, has attempted to strike Russian infrastructure supporting the country's war effort.

The falling debris in Kyiv smashed into the city centre, causing damage to around two dozen high-rise office buildings as well as the Catholic Church of St. Nicholas, which is a city landmark, and the Kyiv National Linguistic University.

What may have been the blast wave from an intercepted low-flying missile also blew out windows or caused other damage at six embassies, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.

The Russian Ministry of Defence said the strike was in response to a Ukrainian missile attack on Russia's Rostov border region two days earlier. That attack used six American-made Army Tactical Missile System, known as #ATACMS, missiles and four Storm Shadow air-launched missiles provided by the United Kingdom, it said.

That day, Ukraine claimed to have targeted a Rostov oil refinery as part of its campaign to strike Russian infrastructure supporting the country's war effort.

The use of Western-supplied weapons to strike Russia has angered the Kremlin. Ukraine fired several American-supplied longer-range #missiles into Russia for the first time on Nov. 19 after Washington eased restrictions on their use.

That development prompted #Russia to use a new hypersonic missile, called Oreshnik, for the first time. President Vladimir Putin suggested the missile could be used to target government buildings in Kyiv, though there have been no reports of an Oreshnik being used for a second time.

Answering the Ukrainian attack on Rostov on Wednesday, the Defence Ministry said it carried out a group strike with "high-precision, long-range weapons" on the command centre of Ukraine's military intelligence agency and another location where it said Ukraine's Neptune missile systems are designed and produced.

The attack also targeted Ukrainian ground-based cruise missile systems and U.S.-made Patriot air defence systems, the Defence Ministry said.

"The objectives of the strike have been achieved. All objects are hit," the defence ministry said in a Telegram post.

SAO PAULO, Brazil -Sloths weren’t always slow-moving, furry tree-dwellers. Their prehistoric ancestors were huge — up to four tons (3.6 metric tons) — and when startled, they brandished immense claws.

For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier — perhaps far earlier — than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.

“There was this idea that humans arrived and killed everything off very quickly — what’s called ‘Pleistocene overkill,’” said Daniel Odess, an archaeologist at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. But new discoveries suggest that “humans were existing alongside these animals for at least 10,000 years, without making them go extinct."

Some of the most tantalizing clues come from an archaeological site in central Brazil, called Santa Elina, where bones of giant ground sloths show signs of being manipulated by humans. Sloths like these once lived from Alaska to Argentina, and some species had bony structures on their backs, called osteoderms — a bit like the plates of modern armadillos — that may have been used to make decorations.

In a lab at the University of Sao Paulo, researcher Mírian Pacheco holds in her palm a round, penny-sized sloth fossil. She notes that its surface is surprisingly smooth, the edges appear to have been deliberately polished, and there’s a tiny hole near one edge.

“We believe it was intentionally altered and used by ancient people as jewelry or adornment,” she said. Three similar “pendant” fossils are visibly different from unworked osteoderms on a table — those are rough-surfaced and without any holes.

The military's tradition of #tracking Santa Claus on his gravity-defying sweep across the globe will carry on this Christmas Eve, even if the U.S. government shuts down, officials said Friday.

Each year, at least 100,000 kids call into the North American Aerospace Defense Command to inquire about Santa’s location. Millions more follow online.

“We fully expect for Santa to take flight on Dec. 24 and Norad will track him," the U.S.-Canadian agency said in a statement.

On any other night, Norad is scanning the heavens for potential threats, such as last year's Chinese spy balloon. But on Christmas Eve, volunteers in Colorado Springs, Colo., are fielding questions like, “When is Santa coming to my house?” and, “Am I on the naughty or nice list?”

The endeavour is supported by local and corporate sponsors, who also help shield the tradition from #Washington dysfunction.

Bob Sommers, 63, a civilian contractor and Norad volunteer, told The Associated Press that there are "screams and giggles and laughter” when families call in, usually on speakerphone.

Sommers often says on the call that everyone must be asleep before Santa arrives, prompting parents to say, "Do you hear what he said? We got to go to bed early."

Norad's annual tracking of Santa has endured since the Cold War, predating ugly sweater parties and Mariah Carey classics. Here's how it began and why the phones keep ringing.

The origin story is Hollywood-esque

It started with a child's accidental phone call in 1955. The Colorado Springs newspaper printed a Sears advertisement that encouraged children to call Santa, listing a phone number.

A boy called. But he reached the Continental Air Defense Command, now Norad, a joint U.S. and Canadian effort to spot potential enemy attacks. Tensions were growing with the Soviet Union, along with anxieties about nuclear war.