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Congress in disarray and shutdown looms as Trump, Musk slam spending deal

A US government shutdown could be two days away after President-elect Donald Trump called on Republican lawmakers to reject a cross-party funding bill.

Trump urged Congress to scrap the deal and pass a streamlined bill. His intervention followed heavy criticism of the bill by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Congressman Steve Scalise, the Republican House Majority Leader, indicated on Wednesday night that the bill was dead after Trump denounced it.

UK interest rates held at 4.75%

UK interest rates will remain at 4.75% after the Bank of England voted to hold borrowing costs.

While the Bank voted to keep rates unchanged, three members of the nine-member rate-setting committee wanted to reduce it to 4.5%.

The Bank now thinks the economy will have performed worse than expected between October and December, leading it to seriously consider a rate cut.

Stocks slide as US central bank signals slower pace of rate cuts

US share prices slumped after the central bank cut interest rates for the third time in a row but its economic projections signalled a slower pace of cuts next year.

In a widely expected move, the Federal Reserve set its key lending rate in a target range of 4.25% to 4.5%.

That is down a full percentage point since September, when the bank started lowering borrowing costs, citing progress stabilising prices and a desire to head off economic weakening.

My kids saw my pain on set, says Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie is notoriously private.

But in a new interview with BBC News, the Hollywood star spoke candidly about her experience of working on set with her eldest sons, saying they saw "the pain" she usually hides from them.

The actress is starring in a new biopic, titled Maria, about opera singer Maria Callas.

Two of Jolie's six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt, Maddox and Pax, took on roles as production assistants on the film.

"The character [Callas] has a lot of pain and they've of course seen me go through a lot of things, but they hadn't experienced me expressing a lot of the pain that usually a parent hides from a child," she said.

"So they were there to witness some of that, but then we would hug or they would bring me cups of tea."

'I drove as fast as I could': What happened to Malibu's horses when the fire hit

Wildfires are becoming more common in Southern California – where horse riding is a popular pastime. So what happens to horses when disaster hits?

The call came in the middle of the night. "There's a fire in Malibu, go check on your horse," Jocelyn Writer, a model living in Los Angeles, was told. "That was it," she says. "I wasn't sure where the fire was, or how big it was. And most of all I wasn't expecting to be driving through it."

But during Southern California's recent Franklin Fire, that's exactly what Writer had to do at 2am to rescue her horse Cashew, a caramel-coloured stallion who was boarding at Zad Ranch stables, a picturesque retreat for equines with ocean views. The blaze, which more than 1,300 firefighters have been battling since it started on 9 December, forced thousands to evacuate from the wealthy enclave. It burned more than 4,000 acres (16.2 sq km), but is now 100% contained as of 18 December. There were dramatic scenes over the mountains which border the Pacific Ocean as helicopters were deployed to drop water on the flames, which damaged 27 structures and destroyed 19 – although there were no human fatalities.

Netflix's The Perfect Couple and the reason TV was so poor in 2024 – but we watched anyway

This year was defined by a host of average TV shows that were glossy and watchable enough but insubstantial and forgettable – as epitomised by the Nicole Kidman thriller. Here's why.

'God's influencer' to be made first millennial saint in April

A London-born teenager nicknamed "God's influencer" for his online skills will be made a saint in April.

Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 15, will be the first millennial - a person born in the early 1980s to late 1990s - to be canonised by the Catholic church.

Pope Francis previously cleared the way for him to be made a saint by attributing a second miracle to him in May.

Fewer than half of IVF cycles are successful. These scientists are trying to change that

It is more than 45 years since the first baby conceived using IVF – Louise Joy Brown – was born, yet the procedure is still a roll of the dice for many couples. Can new research change that?

With steady hands, an embryologist picks up a culture dish containing four human egg cells. Each one has just been fertilised by a sperm – these eggs will start to develop into embryos. Hopefully, at least one of them will go on to become a healthy baby. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of couples will leave clinics around the world on the day you read this story, counting on success. It means the world to them.

For people who undergo in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the days that follow are a tense, agonising waiting game. They have already put themselves through a lot, physically and emotionally, to reach this point.

Fake step counts and point farms: How 'addicted' gamers are cheating a Chinese app designed to help the climate

An acclaimed Chinese mobile app was designed to encourage green behaviour. Some of its users are gaming the system – paying others to help them rack up points and even buying devices that rock their phones to artificially boost their step count.

Every morning, the first thing 64-year-old retiree Li Yulan does when she wakes up is to plant some trees in Ant Forest.

It's a popular carbon footprint-tracking mobile game in China. Players tend to digital trees – and by doing so, help plant real ones. "The game has enriched my life," says Li, who used a pseudonym over security concerns.

What could Google monopoly ruling mean for you?

The tech world is paying close attention to what happens to Google after a judge ruled in August that it illegally monopolised online search.

A potentially seismic ruling for the industry and landscape of web search, it may have similarly seismic consequences for Google.

The US government has asked the judge in November to consider ordering Google's break-up - such as by selling its Chrome browser - to reduce its search market dominance.

But getting to this stage has taken four years, and Google-parent Alphabet's plans to appeal will no doubt see this legal process continue for some time yet.

Thousands of PayPal customers report brief outage

Payment app PayPal experienced a brief outage worldwide on Thursday, it confirmed.

It said in a post on its service status page it was experiencing "a system issue" that affecting multiple PayPal Products - including account withdrawal and express checkout.

The company said the technical issue was swiftly resolved.

However, even a brief outage was enough to cause problems for customers, who reported being unable to log in to their accounts or said they were having problems making payments.

Platform outage monitor Downdetector had received more than seven thousand reports from users as of 12:12 GMT.

Tuvalu: The disappearing island nation recreating itself in the metaverse

Facing erasure due to climate change, the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu is digitally backing up everything from its houses to its trees as it endeavors to save whatever it can.

Tuvalu, a small country in the Pacific Ocean made up of nine coral islands, is reckoning with a future where it may no longer be habitable. Sea level rise, caused by climate change, is eating away at its shores.

Faced with such an existential threat, what do you do? Build sea walls? Try to reclaim some land from the sea? Move away altogether? These are all solutions that have been attempted by other small island nations facing similar problems, and indeed by the Tuvaluans themselves.

Conservationists turn to AI in battle to save red squirrels

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool which has been trained to tell the difference between grey and red squirrels could be "an absolute game changer", conservationists say.

The system, called Squirrel Agent, has been trained on thousands of images of the animals allowing it to tell them apart with 97% accuracy, its developer says.

It can then be used to automatically control access to squirrel feeders - with only reds being allowed into those containing food, and only greys into those where food has been replaced with contraceptive paste.

“It’s a real showcase of what AI can do,” said Emma McClenaghan, co-founder of Genysys Engine, which developed the tool.

Swirls and scoops: Antarctica's upside down ice-scape we had no idea existed

When scientists peered beneath one of Antarctica's floating ice shelves, they were surprised to find an upside-down landscape of peaks, valleys and plateaus.

"We were surprised – we had to double check it was real," says Anna Wåhlin, professor of physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. "But we realised, it really does look like this – there are these shapes. There is a landscape of ice down there we had no idea about before," she says.

In 2022, an international team of scientists led by Wåhlin lowered an unmanned submersible underneath 350m (1,150ft) thick Antarctic ice. For 27 days, it travelled over 1,000km (621miles) back and forth under the Dotson Ice Shelf in West Antarctica, scanning the ice above it with an advanced sonar. The result was the very first map of the underside of an ice shelf – and the discovery of an otherworldly ice-scape – which Wåhlin likens to seeing the dark side of the moon for the first time.

LinkedIn: We're too boring for kids for social media ban

Career-networking site LinkedIn has told Australian lawmakers it is too dull for kids to warrant its inclusion in a proposed ban on social media for under 16 year olds.

"LinkedIn simply does not have content interesting and appealing to minors," the Microsoft-owned company said in a submission to an Australian senate committee.

The Australian government has said it will introduce "world-leading" legislation to stop children accessing social media platforms.

Citizenship sales, land creation and legal battles: How small islands are confronting existential climate threat

From erecting seawalls to selling citizenship, vulnerable small islands are taking sometimes drastic measures to protect themselves from rising seas, storms and economic devastation.

For decades now, scientists have been warning that without action to combat emissions, some low-lying islands will literally disappear beneath the waves. Many others will become uninhabitable as extreme weather increasingly batters their coastlines.

As the world edges closer to a long-term average of 1.5C warming, these warnings are becoming a seriously imminent prospect for some island nations. Five islets in the Solomon Islands, a nation of hundreds of islands in the South Pacific, have already been completely lost to sea level rise. And many small island developing states are seeing substantial annual economic losses due to coastal floods. By 2050, coastal flooding is set to triple across these nations, increasing annual economic damages by nine to 11 times.

Why India's latest Sun mission finding is crucial for the world

Scientists in India have reported the “first significant result” from Aditya-L1, the country’s first solar observation mission in space.

The new learnings, they said, could help keep power grids and communication satellites out of harm's way the next time solar activities threatened infrastructure on Earth and space.

On 16 July, the most important of the seven scientific instruments Aditya-L1 is carrying – Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, or Velc – captured data that helped scientists estimate the precise time a coronal mass ejection (CME) began.

Studying CMEs – massive fireballs that blow out of the Sun’s outermost corona layer – is one of the most important scientific objectives of India’s maiden solar mission.

“Made up of charged particles, a CME could weigh up to a trillion kilograms and can attain a speed of up to 3,000km [1,864 miles] per second while travelling. It can head out in any direction, including towards the Earth,” says Prof R Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics that designed Velc.