After Congress approved President Donald Trump's rescission package eliminating federal funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve after 58 years, rather than continue to exist and potentially be "vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse." The shutdown leaves hundreds of local public TV and radio stations facing an uncertain future. Variety reports: The CPB was created by Congress by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to support the federal government's investment in public broadcasting. The org noted that the rescission of all of CPB's federal funding came after years of political attacks. "For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans -- regardless of geography, income, or background -- had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling," said CPB president/CEO Patricia Harrison. "When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB's final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.

[...] "CPB's support extends to every corner of the country -- urban, rural, tribal, and everywhere in between," the org noted. "In many communities, public media stations are the only free source of trusted news, educational children's programming, and local and national cultural content." The CPB said that without funding, its board determined that "maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media. A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors."

As it closes, CPB is distributing its remaining funds, and also supporting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in digitizing and preserving historic content. The CPB's own archives will be preserved at the University of Maryland, which will make it accessible to the public. "Public media remains essential to a healthy democracy," Harrison added. "Our hope is that future leaders and generations will recognize its value, defend its independence, and continue the work of ensuring that trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media remains accessible to all Americans."

Both GNOME and Firefox are considering disabling middle-click paste by default, arguing it's a confusing, accident-prone X11 relic that dumps clipboard contents without warning. Phoronix reports: A merge request for GNOME's gsettings-desktop-schemas was opened this weekend to disable the primary-paste functionality by default that allows using the middle mouse button for pasting. Jordan Petridis argued in that GNOME pull request that middle-click paste is an "X11'ism" and that the setting could remain for those wanting to opt-in to enabling the functionality [...].

The gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true command would be a way of restoring the primary paste (middle click paste) for those desiring the functionality. The decision over the default has been tasked to GNOME's design team for consideration.

Separately, Mozilla is also considering disabling middle mouse button paste by default too. [...] Another option being considered is having the option to enable/disable it at either the GTK toolkit level or Wayland compositor level.

A viral Reddit "whistleblower" post accusing a major food delivery app of systemic exploitation is "most likely AI-generated," reports the Verge. From the report: The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers "human assets," and exploits their "desperation" for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it's become increasingly clear that the post's text is probably AI-generated. Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it's easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing.

The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle. Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was generated or edited with Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows an Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering an employee name and photo, and the words "senior software engineer." It's odd that an engineer's badge would have the Uber Eats logo, and not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. That, in addition to slightly misaligned words and warped coloration at the edge of the green border, are reasons Gemini thinks it's inauthentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.) "Not only are the claims fake, but they're also dead wrong," Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats' Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, "This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don't trust everything you read on the internet."

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor's "appalling" allegations. "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post," Xu said in a post on X.

Capita, the UK outsourcer that won a $323 million contract to administer the nation's Civil Service Pension Scheme for 1.7 million members, has responded to a disastrous portal launch by asking users to hold off on complaints until its new AI chatbots go live.

The service launched on December 1 and immediately ran into problems including unrecognized passwords, broken links and placeholder text scattered across unfinished pages. In a December 17 email to members, The Register reports today, managing director Chris Clements said Capita was "working tirelessly" and promised "one of the biggest services in the United Kingdom with AI at its core" by March.

He asked users whose enquiries were not urgent to wait until the new year before contacting support again.

America's tech companies and data center developers "are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don't want to live next to them, or even near them," reports the Associated Press: Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other's battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources... [A]s more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests...

A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more. Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he'd worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people's yards. "It's becoming a huge problem," Cvengros said. Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development. Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking...

For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry...

While California's residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company," reports TechCrunch. But now Californians can make "a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information" — using the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (or DROP): Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state...

Brokers are supposed to start processing requests in August 2026, then they have 90 days to actually process requests and report back. If they don't delete your data, you'll have the option to submit additional information that may help them locate your records. Companies will also be able to keep first-party data that they've collected from users. It's only brokers who seek to buy or sell that data — which can include your social security number, browsing history, email address, phone number, and more — who will be required to delete it...

The California Privacy Protection Agency says that in addition to giving residents more control over their data, the tool could result in fewer "unwanted texts, calls, or emails" and also decrease the "risk of identity theft, fraud, AI impersonations, or that your data is leaked or hacked."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent: Candida auris, a type of invasive yeast that can cause deadly infections in people with weakened immune systems, has infected at least 7,000 people [in 2025] across 27 U.S. states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fungus, which can spread easily in healthcare settings such as hospitals and nursing homes, is gaining virulence and spreading at an "alarming" rate, the CDC says. Some strains of the fungus are particularly troublesome — and even considered a superbug — because they're resistant to all types of antibiotics used to treat fungal infections, The Hill reports.

While healthy people may be able to fight off the infection on their own, the fungus can be deadly, especially in healthcare settings, where it can quickly spread amongst a vulnerable population. "If you get infected with this pathogen that's resistant to any treatment, there's no treatment we can give you to help combat it. You're all on your own," Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, told Nexstar...

A recent study found that Candida auris is gaining virulence and spreading rapidly, not just in the U.S., but also globally. Candida auris has already been found in at least 61 countries on six continents.
Some context from Newsweek: There are strategies available to combat Candida auris infection. While the superbug can develop ways to evade the immune response, vaccination and treatment strategies are possible, but researchers would like them to be strengthened. Four classes of antifungal drugs are currently available, with varying degrees of efficacy, and three new drugs are currently in trials or at newly approved stages

"Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off," reports GeekWire: A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what's known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps... "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. "This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world...." [The article notes Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude will also offer desktop-style agentsthrough browsers and native apps, while Amazon is developing "frontier agents" for automating business processes in the cloud.]

But Microsoft's Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system. Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription...

Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user's behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company. Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent's instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation. To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access. The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to "understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer" before turning them on...

There is a business reality driving all of this. In Microsoft's most recent fiscal year, Windows and Devices generated $17.3 billion in revenue — essentially flat for the past three years. That's less than Gaming ($23.5 billion) and LinkedIn ($17.8 billion), and a fraction of the $98 billion in revenue from Azure and cloud services or the nearly $88 billion from Microsoft 365 commercial.

Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian: The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

Remember how California's government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California's local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

"A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget cuts, bureaucratic infighting and unresolved questions about who controls the money," reports Politico, "leaving journalists empty-handed and casting doubt on whether the lofty experiment will ever live up to its promise." The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue. It's changed hands twice since the University of California, Berkeley withdrew its support [with school officials "worried they wouldn't have enough of a say in how the money was distributed"]. Suggestions that other big tech players like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could front more resources haven't materialized. A $62.5 million "AI accelerator" tied to the deal hasn't been set up yet.

Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there's no definitive timeline spelling out when they will... [The article adds later that state officials "have yet to draft precise rules for how California will decide which newsrooms get cash..."] Conversations with at least 20 people involved in the deal's rollout reveal how California's budget shortfalls and intraparty spats among Democrats scrambled it... California's struggle to launch its program has dampened hopes of replicating its model in other states such as Oregon, Illinois and New York, where lawmakers have tried but failed to make Big Tech pay for news...

When [California governor] Newsom unveiled his final state budget plan in May 2025 after a $12 billion deficit suddenly scrambled the state's finances, California's first-year commitment was reduced from $30 million to $10 million. Google followed suit within days and cut its first-year contribution from $15 million to $10 million... Whether the program even continues past 2026 is also unclear. Newsom's office declined to confirm whether the state will provide its $10 million commitment to the fund in the coming 2026-27 state budget. Newsom will also be termed out in 2027, and there's no requirement for his successor to honor the state's agreement with Google.

"While a growing number of U.S. employers are mandating workers return to the office five days a week," reports the Washington Post, "some companies say AI is saving them enough time to launch or sustain a four-day workweek.

"More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance." And "several companies — especially those with a largely remote workforce — have adjusted their work rhythm after delegating many tasks to AI..." AI "has such a potential to have so much labor savings, you'll see firms shift to a four-day week in an evolutionary way," said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who has studied the subject. "There's enough social consensus that people are exhausted and stressed...." Small and medium businesses often adopt shortened workweeks to compete with big salaries for new hires and retention, Schor said. That's how Peak PEO, a London-based service that helps companies expand globally with teams in different locations, thought about its strategy... CEO Alex Voakes said that job openings that used to get two applications jumped to 350 after the change.
"Some of the world's most influential business leaders have publicly suggested the shift may be inevitable," adds Fortune: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has said advancing technology could eventually push the workweek down to just three-and-a-half days. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has gone further, openly questioning whether a two-day workweek could be the future. Elon Musk has taken the idea to its logical extreme, positing that the need to work altogether could cease... Tech innovation could "probably" lead to a transition toward four-day workweeks, [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang said on Fox Business in August...

CNBC reports that U.S. airlines have "canceled hundreds of flights to airports in Puerto Rico and Aruba, according to flight tallies from FlightAware and carriers' sites."

JetBlue, Southwest, and American Airlines were among the multiple airlines showing cancelled flights, which "included close to 300 flights to and from San Juan, Puerto Rico's Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, more than 40% of the day's schedule, according to FlightAware." Airlines canceled flights throughout the Caribbean on Saturday following U.S. strikes on Venezuela after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered commercial aircraft to avoid airspace in parts of the region.... It wasn't immediately clear how long the disruptions would last, though such broad restrictions are often temporary. Airlines said they would waive change fees and fare differences for customers affected by the airspace closures who could fly later in the month.
CNN cites a U.S. official who says more than 150 U.S. aircraft (including helicopters) launched from 20 different bases "on land and sea" during Friday's attack.

The U.S. has said the lights were out in Caracas during the attack, presumably because of a targeted strike on their power grid. "Videos filmed by Caracas residents showed parts of the city in the dark," reports the Miami Herald.

United Nations secretary-general António Guterres issued a statement via his spokesman saying he was "deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected," (according to a Reuters report cited by the Guardian). The Guardian adds that "a number of nations have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, in New York, today, as a result of the U.S.'s unilateral action."

MacRumors: Apple is not expected to release a standard iPhone 18 model this year, according to a growing number of reports that suggest the company is planning a significant change to its long-standing annual iPhone launch cycle.

Despite the immense success of the iPhone 17 in 2025, the iPhone 18 is not expected to arrive until the spring of 2027, leaving the iPhone 17 in the lineup as the latest standard model for over 18 months. This would mark the first time Apple skips an entire calendar year without releasing a new generation of its flagship non-Pro iPhone.

A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." The BBC reports: Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they're made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure. When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can't sneak in. The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.

[...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]

The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.

NASA is closing its largest research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center amid budget cuts and campus consolidation, putting tens of thousands of largely non-digitized historical and scientific documents at risk of being warehoused or discarded. The New York Times reports: Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away. "This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property," Mr. Richmond said.

The shutdown of the library at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026. "This is a consolidation not a closure," said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. The changes were part of a long-planned reorganization that began before the Trump administration took office, she said. She said that shutting down the facilities would save $10 million a year and avoid another $63.8 million in deferred maintenance.

Goddard is the nation's premiere spaceflight complex. Its website calls it "the largest organization of scientists, engineers, and technologists who build spacecraft, instruments, and new technology to study Earth, the Sun, our solar system, and the universe." [...] The library closure on Friday follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, and included three libraries this year. As of next week, only three -- at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. -- will remain open.

Warren Buffett is retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at age 95, ending a 55-year run that reshaped how generations of Americans think about investing. "The 95-year-old, often referred to as the 'Oracle of Omaha' and the 'billionaire next door,' will relinquish the title after a career that saw him turn a failing textile firm into one of the most successful asset managers in the world," reports NBC News. From the report: Greg Abel, the 63-year-old lesser-known CEO of Berkshire's energy business, will take the helm of the conglomerate on Thursday. Buffett will remain its chairman.

Under Buffett's leadership, Nebraska-based Berkshire has thrived at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, with investments in industries ranging from railroads and insurance to candy and ice cream.

Along the way, while living in the same house he bought for just over $30,000 in the late 1950s, he redefined investing for the American public with his folksy and practical advice, became one of the wealthiest people on Earth and dedicated much of that fortune to philanthropy. Berkshire's most significant tech bet was initiated in 2016 when it invested $1 billion. Apple has since become Berkshire Hathaway's largest single holding, representing over 20% of the portfolio and valued at more than $65 billion.

While Buffett largely avoided pure tech for decades, Buffett long considered technology a blind spot, famously saying "I wish I had" bought Apple earlier.

Throughout the years, Buffett expressed his disinterest in cryptocurrency and said he would "never own bitcoin," referring to it as "probably rat poison squared" and a "gambling token."

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The pouches are free for employees and guests over the age of 21, a spokeswoman for Palantir said. Palantir pays to stock the nicotine products.

Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.

Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.

OpenAI is paying employees more than any major tech startup in history, with average stock-based compensation hitting roughly $1.5 million per worker in 2025. "That is more than seven times higher than the stock-based pay Google disclosed in 2003, before it filed for an initial public offering in 2004," reports the Wall Street Journal. "The $1.5 million is about 34 times the average employee compensation of 18 other large tech companies in the year before they went public." From the report: To keep its lead in the AI race, OpenAI is doling out massive stock compensation packages to top researchers and engineers, making them some of the richest employees in Silicon Valley. The equity awards are inflating the company's heavy operating losses and diluting existing shareholders at a rapid clip. As an AI arms race intensified this summer, frontier labs such as OpenAI faced pressure to increase employee pay after Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg began offering pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- and in some rare cases $1 billion -- to top executives and researchers at rival companies.

Zuckerberg's recruiting blitz swept up 20-plus OpenAI personnel, including ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao. In August, OpenAI gave some of its research and engineering staff a one-time bonus, with some employees receiving millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. The financial data, shared with investors over the summer, shows that OpenAI's stock-based compensation was expected to increase by about $3 billion annually through 2030. The company recently told staff it would discontinue a policy that required employees to work at OpenAI for at least six months before their equity vests. That development could lead to further compensation increases.

OpenAI's compensation as a percentage of revenue was set to reach 46% in 2025, the highest of any of the 18 companies except for Rivian, which didn't generate revenue the year before its IPO. Palantir's stock-based compensation equaled 33% of its revenue the year before its IPO in 2020, Google's was 15% and Facebook's was 6%, the analysis shows. On average, each company's stock-based compensation made up about 6% of revenue among tech companies the Journal analyzed in the year before their IPOs, according to the Equilar data.

Reuters reports that the United States Department of the Treasury under the Donald Trump administration has lifted sanctions on three executives linked to the spyware firm Intellexa. Reuters reports: The move partially reverses the imposition of sanctions last year by then-President Joe Biden's administration on seven people tied to Intellexa. The Treasury Department at the time described the consortium, opens new tab, launched by former Israeli intelligence official Tal Dilian, as "a complex international web of decentralized companies that built and commercialized a comprehensive suite of highly invasive spyware products."

Treasury said in an email that the removal "was done as part of the normal administrative process in response to a petition request for reconsideration." It added that each of the individuals had "demonstrated measures to separate themselves from the Intellexa Consortium."

The notice said sanctions were lifted on Sara Hamou, whom the U.S. government accused of providing managerial services to Intellexa, Andrea Gambazzi, whose company was alleged by the U.S. government to have held the distribution rights to the Predator spyware, and Merom Harpaz, described by U.S. officials as a top executive in the consortium.

PostNord is ending letter delivery in Denmark after a 90%+ collapse in mail volume. It marks the first known case of a national postal carrier abandoning letters entirely -- a symbolic milestone of a fully digitized society that's sparking nostalgia even among people who stopped sending mail years ago. The New York Times reports: Denmark has had a postal service for more than 400 years. But a steep decline in its use has led the Nordic country's longtime postal carrier to stop letter deliveries entirely, a change taking effect on Tuesday.

Danes have seen it coming for months: The carrier, PostNord, has been removing its red mailboxes, once a ubiquitous public fixture. The disappearance of the mailboxes is "what actually made people emotional," said Julia Lahme, a trend researcher and the director of Lahme, a Danish communications agency, "even though most of them hadn't sent a letter in 18 months."

Letter writing in the country has declined by more than 90 percent since 2000, according to PostNord, which is owned jointly by the Danish and Swedish governments. Next year, in Denmark, it will only deliver packages, although in Sweden it will continue to deliver letters.

The change comes partly as a result of a drop-off in government mail. Denmark is one of the world's most digitized countries. Only 250,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the population, still receive their official communications in the mail. "People simply do not rely on physical letters the way they used to," Andreas Brethvad, the communications director of PostNord Denmark, said in an emailed statement. He said that because nine in 10 Danes shop online each month, the change "is about keeping up with times to meet the demands of society. It's a natural evolution." The report notes that snail mail lovers will still be able to send and receive letters through Dao, a private company. "While some Danes are quietly mourning a service that, for the most part, they had largely stopped using, the transition feels like a sign of the times," reports the Times.