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December 30 - Ilya Samsonov turned aside 31 shots for his 14th career shutout and Tanner Pearson had a goal and an assist as the Vegas Golden Knights extended their season-best winning streak to six games with a 3-0 victory over the Calgary Flames on Sunday night in Las Vegas. It was Samsonov's first shutout with the Golden Knights and marked his sixth win in his past seven starts. Brett Howden and Victor Olofsson also scored goals and Shea Theodore added two assists for Pacific Division-leading Vegas, which improved to an NHL-best 15-3-0 at home. The Golden Knights also moved into a tie with the Winnipeg Jets for the NHL lead in points with 53. Dan Vladar stopped 34 of 36 shots for Calgary, which had a five-game point streak (3-0-2) come to an end. The Flames were playing the second game of a back-to-back that began 22 hours earlier with a 3-1 victory against the San Jose Sharks. Vegas, which scored two short-handed goals in a 23-second span in the third period of a 6-3 comeback win over San Jose on Friday, came up big again on special teams on Sunday during a scoreless first period, killing off a five-on-three power play by the Flames. Meanwhile, Vladar, who yielded five goals on 38 shots in a 5-0 loss to the Golden Knights on Oct. 28, turned aside the first 23 shots he faced, including a handful of close, grade-A chances. Howden finally ended the scoreless duel with 4:01 left in the second period when he redirected Alex Pietrangelo's shot from the high slot over Vladar's right shoulder for his 15th goal of the season, moving him into a tie with the injured Ivan Barbashev for the team lead. Olofsson made it 2-0 at the 14:41 mark of the third period with a power-play goal, one-timing a Theodore pass from the middle of the right circle into the top far corner of the net for his eighth goal of the campaign. The Flames pulled Vladar for an extra attacker with about 2 1/2 minutes remaining, and Pearson sealed the win with an empty-netter with 6.7 seconds to go. --Field Level Media Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tabMark Wahlberg’s decades-long dedication to his body is well known. He’s letting everyone in on his secret for staying ripped into his fifties. The actor recently announced plans to open an expansive Las Vegas fitness facility combining serious conditioning and high-end luxury. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Wahlberg will partner with EoS Fitness for his new Municipal Gym, signing the lease on Nov. 1 for the 32,064-square-foot space previously occupied by Bed, Bath and Beyond. The facility is planned to open in 2026. It will take a year to prepare the space because the finished product promises to be unlike any other fitness facility, featuring cryotherapy and cold plunges, compression therapy, infrared saunas, eucalyptus steam rooms and red light therapy, among other luxury offerings. In addition, there will be retail and apparel stores, juice bars and cafes and vitamins and supplements available for purchase. Don't Miss: These five entrepreneurs are worth $223 billion – they all believe in one platform that offers a 7-9% target yield with monthly dividends Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — you can become an investor for $0.80 per share today. “Together, with Mark, we’re building a first-of-its-kind, state-of-the-art facility,” said Municipal Gym Co-Chairman, President and CEO Manzo Hodge. “With the best equipment in the world, created with a singular mission: to inspire and equip people to be unstoppable.” A $400 Million Fortune Wahlberg, who, according to Celebrity Net Worth, has a $400 million fortune, moved to Vegas in 2022 and wasted no time in putting his business footprint on the city, opening a new restaurant in Town Square, Flecha Cantina and reportedly being a driving force behind the proposed Sony Entertainment film studio in Summerlin . Wahlberg also flipped a personal residence in Vegas, which, according to People, he purchased for $14.5 million to enable his children to attend school after leaving Los Angeles and sold it for $16.6 million barely a year later, moving into another Vegas home. That, however, is a small change compared to the other deals Wahlberg has done. See Also: Warren Buffett once said, "If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die." These high-yield real estate notes that pay 7.5% – 9% make earning passive income easier than ever. $40+ Million Real Estate Profit In 2009, Wahlberg purchased a parcel of land in North Beverly Park, an exclusive gated Los Angeles community, for $8.25 million. Five years later, he completed construction on his chateau-style dream home and sold it in 2023 for $55 million. Before that, he lived in a home in Beverly Hills, which he purchased for $5 million in 2001 and sold for $13 million in 2013. Wahlberg has consistently been one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood with hit movies, including the Transformers franchise, Ted and Planet of the Apes. He also has his own production and distribution company, Closest to the Hole Productions, which has produced many of his films, such as Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day, Spenser Confidential and Mile 22. He has also executive produced TV shows such as HBO’s Ballers, Boardwalk Empire and Entourage. Wahlberg has leveraged his star power in many different business ventures outside the movie industry. These include: Trending: Warren Buffett once said, "If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die." These high-yield real estate notes that pay 7.5% – 9% make earning passive income easier than ever. Fitness and Nutrition Municipal isn’t the actor’s only foray into fitness . According to a 2022 Reuters article, he is a 1.73% investor in the F45 Training chain of gyms, which had 1,700 studios and 3,300 franchises in 67 countries and went public in 2021 with a valuation of about $1.4 billion. Since then, the brand has been through a few ups and downs, closed some locations and opened others, got a new CEO, Tom Dowd and, according to athletechnews.com, plans to move into HIIT training, Pilates and ancillary services like recovery, nutrition and weight loss, including some of the sectors that Wahlberg is targeting with his Municipal Gym in Vegas such as infrared sauna and cold plunge stations. Wahlberg also invested in Aquahydrate, a brand of electrolyte water, with the currently embattled Sean “Diddy” Combs in 2019. According to Forbes, they both invested $20 million. There is no word on whether the actor is still associated with the brand. He has also been associated with the sports nutrition company Performance Inspired and still appears on the company website as a cofounder. The company sells products such as protein powders and supplements. Trending: This Jeff Bezos-backed startup will allow you to become a landlord in just 10 minutes, with minimum investments as low as $100 for properties like the Byer House from Stranger Things. Car Dealership Wahlberg owns several car dealerships under the moniker Mark Wahlberg Chevrolet in Ohio with business partner/car dealer Jay Feldman. “I’ve had a love for all makes of cars, especially American-made cars,” Wahlberg, who worked in an auto body shop as a teen, told autobodynews.com of his Chevrolet endorsements. Fast Food Mark owns the Wahlburgers fast food chain with his brothers, actor/singer Donnie and chef Paul. The chain currently has 90 branches worldwide. Clothing Wahlberg founded the clothing line Municipal in 2020 alongside his manager, Stephen Levinson and golf industry guru Harry Arnett. The name also ties in with the name of his Vegas gym. When the brand was launched, he told Rolling Stone, “We wanted to create stuff that looked cool, that fit and felt great, stuff that you could wear to work, you could wear to work out and wear out at night. We wanted to create something that was a great value proposition to the every guy and gal who’s out there working hard to be the best version of themselves, you know?” It’s a wonder Wahlberg still gets time to make movies, given all his business ventures. However, according to screenrant.com, he has a full slate of upcoming releases in 2025, including Flight Risk, Play Dirty, The Six Billion Dollar Man, Balls Up and Unchartered 2. Read Next: Commercial real estate has historically outperformed the stock market, and this platform allows individuals to invest in commercial real estate with as little as $5,000 offering a 12% target yield with a bonus 1% return boost today! During market downturns, investors are learning that unlike equities, these high-yield real estate notes that pay 7.5% – 9% are protected by resilient assets, buffering against losses. © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Building the right organizational strategy by getting all teams together and modifying the role of human employees is the biggest roadblock to adoption of artificial intelligence by businesses, Harrick Vin, global chief technology officer at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said in an exclusive interview with Mint. Speaking about the core challenges in the enterprise adoption of AI and generative AI technologies, Vin said, “Organizations must design their AI strategy to balance value, complexity and risk. To do this, they need to get multiple teams together, which makes it a big challenge for the company itself, since each team will have different requisites and philosophies. But, for a cohesive AI strategy to become AI-mature, creating a common take is crucial," he said. Also Read: “This is why the adoption of AI is not up to expectations. A relatively small percentage of use cases are actually going into production, because they’re failing on not being engineered to a company’s needs, or a company not knowing how to drive the organizational changes to take AI deployment from experiment to value-driven production." To help improve this, Vin said that while TCS, India’s largest software services company by market cap and revenue, continued to incrementally raise its research and development (R&D) expenditure, there is unlikely to be any exponential jump in this figure. In FY24, TCS spent 2,751 crore on its R&D initiatives—about 1.2% of its 2.41 trillion annual net revenue. “We’ve stayed around the 1.2% figure for a while, keeping our research expenditure consistent. It is difficult to project any change for the future—right now, the magnitude of our investments is not limited by any arbitrary figure, but based on where we need to invest in R&D. We’re constantly observing various industries, which helps us decide upon where and when to invest," Vin said. The affirmation of TCS’ R&D approach to address technical challenges comes against the backdrop of India looking to set up a target-linked incentives programme to help private sector companies increase R&D spending. The programme, senior government officials told Mint last week, is designed to help create technical patents and intellectual properties within India—instead of licensing tech from overseas economies. In a proposal for a $3-billion incentives package to boost India’s tech industry, up to $1 billion could be earmarked to boost private-sector technical R&D expenditure, Mint reported on 12 December. Focus on R&D to address AI challenges Vin, meanwhile, said that TCS is using its R&D expenditure to develop solutions that make AI more palatable to enterprises. “Our R&D approach is divided between the future of tech initiatives, and also the future of work. For the latter, there is knowledge work, and physical work. There’s also the future of societal work that defines areas such as food, agricultural development, waste management and more. In physical work, we split our research into areas including the future of robots and robotic automation, and automation of factory operations," he said. Also Read: He also identified six key fields that defined technical innovation demand from enterprises through this year. “We have sensing technologies to collect and observe lots of data globally—without data, there’s no machine intelligence. The second is the rise of quantum and neuromorphic computing that brings brain-like computing power to the edge at nearly a hundredth the power consumption—giving rise to us working towards a future where all computing will be hybrid. Data management and security is an obvious third, given all the threats. In communications, 6G technologies will set standards; in AI, knowledge management to upskill the future of our work is happening as we speak. Finally, new human-computer interfaces will become key as we work even more closely with machines," Vin added. As an example of how such initiatives are playing out, Vin highlighted the ongoing project examples of using hyperspectral imaging, that is, data from satellites, to assist in city planning projects. Further, the presence of low-power processors and local AI models help connected cars gauge parameters to detect if a driver is fatigued. All of this, Vin added, will depend on the evolution of AI models, and the human understanding of deploying the right models for the right use cases. “Traditional AI models are inherently more predictable, explainable and efficient, since they are based on causality and logical reasoning, and are deterministic. Generative AI models, on the other hand, use analogical reasoning and correlational learning. The advantage of the latter is that it is inherently more adaptive than rule-based models—on the other hand, they’re non-deterministic and not explainable. A key challenge is to know when not to use generative AI, and also the right model to use. Agents, on this note, help determine the outcome of an ensemble of models, tally that with external environments, and drive outcomes. These agents are designed for change, failing which they can become obsolete quickly. From an engineering standpoint, this is why AI is a big challenge—and thus akin to an art form today," he said. Generative AI, despite its hype, is yet to create a major revenue impact for tech exporters. On 19 December, Accenture Plc reported $1.2 billion worth of generative AI bookings or orders. It has recorded $500 million in generative AI revenue in the latest quarter. Also Read: While TCS disclosed 600 active generative AI projects in its September-quarter earnings press conference, a quarterly revenue figure wasn't shared. With the current initiatives, TCS’ AI revenue could swing upward—even in the absence of accelerated R&D expenditure from the domestic tech bellwether.Vance takes on a more visible transition role, working to boost Trump’s most contentious picks

Ministers warned of cuts as ‘every pound’ of spending to face reviewExeter City players in 2024 - how many can you remember

NEW YORK (AP) — What a wonderful year 2024 has been for investors. U.S. stocks ripped higher and carried the S&P 500 to records as the economy kept growing and the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates. The year featured many familiar winners, such as Big Tech, which got even bigger as their . But it wasn’t just Apple, Nvidia and the like. , gold and other investments also drove higher. Here’s a look at some of the numbers that defined the year. All are as of Dec. 20. Remember when President Bill Clinton got impeached or when baseball’s Mark McGwire hit his 70th home run against the Montreal Expos? That was the last time the U.S. stock market closed out a second straight year with a leap of at least 20%, something the S&P 500 is on track to do again this year. The index has climbed 24.3% so far this year, not including dividends, following last year’s spurt of 24.2%. The number of all-time highs the S&P 500 has set so far this year. The first came early, on Jan. 19, when the index capped a two-year comeback from the swoon caused by high inflation and worries that high interest rates instituted by the Federal Reserve to combat it would create a recession. But the index was methodical through the rest of the year, setting a record in every month outside of April and August, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. The latest came on Dec. 6. The number of times the Federal Reserve has cut its main interest rate this year from a two-decade high, offering some relief to the economy. Expectations for those cuts, along with hopes for more in 2025, were a big reason the U.S. stock market has been so successful this year. The 1 percentage point of cuts, though, is still short of the for 2024 at the start of the year. The Fed disappointed investors in December when it said it may cut rates just two more times in 2025, fewer than it had earlier expected. That’s how many points the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by the day after Election Day, as investors made bets on what Donald will mean for the economy and the . The more widely followed S&P 500 soared 2.5% for its best day in nearly two years. Aside from bitcoin, stocks of banks and smaller winners were also perceived to be big winners. The bump has since diminished amid worries that Trump’s policies could also send inflation higher. The level that bitcoin topped to set a record above $108,000 this past month. It’s been climbing as interest rates come down, and it got a particularly big boost following Trump’s election. He’s turned around and become a fan of crypto, and he’s named a former regulator who’s seen as friendly to digital currencies as the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, replacing was overly aggressive in his oversight. Bitcoin was below $17,000 just two years ago following the Gold’s rise for the year, as it also hit records and had as strong a run as U.S. stocks. Wars around the world have helped drive demand for investments seen as safe, such as gold. It’s also benefited from the Fed’s cut to interest rates. When bonds are paying less in interest, they pull away fewer potential buyers from gold, which pays investors nothing. It’s a favorite number of Elon Musk, and it’s also a threshold that Tesla’s stock price passed in December as it set a record. The number has a long history among marijuana devotees, and Musk famously said in 2018 that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at . Tesla soared this year, up from less than $250 at the start, in part because of expectations that Musk’s close relationship with Trump could benefit the company. That’s how much revenue Nvidia made in the nine months through Oct. 27, showing how the artificial-intelligence frenzy is creating mountains of cash. Nvidia’s chips are driving much of the move into AI, and its revenue through the last nine months catapulted from less than $39 billion the year before. Such growth has boosted Nvidia’s worth to more than $3 trillion in total. after Keith Gill, better known as “Roaring Kitty,” appeared online for the first time in three years to support the video game retailer’s stock, which he helped rocket to unimaginable heights during the “ ” in 2021. Several other meme stocks also jumped following his post in May on the social platform X, including AMC Entertainment. Gill later disclosed a sizeable stake in the online pet products retailer Chewy, but he . That’s how much the U.S. economy grew, at annualized seasonally adjusted rates, in each of the three first quarters of this year. Such growth blew past what many pessimists were expecting when inflation was topping 9% in the summer of 2022. The fear was that the medicine prescribed by the Fed to beat high inflation — high interest rates — would create a recession. Households at the lower end of the income spectrum in particular are feeling pain now, as they contend with still-high prices. But the overall economy has remained remarkably resilient. This is the vacancy rate for U.S. office buildings — an all-time high — through the first three quarters of 2024, according to data from Moody’s. The fact the rate held steady for most of the year was something of a win for office building owners, given that it had marched up steadily from 16.8% in the fourth quarter of 2019. Demand for office space weakened as the pandemic led to the popularization of remote work. That’s through the first 11 months of 2024. Sales would have to surge 20% year-over-year in December for 2024’s home sales to match the 4.09 million existing homes sold in 2023, a nearly 30-year low. The U.S. housing market has been in a sales slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. A shortage of homes for sale and elevated mortgage rates have discouraged many would-be homebuyers.James Madison wins 96-64 over Midway

NoneEU Universal Charger Rules Come Into Force

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced House Republicans’ efforts this week to ban trans people from using single-sex bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol building reserved for “ individuals of that biological sex ,” just weeks after the election of the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride of Delaware. In a video interview with Spectrum News on Wednesday, the New York progressive, known as AOC, described the policy as “disgusting.” “If a woman doesn’t look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect her genitals to use a bathroom?” asked Ocasio-Cortez. “No matter how you may feel about this issue, [you] should reject it completely.” “ Women deserve women’s only spaces ,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said in a statement to Reuters. He said members could use bathrooms in their private offices, which can be a 10-minute walk from the House floor where voting and debate take place, or unisex bathrooms in the Capitol. McBride said she would comply with Johnson’s order but called it a distraction from more substantive issues. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for all Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said. Sign-up for Your Vote: Text with the USA TODAY elections team. The issue became a flashpoint after Republican Rep. Nancy Mace filed a resolution to impose that requirement, which targets the incoming lawmaker. The South Carolina conservative posted a flurry of messages on social media saying she doesn’t “want penises in women’s spaces." She has even launched a T-shirt on the issue of bathrooms, saying proceeds will “ fuel the fight to protect women and girls across America.” In a searing review of Republican men, Ocasio-Cortez rejected the argument that transgender women using women’s restrooms poses a safety risk to women. “Women know that men don’t scheme to ‘dress like girls’ to assault them,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X . “They do it every day in broad daylight. And the ones in power protect each other to keep it quiet. Just ask the House Ethics Committee. Or the President-elect of the United States.” Transgender rights have become a political rallying cry for right-wing politicians in the U.S. Lawmakers in 37 states introduced at least 142 bills to restrict gender-affirming healthcare for transgender and gender-expansive people in 2023, Reuters reported , nearly three times as many as the previous year. USA TODAY’s Rachel Barber, Sudiksha Kochi, and Savannah Kuchar; USA TODAY Network's Xerxes Wilson and Reuters contributed to this report.Global Loading Spout Industry to Grow at 5.32% CAGR, Surpassing USD 8,324.3 Million by 2034, Driven by Automation, Trade, and Environmental Regulations | Future Market Insights, Inc.