The final miles of a nearly two-month race across Antarctica -- a lonely effort marked by long days, short nights and stunning endurance -- ended Wednesday with a sprint to the finish. From a report: Adventurer Colin O'Brady on Wednesday accomplished what he had dubbed "the Impossible First," becoming the first person to complete a solo, unsupported crossing of Antarctica. With a push of 32 hours after leaving his last camp on Christmas morning, the 33-year-old American reached the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf on Day 54 of his expedition. He had covered almost 80 miles since his last sleep. Briton Lou Rudd, who set off the same day -- Nov. 3 -- on the same quest, on Wednesday had about 70 miles left, according to his expedition's tracking map. It estimated a finish on Saturday. The full trek is about 935 miles. O'Brady's Instagram post from the finish post read in part: "While the last 32 hours were some of the most challenging hours of my life, they have quite honestly been some of the best moments I have ever experienced. I was locked in a deep flow state the entire time, equally focused on the end goal, while allowing my mind to recount the profound lessons of this journey." O'Brady had reached the South Pole on Dec. 12, a day ahead of Rudd. The New York Times story adds: To some following his progress, his decision was unnerving. Under intense stress, the line between lucidity and madness can be fuzzy, and especially so for someone who has been alone for almost two months, trekking miles each day, while doing battle with raging winds, unseasonal snowfall, whiteout visibility and polar temperatures. Could someone in that situation, exhausted and emaciated, be trusted to make sound choices? "I can feel myself in a deep fatigue state," O'Brady said when reached by satellite phone on Dec. 22. "When I was crossing Greenland" -- a journey he undertook this summer to prepare for this expedition -- "I kind of let my guard down on my last night, and I fell into a crevasse that could have easily killed me. I want to be done badly, but at the same time, it's about executing all the little things and not make any stupid mistakes at the end."

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I had no way of knowing how well the two shows I've been bingeing fit together. They are River, which is the story of a crazy grieving brilliant cop who learns to accept his insanity, and Kidding, a crazy grieving Mr Rogers type TV actor. They're both struggling with pretty much the same issue. What were the chances. And both are quite good, if you're looking for a time-consuming holiday binge.

Trump and his wall is beginning to sound like Captain Queeg and his strawberries, or Gollum and My Precious.

I wish Netflix would link to Metacritic from each show. I wish they would all do this. And I wish HBO Go let you download shows. I'd watch a lot more HBO if they did.

Israel says it has destroyed tunnels crossing into its territory after claims of discovering five of them this month.

An anonymous reader shares a column: I've been trying to figure out why the removal of the headphone port bugs me more than other ports that have been unceremoniously killed off, and I think it's because the headphone port almost always only made me happy. Using the headphone port meant listening to my favorite album, or using a free minute to catch the latest episode of a show, or passing an earbud to a friend to share some new tune. It enabled happy moments and never got in the way. Now every time I want to use my headphones, I just find myself annoyed. Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they're trying to pair with my laptop even though my laptop is turned off and in my backpack. Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work. Or whoops, it fell off somewhere, and now I've got to go buy another one. I'll just buy a bunch of dongles, and put them on all my headphones! I'll keep extras in my bag for when I need to borrow a pair of headphones. That's just like five dongles at this point, problem solved! Oh, wait: now I want to listen to music while I fall asleep, but also charge my phone so it's not dead in the morning. That's a different, more expensive splitter dongle (many of which, I've found, are poorly made garbage).

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Days after announcing Syria withdrawal, Trump makes first visit to see troops in a conflict zone since taking office.

Trump refuses to back down on request for $5bn in funding for US-Mexico wall as partial gov't shutdown enters fifth day.

In San Francisco and Bangalore, street-vendor unions and nonprofits are helping informal food workers eke out a living -- but their future is still uncertain. From a report: Bangalore and the Bay Area have a lot in common. They are the tech centers of the world's second- and third-most-populous countries, respectively, and they both sometimes feel like they're bursting at the seams. Some economists argue that when tech companies move to cities with rigid housing markets, the value of real wages goes down as the cost of living jumps. [...] In both places, many street vendors are migrants -- Bangalore's come from other parts of India, while in the Bay Area many hail from Latin America. They and their livelihoods offer a warning about the fate of immigrant service labor in the tech economy: When space is at a premium, the high-profile, high-margin industries tend to take it up, while the low-paid, already precarious jobs that keep them humming are threatened. Bangalore is full of food vendors like Sukumar N. T. According to Aditi Surie, a sociologist at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements who specializes in the gig economy, Bangalore has limited licensed areas for people to ply food, so "across income groups" in the city, "informal food vending is valuable to all." But near the International Tech Park Bangalore in Whitefield, you won't see street vendors. Plenty are stationed immediately outside the ITPB's gates, however, which has led to some tension. Earlier this year, The Times of India called the street vendors near the office park "a huge menace" because they impede ITPB employees' passage in and out of the complex. Whitefield "is really illogically planned," Vinay Sreenivasa told me from his dusty office. Sreenivasa is a member of both the Alternative Law Forum, a legal-advocacy organization, and Bengaluru Jilla Beedhi Vyaapari Sanghatanegala Okkuta, a street-vendor union. "They planned only for tech parks and hotels," he explained. "In a way, those [informal] livelihoods are created by the poor planning." That generally doesn't bother rank-and-file IT workers -- they need to eat, too -- but according to Sreenivasa, some managers and officials think that the informal businesses undermine the area's air of modern enterprise. Back in California, some of the Bay Area's massive tech campuses have become mini cities, complete with their own closed food systems. This is an understandable move for companies in remote suburban enclaves, perhaps, but less so for urban headquarters, where abundant free or subsidized food can allow tech employees to avoid engaging with local restaurants or vendors. Some tech offices do hire small catering businesses. And companies such as Zendesk choose not to offer free food, to encourage their employees to frequent local businesses. But many technology headquarters isolate themselves from the local food culture, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it.

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With its motto 'Beauty Beyond the Skin', the contest aimed to demystify the condition of people living with albinism.

Nine people were injured in Tuesday's protests in capital city Khartoum, according to Sudanese Doctors' Association

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can automatically differentiate between different types of cancer cells and their sensitivity to radiotherapy. From a report: A team of researchers in Japan have devised an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can identify different types of cancer cells using microscopy images. Their method can also be used to determine whether the cancer cells are sensitive to radiotherapy. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Cancer Research. In cancer patients, there can be tremendous variation in the types of cancer cells in a single tumor. Identifying the specific cell types present in tumors can be very useful when choosing the most effective treatment. However, making accurate assessments of cell types is time consuming and often hampered by human error and the limits of human sight. To overcome these challenges, scientists led by Professor Hideshi Ishii of Osaka University, Japan, have developed an AI system that can identify different types of cancer cells from microscopy images, achieving higher accuracy than human judgement.

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President Omar al-Bashir says protesters demanding an end to his 29-year rule are 'traitors'.

Peru says that, after December, it will not offer work permits to the 2,000 Venezuelan migrants that are crossing the border daily, but will keep the border open.

New York Public Library's Tony Ageh was recently in Seattle to talk about libraries' digital transformation. Ageh made the point that tech now permeates pretty much all of a library's operations, from ebooks and article databases, to systems for checking out materials and tracking fines. Still, don't look for your library to be on the bleeding edge of digital. From a report: "What I previously imagined was a weakness I think is a strength, which is that libraries have been very reluctant to move too quickly and have allowed the marketplace and allowed other organizations to kind of prove things work before libraries have taken the plunge," said Ageh, who before joining NYPL oversaw internet and archive efforts at the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). "I think that has actually inoculated us against waste or harmful behavior." That kind of fad-or-trend, wait-and-see behavior appears to generally suit libraries well. "Librarians are incredibly risk averse," he said. "I think they do care very much about patrons and about the impact that their work does, and so we're very unlikely to take a chance when we're dealing with public money and when we're dealing with patrons; we have a personal relationship with them."

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