A multi-billion-euro funding package for the European Space Agency is agreed by its member states.

Richard Barnes, Member of the Internet Society Board of Trustees, writes: I joined the board's unanimous decision to, sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for the .org top-level domain, to Ethos Capital. Since this transaction has gotten some attention, I'd like to speak a little about why, in my estimation, this deal is a good one for the Internet. It basically comes down to two things: 1. The Internet Society does great work protecting the Internet and bringing it to the people who need it most -- work that is way more impactful than leasing domain names. This transaction secures that work's future and independence. 2. Ethos is a worthy successor to the Internet Society as the steward of .org. There's no doubt that .org has a big impact on the online brand and identity of nonprofits. But the impact of the Internet Society is much broader than that. For those who might be unfamiliar with the Internet Society, our mission is as follows: 1. The Internet Society supports and promotes the development of the Internet as a global technical infrastructure, a resource to enrich people's lives, and a force for good in society. 2. Our work aligns with our goals for the Internet to be open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy. We seek collaboration with all who share these goals. [...] This transaction will put that bigger mission on a solid footing -- so that the Internet Society can provide much more substantive help to nonprofits than merely leasing domain names, and with more continuity over time. While it's true that running .org provided a relatively steady income stream, it effectively staked most of our revenue on a single business, and required a certain amount of our resources to be spent managing that business, distracting from the broader mission. Especially as PIR has grown over time, this situation has become increasingly untenable. Establishing a more diverse portfolio of investments will allow us to have more predictable revenue over time, and to take a longer-range perspective when it comes to achieving our mission.

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According to recent data, about 5.5 million people, 38% of the rural population, currently faces food insecurity.

Angry Iraqi protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in the city of Najaf in a clear anti-Tehran escalation.

Donald Trump makes unannounced trip to Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day, his first since becoming the US president.

We finally know how big a set of numbers can get before it has to contain a pattern known as a "polynomial progression." From a report: A new proof by Sarah Peluse of the University of Oxford establishes that one particularly important type of numerical sequence is, ultimately, unavoidable: It's guaranteed to show up in every single sufficiently large collection of numbers, regardless of how the numbers are chosen. "There's a sort of indestructibility to these patterns," said Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles. Peluse's proof concerns sequences of numbers called "polynomial progressions." They are easy to generate -- you could create one yourself in short order -- and they touch on the interplay between addition and multiplication among the numbers. For several decades, mathematicians have known that when a collection, or set, of numbers is small (meaning it contains relatively few numbers), the set might not contain any polynomial progressions. They also knew that as a set grows it eventually crosses a threshold, after which it has so many numbers that one of these patterns has to be there, somewhere. It's like a bowl of alphabet soup -- the more letters you have, the more likely it is that the bowl will contain words. But prior to Peluse's work, mathematicians didn't know what that critical threshold was. Her proof provides an answer -- a precise formula for determining how big a set needs to be in order to guarantee that it contains certain polynomial progressions. Previously, mathematicians had only a vague understanding that polynomial progressions are embedded among the whole numbers (1, 2, 3 and so on). Now they know exactly how to find them.

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Young cartoonist had in recent weeks posted caricatures critical of the country's military ahead of December 12 vote.

Luis Lacalle Pou set to become president, ending 15 years of left-leaning government.

David Duckenfield, who ordered gates to be opened, worsening the crush, faced 95 gross negligence manslaughter counts.

Attacks on consulates in Iraqi cities reflect growing anger towards 'Iranian intervention', protesters and analysts say.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Astronomers think our home galaxy -- the Milky Way -- is practically bursting with black holes, with estimates of up to 100 million of the invisible beasts hiding across the galactic neighborhood. It was generally assumed these black holes could reach a mass of up to 20 times that of the sun, but the discovery of a "monster" black hole, with about 70 times the mass of the sun, has surprised Chinese astronomers. In a new study, published in the journal Nature on Nov. 27, a research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences peered across the galaxy with the Large sky Area Multi-Object fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (Lamost), based at Xinglong Observatory in China. Black holes don't emit light, so astronomers have to get crafty when they go hunting for them. Usually, this involves looking for signs a black hole is feasting on a nearby star or the gas and dust that swirls around them. If the black hole isn't feasting and if it isn't surrounded by bright gas and dust, it becomes a little trickier to locate. But, using Lamost, the team examined the movement of stars across the sky, searching for those that seemed to be orbiting an invisible object. Follow-up observations with telescopes in Spain and the US helped the researchers discover a star about eight times bigger than the sun. Intriguingly, it was orbiting a "dark companion": The monster black hole, dubbed LB-1. "Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution," said Liu Jifeng, astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of China and first author of the study, in a press release. "LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation."

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Traffic in Paris was held up by tractors driven by farmers protesting poor revenues and unfair professional conditions.

French president's meeting with NATO's secretary-general was a chance for the two men to clear the air, but there are still big questions being asked about future of NATO.

Pakistan sends teenagers to compete against India after ITF moves fixture from Islamabad to Kazakhstan over security.

Axel Springer's price-comparison shopping service Idealo and 40 other European peers have accused Google of tilting the playing field in its favour and urged EU antitrust regulators to enforce a ruling against the company. From a report: The joint call by the group ratchets up pressure on European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take further action against Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, two years after she ordered it to stop favouring its own price comparison shopping service (CSS). The companies, the largest group to take a stand against Google to date, in a joint letter to Vestager seen by Reuters on Thursday said that the U.S. web giant had yet to comply with the 2017 order. Google was also fined 2.4 billion euros ($2.65 billion) at the time. The signatories to the letter are from 21 EU countries and include Idealo, Europe's second largest price comparison shopping service, Polish No. 1 Ceneo, Britainâ(TM)s Kelkoo, and Foundem and Heureka in the Czech Republic.

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