A Christmas fair in Romania, an enormous indoor ice rink in Paris, a surfing Santa Claus in Australia, a sunset camel safari in India, a cyclo-cross race in Belgium, holiday lights in Japan and France, and much more A drone flies a guard figure past a 12-meter-tall statue of Young-hee, the infamous doll from Netflix's South Korean TV series "Squid Game," standing on a barge in front of Wat Arun temple in Bangkok, Thailand, ahead of the launch of Season 2, on December 19, 2024. # Alida Freding, from Stockholm, in the role of Sankta Lucia, has her headdress of candles lit as she prepares to lead the procession during the Sankta Lucia Festival of Light service at York Minster on December 16, 2024, in York, England. The Sankta Lucia service, featuring the Chorus Pictor Choir, is a traditional Swedish service combining pagan and Christian traditions. # A dinosaur statue is seen on top of a ruined building in Aleppo, Syria, on December 16, 2024. Aleppo was the first major city to fall in last week's lightning offensive by rebel forces as they toppled Syria's Assad regime. #...

The past two weeks in South Korean politics have featured enough twists to fill a Netflix K-drama. President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, shocking even some of his own advisers. In a late-night session, the national legislature overturned it. A few days later, the besieged president begged forgiveness from his people, while a corruption scandal engulfed the first lady. Legislators voted to impeach Yoon last weekend and suspend his powers, which have been transferred to a caretaker government run by the prime minister. For now, Yoon remains in office; the country's highest court will decide whether he can stay. Korea's national crisis is far from over. Government dysfunction will likely last well into the new year, entrenching the country's economic and social problems. The crisis also threatens to undo the substantial progress that Korea has made in strengthening ties with the West, and to leave Seoul woefully unprepared to address Donald Trump's return to the U.S. presidency, with all the dangers he poses to Korean security....

Employers get away with what may appear to be a violation of basic labor laws because those contestants are classified as independent contractors, not employees. In the eyes of the law, they do not have the same protections most workers get with just about any other kind of job, such as the freedom to join unions. It also means that the National Labor Relations Board does not have jurisdiction over them. This may soon change after the government agency filed a complaint against Delirium TV and Kinetic Content, the producers of 'Love Is Blind.' The NLRB complaint states that reality TV contestants are employees and therefore have the right to join a union. Former 'Love Is Blind' contestants Renee Poche and Nicholas Thompson had filed a petition requesting this action. In addition to not being able to join a union, they couldn't even discuss the terms of their contracts due to nondisclosure agreements. Reality TV participants, including many of the stars of those shows, are essentially the unpaid interns of the entertainment industry, even though it's their stories, personalities and talent that attract and hook viewers....

The days of tech CEOs tussling with Donald Trump are fading. After distancing themselves from Trump during his first administration'and publicly rebuking him after the events of January 6, 2021'many Silicon Valley leaders are now taking a softer approach. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have each pledged, through their companies or their personal coffers, individual $1 million donations to Trump's inauguration fund. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who protested Trump's immigration policies in 2017, apparently dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, this month; Bezos, along with the the heads of TikTok and Netflix, are reportedly on the schedule there this week too. As Trump put it in a press conference today: 'In the first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.' Friendship may not be exactly what these tech CEOs are after. Self-preservation seems to be playing a role'these companies don't want to lose out on government contracts or face retribution from a man known for threatening to punish his critics. For years, Trump was no friend to tech, and vice versa: During his first term, he used Twitter to lob insults at Amazon and its then-CEO Bezos. And as recently as this past summer, Trump was hurling unfounded accusations at Zuckerberg. Ambition is likely part of the calculus too; CEOs hope that Trump will go easier on the industry than the Biden administration did, including on crypto and AI. Now, as Trump prepares to take office a second time, tech executives seem eager to please the president-elect'and to start a new chapter in their relationship that elides the past....