📌 Social Media Ban, USPS Losses, More

The Australian government’s plan to ban children from social media platforms until their 16th birthday is politically popular.

The opposition party says it would have done the same after winning elections due within months if the government hadn’t moved first.

The leaders of all eight Australian states and mainland territories have unanimously backed the plan, although Tasmania, the smallest state, would have preferred the threshold at 14.

But a vocal assortment of technology and child welfare experts have responded with alarm. Over 140 such experts signed an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemning the 16-year age limit as “too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively.”

Leo Puglisi, a 17-year-old Melbourne student who founded online streaming service 6 News Australia at 11, laments that lawmakers imposing the ban lack the perspective on social media that young people have gained by growing up in the digital age.

“With respect to the government and prime minister, they didn’t grow up in the social media age, they’re not growing up in the social media age, and what a lot of people are failing to understand here is that, like it or not, social media is a part of people’s daily lives,” Leo said.

The US Postal Service (USPS) on Thursday said its annual loss widened to almost $10 billion.

However, revenue rose slightly after two postage rate hikes this year, part of Postmaster Louis DeJoy's plan to improve the postal agency's financial position.

The USPS said it lost $9.5 billion in the fiscal year ended September 30, compared with a loss of $6.5 billion a year earlier. The postal service blamed the wider loss on billions spent on noncash contributions to worker compensation.

The USPS is undergoing a 10-year overhaul engineered by DeJoy, who has argued that higher postal rates and other changes are essential to staunch the postal service's financial bleeding.

Under his original plan, the USPS aimed to turn a profit in fiscal 2024. Instead, the agency has reported mounting losses for two consecutive years, raising questions about the effectiveness of the turnaround effort.

"The bottom line is that these consistent financial losses are driven by stamp hikes which lead to disastrous mail volume losses, plus the complete failure of USPS to capture parcel market share in already crowded package delivery space," said Keep US Posted executive director Kevin Yoder.

Vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is President-elect Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Trump said Americans have been “crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies” and “HHS will play a big role in helping ensure everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products and food additives.”

Kennedy, 70, will restore federal agencies to the “traditions of gold standard scientific research and beacons of transparency” to end what Trump called a "chronic disease epidemic" in the US.

Kennedy briefly ran for the presidency as an independent before ending his candidacy and endorsing Trump. Trump chose Kennedy to lead HHS despite Kennedy's skepticism of vaccines.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney who founded Children's Health Defense, an organization that protects and advocates for children's health, has referred to federal regulators as “puppets” of large pharmaceutical companies and said they should be removed from the federal government.

A molecule in lizard saliva may make it easier to find certain tumors in the pancreas.

Insulinomas — benign tumors that can cause low blood sugar and sudden fainting spells — are hard to detect with scans. However, researchers report that using a tweaked variant of a protein in Gila monster saliva as a radioactive tracer with a new type of PET scan found the tumors in 95% of confirmed cases.

By comparison, PET scans used now to detect such tumors had just a 65% success rate. If doctors manage to find the tumors, surgically removing them cures the patients and lets them live a normal life. But finding the insulinomas is hard.

The researchers are focused on helping other labs and hospitals use their technique. “We just want to spread the technology,” a researcher says. “Everybody should be able to use it because it really helps the patients.”

A hacker has been sentenced to five years for laundering the proceeds of one of the biggest-ever cryptocurrency thefts.

Ilya Lichtenstein pleaded guilty last year to the 2016 hacking of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, which resulted in the theft of almost 120,000 bitcoin. He laundered the stolen cryptocurrency with his wife, Heather Morgan, who used the alias Razzlekhan to promote her hip-hop music.

At the time of the theft, the bitcoin was worth around $70 million but had risen to over $4.5 billion when they were arrested. Today, it would be worth over twice that.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the time that the $3.6 billion worth of assets recovered in the case was the biggest financial seizure in the DOJ's history.

“It’s important to send a message that you can’t commit these crimes with impunity, that there are consequences to them,” district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said.

Lichtenstein, who has been in prison since his arrest in February 2022, expressed remorse for his actions. He said he hopes to apply his skills to fight cybercrime after serving his sentence.

Large tiger farms are operating freely in South Africa, facilitating the illegal smuggling of tiger body parts, says a report.

Research by Four Paws, campaigning to shut down South Africa’s big cat industry, found 103 places in the country where tigers were kept in captivity in 2023 or 2024 or had been kept during the previous three years.

Several facilities were breeding tigers to sell their body parts to China or Vietnam for use in traditional medicine, the report said, identifying three networks it said were known or suspected to be involved.

Members of one network of “interlinked criminal syndicates” posted photos on social media advertising “tiger products,” which the report said were suspected to be tiger bone glue. In another photo that the report included in anonymized form, network members claimed they were cooking tigers somewhere in South Africa.

The commercial trade in live tigers and their body parts has been banned globally since 1975 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

The 2024 government report noted regulations were weaker for tigers in South Africa because they are not a native species, making it a “more attractive option” for big cat breeders.

A couple in Adelaide, Australia, were surprised when they came home from work to find a koala asleep in their bed.

Francielle Dias Rufino said their dachshund cross beagle was asleep in his dog bed, meters from the sleeping koala. “He made a new friend!” she said.

The couple think the koala ventured into the house through their dog door. "The doors and the windows were locked," Francielle said. In a video taken by the couple, the koala can be seen glancing at them before it climbs up a bedside table and returns to the bed.

Francielle said all the animal rescue groups she called were not open, so her husband used a blanket to encourage the koala out the front door. "He was so cute. I love koalas," she said. “He can come back anytime he likes.”