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Jude Bellingham inspired champions Real Madrid to a comfortable 3-0 victory at Girona on Saturday in La Liga, with Kylian Mbappe also on the scoresheet after two high-profile penalty misses. Los Blancos cut the gap on league leaders Barcelona to two points after the Catalans drew 2-2 at Real Betis, with Madrid having played one fewer match. Bellingham opened the scoring before half-time and set up Arda Guler for Madrid's second, before Mbappe produced a clinical finish for their third. Both Bellingham and defender Ferland Mendy were replaced with apparent knocks in the second half ahead of Tuesday's Champions League clash at Atalanta. Coach Carlo Ancelotti confirmed Bellingham would be fit for the game but said Mendy had suffered a muscular injury. After Madrid's fifth defeat across all competitions in midweek against Athletic Bilbao, having lost just twice last season, Ancelotti pledged his team would improve and they were significantly better against Girona. "Bellingham scored his fifth goal running (in La Liga), Mbappe scored, Brahim (Diaz) did good work, Arda scored a great goal, as I said, bit by bit we will come back (to form)," said Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti. With Vinicius Junior and Rodrygo sidelined, Ancelotti selected Bellingham and Diaz in support of Mbappe. The French forward has been the focus of criticism in recent weeks after blowing penalties against Liverpool and Athletic Bilbao, and struggling to find the form which made him a star with Paris Saint-Germain and his country. Girona, who ran Madrid close for the Spanish title for much of last season before eventually finishing third, started the stronger and Bryan Gil fired wide, with Donny van de Beek lashing over. Madrid settled into the game and, keeping the hosts at arm's length, began to create chances of their own. Paulo Gazzaniga saved Brahim Diaz's fierce drive from the edge of the box as the champions clicked into gear. Bellingham broke the deadlock after 36 minutes when Diaz's cross was blocked and the ball fell kindly to the England international, who fired home through a crowd of players. It was Bellingham's fifth goal in his last five La Liga games, with the former Borussia Dortmund midfielder finding the form which inspired Madrid to a Champions League and La Liga double last season. After a quiet first half, early in the second Mbappe broke through and fired wide, although the striker had handled the ball to control it and if he had scored it would not have stood. Improved display Madrid kept pushing and Gazzaniga saved well from Aurelien Tchouameni's header from Luka Modric's free-kick. Los Blancos got their second in the 55th minute when Bellingham threaded through a fine pass for Guler, who rolled the ball home. Bellingham hobbled off after sustaining an apparent knock in a challenge before Mbappe rattled home Madrid's third. After Thibaut Courtois saved well from Yaser Asprilla, Madrid burst forward on the counter-attack. Modric sprang the French forward, who finished with aplomb from a tight angle on the right side of the area, across Gazzaniga into the bottom corner. Madrid beat Girona 3-0 at Montilivi and 4-0 at the Santiago Bernabeu last season and this victory was another which showed their superiority over the Catalan minnows. Ancelotti will hope they can carry some momentum into the vital Champions League visit to Atalanta, for which Vinicius is expected to return from a hamstring problem. Girona, eighth in La Liga after a poor start to the season exacerbated by a host of injuries, welcome Liverpool in the Champions League on Tuesday. "If we were more accurate in front of goal it would have been different," said Girona defender Miguel Gutierrez. "We have to continue, we have two very important games, Liverpool in the Champions League and then at Mallorca (in La Liga)."
NEW YORK—He’s one of the most famous corporate leaders in the world, delivering products embraced by billions. But it’s the haters that companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta worry about. In an era when online anger and social tensions are increasingly directed at the businesses consumers count on, Meta last year spent $24.4 million on guards, alarms, and other measures to keep Zuckerberg and the company’s former chief operating officer safe. Some high-profile CEOs surround themselves with security. But the fatal shooting this week of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson while he walked alone on a New York City sidewalk has put a spotlight on the widely varied approaches companies take in protecting their leaders against threats. Thompson had no personal security and appeared unaware of the shooter lurking before he was gunned down. And today’s political, economic and technological climate is only going to make the job of evaluating threats against executives and taking action to protect them even more difficult, experts say. “We are better today at collecting signals. I’m not sure we’re any better at making sense of the signals we collect,” says Fred Burton of Ontic, a provider of threat management software for companies. After Thompson’s shooting, Burton said, “I’ve been on the phone all day with some organizations asking for consultation, saying, ‘Am I doing enough?’” Since the killing, some health insurers have taken steps to safeguard their executives and rank-and-file workers. Medica, a Minnesota-based nonprofit health care firm, said Friday it is temporarily closing its six offices for security reasons and will have its employees work from home. “Although we have received no specific threats related to our campuses, our office buildings will be temporarily closed out of an abundance of caution,” the company said in a statement. A Medica spokesman said the company had also removed biographical information about its executives from its website as a precaution. UnitedHealth Group, parent of the insurer Thompson led, removed photos of its top executives from its website hours after the shooting, later removing their names and biographies. But well before the attack, some of the biggest U.S. companies, particularly those in the tech sector, were spending heavily on personal and residential security for their top executives. Meta, whose businesses include Facebook and Instagram, reported the highest spending on personal security for top executives last year, filings culled by research firm Equilar show. Zuckerberg “is synonymous with Meta and, as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg,” the Menlo Park, California, company explained earlier this year in an annual shareholder disclosure. At Apple, the world’s largest tech company by stock valuation, CEO Tim Cook was tormented by a stalker who sent him sexually provocative emails and even showed up outside his Silicon Valley home at one point before the company’s security team successfully took legal action against her in 2022. Cook is regularly accompanied by security personnel when he appears in public. Still, the company’s $820,000 allotted last year to protect top executives is a fraction of what other tech giants spent for CEO security. Just over a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500 reported spending money to protect their CEOs and other top executives. Of those that did, the median payment for personal security doubled over the last three years to about $98,000. In many companies, investor meetings like the one UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson was walking to when he was shot are viewed as very risky because details on the location and who will be speaking are highly publicized. “It gives people an opportunity to arrive well in advance and take a look at the room, take a look at how people would probably come and go out of a location,” said Dave Komendat, president of DSKomendat Risk Management Services, which is based in the greater Seattle area. Some firms respond by beefing up security. For example, tech companies routinely require everyone attending a major event, such as Apple’s annual unveiling of the next iPhone or a shareholder meeting, to go through airport-style security checkpoints before entering. Others forgo in-person meetings with shareholders. Government health insurance provider Centene Corp. joined that group Thursday, citing the UnitedHealthcare executive’s death in announcing that its upcoming Investor Day will be held online, rather than in-person as originally planned. “But there are also company cultures that really frown on that and want their leaders to be accessible to people, accessible to shareholders, employees,” Komendat said. Depending on the company, such an approach may make sense. Many top executives are little known to the public, operating in industries and locations that make them far less prone to public exposure and to threats. “Determining the need for and appropriate level of an executive-level protection program is specific to each organization,” says David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations at the National Retail Federation. “These safeguards should also include the constant monitoring of potential threats and the ability to adapt to maintain the appropriate level of security and safety.” Some organizations have a protective intelligence group that uses digital tools such as machine learning or artificial intelligence to comb through online comments to detect threats not only on social media platforms such as X but also on the dark web, says Komendat. They look for what’s being said about the company, its employees and its leadership to uncover risks. “There are always threats directed towards senior leaders at companies. Many of them are not credible,” Komendat said. “The question always is trying to determine what is a real threat versus what is someone just venting with no intent to take any additional action.” Burton, a former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service, points out that despite the current climate, there is little in the way of organized groups that target companies. Today, one of the primary worries are loners whose rantings online are fed by others who are like-minded. It’s up to corporate security analysts to zero in on such dialogue and decide whether or not it represents a real threat. And CEOs aren’t the only targets of disgruntled customers. In the United States, there were 525 workplace fatalities due to assault in 2022, according to the National Safety Council. Industries including health care, education and service providers are more prone to violence than others, and taxi drivers are more than 20 times more likely to be murdered on the job than other workers, the group said. But the ambush of UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson this week is bound to get some CEOs second-guessing. “What invariably happen at moments like this in time is you will get additional ears listening” to security professionals seeking money to beef up executive protection, Burton says. “Because I can guarantee you there’s not a CEO in America who’s not aware of this incident.”Berlin: Tech billionaire Elon Musk caused uproar after backing Germany’s far-right party in a major newspaper ahead of key parliamentary elections in the Western European country, leading to the resignation of Welt am Sonntag’ s opinion editor in protest. Germany is to vote in an early election on February 23 after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party governing coalition collapsed last month in a dispute over how to revitalise the country’s stagnant economy. Elon Musk has involved himself deeply in US politics - now he’s turned his attention to Germany. Credit: AP Musk’s guest opinion piece for Welt am Sonntag — a sister publication of POLITICO owned by the Axel Springer Group — published in German over the weekend, was the second time this month he supported the Alternative for Germany, or AfD . “The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the last spark of hope for this country,” Musk wrote in his translated commentary. He went on to say the far-right party “can lead the country into a future where economic prosperity, cultural integrity and technological innovation are not just wishes, but reality”. The Tesla Motors chief executive also wrote that his investment in Germany gave him the right to comment on the country’s condition. The AfD is polling strongly, but its candidate for the top job, Alice Weidel, has no realistic chance of becoming chancellor because other parties refuse to work with the far-right party. An ally of US President-elect Donald Trump, the technology billionaire challenged in his opinion piece the party’s public image. “The portrayal of the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!” Musk’s commentary has led to a debate in German media over the boundaries of free speech, with the paper’s own opinion editor announcing her resignation, pointedly on Musk’s social media platform, X. “I always enjoyed leading the opinion section of WELT and WAMS. Today an article by Elon Musk appeared in Welt am Sonntag . I handed in my resignation yesterday after it went to print,” Eva Marie Kogel wrote. Eva Marie Kogel, the editor who quit in protest after her paper ran an Elon Musk opinion piece. Credit: Martin U. K. Lengemann The newspaper was also attacked by politicians and other media for offering Musk, an outsider, a platform to express his views, in favour of the AfD. Candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, of the Christian Democratic Union, said on Sunday that Musk’s comments were “intrusive and presumptuous”. He was speaking to the newspapers of the German Funke Media Group. Supporters of the far-right Alternative for Germany political party hold a placard that reads: “Germany First!” at an AfD campaign rally in Thuringia. Credit: Getty Images Co-leader of the Social Democratic Party, Saskia Esken said that “Anyone who tries to influence our election from outside, who supports an anti-democratic, misanthropic party like the AfD, whether the influence is organised by the state from Russia or by the concentrated financial and media power of Elon Musk and his billionaire friends on the Springer board, must expect our tough resistance,” according to the ARD national public TV network. “In Elon Musk’s world, democracy and workers’ rights are obstacles to more profit,” Esken told Reuters. “We say quite clearly: Our democracy is defensible and it cannot be bought.” Musk’s opinion piece in the Welt am Sonntag was accompanied by a critical article by the future editor-in-chief of the Welt group, Jan Philipp Burgard. “Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach, that only the AfD can save Germany, is fatally wrong,” Burgard wrote. A general view of The Reichstag, which houses the German lower House of Parliament or Bundestag. Snap elections are scheduled for February 23. Credit: Getty Images Responding to a request for comment from the German Press Agency, dpa, the current editor-in-chief of the Welt group, Ulf Poschardt, and Burgard — who is due to take over on January 1 — said in a joint statement that the discussion over Musk’s piece was “very insightful. Democracy and journalism thrive on freedom of expression.” “This will continue to determine the compass of the “world” in the future. We will develop “ Die Welt ” even more decisively as a forum for such debates,” they wrote to dpa. AP, Reuters Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here .
In a remarkable political development, Austria's far-right Freedom Party achieved a milestone victory in the Styria state election, securing a triumph for the first time in the region. This win reflects echoes of last September's general election, showcasing the party's rising strength as national coalition discussions proceed. Though the Styria election carries limited direct national repercussions, it adds pressure on those currently negotiating Austria's first three-way government since 1949. This marks only the second state win for the eurosceptic, Russia-friendly Freedom Party, their previous being Carinthia during former leader Joerg Haider's prominence in the late 1990s and 2000s. According to projections by pollster Foresight, the Freedom Party secured 35.3% of votes, surpassing the conservative People's Party's 26.6%. This is a historic first since World War Two, with neither the People's Party nor the Social Democrats winning in the state, famed as the birthplace of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Freedom Party now looks to form a coalition for a majority in Styria's state assembly. (With inputs from agencies.)
Political Shifts Loom as Unrest Grows in Maha Vikas Aghadi
— BIRTH NAME: James Earl Carter, Jr. — BORN: Oct. 1, 1924, at the Wise Clinic in Plains, Georgia , the first U.S. president born in a hospital. He would become the first president to live for an entire century . — EDUCATION: Plains High School, Plains, Georgia, 1939-1941; Georgia Southwestern College, Americus, Georgia, 1941-1942; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 1942-1943; U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, 1943-1946 (class of 1947); Union College, Schenectady, New York , 1952-1953. — PRESIDENCY: Sworn-in as 39th president of the United States at the age of 52 years, 3 months and 20 days on Jan. 20, 1977, after defeating President Gerald R. Ford in the 1976 general election. Left office on Jan. 20, 1981, following 1980 general election loss to Ronald Reagan. — POST-PRESIDENCY: Launched The Carter Center in 1982. Began volunteering at Habitat for Humanity in 1984. Awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Taught for 37 years at Emory University, where he was granted tenure in 2019, at age 94. — OTHER ELECTED OFFICES: Georgia state senator, 1963-1967; Georgia governor, 1971-1975. — OTHER OCCUPATIONS: Served in U.S. Navy, achieved rank of lieutenant, 1946-53; Farmer, warehouseman, Plains, Georgia, 1953-77. — FAMILY: Wife, Rosalynn Smith Carter , married July 7, 1946 until her death Nov. 19, 2023. They had three sons, John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip), Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff); a daughter, Amy Lynn; and 11 living grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. ___ Source: Jimmy Carter Library & Museum Copyright 2024 The Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. READ:
Former President Jimmy Carter dies at age 100
