Outrage flooded social media after a video showed an activist being arrested mid-interview at a pro-Venezuela protest, fuelling questions about the state of free speech in the United States.

In the now-viral clip taken from Grand Rapids, Michigan, 22-year-old teacher and activist Jessica Plichta can be heard criticising US foreign policy towards Venezuela, arguing that American involvement abroad is inseparable from domestic accountability.

"This isn’t just a foreign issue," she said moments before her arrest. "It’s our tax dollars being used to commit war crimes, and it’s the responsibility of the people to resist a Trump administration committing crimes both at home and against people in Venezuela."

Seconds later, local police move in. As she is escorted to a patrol vehicle, Plichta repeatedly states, "I am not resisting arrest."

Local outlet WZZM, the city’s ABC affiliate, later reported that police said Plichta was arrested for obstructing a roadway and failing to obey a lawful command. In footage from the scene, an officer tells a bystander that demonstrators had been instructed to relocate their protest to the sidewalk, and alleged that the group instead blocked intersections until the march concluded.

Judge Benny Sagi, president of Israel’s Beersheba District Court, who presided over the corruption case against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was killed in a traffic accident on Route 6 when a vehicle struck his motorcycle.

Police said the vehicle had been driving off-road, entered the highway, and collided with Sagi’s motorcycle, according to Israeli media.

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 device-optimized quant variants without output quality falling off a cliff.

A 30B runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB) achieving 8.03 TPS at 2.70 BPW, while retaining 94.18% of BF16 quality. ShapeLearn tends to find better TPS/quality tradeoffs versus alternatives.

What’s new/interesting in this one

1. CPU behavior is mostly sane

On CPUs, once you’re past “it fits,” smaller tends to be faster in a fairly monotonic way. The tradeoff curve behaves like you’d expect.

2. GPU behavior is quirky

On GPUs, performance depends as much on kernel choice as on memory footprint. So you often get sweet spots (especially around ~4b) where the kernels are “golden path,” and pushing lower-bit can get weird.

models: https://huggingface.co/byteshape/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-GGUF

The US Americans have lost their marbles.

A major donor to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) could reap billions of dollars from a reshuffle in Venezuela’s oil assets following the US's abduction of President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday.

Maduro’s removal and a pliant government in Caracas could allow Singer to finalise a deal that would see his investment firm, Elliot Investment Management, gain control of a network of US-based oil refineries at a steeply discounted price.

Singer’s firm bid $6bn for refineries in Texas, Louisiana, and Illinois, which some analysts say could be worth $12bn. If Trump follows through on his pledge to revive Venezuela's oil industry, the country's heavy crude could start flowing back to the US in large numbers.

Elliot Investment Management is no stranger to the world of emerging market debt. It made billions of dollars in the aftermath of Argentina’s debt crisis. But it also has an inside track to the Trump White House.

According to the NYT article[0] "about five million borrowers are in default" which means like 1.5% of the population is about to have 15% of their wages garnished. Seems pretty intense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/student-loan-debtors-default-wages-garnish.html