There are no plans to launch fireworks in Moscow to celebrate the New Year. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin stated this to RIA Novosti. Moscow will celebrate the New Year without fireworks for the third time since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine - fireworks were canceled in 2023 and 2022. Sobyanin said that on the eve of 2023, a vote was held on plans for the New Year holidays.

On December 5, an Indian launch vehicle launched a pair of European Proba-3 satellites into low-Earth orbit, which will simulate solar eclipses and study the solar corona. This was reported by the European Space Agency. The solar corona is the outer layer of the Sun's atmosphere, consisting of plasma heated to a million kelvins. It is still not known exactly why the corona is 181 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

Hungarian intelligence services monitored representatives of European institutions when they came to the country. In particular, they searched hotel rooms when European officials were outside, downloaded data from computers left there and wiretapped telephone conversations. This is stated in a joint publication by the investigative journalism center Direkt36 and De Tijd.

In Orenburg, security forces detained a man who was trying to sell his 1.5-year-old son for one and a half million rubles. This was reported by the representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Irina Volk and the Investigative Committee of the Orenburg Region.

Vladimir Putin, during his visit to Minsk, said that at the end of 2025, Russia will begin to deploy Oreshnik missile systems on the territory of Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko publicly asked Putin about this at the same meeting. A video from a meeting of the Supreme State Council of the Union State of Russia and Belarus was published by TASS.

Deputy General Director of VGTRK Rifat Sabitov explained the appearance of an offensive post about Alexander Khinshtein on the Vesti Kursk telegram channel as a hacker attack. He stated this to the Baza telegram channel. “Unfortunately, scammers are doing fakes and hacking accounts everywhere. I get “opened up” every day. Therefore, it is better to contact these scammers,” Sabitov said. The night before, in the telegram channel of the Vesti TV channel.

There is an underground donation market in China for the sale of Russian eggs. The scheme is designed in such a way that healthy, attractive Slavic women without bad habits are provided with a flight to China and accommodation in comfortable hotels, and then they undergo an egg retrieval procedure - sometimes painful and risky. This is stated in the study of the publication “People of Baikal”. This scheme has existed for a long time, journalists found out.

17-year-old actor Jack Veal, who played the god of cunning Loki as a child in the Marvel series of the same name, said that he ran away from home due to physical and emotional abuse and lived on the streets. CNN reports this. In his TikTok, Vil published a video message in which he said that he is a “famous actor and he is homeless.” “You may know me from the films “Loki”, “The End of the F***ing World” and others, where I played important roles.

Sberbank President German Gref compared the actions of the Bank of Russia to the expansion of NATO. The Central Bank has crossed the “red lines”, forcing all payments in the country to be carried out using a single universal QR code, the head of the largest Russian commercial bank said at the Sber Investor Day event. The National Payment Card System, controlled by the Central Bank, will have to process payments using a single QR code.

Yu Xiaodong threw his pregnant wife, Chinese woman Wang Nan, from a 34-meter cliff in Thailand. The woman survived, but received many injuries and lost her fetus. Now, while in prison, he is demanding four million dollars for a divorce. This was reported by the South China Morning Post. According to the publication, in June 2019, a man pushed his wife off a cliff in a national park in Thailand, as a result of which she received 17 broken bones and underwent extensive surgery.

The Biorobotics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia has developed a special technology with which devices are attached to beetles and cockroaches that send electrical impulses to the insects. This allows them to be controlled and directed in the right direction. CNN reports this. Laboratory employee Lachlan Fitzgerald notes that the developed technology can be useful during search and rescue operations.

The Ministry of Health intends to change the procedure for providing sick leave. They proposed giving frequently ill Russians no more than four full-fledged sick days in six months. The draft corresponding order was published on the portal of draft regulatory legal acts. The text of the document states that Russians who have taken more than four certificates of incapacity for work in six months will be given the next sick leave for only three days, and only a medical commission can extend it.

Abkhaz authorities said that Russia has banned local suppliers from importing tangerines. This was stated to Interfax by the acting chairman of the government of the partially recognized country, Valery Bganba. Rospotrebnadzor denied the introduction of the ban. The day before, the Abkhazian parliament refused to ratify the investment agreement with Russia.

An American family bought a 1909 railroad car for three thousand dollars and turned it into a popular vacation spot, earning more than $90,000 a year in rent. NBC writes about this. Photo: CNBC Car number 306 ran on the Washington-Idaho-Montana route from 1909 to the 1950s. After that, it remained abandoned for several decades until it was noticed by the father of 27-year-old Isaac French, a resident of Idaho in the USA.

The Ministry of Health recommended that medical institutions hospitalize women who decide to have an abortion not in the same ward, but in those where women are at risk of termination of pregnancy and want to keep the child. This is stated in the draft order of the ministry, TASS reported . The proposals apply to women with a pregnancy of up to 12 weeks who have applied to a medical institution for an abortion and do not have medical indications for it.