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Received today β€” 16 December 2025

Bristol city council to give van dwellers temporary sites in affluent areas

16 December 2025 at 09:40

Green-led authority to provide 250 pitches in richer neighbourhoods rather than poorer parts of the city

Bristol city council has vowed to open temporary sites for people who live in vehicles in some of the most affluent neighbourhoods rather than trying to shift them to more deprived areas.

The Green-led authority is aiming to provide 250 pitches on β€œmeanwhile sites” – often plots of land about to be developed – for vehicle dwellers by the spring.

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Β© Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Β© Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Β© Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Morning news brief

16 December 2025 at 04:30

Rob Reiner's son arrested after his parents' deaths, authorities release images of suspected gunman in Brown University shooting, police say Bondi Beach shooting was inspired by Islamic State group.

Jobs reports to finally lift the fog on a fragile U.S. labor market

16 December 2025 at 05:00
The federal government will release October’s payrolls and November’s full jobs report, both of which were delayed by the historic government shutdown.

Β© Joe Raedle

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release a long-awaited trove of federal jobs data on Tuesday.

Β© Joe Raedle

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release a long-awaited trove of federal jobs data on Tuesday.

The 100 best male footballers in the world 2025 – Nos 100-71

Arda GΓΌler, Nick Woltemade and Rafael LeΓ£o are among the first 30 players as we start our countdown to the list, updating through the week

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Β© Illustration: Guardian Design

Β© Illustration: Guardian Design

Β© Illustration: Guardian Design

When Love Becomes a Shadow: The Inner Journey After Parental Alienation

15 December 2025 at 18:04

There's a strange thing that happens when a person you once knew as your child seems, over years, to forget the sound of your voice, the feel of your laugh, or the way your presence once grounded them. It isnt just loss - it's an internal inversion: your love becomes a shadow. Something haunting, familiar, yet painful to face.

I know this because I lived it - decade after decade - as the father of two sons, now ages 28 and 26. What has stayed with me isn't just the external stripping away of connection, but the internal fracture it caused in myself.

Some days I felt like the person I was before alienation didn't exist anymore. Not because I lost my identity, but because I was forced to confront parts of myself I never knew were thereΒ - deep fears, hidden hopes, unexamined beliefs about love, worth, and attachment.

This isn't a story of blame. It's a story of honesty with the inner terrain - the emotional geography that alienation carved into my heart.

The Silent Pull: Love and Loss Intertwined

Love doesn't disappear when a child's affection is withdrawn. Instead, it changes shape. It becomes more subtle, less spoken, but no less alive.

When your kids are little, love shows up in bedtime stories, laughter, scraped knees, and easy smiles. When they're adults and distant, love shows up in the quiet hurtΒ - the way you notice an empty chair, or a text that never came, or the echo of a memory that still makes your heart ache.

This kind of love doesn't vanish. It becomes a quiet force pulling you inward - toward reflection instead of reaction, toward steadiness instead of collapse.

Unmasking Attachment: What the Mind Holds Onto

There's a psychological reality at play here that goes beyond custody schedules, angry words, or fractured holidays. When a person - especially a young person - bonds with one attachment figure and rejects another, something profound is happening in the architecture of their emotional brain.

In some dynamics of parental influence, children form a hyper‑focused attachment to one caregiver and turn away from the other. That pattern isn't about rational choice but emotional survival. Attachment drives us to protect what feels safe and to fear what feels unsafe - even when the fear isn't grounded in reality. High Conflict Institute

When my sons leaned with all their emotional weight toward their mother - even to the point of believing impossible things about me - it was never just "obedience." It was attachment in overdrive: a neural pull toward what felt like safety, acceptance, or approval. And when that sense of safety was threatened by even a hint of disapproval, the defensive system in their psyche kicked into high gear.

This isn't a moral judgment. It's the brain trying to survive.

The Paradox of Love: Holding Two Realities at Once

Here's the part no one talks about in polite conversation:

You can love someone deeply and grieve their absence just as deeply -Β at the same time.

It's one of the paradoxes that stays with you long after the world expects you to "move on."

You can hope that the door will open someday

and you can also acknowledge it may never open in this lifetime.

You can forgive the emotional wounds that were inflicted

and also mourn the lost years that you'll never get back.

You can love someone unconditionally

and still refuse to let that love turn into self‑erosion.

This tension - this bittersweet coexistence - becomes a part of your inner life.

This is where the real work lives.

When Attachment Becomes Overcorrection

When children grow up in an environment where one caregiver's approval feels like survival, the attachment system can begin to over‑regulate itself. Instead of trust being distributed across relationships, it narrows. The safe figure becomes everything. The other becomes threatening by association, even when there's no rational basis for fear. Men and Families

For my sons, that meant years of believing narratives that didn't fit reality - like refusing to consider documented proof of child support, or assigning malicious intent to benign situations. When confronted with facts, they didn't question the narrative - they rationalized it to preserve the internal emotional logic they had built around attachment and fear.

That's not weakness. That's how emotional survival systems work.

The Inner Terrain: Learning to Live With Ambivalence

One of the hardest lessons is learning to hold ambivalence without distortion. In healthy relational development, people can feel both love and disappointment, both closeness and distance, both gratitude and grief - all without collapsing into one extreme or the other.

But in severe attachment distortion, the emotional brain tries to eliminate complexity - because complexity feels dangerous. It feels unstable. It feels like uncertainty. And the emotional brain prefers certainty, even if that certainty is painful. Karen Woodall

Learning to tolerate ambiguity - that strange space where love and loss coexist - becomes a form of inner strength.

What I've Learned - Without Naming Names

I write this not to indict, accuse, or vilify anyone. The human psyche is far more complicated than simple cause‑and‑effect. What I've learned - through years of quiet reflection - is that:

  • Attachment wounds run deep, and they can overshadow logic and memory.

  • People don't reject love lightly. They reject fear and threat.

  • Healing isn't an event. It's a series of small acts of awareness and presence.

  • Your internal world is the only place you can truly govern. External reality is negotiable - inner life is not.

Hope Without Guarantee

I have a quiet hope - not a loud demand - that one day my sons will look back and see the patterns that were invisible to them before. Not to blame. Not to re‑assign guilt. But to understand.

Hope isn't a promise. It's a stance of openness - a willingness to stay emotionally available without collapsing into desperation.

Living With the Shadow - and the Light

Healing isn't about winning back what was lost. It's about cultivating a life that holds the loss with compassion and still knows how to turn toward joy when it appears - quietly, softly, unexpectedly.

Your heart doesn't have to choose between love and grief. It can carry both.

And in that carrying, something deeper begins to grow.

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Sources & Resources

Parental Alienation & Emotional Impact

Attachment & Alienation Theory

General Parental Alienation Background

The post When Love Becomes a Shadow: The Inner Journey After Parental Alienation appeared first on Security Boulevard.

The Burnout Nobody Talks About: When β€œAlways-On” Leadership Becomes a Liability

15 December 2025 at 17:28

In cybersecurity, being β€œalways on” is often treated like a badge of honor.

We celebrate the leaders who respond at all hours, who jump into every incident, who never seem to unplug. Availability gets confused with commitment. Urgency gets mistaken for effectiveness. And somewhere along the way, exhaustion becomes normalizedβ€”if not quietly admired.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Always-on leadership doesn’t scale. And over time, it becomes a liability.

I’ve seen it firsthand, and if you’ve spent any real time in high-pressure security environments, you probably have too.

The Myth of Constant Availability

Cybersecurity is unforgiving. Threats don’t wait for business hours. Incidents don’t respect calendars. That reality creates a subtle but dangerous expectation: real leaders are always reachable.

The problem isn’t short-term intensity. The problem is when intensity becomes an identity.

When leaders feel compelled to be everywhere, all the time, a few things start to happen:

  • Decision quality quietly degrades

  • Teams become dependent instead of empowered

  • Strategic thinking gets crowded out by reactive work

From the outside, it can look like dedication. From the inside, it often feels like survival mode.

And survival mode is a terrible place to lead from.

What Burnout Actually Costs

Burnout isn’t just about being tired. It’s about losing marginβ€”mental, emotional, and strategic margin.

Leaders without margin:

  • Default to familiar solutions instead of better ones

  • React instead of anticipate

  • Solve today’s problem at the expense of tomorrow’s resilience

In cybersecurity, that’s especially dangerous. This field demands clarity under pressure, judgment amid noise, and the ability to zoom out when everything is screaming β€œzoom in.”

When leaders are depleted, those skills are the first to go.

Strong Leaders Don’t Do Everythingβ€”They Design Systems

One of the biggest mindset shifts I’ve seen in effective leaders is this:

They stop trying to be the system and start building one.

That means:

  • Creating clear decision boundaries so teams don’t need constant escalation

  • Trusting people with ownership, not just tasks

  • Designing escalation paths that protect focus instead of destroying it

This isn’t about disengaging. It’s about leading intentionally.

Ironically, the leaders who are least available at all times are often the ones whose teams perform bestβ€”because the system works even when they step away.

Presence Beats Availability

There’s a difference between being reachable and being present.

Presence is about:

  • Showing up fully when it matters

  • Making thoughtful decisions instead of fast ones

  • Modeling sustainable behavior for teams that are already under pressure

When leaders never disconnect, they send a messageβ€”even if unintentionallyβ€”that rest is optional and boundaries are weakness. Over time, that culture burns people out long before the threat landscape does.

Good leaders protect their teams.

Great leaders also protect their own capacity to lead.

A Different Measure of Leadership

In a field obsessed with uptime, response times, and coverage, it’s worth asking a harder question:

If I stepped away for a week, would things fall apartβ€”or function as designed?

If the answer is β€œfall apart,” that’s not a personal failure. It’s a leadership signal. One that points to opportunity, not inadequacy.

The strongest leaders I know aren’t always on.

They’re intentional. They’re disciplined. And they understand that long-term effectiveness requires more than enduranceβ€”it requires self-mastery.

In cybersecurity especially, that might be the most underrated leadership skill of all.

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References & Resources

The post The Burnout Nobody Talks About: When β€œAlways-On” Leadership Becomes a Liability appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Received yesterday β€” 15 December 2025

Man admits leaving animal carcasses outside churches in English forest

15 December 2025 at 09:20

Benjamin Lewis pleads guilty to harassing Christians by dumping dead deer and lambs in New Forest

A 47-year-old man has admitted harassing Christians by dumping animal carcasses outside churches in and around an English forest.

Benjamin Lewis admitted seven offences relating to incidents in which dead deer and lambs were left at churches in the New Forest in Hampshire earlier this year.

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Β© Photograph: Katharina Brandt/Alamy

Β© Photograph: Katharina Brandt/Alamy

Β© Photograph: Katharina Brandt/Alamy

Received before yesterday

Rethinking Security as Access Control Moves to the Edge

11 December 2025 at 13:35
attacks, cyberattacks, cybersecurity, lobin, CISOs, encryption, organizations, recovery, Fenix24, Edgeless digital immunity, digital security, confidential Oracle recovery gateway, security

The convergence of physical and digital security is driving a shift toward software-driven, open-architecture edge computing. Access control has typically been treated as a physical domain problem β€” managing who can open which doors, using specialized systems largely isolated from broader enterprise IT. However, the boundary between physical and digital security is increasingly blurring. With..

The post Rethinking Security as Access Control Moves to the Edge appeared first on Security Boulevard.

β€˜I love when my enemies hate me’: how Hasan Piker became one of the biggest voices on the US left

11 December 2025 at 00:00

Every day he broadcasts a marathon Twitch stream, airing his views to his three million followers. It has led to fame – and some fear – in a country ever more politically divided

Hasan Piker calls it the bus driver test: β€œYou get on a bus and you have 30 seconds to explain whatever online phenomena took place to the bus driver without them looking at you and going, β€˜Get off the fucking bus.’” Most online discourse, no matter how heated, fails the test, he says – not least an incident last weekend, when someone on a Dublin street asked to take a picture with Piker, then held up a picture of his dog and shouted β€œFree Kaya!” Never mind the bus driver; trying to explain the significance of this particular event might well take the rest of this article, but the wider point is that there is a jarring overlap, or more often disconnect, between the online and offline worlds.

Piker finds himself in this in-between space more and more these days. Until fairly recently, the 34-year-old was familiar only to the very online, especially Americans in their 20s and 30s, largely thanks to his presence on the streaming channel Twitch, where he has 3 million followers. But since Donald Trump’s election, Piker has become an in-demand voice in β€œthe real world” for his views on the beleaguered political left, and especially that inordinately fretted-over demographic, young men.

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Β© Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

Β© Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

Β© Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

Starmer is lobbying Europe to join him in watering down the ECHR. This illiberalism will harm us all | Steve Valdez-Symonds

10 December 2025 at 10:25

The prime minister and his counterpart in Denmark want a concerted effort to weaken human rights across Europe. This isn’t pragmatism – it’s cruelty

  • Steve Valdez-Symonds is refugee and migrant rights director at Amnesty UK

When Keir Starmer and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, argue that asylum protections must be rewritten for a new β€œera”, they are not simply adjusting policy. They are reshaping the moral ground our societies stand on.

Their message is clear: hardening rules so that fewer people receive protection is the way to restore confidence in their leadership. They present this as measured and responsible, even progressive. But what they propose is not a new centre ground; it is a retreat into a politics that regards some lives as less worthy than others.

Steve Valdez-Symonds is refugee and migrant rights director with Amnesty International UK

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Β© Photograph: WPA/Getty Images

Β© Photograph: WPA/Getty Images

Β© Photograph: WPA/Getty Images

Storm Bram batters Britain and Ireland with strong winds and heavy rain

9 December 2025 at 16:22

More than 300 flood warnings or alerts across UK as homes left without power, sporting events cancelled and transport disrupted

Flights, trains and ferries were cancelled, motorists faced long delays and thousands of properties were left without power across the UK and Ireland after Storm Bram brought heavy rain and strong winds.

By Tuesday night, there were more than 300 flood warnings or alerts across the UK and sporting matches and festive events were cancelled because of the weather.

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Β© Photograph: William Dax/SWNS

Β© Photograph: William Dax/SWNS

Β© Photograph: William Dax/SWNS

β€˜Alan’s Universe’ Shows What It Might Look Like to Win at YouTube

As Gen Alpha’s attention drifts from TV and movies, video creators like Alan Chikin Chow are eager to fill the void.

Β© Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Apple's AI chief abruptly steps down

1 December 2025 at 18:23
Apple's top artificial intelligence executive is stepping down and will retire in 2026, an abrupt change at a company known for its careful succession plans.

Β© Apple

John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy at Apple, during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, Calif., on June 10, 2024.

Β© Apple

John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy at Apple, during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, Calif., on June 10, 2024.

Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They Are Losing the Information War

Shifting politics, intensive lobbying and surging disinformation online have undermined international efforts to respond to the threat.

Β© Andre Penner/Associated Press

Oil-rich countries, including the U.S., are downplaying scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating the planet.

How TikTok Helped Meta Land an Antitrust Victory

18 November 2025 at 19:53
Silicon Valley has increasingly pointed at rapid digital changes to blunt government efforts to rein in its power.

Β© Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

The Washington headquarters of the Federal Trade Commission, which sued Meta five years ago.

China Delays Return of Astronauts After Debris May Have Hit Spacecraft

The country’s space authorities said they were investigating whether an object had hit a Chinese spacecraft and the risks tied to it.

Β© Andy Wong/Associated Press

Chinese astronauts for the Shenzhou-20 mission attend a send-off ceremony for their manned space mission at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China earlier this year.

Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars

Once pitched as dispassionate tools to answer your questions, A.I. chatbots are now programmed to reflect the biases of their creators.

Β© Andria Lo for The New York Times

Grok’s prompt page displayed on a phone.

IBM to Cut Thousands of Workers Amid A.I. Boom

4 November 2025 at 17:55
The technology supplier said it was shifting its focus to higher-growth businesses, including A.I. consulting and software.

Β© Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times

For years, IBM has periodically laid off some workers and added others, a process it has called β€œwork force rebalancing.”
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