A luxury cruise liner will embark on a 140-day journey to all 7 continents in January. Take a look inside the ship, where the '1% of the 1%' will stay in suites that cost up to $240,000.

In January 2020, cruise company Silversea is set to kick off a journey to all seven continents. The catch? It costs up to $240,000 per person.

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German Boy Missing Since 2017 Found in Child Pornography Raid

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The U.N.’s Tainted Legacy in Haiti

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A New Secularism Is Appearing in Islam

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Dreading Your Kids’ Annoying Christmas Gifts? You Need a Grinch

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Rivian Gets $1.3 Billion Investment in Electric Truck Venture

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The Cruelty of a Trump Christmas

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G.O.P. Lawmaker Had Visions of a Christian Alternative Government

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6 more horses found shot and killed in Kentucky after gruesome discovery last week

A Kentucky animal rescue group said the horses were killed during the same shooting that killed at least 15 other horses along U.S. 23.

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Miracle survivor on mission to help close gaps in tsunami warning system

Arif Munandar had been pronounced dead before he woke up in a body bag four days after a monstrous wave swept his village in Indonesia's northern Aceh province 15 years ago. When a 9.1-magnitude quake opened a faultline deep beneath the Indian Ocean, it triggered a tsunami as high as 17.4 meters (57 feet), killing more than 230,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries. Aceh province bore the brunt of the disaster.

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Military Nightmare: Is the United States Being Outmatched by Russia and China?

America may not be able to compete in future wars.

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Death toll from New Zealand volcano eruption rises to 19

The death toll from a volcanic eruption in New Zealand earlier this month has risen to 19 after police said Monday another person died at an Auckland hospital overnight. There were 47 people visiting the tourist destination of White Island when the volcano erupted Dec. 9, killing 13 people initially and leaving more than two dozen others hospitalized with severe burns. The latest victim is the sixth person to die in hospitals in New Zealand and Australia in the two weeks since the eruption.

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Alaska Airlines says 'we dropped the ball,' apologizes for 'awful holiday travel experience'

Alaska blamed a "severe'' staffing shortage caused by baggage handlers calling in sick on Friday.

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A top fundraiser for Pete Buttigieg offered a donor the chance to 'get on the campaign's radar' in exchange for money

Buttigieg's campaign attempted to distance itself from Park's email, but insisted the offer was nothing more than a standard donor recruiting tactic.

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U.S. halts sending bomb-sniffing dogs to Jordan, Egypt as seven die

The U.S. State Department said on Monday it has stopped sending explosive-detecting dogs to Jordan and Egypt over concerns of deaths of deployed dogs from causes like heat stroke and poisoning. The decision came after the State Department's Office of Inspector General identified in September the deaths of two dogs sent to Jordan, the largest recipient of the dogs. Dogs already working in Jordan and Egypt will remain there while U.S. authorities demand measures to improve the animals' conditions and handling, a State Department official told reporters.

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FACT: 10 U.S. Military Bases are Named After Confederate Generals

The Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas.

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Iran rejects 'conditional release' for Iranian-British woman

The lawyer of an Iranian-British woman convicted on spying charges in Iran has asked that she be released after serving half of her sentence, a request that was immediately rejected by the Tehran prosecutors'office, the state IRNA news agency reported Sunday. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was sentenced to five years for allegedly planning the "soft toppling" of Iran's government while traveling with her young daughter in Iran at the time.

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Taliban claim attack that killed US soldier in Afghanistan

The Taliban claimed responsibility for an attack Monday on American troops that killed one US soldier and, according to the insurgents, wounded several more. The killing is likely to have consequences for ongoing talks between the US and the Taliban. President Donald Trump in September declared negotiations "dead" after the Taliban killed a US soldier in a Kabul bombing.

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Boeing Starliner spacecraft lands in US desert after botched mission

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has landed successfully in a US desert after aborting a botched mission.The crewless astronaut capsule landed at the White Sands desert in New Mexico on Sunday after abandoning its milestone test mission.

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All France Wants for Christmas Is a Train as Strikes Go On

(Bloomberg) -- Forget presents. All French people want for Christmas is to be able to get on a train to visit family and friends.It looks like Santa, or rather, labor unions won’t be delivering that anytime soon.Strikes by transport workers against the government’s pension-reform plan have shut down half of national train services this weekend, with 59% expected to be cut on Dec. 23-24. France’s railway company, SNCF, said it suspended its unaccompanied minor service, canceling about 6,000 tickets for children who were planning to travel during the vacation.Four out of five trains were suspended in the greater Paris region, while the capital’s metro system ground to a halt, with the exception of two automated lines.French President Emmanuel Macron renewed calls for unions to agree a truce over the holiday period, while a new poll by Ifop for Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) newspaper showed public approval of the movement had continued to decline to 51%.“Strikes are protected by the constitution. But there are times in a nation’s history when it’s also good to know when to call a truce to respect families and family life,” Macron said on a trip to Ivory Coast this weekend, during which he visited troops stationed there.Opposition RisingSome 63% of French people wanted unions to call a halt to strikes during the holiday season, a Dec. 18 Elabe opinion survey showed. An OpinionWay poll on Thursday showed 55% of respondents said unions were “wrong” to keep striking during that period. While some unions are calling for a truce, others aren’t.At the same time, opposition to Macron’s pension reform, a cornerstone of his presidential platform, has been rising. The Elabe poll showed that at 57%, more people reject the plan now than when protests started on Dec. 5. Some unions have called for a new day of demonstrations across the country on Jan. 9.While Macron’s government has barreled through reforms of tax and labor laws, the current gridlock shows how deeply the French are wedded to their pension system. Macron wants to merge 42 separate regimes into a single universal points-based system. The plan also offers incentives to raise the age for full retirement benefits to 64 from 62.Workers have been protesting proposed changes to one of Europe’s most complex and costly pension programs. The French government wants to phase out special retirement plans for sectors ranging from train conductors to dancers at the Paris Opera Ballet.Le Parisien newspaper reported on Sunday that Macron will also give up his right under a 1955 law to a set pension for life granted to French presidents once they finish their mandate and will instead switch to a points-based calculation. He will also abandon the right to a post for life at France’s Constitutional Council, which brings with it 13,500 euros ($14,957) in compensation, the paper said.Car SharingSupport for the protests has remained strong even as the walkouts and demonstrations have created havoc for millions of workers commuting on public transportation -- mostly in and around Paris -- and led to hundreds of miles of traffic jams around the French capital.Read more: French Opposition to Macron Pension Reforms Jumps to 57%: PollCar-sharing platforms such as French unicorn BlaBlaCar have seen a surge in reservations. Bookings have doubled since the start of the protests and have beaten records, the company told Bloomberg. Bookings have also doubled on its BlaBlaBus coach service, and it has added buses on lines such as Paris to Lyon, Strasbourg, Bordeaux and Toulouse.“We see a real solidarity of drivers, more people are offering seats than ever,” said Nicolas Brusson, chief executive officer of BlaBlaCar, told Bloomberg.The company, created in 2006, will have 2 million seats available between Dec. 20 and Jan. 5, the equivalent of about 5,000 TGV high-speed trains, Brusson said.Read more: How’s Your Driving? Use an App, and Insurers Could Be WatchingUnions DividedSNCF has called on travelers to change their tickets but pledged it will seek to make sure the main lines and the most demanded ones will run on Dec. 23-24.Union leaders met with French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Wednesday and Thursday, with several of them saying talks failed to advance and signaling that they planned to continue protests.The government will present a timetable for consultation on the reforms on Monday, with meetings expected to start at the beginning of January, new pensions chief Laurent Pietraszewski told the JDD newspaper in an interview published on Sunday. The Ifop poll showed 69% of those surveyed expect the government will push through the reforms without caving in to the protests, down three points.The hard-line CGT and some other unions have called for further strikes and demonstrations through the end of the year unless Macron withdraws his plan. One of France’s more moderate unions, the CFDT, has called for a Christmas truce.“Everyone should be able to travel freely to do what they need to do during the holiday season,” Laurent Berger, the leader of the CFDT, said on France Inter radio on Friday.(Updates travel disruption, adds Macron and pension chief comments, adds Ifop opinion poll results)To contact the reporters on this story: Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net;James Regan in Paris at jregan65@bloomberg.net;William Horobin in Paris at whorobin@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Geraldine Amiel at gamiel@bloomberg.net, Vidya Root, Anil VarmaFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Kremlin calls Moscow shooting incident 'a manifestation of madness'

The Kremlin on Monday called a Moscow shooting incident last week in which two officers of Russia's FSB security service were killed by a gunman "a manifestation of madness" of the kind faced by all countries from time to time. Russian investigators on Friday named the man who opened fire on the headquarters of the FSB security service in Moscow as Yevgeny Manyurov, a 39-year-old former security guard from just outside the capital.

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Syrian group: Israeli strike kills 3, most likely Iranians

A Syrian war monitoring group said Monday that an Israeli missile strike overnight near the capital of Damascus killed at least three foreigners, who were most likely Iranians. The top Syrian diplomat accused Israel of carrying out missile "aggression" on Damascus and its suburbs. There was no immediate comment from Israel.

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Trump May Be Acquitted in a Senate Impeachment Trial. That's Not the Same as Being Exonerated

The Senate may vote to acquit President Trump in the impeachment trial, according to Joyce White Vance, but if the process isn't fair, then that acquittal won't exonerate him.

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