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My kids saw my pain on set, says Angelina Jolie

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Angelina Jolie is notoriously private.
But in a new interview with BBC News, the Hollywood star spoke candidly about her experience of working on set with her eldest sons, saying they saw “the pain” she usually hides from them.
The actress is starring in a new biopic, titled Maria, about opera singer Maria Callas.
Two of Jolie’s six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt, Maddox and Pax, took on roles as production assistants on the film.
“The character [Callas] has a lot of pain and they’ve of course seen me go through a lot of things, but they hadn’t experienced me expressing a lot of the pain that usually a parent hides from a child,” she said.
“So they were there to witness some of that, but then we would hug or they would bring me cups of tea.”
Jolie added that it was “a new way” of finding out how to be honest with her children about her feelings, “in an even greater way”.
Written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, the film focuses on Callas’s final years, in the 1970s, when she was living in Paris.
With Jolie taking on acting roles relatively infrequently in recent years, the film has provided something of a comeback narrative for her and could lead to an Oscar nomination for best actress.
Callas was a US-born Greek soprano, and one of opera’s best-known singers.
In Maria, a blend of Jolie’s own voice and original recordings by Callas are used in the singing scenes.
The actress learnt to sing opera for the role, something she describes as “very physically demanding”.
Training took around seven months, she said.
“We started with regular singing classes and it was challenging in many ways, but when the opera classes began, what it requires with your breathwork and your body and just the force of what you push through yourself, it’s just a very different physicality.”
Jolie, whose previous film credits include Changeling, Maleficent, Salt, and Mr & Mrs Smith, said she hasn’t sung before, and was “actually quite shy about singing”.
“It was probably one of the areas in my life that I was hesitant,” she said.
But she indicated that it was also something she enjoyed.
“One of the greatest privileges of being an actor is you often are supported by a crew to try something and explore something you’ve never done and this certainly was most challenging,” she said.

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International

FTX executives shave serious time off their sentences

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Ryan Salame and Caroline Ellison, FTX executives convicted for their roles in the notorious crypto fraud led by their former boss Sam Bankman-Fried, have both shaved time off their lengthy prison sentences.

Salame, a former top executive of FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency trading platform, pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges in September 2023, and was sentenced in May to 7 1/2 years in federal prison. He began his sentence in October. But the Federal Bureau of Prisons currently lists his release date as March 1, 2031, more than a year earlier than his initial release date in April 2032. Business Insider first reported Salame’s new release date.

Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and the former CEO of FTX’s hedge fund arm, Alameda Research, was sentenced to 2 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to seven federal counts of fraud and conspiracy and was a key witness against Bankman-Fried. Her current release date is listed as July 20, 2025, three months earlier than her initial release date.

Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison, does not have a release date listed on the prisons website.

The Bureau of Prisons didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. However, in several past statements about early release dates, the bureau has told CNN that it does not comment on the conditions of any individual inmate, but inmates can earn good conduct time that is calculated into their projected release date.

Qualified inmates are currently eligible for up to 54 days of GCT time for each year of the sentence imposed by the court. Inmates have other ways of earning time credits while incarcerated, including participation in various prison programs.

FTX was a high-profile crypto startup that allowed people to buy and sell digital assets. It had its name emblazoned on an arena in Miami and on every Major League Baseball umpire’s jersey. The exchange had several celebrity endorsers and was widely believed to be a gold-standard for safety and security.

But FTX collapsed in November 2022 when customers pulled their funds as rumors spread about FTX’s unusually close ties to its founder’s crypto hedge fund, Alameda

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Accusations of genocide. Charges of corruption. Improbably, Netanyahu had a good year

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This time last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the doldrums.

“He started very low,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist who has worked closely with Netanyahu. “The lowest point that he had.”

Many Israelis accused him of being asleep at the wheel on October 7, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Some even said he enabled it by funding Hamas.

His political support was dismal – even if the Gaza war let him brush aside calls for an election. Polls suggested support for his Likud Party was down 25% from just three months prior.

On its face, the year that followed was hardly uplifting. It brought tens of thousands of deaths, regional conflict, indictments, and accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And yet, Netanyahu ends the year having transformed his standing in Israel.

“I am running a marathon,” he told a Tel Aviv courtroom earlier this month, facing charges – which he denies – of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. “I can run it with 20 kilos on my back, and I can run it with 10 kilos on my back.”

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‘It’s a scary time’: US universities urge international students to return to campus before Trump inauguration

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Fear and uncertainty are spreading across many US college campuses ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, with some schools advising international students to return early from winter break amid promises of another travel ban like the one that stranded students abroad at the start of Trump’s last term.

In a country where more than 1.1 million international students enrolled in US colleges and universities during the 2023-24 academic year, the former president has pledged more hardline immigration policies upon his return to the White House, including an expansion of his previous travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and the revocation of student visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”

International students generally have nonimmigrant visas that allow them to study in the US but don’t provide a legal pathway to stay in the country.

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