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By Nader Ibrahim
December 30, 2025
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After six years of one of the world’s worst financial crises, Lebanon’s cabinet has approved a draft law that could give depositors back their money.
In 2019, the Lebanese currency began spiralling. Banks locked their doors and prevented depositors from accessing their money.
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Some depositors were forced to hold up bank branches to get their own money.
By the time the currency had been regulated, the Lebanese Lira had lost 98 percent of its value.
To fix the situation, Lebanon’s cabinet is passing a so-called “gap law” that’s expected to be signed by the prime minister and president before heading to parliament for debate.
Here’s everything you need to know about the so-called “gap law”.
Depositors will be getting some of their money back.
Under the law, anyone who deposited up to $100,000 will be reimbursed within four years. This is an improvement on past proposals, where the same amount would be repaid over more than a decade.
However, observers noted that plans proposed in 2020, under the government of former Prime Minister Hassan Diab, had depositors receiving up to $500,000 back.
“This was probably the biggest lost opportunity, and it was done to protect the banks,” Fouad Debs, a lawyer and member of the Depositors Union, told Al Jazeera.
There is also supposed to be a full financial audit, according to Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.
“A forensic audit … means [the banks] will open all their operations – their dividends and the bonuses they paid executives – basically all the financial engineering they’ve done,” Debs said.
He added that an audit is important because “there are a lot of discrepancies between what they say and what the state is saying.”
Plenty.
First off, the $100,000 figure is per depositor and not per account. So if someone had two accounts with a figure more than $100,000, they would still only get $100,000 back.
For depositors who have more than $100,000 in their account or accounts, they will be given $100,000 in cash, and the rest will be paid in bonds backed by the Central Bank, according to PM Salam.
The bankers, the banks, and politicians aligned with them get off fairly easily under the current draft law, while the state will bear most of the burden for the financial collapse.
Under the current version of the draft law, banks are responsible for paying only 40 percent of withdrawals, despite their major roles in engineering the financial crisis.
But banks, bankers, and affiliated politicians are still waging media campaigns and lobbying parliament to attack the law and make it even more favourable for them.
Under the new draft law, banks are being asked to pay much more than they are currently paying – but still significantly less than critics say they should be paying.
There is a lack of clarity over the claims.
During the crisis, banks were still able to pay out dividends to shareholders and pay executives bonuses, while regular depositors were blocked from accessing their money for daily expenses like buying food or paying bills.
“Depositors should be last on the list to have to pay,” Debs said.
The state would have to make up the “gap” between what is owed by Lebanese banks to depositors and what the Lebanese financial system can pay out.
Estimates currently say there is a gap of $70bn.
They say the state should pay. Many bankers and banks say that they entrusted their money to the Central Bank of Lebanon (BDL) and that BDL gave the money to the state, which lost it. Therefore, the state should pay.
But critics argue that many of the banks gave depositors’ money to BDL without asking the depositors.
“They put it there because banks made so much money and benefitted from it a lot,” Debs said. “They put all their eggs in the same basket … and the banks knew this very well.”
With public funds, essentially. After the cash is given to depositors, everything else will be paid back in bonds backed by the state and its assets, including Lebanon’s gold reserves.
Critics say this is problematic because many of Lebanon’s current bonds were sold to vulture funds abroad. So state assets could essentially be used to pay back vulture funds or to pay back big depositors at the expense of the entire Lebanese population.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is usually calling for austerity, but for once, civil society and the IMF are on the same page.
“The IMF is saying… ‘how can you make depositors pay before bankers?’” Debs said, adding that the IMF’s position shows “how greedy and vicious the ruling elites are here”.
By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
The NCAA is again staring down the barrel of a paradigm-shifting inflection point in the future of college athletics as professional basketball players are returning to college, further testing the first “A” for “Amateur” in the league’s name.
The two tests of the league’s amateurism policies are Toni Bilic and James Nnaji, both professional basketball players who left their teams to join college programs in the middle of the season (Illinois and Baylor, respectively).
As college football players opt out of college games to prepare for pro careers, basketball is seeing a tide in the opposite direction.
Bilic, a Croatian, has been playing professionally in his native Croatia for years, including the last three with Cedevita Junior Zagreb. While European pros coming to the NCAA is not unheard of, Bilic’s case is unique for a few reasons. One is his age: Bilic played professionally as an adult, not just as a junior (which is not uncommon in Europe), and is coming over at age 20.
The other is that he will only practice with the Illini for the rest of the season, and not play, with an eye on development.
His club KK Cedevita Junior is a five-time Croatian Champion, and in spite of the name is not a junior or youth club.
Nnaji, who is Nigerian, was selected 31st overall int he 2023 NBA Draft by the Detroit Pistons before his rights were later traded to the Charlotte Hornets and later the New York Knicks. He has been playing professionally for FC Barcelona since 2020, first on their B team and then on their A team. He was then put on loan to another top-flight club Girona, and then to a club in the Turkish league.
In July, he announced he and FC Barcelona were mutually opting out of the last two years of their contract.
Spain and Turkey are two of the highest-paying leagues in Europe, with salaries averaging in the mid-six figures and the highest paid players rumored to be as high as $4 million per season.
Because of the ballooning nature of NIL, the calculation about playing in a lower-level professional league versus playing in the NCAA has shifted. While basketball isn’t seeing the same valuations as football, Forbes estimates that top NCAA players are making in the low millions per year.
There are more rumors that Trentyn Flowers, who has played in the NAB and three weeks ago competed in a game, is being recruited by a number of NCAA programs, which would escalate the risks even further. Flowers is making approximately $636,000 on a two-way contract, meaning he is flexing between the NBA team and its G League (minor league) affiliate.
“He’s a good player, he would be a great player in college,” one NBA executive familiar with Flowers told NJ Advance Media, implying that his earnings cap in college could be higher than they are in the NBA.
It’s unclear what would happen to his status with the NBA if he returned to college.
The NCAA provided a telling statement to college basketball outlet The Field of 68.
I asked the NCAA whether players with NBA experience were eligible to play in college.
This was the statement they provided to @TheFieldOf68. pic.twitter.com/FcPiZ5ifOz
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) December 29, 2025
“Schools are recruiting and seeking eligibility for more individuals with more international, semi-pro and professional experience than ever before and while the NCAA members have updated many rules following the House injunction, more rules must likely be updated to reflect the choices member schools are making. At the same time, NCAA eligibility rules have been invalidated by judges across the country wrecking havoc on the system and leading to fewer opportunities for high school students, which is why the Association is asking Congress to intervene in these challenges.”
A war-weary NCAA, worn down by endless lawsuits any time they try to enforce any eligibility rules, is staring down the barrel of years of pain. Their statement sends a clear message: that they are done fighting against the marketplace’s insatiable thirst to win at any cost, regardless of the principles.
The NCAA is the target but are realistically a service organization for the member institutions, which are the ultimate decision-makers.
Collegiate athletics, like most professional sports, never really fit into the framework of American employment law. Most professional sports have received judicial or congressional relief from those laws in order to preserve a system viewed as vital to the fabric of the American culture.
Ignorance of that legal disconnect for years created a situation where the lawsuits outran the legislation and the NCAA has been twisting in the wind to the tune of billions of dollars.
While they haven’t come out and said it, their recent public statements and campaigns urging congress to act have made their new approach clear: they will rewrite any rules they need to in a form of ‘brinksmanship’ in hopes of forcing congress to act and create a more sustainable future for collegiate athletics – which has felt like the only real endgame for at least a decade.
The issues of college sports are bleeding over into the political sphere, with one example being the governor of Louisiana basically inserting himself as the final decision maker on LSU’s next head football coach. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz also posted on social media about the issues facing college athletics on Monday.
An absolute crisis.
Congress NEEDS to act. For months, I’ve been working night & day to try to bring Republicans and Democrats together to save college sports.
If we fail to do so, it will be an utter tragedy. And it’s happening right before our eyes. https://t.co/XOekKlF3Th
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 29, 2025
While the specter of a bursting bubble in NIL payments have begun as fanbases come to the realization that $50 million+ in NIL payments don’t guarantee championships, so far colleges, and their wealthy alumni, are sending a clear message that they are willing to push just about any button to gain a competitive advantage.
The NCAA’s latest statement is basically saying that ‘if any school asks us to change a rule, we’ll change that rule, and we’ll keep changing the rule until you all hate this so much, that congress steps in.” Or the alternative, that the entire system folds.
Australian Lani Pallister told SwimSwam earlier this year that she didn’t swim in the NCAA because the league told her that she would have to repay any prize money she earned. While her being Australian complicates the matter, it feels as though a U.S. swimmer who wanted to push the buttons here and return to the NCAA (say, Katie Ledecky or Carson Foster) might have their way.
Whether schools would be willing to stick their necks out the same way for a swimmer as they are a basketball player remains to be seen, but the foundation that prevents swimmers who have taken prize money (or raced on an ISL team) from returning to the NCAA is eroding by the week.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: As NBA-Drafted Hoopers Return to College, the NCAA’s Congressional Campaign Ramps Up
Warren Buffett’s failure to capitalize on the economy’s digital shift over the last two decades has hurt his otherwise enviable track record as an investor. His blind spot regarding tech didn’t stop at the stock market: It bled into how he ran Berkshire Hathaway’s operating companies as well. Across many of his wholly owned businesses, Buffett neglected technological upgrades, and Berkshire’s business value has suffered as a result.
It’s important to understand this because the majority of Berkshire Hathaway’s assets are invested not in publicly traded securities, but in operating subsidiaries like Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and Geico. While it’s true that Buffett invested aggressively in wind energy, that was largely because of government tax incentives. In the main, he preferred to milk his operating subsidiaries for cash rather than reinvest in them for the digital age. Exhibit A is Geico, which thanks to a lack of IT investment has fallen behind Progressive as the nation’s leading for-profit auto insurer.
Buffett has called Geico his favorite child, and for good reason. Since it began in the 1930s, the auto insurer has used a direct-sales model to keep operating costs the lowest in the industry. In a commodity business like insurance, that’s a major competitive advantage. In the 1990s, after he bought all of Geico, Buffett found a second moat when he began to brand Geico as a trusted, even beloved American company. The gecko, the caveman, the camel who celebrated hump day—all these were marketing masterstrokes, ones directly derived from Buffett’s deep understanding of the mass brand-mass media industrial complex. The mascots also highlight how, while Buffett was comfortable investing in marketing, he was deeply uncomfortable with, and therefore didn’t understand, investing in tech.
When Buffett took control of Geico in 1996, he octupled its marketing budget. This wiped out almost all of Geico’s profits from a GAAP accounting standpoint, but Buffett was confident that increasing advertising outlays today would lead to more profitable customers tomorrow. And so it was: Under Buffett’s leadership, Geico’s market share grew from under 3% in 1996 to 12% in 2020, and it went from the No. 7 auto insurer to the #2 auto insurer, behind only State Farm.
So far, so good—but while Geico was investing in marketing, its rival Progressive was investing in technology. Founded only a year after Geico, Progressive began to upgrade its IT systems as early as the late 1970s. In the 1980s, it bought its agents computers and sent them floppy discs so they could better match price with risk. In 1996, Progressive became the first auto insurer to allow consumers to buy insurance online, and it continually streamlined its backend systems so that it could accurately quote new business. Today, Progressive brags that it has tens of billions of price points and that its tech stack allows the company to adjust its rates much faster than its competition—nearly once every business day. “We are a tech company that happens to sell insurance,” is one of Progressive’s internal mantras.
Driving the company’s tech investment was an insight that was perhaps even more astute than Buffett’s marketing insight. Thanks to its no-agent, no-commission model, Geico enjoyed a six-percentage-point cost advantage vs. Progressive in its operating costs. Because half of its business is through insurance agents, Progressive is unlikely ever to catch up here. But Progressive CEO Peter Lewis, who led the company from 1965 to 2000, understood that an auto insurer’s biggest cost center is the claims it must pay policyholders—four to five times bigger, in fact, than its administrative and advertising costs. If Progressive could manage these “loss costs” better than the competition, Lewis reasoned, then it could become the de facto low-cost auto insurer.
The key to managing loss costs was technology in all its glorious variety. Back-end systems at headquarters that could parse price and risk for each driver were important, but so were front line innovations like Snapshot, a shoebox-sized device that in the 1990s Progressive began installing into the cars of willing customers. Snapshot, now an app on your mobile phone, tracks a customer’s driving behavior; more than one in three Progressive customers buying insurance directly from the company opts in for “usage-based” premiums. Thanks to Snapshot and other innovations, Progressive simply knows more about its drivers than any other insurer, and this creates a virtuous circle in which the company knows which to reward with discounts, which to punish with surcharges, and which to purge altogether.
Thus, while Progressive’s operating costs have historically been six points worse than Geico, its loss costs have been 11 points better, which means that Geico’s low-cost moat has been breached by tech. In contrast to Progressive’s streamlined system, Geico has more than 600 legacy IT systems. It didn’t start working on a Snapshot-like product until 2019, twenty years after Progressive began.
Buffett liked to say that when the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked, and COVID was the perfect storm to reveal how little Geico had paid attention to its digital wardrobe. During COVID, people suddenly stopped driving, and then, when the pandemic ended, they drove more than ever and more recklessly than ever. At the same time, the worst inflation in forty years hit all sectors of the economy, including auto-repair shops. Such rapidly changing conditions favored insurers with robust tracking tools, like Progressive, and punished insurers without them, like Geico. Since 2020, Progressive has almost doubled its personal auto policy count—but Geico has lost nearly 15% of its personal insurance base. Progressive, not Geico, is now the nation’s number two auto insurer.
It turns out that while the branding of the gecko was important, it wasn’t nearly as powerful as employing sophisticated digital tools. Geico is a good example of what happens when a company, even a powerful one, fails to reinvest in its future. Rather than a virtuous cycle—tech investment leading to better pricing and better products, which drives more profits, which can then be reinvested to drive the cycle on—Geico seems caught in the same vicious cycle that afflicts General Motors, Macy’s and other legacy companies.
Laser weapons go mobile as the US Army takes delivery of two 20-kW, anti-drone Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV)-mounted Laser-Oriented Counter-UAS System (LOCUST) Laser Weapon Systems (LWS) from AeroVironment.
Laser weapons seem to be popping up everywhere these days but, despite their increasing effectiveness, they share one drawback in common. The high-powered systems tend to be rather bulky and heavy and look more like a shipping container than something out of Star Wars.
That’s changing as smaller, more powerful, more rugged lasers move from the laboratory to the field. A significant milestone in this trend is the LOCUST laser, the second increment of which has been delivered to the US Army and reflects the military’s shift from fixed-site directed energy weapons to mobile, maneuverable platforms that can defend frontline assets against drones and similar threats.
Beginning life as the Palletized-High Energy Laser (P-HEL) and evolving into the LOCUST, also called the AMP-HEL, the system’s first increment was installed in a General Motors Defense Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) in September 2025. Increment 2 shares the same power output as Increment 1, but is more practical thanks to higher protection, onboard power support, lighter weight, and an upgraded beam aperture with improved focus, beam quality, and lethality over longer distances. Exactly how long is classified, though it’s at least several kilometers.
It can power up in only 15 minutes and has a modular, open architecture for ease of maintenance. However, one major improvement is the Target Acquisition and Tracking System (TATS) gimbal that can turn 360° at a rate of 100° per second. It’s claimed to be ultra stable and the whole system can be operated by a single person using a standard Xbox gaming controller.
“Directed energy is no longer a future concept – it is a proven force-protection capability,” said John Garrity, Vice President ofAeroVironment’s Directed Energy business unit. “Since deployed, LOCUST-equipped P-HEL systems have actively protected warfighters, allies, and critical infrastructure against aerial threats. With LOCUST’s target acquisition, tracking and precision beam control, warfighters have an easy-to-use, reliable, trusted, and proven solution against the very real and evolving threats of modern warfare.”
Source: AeroVironment
X/Ali YerlikayaMore than 350 suspected Islamic State group (IS) members have been detained as part of nationwide police operations in Turkey.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said 357 suspects were apprehended across 21 provinces in coordinated raids on Tuesday morning.
It comes just a day after three police officers and six alleged militants were killed during an eight hour siege in the northwestern town of Yalova. Another eight police officers and a security force member were injured.
Less than a week ago, authorities arrested another 115 suspects who prosecutors said had been planning attacks targeting non-Muslims during Christmas and New Year’s.
In a post on X, Yerlikaya said Tuesday’s operations took place across the country, including in Ankara, Istanbul and Yalova.
“Just as we have never given an opportunity to those who try to bring this country to its knees with terrorism, we will never give them an opportunity in the future either,” he added.
The interior minister also shared a video appearing to show dozens of counter-terrorism officers taking part in the operations and detaining several people.
Raids on addresses in Istanbul and two other provinces – where 110 people were detained, according to the prosecutor’s office – saw officers seize documents and digital materials, while pictures on local media also showed a number of weapons, including knifes and bullets.
A statement from the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office said intelligence had suggested the suspects might attempt an attack on New Year’s Day.
It also noted 41 of those detained had suspected links to the clash in Yalova on Monday.
Interior minister Yerlikaya said another 16 individuals had been detained in Yalova for making “provocative posts” on social media.
The funerals of the three offices killed in Yalova – named as İlker Pehlivan, Turgut Külünk, and Yasin Koçyiğit – were held on Tuesday.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offered his condolences to their families, and said Turkey would continue its fight against “bloodthirsty criminals who threaten the peace of our nation and the security of our state”.
Earlier this month, authorities carried out mass raids and arrested 115 people. Officials said IS supporters had been actively planning attacks across Turkey, particularly against non-Muslims on Christmas and New Year’s Day.
ReutersTurkey’s security services regularly target people with suspected links to IS.
The country shares a 900km (560 mile) border with Syria, where the group continues to operate in parts of the country.
Syria’s president Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has close ties to the Turkish government, has vowed to work with the US and Europe to root out surviving elements of IS.
The US launched a wave of air strikes against the group’s positions across Syria on Friday in response to the killing of three Americans.
Two US soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed by IS gunmen during an ambush earlier this month.
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By Shawn Paik
December 30, 2025
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