Around 8:45pm Wednesday, December 24, 2025, police along with Emergency Medical Services and Bermuda Fire and Rescue Service, were dispatched to a road traffic collision involving two motorcars, one of which overturned, on Mullet Bay Road, near the junction with Ferry Road, St. George’s.
There were no serious injuries reported, although, the female driver of one of the vehicles complained of discomfort to her head. She was conscious and breathing and speaking emergency personnel at the scene.
The occupants of the overturned motorcar, were able to exit the vehicle on their own.
There was minor traffic disruption with vehicles diverted over Ferry Road from Mullet Bay Road. in both directions and police officers assisting with traffic flow at both points.
Motorists are urged to approach the area with caution.
Volumes are light ahead of Thursday’s Christmas Day holiday, when U.S. and many international markets will be closed
International News via Reuters:
The Japanese yen gained modestly against the U.S. dollar on Wednesday as traders focused on whether weakness in the Japanese currency will prompt officials in the country to intervene.
Volumes are light ahead of Thursday’s Christmas Day holiday, when U.S. and many international markets will be closed.
The yen has weakened despite the Bank of Japan delivering a long-anticipated rate hike last Friday. The increase had been well-telegraphed and comments from Governor Kazuo Ueda disappointed some in the market who had bet on a more hawkish tone.
That has left investors vigilant to official yen-buying from Tokyo, particularly as trading volumes thin towards the year-end, which analysts say is an opportune time for authorities to take action.
TOKYO’S READINESS TO INTERVENE
Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama said on Tuesday that Japan has a free hand in dealing with excessive yen moves, issuing the strongest warning to date on Tokyo’s readiness to intervene.
Her remarks arrested the yen’s decline. The Japanese currency was last up 0.25% on the day against the U.S. dollar at 155.84 per dollar. The dollar reached 157.77 yen on Friday.
“The yen has pulled back from recent highs as repeated warnings from Japanese officials about possible FX intervention limited gains,” FX analysts at LMAX Group said in a note on Wednesday.
DOLLAR’S PERFORMACE IS MIXED
The dollar was otherwise mixed.
The dollar index, which measures it against a basket of other currencies, including the yen and the euro, rose 0.07% to 97.96, with the euro down 0.14% at $1.1778. Sterling weakened 0.13% to $1.3498.
The Australian dollar strengthened 0.07% to $0.6705 and the Canadian dollar gained 0.11% to C$1.367 per U.S. dollar.
The U.S. currency has fallen this year as the Federal Reserve cuts rates, with more easing expected next year while analysts expect other central banks to have completed their rate reductions.
Fed officials are balancing the risks of a slowing jobs market against concerns about stubbornly high inflation.
Data last week showed that consumer prices rose less than economists’ had expected in November, but traders are wary about gaps in collecting economic data following the federal government’s 43-day shutdown.
A release on Wednesday showed that the number of Americans filing new applications for jobless benefits unexpectedly fell last week, but the unemployment rate likely remained high in December amid sluggish hiring.
Fed funds futures traders are pricing in two 25-basis point rate cuts next year, with the first most likely in April.
In cryptocurrencies, bitcoin fell 0.39% to $87,330.
Reporting by Karen Brettell in New York; Additional reporting by Rae Wee in Singapore and Alun John in London; Editing by Jamie Freed, Gareth Jones and Barbara Lewis
President Donald Trump’s administration began releasing files related to criminal investigations of Epstein, the late American financier who was friends with Trump in the 1990s
International News via Reuters:
The U.S. Justice Department has found more than a million more documents potentially tied to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, delaying a full release for weeks while officials redact details to protect victims, DOJ said on Wednesday.
President Donald Trump’s administration began releasing files related to criminal investigations of Epstein, the late American financier who was friends with Trump in the 1990s, to comply with a law passed by Congress last month.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress passed the law over Trump’s objections, requiring that all documents be released by December 19 while allowing partial redactions to protect victims.
Releases so far have contained extensive redactions, angering some Republicans and doing little to defuse a scandal threatening the party ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
In a message shared on social media on Wednesday, the Justice Department said more than a million additional documents potentially related to Epstein had been uncovered by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, without elaborating on when or how the documents were found.
“We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible,” the department said. “Due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks.”
Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Writing by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Howard Goller
The statement could dampen the immediate prospect of U.S. land strikes against Venezuela that President Donald Trump has repeatedly said may take place
International News via Reuters:
The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing the “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday.
“While military options still exist the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking,” the official said.
The statement could dampen the immediate prospect of U.S. land strikes against Venezuela that President Donald Trump has repeatedly said may take place.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House order was for U.S. forces to focus almost exclusively “on the quarantine of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months.”
“The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on (Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro and the belief is that by late January Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the U.S.,” the official said.
Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Edmund Klamann
Brent crude futures closed down 14 cents, or 0.2%, at $62.24 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude eased 3 cents, or 0.05%, to $58.29
International News via Reuters:
Oil settled marginally lower on Wednesday, and prices were on course for their steepest annual decline since 2020 as investors weighed U.S. economic growth and assessed the risk of supply disruptions from Venezuela and Russia.
Brent crude futures closed down 14 cents, or 0.2%, at $62.24 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude eased 3 cents, or 0.05%, to $58.29.
Both contracts have gained about 6% since December 16, when they plunged to near five-year lows.
“What we’ve seen over the past week is a combination of position-squaring in thin markets after last week’s breakdown failed to gain traction, coupled with heightened geopolitical tensions including the U.S. blockade on Venezuela, and supported by last night’s robust GDP data,” IG analyst Tony Sycamore said.
U.S. data showed the world’s largest economy grew at its fastest pace in two years in the third quarter, fueled by robust consumer spending and a sharp rebound in exports.
Still, Brent and WTI prices are on track to drop about 16% and 18%, respectively, this year, their steepest declines since 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit oil demand, as supply is expected to outpace demand next year.
On the supply side, disruptions to Venezuelan exports have been the most significant factor pushing up oil prices, while Russian and Ukrainian attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure have also supported the market, Haitong Futures said in a report.
More than a dozen loaded vessels are in Venezuela waiting for new directions from their owners after the U.S. seized the supertanker Skipper earlier this month and targeted two additional vessels over the weekend.
“A choppy holiday trade looks to be the norm here with the Venezuela blockade being the focal point into the holiday weekend,” said Dennis Kissler, senior vice president of trading at BOK Financial.
Additionally, oil shipments from Kazakhstan via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium are set to drop by a third in December to the lowest since October 2024 after a Ukrainian drone attack damaged facilities at the main CPC export terminal, two market sources said on Wednesday.
U.S. crude inventories rose by 2.39 million barrels last week, while gasoline stocks increased by 1.09 million barrels and distillate inventories rose by 685,000 barrels, market sources said, citing American Petroleum Institute figures on Tuesday.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration is due to release official inventory data on Monday, later than usual due to the Christmas holiday.
Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston; Additional reporting by Sam Li in Beijing and Siyi Liu in Singapore; Editing by Mark Potter, Matthew Lewis and Chris Reese
Preliminary images show faster path to affordable homes
It’s an ambitious resolution for the New Year – Housing Minister Zane DeSilva has pledged to provide 200 more affordable homes for those most in need … by the end of next year.
The Minister says it can be achieved if government makes use of modular construction methods, which increase the speed and efficiency of building.
Bermuda Broadcasting has received an exclusive first look at this alternative form of construction currently under consideration by Government.
It’s important to stress that these images and designs are preliminary, but they help put a visual to a term we’ve been hearing more often – modular construction.
Housing Minister Zane DeSilva says this method could make what once seemed impossible, achievable.
A targeted operation by the Bermuda Police Service (BPS) Drugs Unit in conjunction with the Customs Department, on Monday, December 22, 2025, resulted in the interception of a number of packages containing a substantial quantity of illegal drugs.
A male suspect has been arrested in connection with this seizure.
Officers from the Customs Department played a critical role in the detection, and interception of these packages at the point of entry, and aided in the drugs being seized before they could enter the local community.
Preliminary assessments estimate the street value of the drugs seized, at approximately eight hundred thousand dollars.
This operation represents more than just a significant financial loss to organized criminal networks. By preventing these dangerous substances from reaching the streets, the joint efforts of the BPS and the Customs Department have helped avert the social harm and criminal activity often associated with illegal drug trafficking.
Collector of Customs, Lucinda Pearman, and Acting Superintendent, Jason Smith, Head of the BPS Crime Division, stated, “This successful operation highlights the importance of the strong partnership between our two agencies. Customs Officers played a major and decisive role in this seizure. Their vigilance and expertise at the border were critical to this interception. Every seizure of this nature prevents the introduction of harmful substances into our community and contributes directly to saving lives.”
The arrested individual has been released on bail while investigations continue. A court appearance is anticipated.
The Trump administration in recent days has ordered more than two dozen career diplomats serving across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America back to Washington
International News via Reuters:
Democratic senators urged President Donald Trump on Wednesday to reverse a recall of nearly 30 career ambassadors, warning the move leaves a dangerous leadership vacuum that allows adversaries like Russia and China to expand their reach.
The Trump administration in recent days has ordered more than two dozen career diplomats serving across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America back to Washington to ensure U.S. missions abroad reflect its “America First” priorities.
Calling the abrupt mass recalls an “unprecedented move” that no other administration has done since Congress established the modern Foreign Service a century ago, 10 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said there was no plan to replace them with qualified candidates.
The removals bring the number of empty U.S. ambassadorial posts to well over 100, about half of all such posts worldwide, the senators said in their letter addressed to Trump and seen by Reuters. The senators said 80 posts had been vacant before the decision.
State Department and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the letter. A senior department official on Monday described the mass recall as “a standard process in any administration.”
“As the over 100 U.S. embassies lacking senior leadership await a new U.S. ambassador, China, Russia and others will maintain regular communications with the foreign leaders that we will have effectively abandoned, allowing our adversaries to expand their reach and influence to limit, and even harm, U.S. interests,” Democrats said in their letter.
The senators, who included Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Murphy and others, provided examples of how Washington would lack top-level U.S. presence in crucial locations as Beijing and Moscow make inroads.
In regions from the Indo-Pacific to Africa and the Balkans as well as Latin America, Washington would be on the back foot countering China’s expanding economic reach, the senators said.
“These ambassadors have demonstrated their commitment to faithfully execute the policies of administrations of both parties for decades,” the senators said. “We urge you to reverse this decision immediately before more damage is done to America’s standing in the world.”
Political appointees leave their posts when a new administration takes office but career diplomats, while serving at the pleasure of the president, are often considered bipartisan and typically serve three to four years in their overseas posts regardless of a change in government.
But Trump has long been suspicious of the bureaucracy and has repeatedly pledged to “clean out the deep state” by firing bureaucrats whom he deems disloyal and placing loyalists in senior roles.
In February, Trump ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revamp the U.S. foreign service to ensure that the Republican president’s foreign policy is “faithfully” implemented.
In July, the Trump administration fired more than 1,300 State Department diplomats and civil servants as Washington grappled with multiple crises on the world stage: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the almost two-year-long Gaza conflict, and the Middle East on edge due to high tension between Israel and Iran.
The Department’s total workforce reduction in the U.S. totaled roughly 3,000 after deferred resignations and early retirements, accounting for more than 11% of its total foreign and civil service officers.
Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Lisa Shumaker
Washington imposed visa bans on Tuesday on five European citizens, including French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton
International News via Reuters:
The European Union, France and Germany condemned U.S. visa bans on five Europeans combating online hate and disinformation on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump’s administration took its latest swipe at long-standing allies across the Atlantic.
Washington imposed visa bans on Tuesday on five European citizens, including French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton. It accuses them of working to censor freedom of speech or unfairly target U.S. tech giants with burdensome regulation.
The bans mark a fresh escalation against Europe, a region Washington argues is fast becoming irrelevant due to its weak defences, inability to tackle immigration, needless red tape and “censorship” of far-right and nationalist voices to keep them from power.
EUROPEANS FORCED TO RETHINK TRANSATLANTIC TIES
They come just weeks after a U.S. National Security Strategy document warned Europe faced “civilizational erasure” and must course-correct if it is to remain a reliable U.S. ally.
That document – and other comments by senior Trump officials, including a bombshell February speech by Vice President JD Vance in Munich – have upended postwar assumptions about Europe’s close relationship with its strongest ally, and concentrated minds across European capitals on the urgent need to diversify away from reliance on U.S. technology and defence.
In Brussels, Paris and Berlin, senior officials condemned the U.S. bans, and defended Europe’s right to legislate on how foreign companies operate locally.
A European Commission spokesperson said it “strongly condemns the U.S. decision”, adding: “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe and a shared core value with the United States across the democratic world.”
The spokesperson said the EU would seek answers from Washington, but said it could “respond swiftly and decisively” against the “unjustified measures”.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been travelling across France to warn about the dangers that disinformation poses to democracy, said he had spoken with Breton and thanked him for his work.
“We will not give up, and we will protect Europe’s independence and the freedom of Europeans,” Macron said on X.
DSA ANGERS DC
Breton, a former French finance minister and the European commissioner for the internal market from 2019 to 2024, was one of the architects of the EU’s Digital Services Act.
A landmark piece of legislation, the DSA aims to make the internet safer by compelling tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material.
But the DSA has riled the Trump administration, which accuses the EU of placing “undue” restrictions on freedom of expression in its efforts to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation. It also argues that the DSA unfairly targets U.S. tech giants and U.S. citizens.
Trump officials were particularly upset earlier this month when Brussels’ sanctioned Elon Musk’s X platform, fining it 120 million euros for breaching online content rules. Musk and Breton have often sparred online over EU tech regulation, with Musk referring to him as the “tyrant of Europe”.
Breton, the most high-profile individual targeted, wrote on X: “Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?”
GERMANY SAYS BANS ON ACTIVISTS ‘UNACCEPTABLE’
The bans also targeted Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the U.S.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German non-profit HateAid; and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index, according to U.S. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers.
Germany’s justice ministry said the two German activists had the government’s “support and solidarity” and the visa bans on them were unacceptable, adding that HateAid supported people affected by unlawful digital hate speech.
“Anyone who describes this as censorship is misrepresenting our constitutional system,” it said in a statement. “The rules by which we want to live in the digital space in Germany and in Europe are not decided in Washington.”
Britain said it was committed to upholding the right to free speech.
“While every country has the right to set its own visa rules, we support the laws and institutions which are working to keep the internet free from the most harmful content,” a British government spokesperson said in a statement.
A Global Disinformation Index spokesperson called the visa bans “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”
“The Trump Administration is, once again, using the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with,” they said. “Their actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American.”
Breton is not the first French person to be sanctioned by the Trump administration.
In August, Washington sanctioned French judge Nicolas Yann Guillou, who sits on the International Criminal Court, for the tribunal’s targeting of Israeli leaders and a past decision to investigate U.S. officials.
Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Gabriel Stargardter, Sarah Marsh and Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Michael Perry and Alex Richardson
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