News

By HOLLY RAMER

Even the most dedicated doomscrollers smile once in a while. Here’s a look back at some of the Associated Press stories that captured attention around the world and provided moments of brightness throughout 2025:

Related Articles

• Today in History: December 19, U.S. auto industry gets emergency bailout
• Trump’s blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil raises new questions about legality
• British baker’s criticism of Mexican ‘ugly’ bread triggers social media outrage
• Rain creates a crimson spectacle on Iran’s Hormuz Island for the first time this year
• Rubio hits 2 more International Criminal Court judges with sanctions over Israel prosecutions

Art and intrigue

The brazen heist at the world’s most visited museum in November wasn’t just a whodunit, it was a “who wore it.” Hours after thieves snatched the French crown jewels from the Louvre, an AP photographer snapped a picture of a sharply-dressed young man striding past police.

Who was this mysterious “Fedora Man?” A 15-year-old boy who favors elegant clothing inspired by history and fictional detectives.

“I didn’t want to say immediately it was me,” Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux said a week later. “With this photo, there is a mystery, so you have to make it last.”

September marked the solving of another art-related mystery when scientists confirmed the source of the blue color in one of Jackson Pollock’s iconic paintings. While the origins of the reds and yellows splattered across the abstract expressionist’s “Number 1A, 1948” were well known, it took chemistry to confirm the rich turquoise as manganese blue.

FILE – David Brenneman, director of collections and exhibitions at the High Museum, talks about Jackson Pollock’s painting “Number 1A” on display as part of an exhibit in Atlanta on Oct. 6, 2011. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, a cat called Leonardo da Pinchy had more in common with the Louvre thieves than the artist who inspired his nickname. The felonious feline with expensive taste in clothing spent a year stealing laundry from clotheslines before his embarrassed owner posted photos of his hauls on Facebook. Those who showed up to claim their belongings in July included a woman who recognized her pink and purple underwear.

“He only wants stuff he shouldn’t have,” said Leonardo’s owner, Helen North.

Tales — and fins and feathers — of survival

Also in the animals behaving badly category: a humpback whale that briefly swallowed a kayaker off Chilean Patagonia in February.

“I thought I was dead,” Adrián Simancas said. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”

Simancas’ father captured the moment on video while encouraging his son to remain calm, and they both returned to shore uninjured.

Animals elsewhere this year were often facing their own challenges.

FILE – Hundreds of chicks mill around a stall at First State Animal Center and SPCA on May 16, 2025, in Camden, Del. (AP Photo/Mingson Lau, File)

Roughly 7,000 baby chickens and other birds perished in an abandoned postal service truck in Delaware in May. But another 5,000 chicks who endured three days without food and water were rescued by a local animal shelter, where workers spent weeks caring for them and finding them new homes. Some of the adopters took hundreds, hoping for egg-laying hens, while others took them as pets.

And though they weren’t in mortal danger, elephants at a San Diego zoo showed off their survival skills in April when a 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California. Video from their enclosure showed three older, female elephants scrambling to encircle and shield two 7-year-old elephants, named Zuli and Mkhaya.

“It’s so great to see them doing the thing we all should be doing — that any parent does, which is protect their children,” said Mindy Albright, curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

Celebrating girls, goddesses and the wise

For some parents in Nepal, child-rearing involves competing to have their daughters selected and sequestered as living goddesses. In October, 2-year-old Aryatara Shakya was celebrated as the new Kumari, or “virgin Goddess,” a position she will hold until she reaches puberty.

FILE – Nepal’s newly appointed living goddess, Kumari Aryatara Shakya, is carried toward Kumari Ghar, the temple palace where she will be residing in Kathmandu, Nepal, Sept. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha, File)

“She was just my daughter yesterday, but today she is a goddess,” her father, Ananta Shakya, said.

Another father’s involvement in his daughter’s milestone came in August, when 2,000 people turned out for 15-year-old Isela Anahí Santiago Morales’ quinceañera in Axtla de Terrazas, Mexico.

After few guests showed up to mark her symbolic passage from childhood to womanhood, Isela’s father posted about the leftover food on Facebook. An outpouring of support ensued, leading to a redo in August with a dozen music groups performing on two stages. Wearing a sparkly tiara and glittering pink ballgown, the soft-spoken Isela asked attendees to donate toys for vulnerable children instead of bringing gifts.

Meanwhile, some women elsewhere turned away from glamorous looks and ditched makeup altogether in 2025, perhaps inspired by actor Pamela Anderson’s barefaced appearance at fashion shows and film premieres.

FILE – Deborah Borg discusses how to pull off the no makeup makeup look at the women’s clothing store Dalya on Aug. 27, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, File)

“I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room,” Anderson told Vogue during Paris Fashion Week. “I feel like it’s just freedom. It’s like a relief.”

While experts in September offered tips for going makeup-free, the world’s oldest woman offered more universal advice in the spring.

Ethel Caterham, 116, became the world’s oldest living person earlier this year. She described her method for longevity from her nursing home in Surrey, southwest of London:

“Never arguing with anyone,” she said. “I listen, and I do what I like.”

By CLAIRE SAVAGE

The head of the U.S. agency for enforcing workplace civil rights posted a social media call-out urging white men to come forward if they have experienced race or sex discrimination at work.

Related Articles

• Trump’s blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil raises new questions about legality
• Kansas tribe ends nearly $30 million deal with ICE
• US Justice Department sues 3 states, District of Columbia for voter data
• TikTok signs deal to form new US unit with investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake
• Trump’s new $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividend’ to troops is coming from Pentagon funding, not tariffs

“Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws,” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas, a vocal critic of DEI, wrote on X Wednesday evening. The post urged eligible workers to reach out to the agency “as soon as possible” and referred users to the agency’s fact sheet on “DEI-related discrimination” for more information.

Lucas’ post, viewed millions of times, was shared about two hours after Vice President JD Vance posted an article he said “describes the evil of DEI and its consequences,” which also received millions of views. Lucas responded to Vance’s post saying: “Absolutely right @JDVance. And precisely because this widespread, systemic, unlawful discrimination primarily harmed white men, elites didn’t just turn a blind eye; they celebrated it. Absolutely unacceptable; unlawful; immoral.”

She added that the EEOC “won’t rest until this discrimination is eliminated.” Neither the agency nor Vance responded immediately to requests for additional comment.

Since being named acting chair of the EEOC in January, Lucas has been shifting the agency’s focus to prioritize “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” aligning with President Donald Trump’s own anti-DEI executive orders. Trump named Lucas as the agency’s chair in November.

Earlier this year, the EEOC along with the Department of Justice issued two “technical assistance” documents attempting to clarify what might constitute “DEI-related Discrimination at Work” and providing guidance on how workers can file complaints over such concerns. The documents took broad aim at practices such as training, employee resource groups and fellowship programs, warning such programs — depending on how they’re constructed — could run afoul of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race and gender.

Those documents have been criticized by former agency commissioners as misleading for portraying DEI initiatives as legally fraught.

David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the NYU School of Law, said Lucas’s latest social media posts demonstrate a “fundamental misunderstanding of what DEI is.”

“It’s really much more about creating a culture in which you get the most out of everyone who you’re bringing on board, where everyone experiences fairness and equal opportunity, including white men and members of other groups,” Glasgow said.

The Meltzer Center tracks lawsuits that are likely to affect workplace DEI practices, including 57 cases of workplace discrimination. Although there are instances in which it occurs on a case-by-case basis, Glasgow said he has not seen “any kind of systematic evidence that white men are being discriminated against.”

He pointed out that Fortune 500 CEOs are overwhelmingly white men, and that relative to their share of the population, the demographic is overrepresented in corporate senior leadership, Congress, and beyond.

“If DEI has been this engine of discrimination against white men, I have to say it hasn’t really been doing a very good job at achieving that,” Glasgow said.

Jenny Yang, a former EEOC chair and now a partner at law firm Outten & Golden, said it is “unusual” and “problematic” for the head of the agency to single out a particular demographic group for civil rights enforcement.

“It suggests some sort of priority treatment,” Yang said. “That’s not something that sounds to me like equal opportunity for all.”

On the other hand, the agency has done the opposite for transgender workers, whose discrimination complaints have been deprioritized or dropped completely, Yang said. The EEOC has limited resources, and must accordingly prioritize which cases to pursue. But treating charges differently based on workers’ identities goes against the mission of the agency, she said.

“It worries me that a message is being sent that the EEOC only cares about some workers and not others,” Yang said.

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.