Happy Wednesday! We begin the morning with overcast and foggy skies with a quick clearing pattern. A Dense Fog Advisory is in effect through 10am for Santa Barbara and Ventura coastlines, travel safely. It'll be a windy day for most areas as gusty northerly winds set up. Most of the area is underneath a Wind Advisory through Thursday evening. Make sure loose items and patio furniture is secured. Sunshine and warmer than average temperatures appear this evening, highs rise into the 70s and 80s.

One last day of toasty temperatures are in the forecast for Thursday. Max temperatures rise into the 70s and 80s, with breezy winds and low humidity. It'll be a pleasant day to head out the door and maybe tpo the beaches! Marine waters are calm and skies should clear by midday. Enjoy!

We begin the cooling trend Friday into the weekend. Into Christmas week we have a cool and rainy pattern set up. Timing and amounts of rainfall are still in the works, however this looks to be a large system. You'll want to stay up to date on new developments.

The post Warm & windy Wednesday, cool & damp weather ahead appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — Warner Bros. Discovery is officially rejecting Paramount’s buyout offer, calling it “illusory” and arguing that the existing plan to sell most of the media company to Netflix is a better deal for shareholders.

Warner, abbreviated as WBD, is the parent company of CNN. On Wednesday morning, the company filed a formal response to Paramount’s hostile takeover bid launched last week.

The hostile bid “provides inadequate value and imposes numerous, significant risks and costs on WBD,” the board said in a letter to shareholders.

The decision ultimately rests with those shareholders, some of whom have already said that they’ll reject the company’s advice and tender their shares to Paramount for $30 per share.

Executives at Paramount argue that their proposal provides “more value and certainty.”

Executives at WBD say the hostile play is anything but certain.

The fundamental concern raised by WBD is about whether Paramount is “good for the money,” so to speak. The Paramount offer is financed in large part by the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

Paramount says it has “air tight financing” and that any suggestion otherwise is “absurd.”

But the WBD side has questioned why Paramount’s current owners are enlisting outside help instead of putting up more of the funds personally.

Earlier this year, David Ellison and his father, Larry, the Oracle billionaire, took control of Paramount after a protracted, politically tainted merger process.

Larry Ellison is worth about $240 billion, according to Forbes’ calculations, making him the third richest man in the world.

Paramount has said that the Ellison family is fully backstopping the bid. Wednesday’s letter from WBD refutes that: “It does not, and never has.”

Foreign financing under scrutiny

In recent days, some US lawmakers have raised alarms about the Middle Eastern financing arrangement.

“This transaction raises national security concerns because it could transfer substantial influence over one of the largest American media companies to foreign-backed financiers,” Reps. Sam Liccardo and Ayanna Pressley wrote in a letter to WBD.

Paramount has said in SEC filings that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to give up any voting rights and governance role in Warner if the deal goes through. But that, in turn, has intensified questions about why the royal families are seeking to make the investment.

On Tuesday, another financing partner, Jared Kushner’s private equity fund Affinity Partners, withdrew from the process. “With ​two ​strong competitors ​vying to secure ​the future ​of this ​unique American ​asset, ​Affinity ​has ​decided no longer to pursue ​the opportunity,” said Affinity, which has a substantial investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

“We ​continue to ​believe ​there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer,” Affinity added in its statement.

The corporate tug-of-war may drag on for months. Paramount’s current offer to buy up shares is set to expire on January 8, but could be extended.

Wall Street analysts say Paramount could come back with a higher bid, file a lawsuit, or take other steps.

Netflix pushes forward

In the meantime, Netflix is moving forward with its plan to swallow up the Warner Bros. movie studio, the HBO Max streaming service and other immensely valuable Hollywood assets.

“We have a solid deal in place,” co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos told employees in an email. “It’s great for our shareholders, great for consumers, and a strong way to create and protect jobs in the industry. We’re confident we’ll get it over the finish line — and we’re genuinely excited about what’s ahead.”

Under the current plan, WBD will split itself into two publicly

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN

(CNN) — Gil Gerard, the actor best known for playing sci-fi hero Buck Rogers, has died. He was 82.

His death in a hospice on Tuesday was announced by his wife, Janet Gerard, on Facebook. She wrote: “Early this morning Gil – my soulmate – lost his fight with a rare and viciously aggressive form of cancer. From the moment when we knew something was wrong to his death this morning was only days.

“No matter how many years I got to spend with him it would have ever been enough. Hold the ones you have tightly and love them fiercely.”

Separately, she posted another message on Gerard’s own Facebook page including words that he had written himself beforehand.

“If you are reading this, then Janet has posted it as I asked her to,” he wrote, adding: “My life has been an amazing journey. The opportunities I’ve had, the people I’ve met and the love I have given and received have made my 82 years on the planet deeply satisfying.

“My journey has taken me from Arkansas to New York to Los Angeles, and finally, to my home in North Georgia with my amazing wife, Janet, of 18 years. It’s been a great ride, but inevitably one that comes to a close as mine has.

“Don’t waste your time on anything that doesn’t thrill you or bring you love. See you out somewhere in the cosmos.”

Gerard shot to fame in the 1979 movie “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” This was later followed up with a hit TV series by the same name, which ran for 32 episodes between 1979 and 1981.

Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Gerard moved to New York in 1969 where he began training as an actor, while working as a taxi driver to pay the bills. It was while he was driving a cab that one of his customers suggested he audition for the 1970 movie “Love Story.” He spent about 10 weeks working on the set, according to his website, though his bit part never actually featured in the finished film. Nevertheless, the experience inspired him to stay in the business and he went on to appear in hundreds of commercials, several other small parts and also starred in the movies “Airport ’77” and “Hooch.”

It was a guest appearance in “Little House on the Prairie” that led to his big break. The show’s main star, Michael Landon, offered Gerard a new series that he was writing and producing. Although NBC did not pick up the series, they were impressed by Gerard and went on to offer him the titular role in their movie and TV show collaboration with Universal Pictures, “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.”

After “Buck Rogers” ended, Gerard went on to act in a host of TV shows and made-for-TV movies. According to IMDb, Gerard had been married and divorced four times. He is survived by his son, Gib Gerard, who is also an actor.

Gerard also made regular appearances at pop-culture convention Dragon Con.

The convention paid tribute to him on Facebook, writing: “The 25th century won’t be the same without you, and #DragonCon will miss a beloved friend fan favorite. Rest among the stars, Gil Gerard. You will be missed.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025

By Chris Mooney, Yumi Asada

(CNN) — Bathtubs and pools mislead us about the ocean: Its surface is anything but flat.

Seas pile up in some spots, pushed by trade winds or pulled by gravity toward big things like ice sheets. Amid it all, at the western end of large ocean basins, the fastest surface currents — veins of warm water — race toward the poles, causing additional slopes at the surface.

The ocean is uneven to begin with, and its unevenness is also changing. Maps of recent changes show intricate patterns of watery hills and valleys, but also call attention to one extraordinary location. Off the coast of Japan, one region of the ocean has been rising by nearly an inch every year, right next to another where it has been falling even faster.

It’s the fingerprint of one of those surface currents changing its location, an event that has had dramatic repercussions. The Kuroshio, or “Black Current,” is one of the largest streams of water anywhere in the world, and its recent movement has triggered record-warm ocean temperatures and upended fisheries, an indelible staple of Japanese culture. Scientists say the warm waters have even amplified heatwaves on land and driven extreme rainfall.

And while there are signs some of the changes are now waning, fishing communities say they aren’t yet back to normal. Meanwhile, scientists worry it could be a sign of more volatility to come.

The position of the current could keep fluctuating, said Bo Qiu, a leading Kuroshio expert at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “It’s hard to predict the future, but given the data we have so far, I can only see the intensity becoming larger and larger,” he said.

A river in the ocean

The deep, warm Kuroshio transports more than 200 times as much water as the Amazon River, traveling north from the equator and normally banking east around Japan’s Boso peninsula, near Tokyo. Here, it becomes known as the Kuroshio Extension as it heads into the open Pacific.

But in recent years, the current has been behaving in anything but the usual way, and the Extension, in particular, made a major divergence along Japan’s coast. Its northern edge shifted as much as 300 miles farther poleward, leading to unprecedented warm waters in the surrounding region.

“I was so surprised I don’t even know if ‘surprised’ is the right word,” said Shusaku Sugimoto, an associate professor at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, a northern coastal city.

Sugimoto led a study analyzing ocean temperatures off the coast in locations the Extension didn’t historically reach, but has in recent years. “The fact that the temperature rose 6 degrees (Celsius) off the Sanriku coast, and the elevated temperature persisted for two years, represents a level of water temperature rise we’ve never seen before,” he said.

It’s not the only change.

In August of 2017, the Kuroshio current south of Japan settled into a “large meander” pattern, leaving the coastline and looping southward, taking its warm waters with it. This big shift in water temperatures south of Japan changes the distributions of fish species offshore.

Large meanders themselves are a well-known recurring feature of the current, explained Shinichiro Kida, an oceanographer at Kyushu University. Records of these events date back to the 1960s. During a lengthy meander event from 1975 to 1980, scientists saw a severe decline in anchovy in the Enshunada Sea, a major fishing region to the south of Japan’s main island of Honshu. The anchovy were replaced by sardines, which favor the warmer water the current brought to the re

By Lisa Eadicicco, CNN

(CNN) — One of the Apple Watch’s biggest threats has no screen, weighs about a fifth of an ounce and charges a monthly subscription for most of its features. Yet the Oura ring is on pace for $1 billion in sales this year, boosted by its presence on the fingers of celebrities including Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Dell.

The health-tracking ring that measures sleep, physical activity and other biometrics from your finger is having a moment, growing from a relatively obscure Finnish startup to a smartwatch alternative favored by CEOs, sports players and movie stars.

But Big Tech has taken notice. Once an upstart competitor, Oura now has competition of its own. Like technology past, it now needs to evolve – or risk fading out.

CEO Tom Hale says he has a plan.

More than just rings

Ten years after launching its first ring, Oura expects to reach $1 billion in sales in 2025, doubling its 2024 revenue. And consumers bought more than half of the 5.5 million total Oura rings ever sold in the last year alone.

But rivals like Google, Samsung and Apple are ramping up their health offerings, launching new health-related wearables and AI services.

Apple, Samsung and the Google-owned Fitbit have all introduced wellness or sleep-oriented features similar to Oura’s in recent years.

Oura’s strategy to stay ahead? Hale sees a future in which Oura rings may connect to even more devices around the body. He also thinks there’s a lot more to be done with the device we already carry around every day: the smartphone.

“The phone is a super powerful processing and sensing device. Like, how do we take advantage of that?” Hale said in an interview with CNN.

There’s a reason Oura has stuck with rings instead of expanding to more popular devices like smartwatches. The company has long claimed that the finger is more accurate than the wrist for tracking health data.

That approach has worked in Oura’s favor as consumers increasingly seek discrete distraction-free tech without screens, according to Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager covering the wearables industry for the International Data Corporation.

But the company hasn’t ruled out taking health measurements from other body parts. Hale said he’s been interested in measuring brainwaves through the ears and core body temperature and heart data from the torso.

Just don’t expect Oura to make those devices. When asked whether Oura would consider developing devices other than rings, Hale said the company would consider partnering “with other wearables that do special things that are unique and different.”

Oura already works with glucose maker Dexcom to combine ring-measured metrics, like physical activity, heart rate and sleep, with glucose data. The company is more likely to partner with medical tech companies rather than consumer gadget makers in future collaborations to ensure accuracy, Hale said.

He also sees opportunity to use smartphones to capture health signals, saying that he’s seen prototypes that can analyze a person’s cough or measure their stress by the sound of their voice. It’s not a new idea; services such as Canary Speech and Together by Renee have claimed to deduce mood signals from a user’s voice. Amazon’s now-defunct Halo health app also analyzed tone o