• Multiple celebrities got engaged and flaunted their diamond rings in 2024.
• Stars like Lady Gaga and Selena Gomez received some of the most luxurious pieces.
• Pear-cut diamonds were especially popular among stars this year.

For some celebrities, the past year has been all about diamonds.

Just look at Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, and Emma Roberts. They're just a handful of the Hollywood stars who recently got engaged and showed off their massive rings in 2024.

Here's a look at their stunning new jewelry pieces and some other luxurious engagement rings out there.

• Longtime Elon Musk loyalist Steve Davis is ready to help out at DOGE.
• Davis has worked at Musk' companies for over 20 years, having first joined SpaceX in 2003.
• Since then, he has become a close advisor of the world's richest man.

From SpaceX to Twitter, Steve Davis has been a vital point person for Elon Musk. His next act is to help the billionaire sort out the government.

Longtime Musk loyalist Davis has been enlisted to recruit staff for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Donald Trump has tasked Musk with overseeing the new department, the authority and jurisdiction of which is still unclear, alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, according to a new Bloomberg report.

Davis's appearance in operational planning at DOGE, a project proposed to drive $2 trillion in cuts to federal spending, is not surprising. Davis and Musk's working relationship stretches back more than two decades.

Davis first entered the Musk sphere in 2003, when he joined his rocket company, SpaceX, just one year after its founding. While working for the company in Washington, D.C., he decided to launch a dessert shop called Mr Yogato, a 2019 Bloomberg report said.

Davis' ties with Musk have only deepened since then. The Stanford University-educated aerospace engineer helped Musk launch the Boring Company, a tunneling and construction business, in 2016. He was later appointed president and CEO.

He was also reported to have advised the billionaire in the early days of his Twitter takeover, where Musk initiated a sweeping layoff plan that reduced head count by almost 90% in first six months.

Bloomberg reported that Davis was so willing to help Musk during the takeover in October 2022, he slept at Twitter's offices with his partner and newborn baby.

It is not yet clear how Davis will help steer Musk's cost-cutting ambitions when Trump's second term in the White House begins, though Bloomberg's report offers some clues based on Davis' activities at other Musk companies.

According to the report, Davis' leadership responsibilities at The Boring Company involves "signing off on costs as low as a few hundred dollars." The report also said he "drives hard bargains with suppliers."

Meanwhile, during his stint at SpaceX, Davis was reported to have helped Musk find a $3,900 alternative to a part that cost $120,000.

• My husband and I lived in Canada in our 20s, and we brought our young kids there a decade later.
• Our children were 4 years old and 8 months old, so they don't remember any of the overseas trip.
• With two young kids, we had to skip or adjust a lot of the activities we'd planned or hoped to do.

My husband and I lived in Canada in our 20s, and couldn't wait to return a decade later.

Some of our happiest memories were of living in Banff in the Rockies, meeting other young people, going on epic outdoors adventures, and exploring Canada's national parks.

This time around, though, we had our 4-year-old and 8-month-old kids to take with us. On our overseas adventure, we planned to visit my brother in Vancouver for his 50th birthday and road trip across British Columbia and Alberta.

After our grueling 17-hour flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Vancouver, we hit the ground running. In total, we spent 10 days exploring Banff National Park in an RV and went on a road trip throughout Hope and other parts of Canada.

We had great moments along the way but we learned some tough lessons, too.

We couldn't do the same things we used to

On our first trip to Banff, we had zero responsibility. This time, we had two little people to care for — and they came first.

I realized pretty quickly that having young children hindered us from doing some of the things we used to love in the area.

Before we arrived, I had naïve visions of being able to go on epic hikes with the kids strapped to our backs. In reality, they didn't want to traipse up a mountain (on my back or otherwise).

Instead, we took short walks with a stroller and made lots of stops along the way to look at butterflies, pick flowers, and eat snacks.

One night, our housemates kindly offered to look after the kids, so my husband and I snuck away for a cocktail at the restaurant I'd worked at a decade earlier.

Two sips in, they called to say our baby girl wouldn't stop crying, so we rushed back to their place as fast as we could. All in all, having young kids meant we had a very different kind of travel experience.

Next time, we'll wait until our kids are older to travel overseas

Banff wasn't quite the same the second time around, largely because we were in a new stage in life with different priorities: our young kids.

Looking back, it would've been better to wait until our children were both older to take them overseas.

I'd hoped that our 4-year-old son would at least remember this trip, but he's now 9 and a lot of those memories have faded. Sometimes I'll ask him about Vancouver or a particular lake we visited in Canada, and he'll just give me a blank stare.

He was just a little too young to appreciate the privilege (and expense) of traveling to another country. I'm confident if we took him overseas today, he'd remember it far better, as I still recall trips I took abroad with my family when I was around his age.

We now have three children and our youngest is a toddler. So, at this time, we're just focusing on exploring our backyard and taking domestic vacations in Australia.

In a few years, though, we'd like to take the kids on another overseas expedition — ideally one they'll remember.

• An Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people.
• Analysts said Russian air defenses, not a bird strike, may have caused the plane to go down.
• An aviation safety firm plans to raise its risk rating for the nearby airspace after the incident.

An Azerbaijan Airlines flight crash-landed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, with Russia's civil aviation authority quickly pointing to a bird strike as a possible cause.

However, analysts said that Russian air defenses may have been behind the incident, which killed 38 of the 67 people on board, including both pilots.

Ukraine was quick to put the blame on Russia.

On Wednesday, Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, said in an X post that the plane was "shot down by a Russian air defense system."

But others have also suggested that Russian air defenses may have played a role.

Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation security firm, said in a critical alert sent to its clients and shared with Business Insider that the flight was "likely shot down by a Russian military air-defense system of unspecified type/variant over the North Caucasus Federal District."

The firm cited video of the wreckage, Ukraine's official statement, and the "circumstances around the airspace security environment in southwest Russia."

It also said that "incidents of civilian airliners being misidentified and shot down by air-defence systems are not unprecedented in the region."

It pointed to examples such as Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in eastern Ukraine in 2014 after reportedly being hit by a Russian-made missile.

Matthew Borie, Osprey's chief intelligence officer, told BI that the firm was in the process of raising its risk ratings for that portion of Russian airspace to its highest level.

"We have a portion of Russian airspace within 300 kilometers of the Ukrainian border, we have at extreme, we'll be expanding that out to about 600 kilometers from the Russian border now," he said, equivalent to 373 miles.

The Azerbaijan Airlines flight was en route to Grozny, which Ukrainian drones have targeted in recent attacks.

The governor of the Russian region of North Ossetia said in a Telegram post that there were Ukrainian drone attacks carried out on Wednesday in a number of regions of the North Caucasus Federal District, which includes Grozny and the surrounding area.

The governor's post specifically mentioned a drone being taken down in Vladikavkas, which is about 70 miles away from Grozny.

Oliver Alexander, an independent OSINT analyst, told BI that "all the evidence I have seen points to the aircraft being hit by shrapnel from an air defense missile, which severely damaged the elevator and rudder controls."

In a thread on X, which cited post-crash footage, he wrote that "every single piece of debris that hit the aircraft had enough kinetic to punch through the skin and not just dent it."

Alexander also dismissed the preliminary information from Russia's civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, which suggested that the plane diverted after a bird strike, causing an onboard emergency.

He told BI that a bird strike would produce "a lot of blood" and "a lot of denting," neither of which seemed apparent in footage and images from the crash site.

"The location of the damage is all focused around the tail section," he added, "which would be very unlikely for a bird strike."

Russia has cautioned against drawing conclusions.

On Thursday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it "would be wrong to put forward any hypotheses" until the investigation into the crash is concluded.

"We, of course, will not do this, and no-one should do this," he added, per a translation by the BBC.

Azerbaijan Airline's president, Samir Rzayev, told reporters Wednesday that the plane's black box had been recovered and its analysis was being "conducted in line with international aviation standards."

The country's president, Ilham Aliyev, said in a statement that while there are videos of the crash online, the cause was still unknown.

However, on Thursday, unnamed Azerbaijani government sources told Euronews that a preliminary investigation had found that a Russian surface-to-air missile caused the crash.

According to Euronews, the sources said that shrapnel from the missile hit the plane after it exploded during drone activity above Grozny.

Azerbaijan's Foreign Affairs department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Elon Musk had some criticism for former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on Christmas Day.
• "Boeing is on a much better track with the new CEO," Musk wrote on X.
• Musk said Calhoun, an accounting graduate, "had no idea how airplanes or rockets worked."

Boeing is "on a much better track" after changing CEOs, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday.

Musk was talking about America's shortage of engineering talent on X when he was asked about the embattled aerospace manufacturer.

"That said, talking in terms of specific companies, Boeing is on a much better track with the new CEO. The prior guy had no idea how airplanes or rockets worked. Just zero," Musk wrote in his post.

Boeing was previously led by Dave Calhoun, who served as the company's CEO from January 2020 to July 2024.

The Virginia Tech accounting graduate was succeeded by former Rockwell Collins CEO Kelly Ortberg in August. Ortberg holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Iowa.

When Boeing announced Calhoun's resignation in March, Calhoun said the decision was 100% his own.

"I've entered my fifth year. At the end of this year, I'll be close to 68 years old," Calhoun said in an interview with CNBC.

This isn't the first time Musk has criticized Calhoun's academic background. Back in June, Musk said that Boeing had lost touch with its engineering roots.

"The CEO of an aircraft company should know how to design aircraft, not spreadsheets," Musk wrote in an X post on June 25.

Representatives for Calhoun and Ortberg at Boeing did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment. Musk also did not respond to a request for comment.

Calhoun's departure came amid a deepening quality-control crisis at Boeing.

The aerospace company faced intense scrutiny in January after a door plug flew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 during an Alaskan Airlines flight from Oregon to California.

The incident resulted in a series of investigations from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Justice, and the National Transportation Safety Board.

According to a Senate subcommittee report on Boeing's safety and quality practices that was published in June, several whistleblowers came forward to express concerns about how Boeing handles faulty plane parts.

Calhoun's predecessor, Dennis Muilenburg, was fired after two crashes involving a different Max variant, the Max 8, killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

Calhoun publicly apologized to the families of the crash victims during a Senate hearing in June, but defended Boeing's safety record when he was grilled by lawmakers.

"You're proud of the safety record?" Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri asked Calhoun.

"I am proud of every action we've taken," Calhoun said.

In October, Ortberg shared his four-part turnaround plan for Boeing in a memo to employees.

Ortberg's plan called for a fundamental change in the company's culture, a stabilization of its business, an improvement in execution discipline, and the building of a new future for the planemaker.

"We need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops and in our engineering labs. We need to know what's going on, not only with our products, but with our people," Ortberg wrote.

"And most importantly, we need to prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause," he added.

Boeing reported a net loss of $6.1 billion in the third quarter of 2024 in the same month. The company recorded a loss of more than $1.4 billion in the previous quarter.

Boeing's shares are down by over 31% this year.

"It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy, but with the right focus and culture, we can be an iconic company and aerospace leader once again," Ortberg said in his October memo.

"He was like, 'Ouuu girl this not it,'" one viewer commented, while another posted: "Paused to contemplate and everything."

The vast majority of the world's data runs through undersea cables, which can be exposed to attacks under what is known as hybrid warfare.

Far-right activist and conservative commentator Laura Loomer has been engaged in a social media spat over H-1B visas.

LeBron had a strange, unprompted comment about the NFL after the Lakers win over the Warriors.

Newcastle United and Aston Villa are separated by two points and two places in the Premier League table when they meet on Thursday.

Podcast host Lex Fridman said he wanted to interview Volodymyr Zelensky in Russian as it is a language both men are fluent in.

"The Odyssey" marks the Oscar-winning director's second collaboration with Universal Pictures.

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