Good morning – and congrats to us all for somehow making it to the end of 2025. The newsletter is off until Monday, so let’s wrap up with a few memorable images captured by Globe photographers this year. Thanks so much for reading Morning Update, and I’ll see you back in your inbox in 2026. But first:

• China threatens a “chokehold” on Taiwan and fires rockets into the island’s surrounding waters
• RCMP search for two armed men after a deadly shooting on a Saskatchewan First Nation
• Canadian and European leaders discuss the U.S.-led peace efforts as Russia-Ukraine tensions spike

When photographer Fred Lum rolled up to the 28th annual Saskatchewan Summer Star Party in August, he found hundreds of amateur astronomers armed with their finest equipment: large-aperture telescopes, digital cameras and computers, sky atlases and star charts.

Lum added his film camera to the mix, brought along for the express purpose of taking a single, hours-long exposure of the night sky. The result is the stellar image you see above, which reveals the rotation of our planet through the trails of light the stars left behind.

It’s one of my favourite pictures from 2025, though I’m partial to all the work our staff photographers were proud of this year. Here’s a few more of those great shots.

Last March, two extremely adorable world-record holders celebrated their third birthday, a milestone that seemed almost unthinkable when they were delivered 22 weeks and zero days into their mother’s pregnancy. Globe photographer Melissa Tait has been at each one of Adiah and Adrial Nadarajah’s birthday parties, capturing the remarkable development of the most prematurely born twins ever to survive.

Tait chased the toddlers around with a camera in their home and at a play place, where Adrial kept scampering up a slide and dropping into the ball pit. “He continues to overcome the physical limitations from his early birth,” Tait says. “And I continue to be astonished when I see both twins with their strength and growing personalities.”

Over the summer, record-shattering heat drove bigger, stronger wildfires all across Europe, burning more than a million hectares of land and displacing thousands of people from their homes. In Patras, Greece’s third-largest city, tall flames tore through the olive groves and exploded behind apartment blocks.

Goran Tomasevic has photographed conflict and crisis around the world for three decades, and in August, he travelled to Patras to document the fires. He saw water-dropping helicopters swooping overhead, people rushing religious icons to safety as the flames approached a church, and two men hugging amid the smoke. “The fire engulfed the houses of Patras, destroying everything,” Tomasevic says. “The sound of burning trees was scary; I will never forget it.”

Over his 41 years at The Globe, Fred Lum has covered a huge and diverse range of photo assignments. Sometimes, he gets to gaze up at the stars. Sometimes, he witnesses a World Series game. And not infrequently, he’s dispatched to Toronto’s Financial District for a story on big banks or return-to-office orders or the slow pace of AI adoption.

When that happens, Lum says, he’ll get downtown early to shoot the commuters spilling out of Union Station on their way to work. “If I time it right, the morning sun will reflect off the many glass-covered office towers and shine back down onto street level.” Then he just has to wait for the tableau to emerge – a bit of patience we might all carry into 2026.

This year, seven Canadian tech firms crossed US$100-million in annual revenue, adding their names to an elite group that now boasts 77 members. And guess what unites most of these companies? Yup, they’re all leaning hard into AI.