News gathered 2024-06-06
(date: 2024-06-06 08:59:13)
Milk-V Meles RISC-V single-board computer is now available for $80
date: 2024-06-06, from: Liliputing
The Milk-V Meles is a Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer with a similar credit card-sized design featuring a decent number of full-sized ports as well as a 40-pin GPIO connector and MIPI-CSI and MIPI-DSIC connectors. But while Raspberry Pi’s little computers feature ARM-based processors, the Milk-V Meles is powered by a quad-core RISC-V processor. First announced last […]
The post Milk-V Meles RISC-V single-board computer is now available for $80 appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/milk-v-meles-risc-v-single-board-computer-is-now-available-for-80/
Oregon football team’s academic performance drops again: Time for alarm in Eugene? (Probably not)
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Ducks have accumulated several years of low Academic Progress Rate scores and will be banned from the 2025 postseason if the situation doesn’t stabilize.
Meta faces multiple complaints in Europe over plans to train AI on user data
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Opt out or prepare for your posts to be ingested
Meta’s plans to use customer data in AI training have resulted in complaints to data protection authorities in 11 European countries.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/meta_ai_complaints/
A 27-Year Old Tamagotchi Mystery Has Been Solved
date: 2024-06-06, from: 404 Media Group
“Looking at it now, this looks like a bad schoolyard video game urban legend. But it is real.”
https://www.404media.co/a-27-year-old-tamagotchi-mystery-has-been-solved/
Jurors in Hunter Biden trial hear more from clerk who sold him gun at center of case
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
WILMINGTON, Delaware — Jurors at Hunter Biden’s criminal trial heard more Thursday from the former gun store clerk who sold him the .38-caliber Colt revolver at the center of the case.
The clerk testified Wednesday that he watched as President Joe Biden’s son checked off “no” to the question of whether he was “an unlawful user of or addicted to” marijuana, stimulants, narcotics or any other controlled substance.
Federal prosecutors have argued Hunter Biden was in the throes of a heavy crack addiction when he bought the gun, and they’ve accused him of lying on the form. He’s been charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application by saying he was not a drug user, and illegally having the gun for 11 days.
The Democratic president’s son arrived at court Thursday with a copy of his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” tucked under his arm. The book, written after he got sober in 2021, figures heavily into prosecutors’ case: They’ve played audio excerpts for jurors in which he details his descent into drugs and alcohol following the death of his brother, Beau, in 2015.
Hunter Biden, who has pleaded not guilty, has said the Justice Department is bending to political pressure from Republicans and that he’s being wrongly targeted.
Jurors have been shown as evidence Form 4473, the firearms transaction record in question, and on Wednesday, they saw the gun that was purchased.
Gordon Cleveland, the former clerk at StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply, told jurors he walked Hunter Biden through a few options before he settled on the $900 gun, and he watched Biden sign the form, which includes a warning about the consequences of submitting false information.
“Everything he bought, he ultimately decided on,” he told jurors.
In his cross-examination Thursday, defense attorney Abbe Lowell pointed out that some of the questions on the form are in the present tense, such as “are you an unlawful user of or addicted to” drugs. He has suggested Hunter Biden did not believe he had an active drug problem.
Other questions are in the past tense, such as asking the potential gun buyer whether he or she has ever been discharged from the military or been adjudicated as a mental defective.
Much of the prosecution’s case so far has been dedicated to highlighting the seriousness of his crack addiction and showcasing to jurors bare-chested moments with ex-girlfriends, infidelity, crack pipes — judgment lapses they believe prove he was actively using when he checked off no. Prosecutors argue it’s necessary evidence to show his state of mind when he bought the gun.
The proceedings are unfolding after the collapse of a plea deal that would have resolved the gun charge and a separate tax case, and spared the Biden family the spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024 election. First lady Jill Biden spent several days in court before joining President Joe Biden in France for the D-Day anniversary. Allies worry about the toll the proceedings will take on the president, who is deeply concerned about the health and sustained sobriety of his only living son.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s friends and family are being called to testify.
Kathleen Buhle, who was married to Hunter Biden for 20 years, told jurors Wednesday that she discovered her husband was using drugs when she found a crack pipe in an ashtray on their porch on July 3, 2015, a day after their anniversary. When she confronted him, “he acknowledged smoking crack,” she said.
Buhle testified that even before she found the drugs, she suspected he was using. He had been kicked out of the Navy after testing positive for cocaine.
“I was definitely worried, scared,” she said. They have three children and divorced in 2016 after his infidelity and drug abuse became too much, according to her memoir, “If We Break,” about the dissolution of their marriage.
Buhle, who was subpoenaed, was on the stand for a brief 20 minutes. She remained composed but seemed upset as she recounted how she searched his car about a dozen times for drugs, whenever the children were driving it.
“Did you ever see Hunter using drugs?” Lowell asked Buhle.
“No,” she replied.
Then prosecutor Leo Wise asked Buhle how she knew Hunter Biden was using drugs.
“He told me,” she said.
Prosecutors also called Zoe Kestan, who testified under immunity about meeting Hunter Biden in December 2017 at a strip club in New York where she worked. During a private session, he pulled out a pipe and began smoking what she assumed was crack.
“He was incredibly charming and charismatic and friendly, and I felt really safe around him,” she said. “I remember after he had smoked it, nothing had changed. He was the same charming person.”
Kestan detailed for jurors when she saw him use drugs, buy drugs, talk about drugs or possess drug paraphernalia. Prosecutors asked her where he stored his drugs and pipes, and she testified he kept them in pouches and other places, such as sunglasses cases.
On cross-examination, Kestan acknowledged that she had no contact with him in October 2018, the period when he bought the gun.
Prosecutors have also used his own words as evidence through his memoir and text messages he sent to friends and family. The memoir covers the period he bought the gun, though it doesn’t mention the weapon specifically.
Lowell has said Hunter Biden’s state of mind was different when he wrote the book than when he purchased the gun, when he didn’t believe he had an addiction. And he’s suggested Hunter Biden might have felt he had a drinking problem at the time, but not a drug problem. Alcohol abuse doesn’t preclude a gun purchase.
If convicted, Hunter Biden faces up to 25 years in prison, though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near the maximum, and it’s unclear whether the judge would give him time behind bars.
He’s also facing a separate trial in September on charges of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes.
In Congress, Republicans have for months pursued an impeachment inquiry seeking to tie President Biden to his son’s business dealings. So far, GOP lawmakers have failed to uncover evidence directly implicating President Biden in any wrongdoing. But on Wednesday, House Republicans accused Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden of making false statements to Congress as part of the inquiry.
The trial is unfolding shortly after Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was convicted of 34 felonies in New York City. The two criminal cases are unrelated, but their proximity underscores how the courts have taken center stage during the 2024 campaign.
Lottery ticket worth $621,419 sold at Milpitas convenience store
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
No one in the state won the Powerball lottery game jackpot of $185 million Wednesday night, but someone playing the game at a South Bay convenience store is $621,419 richer, officials said.
Court Allows K-Pop Group to Subpoena YouTuber’s Identity from Google
date: 2024-06-06, from: 404 Media Group
K-pop group NewJeans is attempting to sue the anonymous user of a YouTube account for defamation, but cannot proceed without obtaining their identity.
https://www.404media.co/newjeans-kpop-google-youtube-lawsuit/
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft detects leaks on journey to ISS
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/boeing-starliner-spacecraft-detects-leaks-on-journey-to-iss/7645414.html
Dominant AI players Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI face US antitrust inquiries
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hmm… world’s most valuable companies furthest ahead with world’s most coveted tech. WCGW?
Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia are set to be investigated for potential antitrust violations with regard to their dominant positions in the burgeoning AI industry, according to reports.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/nvidia_microsoft_and_openai_face/
Earbuds vs headphones and other personal listening devices
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Losing a device that can cost $200 or more is no joke so, despite the portability and convenience of these small earbuds, there is a good reason to consider an alternative, including much less expensive earbuds.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/06/larry-magid-earbuds/
Lakers reportedly targeting UConn’s Dan Hurley for coaching job
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Hurley has won back-to-back men’s NCAA national championships at the helm of the Huskies.
Facebook’s Taylor Swift Fan Pages Taken Over by Animal Abuse, Porn, and Scams
date: 2024-06-06, from: 404 Media Group
Here is how I found hardcore porn, pirated content, malware, and endless scams on Facebook: I typed “Katy Perry” into the search bar.
https://www.404media.co/facebooks-taylor-swift-fan-pages-taken-over-by-bestiality-porn-and-scams-2/
OSNews needs your help to stay alive
date: 2024-06-06, from: OS News
As some of you will know, I recently started working on OSNews as my full-time job, and that means I sometimes need to be annoying and remind you all that I need your help in keeping the website going. Ad income has been going down the drain for years and years now, so your support is crucial in keeping OSNews online. We’ve been providing you with the latest technology news for over 25 years now, and I’d really like to keep things going for another 25 years. So, how can you help? You can become an OSNews Patreon, which will remove ads from OSNews, and give you a little bit of flair on every comment you post to show off that you support us. We offer three pricing tiers with an increasing level of prominence for your flair, with the highest tier giving you the option of choosing your own flair to really show off to your fellow readers and commenters that you are just a little bit more equal than everyone else. You can also make individual donations through Ko-Fi. Since I really need to replace the monitor of my OSNews workstation – after eight years of loyal use, the cheap monitor is started to show ghosting and flickering, and I feel like it could give out at any moment – I’ve set a goal on Ko-Fi for this very purpose. I don’t expect this goal to be met any time soon, but it’s a nice target to aim for and look forward to. I intend to replace the old 4K display with the cheapest 4K/144Hz panel I can find here in Sweden, but since that will most likely be unrealistic price-wise, the goal is rooted more in aspiration than reality. There are other ways to support us too – you can make a donation through Liberapay, or go to our merch store and buy T-shirts, mugs, and other cool items. The ultimate goal that I’m working towards is to eventually be able to offer ad-free by default, fully supported by you, our generous readers. This is a long-term goal and not something we’ll achieve overnight, but I want to maintain OSNews’ independence at all costs. Virtually every other technology news site you visit is part of a major media empire, such as The Verge or Ars Technica, with huge amounts of staff and massive funds backing them – and all the questionable relationships between writers and the technology companies that entails. Add to it the rise of artificial intelligence and the negative consequences that’s going to have, and the need for independent, reader-funded technology websites is greater than ever. That being said, we will not be gating content behind paywalls, so even if you cannot or are unwilling to support us, you will still get all the same content as everyone else. As such, supporting OSNews financially is entirely optional, and will not degrade your experience in any way. Still, OSNews’ continued existence is entirely dependent on me being able to generate enough income through it, so while you do not have to support us, it’s definitely needed.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139901/osnews-needs-your-help-to-stay-alive/
Biden on D-Day: West won’t abandon Ukraine
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, FRANCE — U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday marked the solemnity of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing of Allied troops on the shores of Normandy by vowing that the United States and NATO would not abandon support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s two-year invasion.
Speaking in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Biden said “we will not walk away” from Ukraine’s defense and “surrender to bullies.”
The U.S. leader said Ukraine was invaded by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a “tyrant intent on domination,” and that democracy is now more at risk than at any point since World War II.
“Make no mistake, we will not bow down, we cannot surrender to the bullies, it is simply unthinkable. If we do, freedom will be subjugated, all Europe will be threatened,” he said in offering wide support for the global world order that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” he said during a ceremony at the American cemetery in Normandy. “If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.”
D-Day was the largest amphibious assault in history, and Biden called it a “powerful illustration of how alliances, real alliances make us stronger.”
He said that was “a lesson that I pray we Americans never forget.”
Biden greeted World War II veterans who participated in the D-Day landings, including many in wheelchairs and some who are more than 100 years old.
“You saved the world,” Biden told one veteran. He greeted each veteran one by one, offering a salute or a handshake, and handing them a special coin he had designed for the occasion.
Biden’s appearance came in the midst of his 2024 reelection campaign for the presidency against Republican Donald Trump, who spoke at the 75th anniversary of D-Day five years ago.
Trump, who has often questioned the necessity of the U.S. commitment to NATO, the West’s main military alliance, hailed the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy in his 2019 speech but did not praise the global alliances that emerged after the war.
Trump has often attacked European members of NATO who do not spend the equivalent of 2% of their national economic output on defense, a NATO-suggested level for defense of their own countries.
Biden has cited his administration’s record of building global alliances as a key accomplishment. He recently told Time magazine that Trump “wanted to just abandon” U.S. allies and suggested the former president would ultimately pull the country out of NATO if he is elected.
VOA’s Anita Powell contributed to this report from Colleville-Sur-Mer
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-on-d-day-west-won-t-abandon-ukraine-/7645388.html
San Jose food bank preps warehouse shutdown after facing rent hike
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Second Harvest of Silicon Valley has decided to shut one of its warehouses after learning it was facing a rent hike.
Ariane 6 ready to rocket, bringing heavy-lift capability back to Europe
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Just a wet dress rehearsal left before debut launch
The much-delayed Ariane 6 rocket is scheduled to launch on July 9 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/july_9_ariane_6_launch/
18-year-old shot multiple times in East Oakland
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
The man told police he had just left a liquor store when he heard gunfire and began running away before realizing he had been shot.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/06/18-year-old-shot-multiple-times-in-east-oakland/
California home-price gains may ‘cool’ in next 12 months
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
California ranked No. 15 with 7% price gains in the past year vs. 5.7% nationally.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/06/california-home-price-gains-may-cool-in-next-12-months/
SpaceX’s mega rocket completes its fourth test flight from Texas without exploding
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
Boca Chica, Texas — SpaceX’s mega Starship rocket completed its first full test flight Thursday, returning to Earth without exploding after blasting off from Texas.
The previous three test flights ended in explosions of the rocket and the spacecraft. This time, both managed to splash down in a controlled fashion.
The world’s largest and most powerful rocket — almost 121 meters tall — was empty as it soared above the Gulf of Mexico and headed east on a flight to the Indian Ocean.
Minutes after Thursday morning’s liftoff, the first-stage booster separated from the spacecraft and splashed into the gulf precisely as planned, after firing its engines.
An hour later, live views showed parts of the spacecraft breaking away during the intense heat of reentry, but it remained intact enough to transmit data all the way to its targeted splashdown site in the Indian Ocean.
“And we have splashdown!” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice announced from Mission Control at company headquarters in California.
It was a critical milestone in the company’s plan to eventually return Starship’s Super Heavy booster to its launch site for reuse.
SpaceX came close to avoiding explosion in March, but lost contact with the spacecraft as it careened out of space and blew up short of its goal. The booster also ruptured in flight, a quarter-mile above the gulf.
Last year’s two test flights ended in explosions shortly after blasting off from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The first one cratered the pad at Boca Chica Beach and hurled debris for thousands of feet (meters).
SpaceX upgraded the software and made some rocket-flyback changes to improve the odds. The Federal Aviation Administration signed off Tuesday on this fourth demo, saying all safety requirements had been met.
Starship is designed to be fully reusable. That’s why SpaceX wants to control the booster’s entry into the gulf and the spacecraft’s descent into the Indian Ocean — it’s intended as practice for planned future landings. Nothing is being recovered from Thursday’s flight.
NASA has ordered a pair of Starships for two moon-landing missions by astronauts, on tap for later this decade. Each moon crew will rely on NASA’s own rocket and capsule to leave Earth, but meet up with Starship in lunar orbit for the ride down to the surface.
SpaceX already is selling tourist trips around the moon. The first private lunar customer, a Japanese tycoon, pulled out of the trip with his entourage last week, citing the oft-delayed schedule.
SpaceX’s founder and CEO has grander plans: Musk envisions fleets of Starships launching people and the infrastructure necessary to build a city on Mars.
https://www.voanews.com/a/spacex-s-megarocket-starship-launches-on-fourth-test-flight/7645357.html
The First Responder UAS Wireless Data Gatherer Challenge
date: 2024-06-06, from: NASA breaking news
The First Responder UAS Wireless Data Gatherer Challenge (UAS 6.0) seeks innovators with applicable expertise across and beyond the UAS ecosystem. For public safety and the greater good, contribute invaluable knowledge and ingenuity in artificial intelligence (AI), radio communications and mapping, Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity, and more. Challenge results will support the public safety […]
Former President Donald Trump expected in Bay Area for fundraiser
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
The fundraiser comes a week after the former president’s conviction on 34 felony counts in a “hush-money” trial.
AI PCs might solve a real problem: The ‘friction’ that sees users ignore security
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Trend Micro says cloudy email scans trigger GDPR warnings that deter users. Local models that use NPUs don’t
Computex Trend Micro has outlined how it will tailor its desktop security software for AI PCs, and thinks it might improve security in ways that normal, bog-standard PCs can’t match.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/trend_micro_ai_pc_security/
The 2024 FAA Data Challenge
date: 2024-06-06, from: NASA breaking news
The 2024 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Data Challenge ushers in a groundbreaking opportunity for university students to identify challenges and present solutions toward the evolution of the National Airspace System (NAS) into a more information-centric entity. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, participants are invited to tackle pressing challenges within aviation […]
An obscure option could help Californians without high school diplomas pay for college — if it survives
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Adults without high school diplomas can attend community college, but few of them receive financial aid, even when they’re eligible. A new proposal from Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian aims to fix that. But it may be too late.
Baseball’s Gambling Hypocrisy
date: 2024-06-06, from: Om Malik blog
If you’re wondering why this is a topic of interest, let me elaborate — whether it involves selling in-game upgrades, pursuing growth at all costs on Facebook, or engaging in sports betting, I believe these practices are fundamentally wrong and not right way to use technology for the greater good. The weaponization of betting in …
https://om.co/2024/06/06/baseballs-gambling-hypocrisy/
A BSD person tries Alpine Linux
date: 2024-06-06, from: OS News
I’ve barely scratched the surface, but there’s enough here for me to seriously consider a switch to it as my primary Linux distro for testing and servers. I love that htop(1) and lsof(1) only shows a small list of recognisable processes, that it uses OpenRC, that package management seems straight forward, and that it’s so simple to configure. I’ve wondered what a modern, functional “Occam’s Linux” would look like. This is it. ↫ Ruben Schade Alpine is very popular among people inclined towards BSD, but who still want to run Linux as well – and it’s easy to see why when you try it out or read about it. This article is a good jumping-off point for those of you curious about Alpine.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139899/a-bsd-person-tries-alpine-linux-2/
Why 401(k) plans aren’t equitable
date: 2024-06-06, from: Marketplace Morning Report
A new report out of investment advisor Vanguard finds that more than 40% of employer matches go to the richest 20% of workers — and it’s not just because they have the highest salaries. We’ll discuss the problems with the 401(k) model and hear a potential fix. Plus, St. Louis is grappling with a “real estate doom loop.” How did it get there and how might it get out?
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/why-401k-plans-arent-equitable
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
2018: Comey made announcement on Clinton email probe days before election to give himself cover.
Targeted Genome Editor Delivery Challenge
date: 2024-06-06, from: NASA breaking news
Gene editing holds the promise to treat genetic diseases at the source by correcting the faulty genetic patterns within our cells. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched the TARGETED (Targeted Genome Editor Delivery) Challenge to advance genome editing technology by sourcing innovative solutions for delivering genome editors to somatic cells. The Challenge is […]
They’re putting “AI” in your BIOS
date: 2024-06-06, from: OS News
You know what could really use a dose of “AI”? Your BIOS. aiBIOS leverages an LLM to integrate AI capabilities into Insyde Software’s flagship firmware solution, InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS. It provides the ability to interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle for PC users that require or desire changes to their BIOS Setup for their personal computers but do not fully understand the meaning of the settings available to them. ↫ Insyde press release Google told users to put glue on pizzas and eat rocks, so I’m sure the combined efforts of a BIOS maker will surely not pose any problems when automatically changing BIOS settings based on the requests of users who do not really understand what they’re doing. This surely is a recipe for success, and I can’t wait to tell my BIOS to enable XMP, only for it to disable hyperthreading, change the boot order to only allow booting from the non-existent floppy drive, and to force the use of the integrated GPU when I’m actually using a dedicated one. This is going to be just fine.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139896/theyre-puting-ai-in-your-bios/
Red Lobster announces the Bay Area locations it wants to shut down
date: 2024-06-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Red Lobster wants to close several dozen more restaurants following its bankruptcy, and it has identified which ones are in danger of shutting down if the court approves its plan.
Lost and Found
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I found a semi-used Rolex Submariner with a black dial in the ground while I was running.
The post Lost and Found appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/06/lost-and-found-2/
Water Supply Forecast Rodeo
date: 2024-06-06, from: NASA breaking news
Accurate seasonal water supply forecasts are crucial for effective water resources management. Help the Bureau of Reclamation develop models to forecast the cumulative streamflow volume for sites across the Western United States. Government Agency: Bureau of Reclamation Award: $500,000 Open Date: October 2023 Close Date: July 2024 For more information, visit: https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/group/reclamation-water-supply-forecast/
An overview of the Starlark language
date: 2024-06-06, from: OS News
Starlark is a small programming language, designed as a simple dialect of Python and intended primarily for embedded use in applications. Some people might say it’s a bit like Lua with Python syntax, but I think there are many interesting bits to discuss. The language is now open-source and used in many other applications and companies. As I led the design and implementation of Starlark, I’d like to write a bit more about it. ↫ Laurent Le Brun I’m sure there’s a few among you will like this.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139894/an-overview-of-the-starlark-language/
NASA Marshall Engineer Receives AIAA Honors Award
date: 2024-06-06, from: NASA breaking news
By Daniel Boyette Advanced space nuclear propulsion systems are critical to NASA’s Moon to Mars vision. On May 15, one of the individuals at the forefront of those future exploration efforts was honored for his contributions. Kurt Polzin, chief engineer for the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, […]
Uncle Sam seeks to claw back $5M+ stolen from trade union through spoofed email
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Funds are currently seized after being sent to offshore accounts
The US Justice Department is seeking permission to recover more than $5 million worth of funds stolen from a trade union by business email compromise (BEC) scammers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/union_bec_scam/
Pioneering Research for Early Prediction of Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias EUREKA Challenge
date: 2024-06-06, from: NASA breaking news
The National Institute on Aging (NIA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) seeks to stimulate the use of data resources with appropriate sample diversity, including data relevant to under-resourced, underserved communities disproportionately burdened by AD/ADRD. For example, for Asian, Black, or Hispanic older adults, the protein amyloid – which has long been […]
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The best thing Moscow Mitch could do is resign and make way for a Repub who isn't totally stained by MAGA if there are any.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/opinion/mcconnell-military-spending-d-day.html
Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned
date: 2024-06-06, from: OS News
The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says “several days” of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC’s native resolution, minus the taskbar area). Recall works locally thanks to Azure AI code that runs on your device, and it works without Internet connectivity and without a Microsoft account. Data is encrypted at rest, sort of, at least insofar as your entire drive is generally encrypted when your PC is either signed into a Microsoft account or has Bitlocker turned on. But in its current form, Beaumont says Recall has “gaps you can drive a plane through” that make it trivially easy to grab and scan through a user’s Recall database if you either (1) have local access to the machine and can log into any account (not just the account of the user whose database you’re trying to see), or (2) are using a PC infected with some kind of info-stealer virus that can quickly transfer the SQLite database to another system. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica It really does seem Recall is kind of a mess in the security department, and it has a certain rushed quality about it. All the screenshots are saved in an AppData folder, and data pulled from those screenshots is stored in a local SQLite database that happens to be entirely unencrypted. TotalRecall, a tool developed by Alexander Hagenah, will neatly pull the data from Recall for you without any hassle or issues. This truly is a security nightmare. Aside from all the obvious issues this presents, such as making it even easier for law enforcement to gain access to pretty much everything you do online, something especially troubling for minorities or in countries with less-than-stellar police departments, Recall also presents a whole host of other problems. Imagine being in an abusive relationship, and the abusive partner demanding Recall be left on at all times to exert even more control. Imagine an unscrupulous employee abusing Recall to steal sensitive information from a company for a competitor. Imagine living in some backwards part of a country with controlling religious parents, and you happen to be gay. The problems here are endless. The fact you can turn Recall off doesn’t mean much, since in the above examples, turning it off is not an option since there are controlling people involved who will demand you keep it on. Browser history and other forms of history in your computer exist as well, of course, but they’re not always as easy to parse, they’re easier to manipulate, sanitise, and temporarily hide. Recall just combines all of this and puts a neat little bow on it, ready to be abused by anyone with bad intentions. Recall is ill-conceived, badly implemented, and a solution looking for a problem, that in an of itself creates tons of other problems. I hope Microsoft reconsiders, but in a world where “AI” makes investors go nuts, I doubt we’ll see a sudden sense of clarity coming out of Redmond.
Tetris Company celebrates classic game’s 40th birthday
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
You’re not a 1985 truther, are you?
We hate to be the ones to break it to all you El Reg readers, but we’re informed the classic video game Tetris is turning 40.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/happy_birthday_tetris/
Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?
date: 2024-06-06, from: Quanta Magazine
Research suggests that psychedelic drugs can reopen critical periods of brain development to create opportunities for re-learning and psychological healing. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin speaks with Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist studying the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances.The post Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/can-psychedelics-improve-mental-health-20240606/
Inside a Kidnapping Planned on the FBI’s Secret Chat App
date: 2024-06-06, from: 404 Media Group
Anom, the FBI’s secret tech startup, is reaching breaking point due to being too popular. Will another murder fall through the cracks?
https://www.404media.co/dark-wire-inside-a-kidnapping-planned-on-the-fbis-secret-chat-app/
Clean Energy Investment Is Eclipsing Fossil Fuel Funding
date: 2024-06-06, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Unseasonably cool temperatures brought snow to parts of Scotland • New South Wales in Australia recorded more than a month’s worth of rain in just 12 hours • Multiple tornadoes were reported across Maryland.
THE TOP FIVE
- Gov. Hochul pauses NYC congestion pricing ‘indefinitely’
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced yesterday that she will “indefinitely pause” the long-awaited NYC congestion pricing program that was set to start on June 30. The policy would have charged drivers for entering some of the city’s busiest areas, raising $1 billion annually for the transit authority, cutting pollution, and easing traffic congestion. It would have been the first such program in the nation. But, no more. Hochul said it risked “too many unintended consequences.”
Environmental groups, state budget hawks, and transit advocates are outraged by the u-turn. Her decision “will be a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” wrote an incensed Robinson Meyer for Heatmap. “New York was bushwhacking a trail for everyone else to follow: If congestion policy was a success there, then other American cities could experiment with it in some form. By pausing that trial before it has even begun, Hochul has essentially frozen our ability to experiment with congestion pricing anywhere else in the country.”
2. IEA: Clean energy investment set to double fossil fuels in 2024
Global investment in clean energy is on track to reach $2 trillion in 2024, double the $1 trillion expected to be invested in fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. In its new World Energy Investment report, out today, the IEA said global spending on renewables surpassed the amount invested in fossil fuels last year for the first time. Most of the money is going toward solar power. Here’s a look at recent annual investment in solar PV (light blue) compared to all other power generation sources (dark blue):
China accounts for the largest share of clean energy investment by a long shot, and China, the U.S., and Europe make up more than two thirds of the world’s clean energy investment. “More must be done to ensure that investment reaches the places where it is needed most, in particular the developing economies where access to affordable, sustainable and secure energy is severely lacking today,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. Even as clean energy funds are flowing, spending on oil and gas is set to rise this year and remains far too high to meet the world’s climate goals, the report said. Just 4% of oil and gas companies’ 2023 investments went toward clean energy.
- UN secretary-general calls for global ban on fossil fuel ads
António Guterres yesterday urged nations to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies in a speech at the American Museum of Natural History. The UN secretary-general called the fossil fuel industry “the Godfathers of climate chaos,” and said advertising and PR agencies that take Big Oil on as clients are “enablers to planetary destruction.” He said the end of the fossil fuel age was an economic inevitability, but that global emissions need to fall 9% every year until 2030 to keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius alive. The next 18 months will be key to deciding our future, he said. “I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end – and taking us all with you,” Guterres said.
The speech coincided with a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) concluding there is an 80% chance that the global annual average temperature will exceed the 1.5C degree increase in one (or more) of the next five years. That’s up from a 66% chance last year, and as Guterres noted, “in 2015, the chance of such a breach was near zero.”
- Southwestern states bake under intense heat dome
Temperatures across much of the American Southwest are between 20 and 30 degrees Fahrenheit higher than usual for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service. Residents in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas are roasting under a heat dome that has settled on the region and will likely peak in severity today. In Phoenix, where temperatures will hit 111 degrees Fahrenheit today, all fire department vehicles are being kitted out with large ice bags in which people suffering from heat stroke can be submerged to lower their temperatures. In California’s Death Valley, the mercury will hit 120 degrees today. The heat wave is expected to boost emissions from California’s power sector as customers crank up their air conditioners. Below is a snapshot of the region today from the NWS HeatRisk tool. Regions in red are experiencing “major” heat-related impacts; purple regions are under extreme heat conditions.
NWS HeatRisk
- GM records best month for North American EV sales
In case you missed it: General Motors just had its best month ever in terms of EV sales. During a shareholder meeting on Tuesday, CEO Mary Barra said May was the company’s “best month ever for EV sales in North America,” adding that “we’re seeing profit improvement in our EV portfolio as we scale production of the broadest EV portfolio on the market, a portfolio purposely built to win new customers.” Demand was particularly strong for the Cadillac Lyric and the new Chevrolet Blazer EV. The news would have been unfathomable even last year, when GM reported cratering EV sales after it discontinued the Chevy Bolt EV, wrote Patrick George at Inside EVs. The new numbers are “an outstanding development for GM and for the wider EV market,” he said.
THE KICKER
A Department of Energy initiative will repurpose two former nuclear test sites in Idaho by using the land to install 400 megawatts of solar power with battery storage.
https://heatmap.news/climate/iea-clean-energy-investment-report
Atos defers its own D-Day to ponder financial rescue decision
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Restructure saga kicked into next week, investors unamused
Crisis-ridden tech giant Atos has further delayed a decision on its restructuring, putting back until next week the choice of a rescue package to reduce the company’s debt and get its finances back in shape.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/atos_defers_rescue_package/
What Trump, the businessman, can and can’t do as Trump, the felon
date: 2024-06-06, from: Marketplace Morning Report
It’s been one week since former President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election. So what’s to become of the publicly traded company he heads, Trump Media and Technology Group? Can a convicted felon legally be a principal of a publicly traded company? We discuss. Also on the show; Nvidia stock, congestion pricing and wage growth.
PeerJ Award Winners at ICTE 2024
date: 2024-06-06, from: PeerJ blog
Transposable elements, also known as mobile DNA, are present all over the tree of life. They play a major role in the biology of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, have implications in agriculture and medicine and are useful biotechnology tools. Due to their fascinating capacity to jump around, and their structural and functional impact on the genomes […]
https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284889287/peerj-award-winners-at-icte-2024/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-06, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
I stopped using Adobe software a few years ago, I just didn’t use it enough and was happy with the iPad and Mac alternatives.
I don’t do enough graphics design work to justify subscriptions (not even Figma that everyone loves)
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112569566704920069
Microsoft shows venerable and vulnerable NTLM security protocol the door
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Time to get moving if you still rely on this deprecated feature
Microsoft has finally decided to add the venerable NTLM authentication protocol to the Deprecated Features list.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/microsoft_deprecates_ntlm/
How a Defrocked Armenian Preacher Uses YouTube to Spread Misinformation to His Flock
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Markup blog
Barthev Gulumian uses his daily videos to discuss the Bible, as well as QAnon-style conspiracy theories and why COVID vaccines are “poison”
Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Coming SiB boom will be a Chinese one while the West is years behind, industry watcher tells us
Interview The burgeoning sodium ion battery industry is poised for a big year, says one analyst, though the US and its friends may miss out as China whizzes by.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/sodium_ion_batteries_china/
Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition
date: 2024-06-06, from: One Useful Thing
AI systems have gotten more capable and easier to use
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/doing-stuff-with-ai-opinionated-midyear
#ArchivesPets on the National Archives Building
date: 2024-06-06, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
On Friday, June 7, 2024, the National Archives is raising the woof with our next #ArchivesHashtagParty—#ArchivesPets! Join us on social media to see some paw-some images and artifacts of pets in our collection and collections in repositories around the world. Designed by renowned architect John Russell Pope, the National Archives Building is the most elaborately … Continue reading #ArchivesPets on the National Archives Building
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/06/06/archivespets-on-the-national-archives-building/
Russia’s economic contradiction
date: 2024-06-06, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Vladimir Putin is hosting the International Economic Forum. There’s a bit of a contradiction there: Despite being the most sanctioned country in the world, Russia’s economy is set to grow faster than all advanced economies this year. Also, Gen Z is posing a challenge for alcohol companies. And later, tourism officials in Henan, China, admitted the famous Yuntai Falls use hidden water pipes to boost the flow.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/russias-economic-contradiction
What If We Just Nationalize the Power Grid?
date: 2024-06-06, from: Heatmap News
The urgent need to build transmission infrastructure at dramatic pace, scale, and geographic scope is clear. To decarbonize the power sector, we’ll have to physically rebuild the grid once-over in the coming decades to connect and facilitate a hopeful explosion in new renewable generation capacity across our continental country. We will have to accomplish this as electricity demand grows, including on account of decarbonizing sectors such as buildings, transportation, and industrial production through electrification. Given the stakes of grid balancing, this task is akin to building and starting to operate a new beating heart and wider cardiovascular system, all while keeping the old one from failing amid surgery. Coordination and proactive planning of grid buildout will be key.
Despite the undeniable public benefits, investment in the grid has been stagnating, if not declining. A Department of Energy study found that annual net investment in the grid, as measured by new miles of line, was actually negative on average between 2016 and 2020. Some have faulted the National Environmental Policy Act for this underinvestment, while others have blamed anti-social NIMBYs, both of which, but especially combined, can thwart projects at the permitting stage.
The reality is more complicated and implicates the basic governance of the transmission system. The grid in the United States is owned, operated, and planned largely by a highly fragmented set of privately owned utilities and, in some places, their nonprofit associations, which are regulated at the federal and state level. Transmission owners do not propose and build transmission lines unless they are profitable for their business, which is not guaranteed most of the time. Indeed, new lines can cost transmission owners profits by creating a larger pool of power supply and reducing the energy sales and pricing power of their generation affiliates.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has repeatedly attempted to prod utilities to do more by mandating regional planning procedures. FERC announced its latest regulatory initiative, called Order 1920, last month, and it requires transmission owners to undertake long-range regional planning that considers an array of public benefits, including lower energy prices and enhanced system reliability. In particular, the rule alleviates disputes over investment cost allocation. But stronger planning procedures can hardly ensure that private utilities will actually invest in needed lines. Indeed, FERC’s serial attempts on this front have so far been a failure.
As this FERC activity suggests, the grid is already subject to great public regulation, but this regulatory architecture still falls well short of the public control necessary to treat the grid as a vital common resource whose transformation must be proactively planned and precisely delivered at the system-level. Through public planning and development, we can overcome this structural fragmentation and counteract private utilities’ low propensity to investment across the transmission system. We need a centralized system of public planning, funding, and construction of transmission facilities. We need to nationalize the grid.
The benefits of grid expansion are manifold and go well beyond just the functionality of decarbonization. More connections between states and regions can lower the price of electricity and improve reliability, which will become an increasingly pressing issue in the face of further climate destabilization. And yet our transmission system consists of regional and subregional grids “that operate like jealous petty potentates, resisting stronger links that would allow renewable energy to flow across regional boundaries,” in the words of the New York Times editorial board. Projects founder over disputes between utilities over how to distribute costs, while other necessary new additions are never proposed in the first place. This is a structural problem that leads to quantitative underinvestment and qualitative poor coordination of investment across the balkanized system.
The public pays for investments in the electricity system, whether through taxes or consumer electricity bills in monopoly serviced systems down the line. Public investment in critical infrastructure is cheaper for the public than private investment due to the lower costs of debt financing or direct access to the U.S. Treasury for public agencies. These entities are also free from the imperative to maximize shareholder returns and pay dividends. Public investment is more flexible and can adopt a system-wide approach, as opposed to one blinkered at the level of the project. Instead of piecemeal line extensions, the grid can be expanded in a methodical and holistic fashion in accordance with social need.
Public power is firmly established in the United States. Public agencies such as the federal Tennessee Valley Authority and state-owned New York Power Authority generate and transmit power. In nearly the entire contiguous United States west of the Mississippi River, three federal power administrations own transmission lines and can construct new ones. Congress should set up and fund federal authorities across the country to build the power grid we desperately need, coordinating with each other and through federal level planning, and working with, and when needed against, the current assemblage of private utilities.
The Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest offers a good model of governance. It is led by a single administrator appointed by the Secretary of Energy. This official has the broad authority to set rates on wholesale power and transmission and develop the regional grid. But these important decisions can only be made after close consultation with retail and wholesale customers, Native American tribes, elected officials, and environmental groups and are reviewed by FERC. This system ensures efficient, publicly accountable management of the grid.
Given the tight timeline we face to deliver on critical decarbonization pillars, one might ask, why experiment with a publicly led approach? We might stoke private utility backlash and weaken or slow the broader project of cleaning up the power supply. But private utilities have had decades to deliver a modern grid and failed. Because of the pressing need to decarbonize and fortify resilience against entrenched climate instability, the necessity of building state capacity is a sober reality. We cannot begin to build necessary state capacity without first acknowledging this necessity and acting in light of it.
North America’s power grid is called the “world’s largest machine” because it is a complex physical infrastructure that must be in perfect balance every second. Our homes, places of work and leisure, and increasingly vehicles are all plugged into the grid. Preserving modern living standards—and an inhabitable planet—requires expanding and rationally operating this common resource. This social undertaking is too important to be entrusted to private corporations.
https://heatmap.news/economy/ferc-public-power-grid
7-year-old Oracle WebLogic bug under active exploitation
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Experts say Big Red will probably re-release patch in an upcoming cycle
A seven-year-old Oracle vulnerability is the latest to be added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) catalog, meaning the security agency considers it a significant threat to federal government.…
BT chief blames regulations for UK lagging in next-gen network rollout
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Someone noticed Britain’s about to elect a new govt, amirite?
The latest CEO of UK telecoms giant BT says that Scandinavian nations are far more developed than Britain when it comes to telco infrastructure, and the government needs to overhaul regulations to fix this.…
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-06-06, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Kiddo’s last day of year 6 today. It’s going too fast
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/112568979937258341
Ukrainian leader attends D-Day events as he seeks Western aid to check Russia’s invasion
date: 2024-06-06, from: Associated Press, World News
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has joined world leaders in France to commemorate the D-Day invasion and seek more Western help, even as his forces battle to stave off a Russian onslaught near the eastern city of Kharkiv in Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.
Teach your tomato plant to talk
date: 2024-06-06, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Meet Audrey, a Raspberry Pi 5-enhanced tomato plant who uses AI to talk to you and help you look after her better.
The post Teach your tomato plant to talk appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/teach-your-tomato-plant-to-talk/
Bill Miranda | Beat the Heat This Summer with Santa Clarita Transit
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
As the days start to feel longer and warmer, summer adventures in Santa Clarita are on the horizon. Whether you’re local or a visitor eager to explore all that our […]
The post Bill Miranda | Beat the Heat This Summer with Santa Clarita Transit appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/bill-miranda-beat-the-heat-this-summer-with-santa-clarita-transit/
Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
What’s that Lassie? Our nefarious AI overlords are about to take over the world? You must be barking
People who want to understand their dogs might be about to be given a helping paw by AI, according to the latest study.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/dog_speech_ai_models/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in May 2024.
https://electrek.co/2024/06/06/here-are-the-best-electric-bikes-you-can-buy-at-every-price-level/
A Home on a Country Lane
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Sweet farmhouse near Oak Park is now “Bonnie’s Barn.”
The post A Home on a Country Lane appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/06/a-home-on-a-country-lane/
House Hunting with a Designer’s Eye
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Look past the current details to imagine your new home.
The post House Hunting with a Designer’s Eye appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/06/house-hunting-with-a-designers-eye/
Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As tool emerges to probe OS feature’s SQLite-based store of user activities
Asked to explore the data privacy issues arising from Microsoft Recall, the Windows maker’s poorly received self-surveillance tool, Jaime Teevan, chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft Research, brushed aside concerns.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/microsoft_research_recall/
Lois Eisenberg | Hypocrisy of SCOTUS
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
The Supreme Court is blatantly delaying its decision about Donald Trump’s immunity case and in doing so they are doing the U.S. a grave injustice. It is obvious that the […]
The post Lois Eisenberg | Hypocrisy of SCOTUS appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/lois-eisenberg-hypocrisy-of-scotus/
Dan Walters | California Restaurants and the ‘Junk Fee’ Ban
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
A friend and I recently met at a chain restaurant in Sacramento for our weekly lunch. Both of us ordered $16 plates of Mexican food. When the bill came, it totaled […]
The post Dan Walters | California Restaurants and the ‘Junk Fee’ Ban appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/dan-walters-california-restaurants-and-the-junk-fee-ban/
Christine Flowers | Alito Dust-Up Has Nothing to Do with Flags
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
I have never been married, nor do I have any children. I grew up around married people. I descend from a whole line of married people. I have friends who […]
The post Christine Flowers | Alito Dust-Up Has Nothing to Do with Flags appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/christine-flowers-alito-dust-up-has-nothing-to-do-with-flags/
Benefits from Urban Mini-Forests
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Low costs, fast results, and great enjoyment. Why not?
The post Benefits from Urban Mini-Forests appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/06/benefits-from-urban-mini-forests/
Today in SCV History (June 6)
date: 2024-06-06, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1824 – Mexican soldiers track runaway Chumash slaves through the Santa Clarita Valley. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-june-6/
County CEO: Cannabis Tax Revenues Are Falling Short — Again
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Four pot shops in unincorporated areas were expected to open but didn’t, officials said.
The post County CEO: Cannabis Tax Revenues Are Falling Short — Again appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/06/county-ceo-cannabis-tax-revenues-are-falling-short-again/
Tokyo takes on Tinder by developing its own dating app it hopes will arrest population decline
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
We’re from the government and we want you to find love and procreate
The city of Tokyo plans to launch a dating app in coming months, in the hope it helps to address Japan’ declining population.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/tokyo_dating_app/
Wi-Fi can watch your heart beating, Taiwan’s datacenter power outfit Delta finds
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
May come in handy for healthcare orgs, or to turn you off private 5G
Computex Delta is a Taiwanese company that specializes in power management kit, the sort of thing that datacenters need. It’s therefore very much in demand right now but also, as revealed in the final keynote address of the 2024 edition of the Computex conference, undertakes some tangential R&D…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/wifi_motion_detection_delta_computex/
Vandalism of USC Chabad house not hate crime, early evidence suggests
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating the crime on Rabbi Dov and Runya Wagner’s house, which has served as USC’s Chabad House for the past five years.
The post Vandalism of USC Chabad house not hate crime, early evidence suggests appeared first on Daily Trojan.
Google takes on virtual desktops with acquisition of app-streamer Cameyo
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Legacy apps on Chromebooks is the goal, which won’t terrify VDI incumbents like Citrix and Omnissa
Google has decided to take on the likes of Citrix and VMware by acquiring an outfit called Cameyo whose tech makes it possible to stream apps into browsers – including on Chromebooks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/google_acquires_cameyo_vdi_challenge/
Negotiator discusses pathways of gaining release of wrongfully detained Americans
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
Our Beloved Pets & Animals, 2024 Edition
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Celebrating Santa Barbara’s furry, scaly, blubbery, and feathery friends.
The post Our Beloved Pets & Animals, 2024 Edition appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/our-beloved-pets-animals-2024-edition/
Meet the Fido Photo Contest Winners!
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Sibling labs attached at the hip, Cover Boy Harley, and a rescue from Qatar.
The post Meet the Fido Photo Contest Winners! appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/meet-the-fido-photo-contest-winners/
A Whale of a Day to Santa Cruz Island
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
After some epic kayaking through sea caves, we were greeted by a big surprise guest.
The post A Whale of a Day to Santa Cruz Island appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/a-whale-of-a-day-to-santa-cruz-island/
Our Beautiful ― and Badass ― Barn Owls
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
After years of waiting, we’re thrilled to welcome a new nest.
The post Our Beautiful ― and Badass ― Barn Owls appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/our-beautiful-%e2%80%95-and-badass-%e2%80%95-barn-owls/
Inside Santa Barbara County Animal Services
date: 2024-06-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
An interview with Sarah Aguilar, director of S.B.’s largest animal agency.
The post Inside Santa Barbara County Animal Services appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/inside-santa-barbara-county-animal-services/
Hart school board appoints Vierra as interim superintendent
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
As the William S. Hart Union High School District prepares for the impending departure of Superintendent Mike Kuhlman, the governing board appointed Deputy Superintendent Michael Vierra to be the district’s […]
The post Hart school board appoints Vierra as interim superintendent appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/hart-school-board-appoints-vierra-as-interim-superintendent/
Costs of World War II, Ukraine war fuse as Allies remember D-Day without Russia
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
UTAH BEACH, France — As the sun sets on the D-Day generation, it will rise again Thursday over the Normandy beaches where the waves long ago washed away the blood and boot-steps of its soldiers, but where their exploits that helped end Adolf Hitler’s tyranny are being remembered by the next generations, seeing war again in Europe, in Ukraine.
Ever-dwindling numbers of World War II veterans who have pilgrimaged back to France, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has dashed hopes that lives and cities wouldn’t again be laid to waste in Europe, are making the always poignant anniversaries of the June 6, 1944, Allied landings even more so 80 years on.
As now-centenarian veterans revisit old memories and fallen comrades buried in Normandy graves, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presence at D-Day commemorations with world leaders — including U.S. President Joe Biden — who are supporting his country’s fight against Russia’s invasion will inevitably fuse together World War II’s awful past with the fraught present on Thursday.
The break of dawn almost eight decades exactly after Allied troops waded ashore under hails of gunfire on five code-named beaches — Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — will kick off a day of remembrance by Allied nations now standing together again behind Ukraine — and with World War II ally Russia not invited by host France. It cited Russia’s “war of aggression against Ukraine that has intensified in recent weeks” for the snub.
With the dead and wounded on both sides in Ukraine estimated in the hundreds of thousands, commemorations for the more than 4,400 Allied dead on D-Day and many tens of thousands more, including French civilians, killed in the ensuing Battle of Normandy are tinged with concerns that World War II lessons are being lost.
“There are things worth fighting for,” said World War II veteran Walter Stitt, who fought in tanks and turns 100 in July, as he visited Omaha Beach this week. “Although I wish there was another way to do it than to try to kill each other.”
“We’ll learn one of these days, but I won’t be around for that,” he said.
Conscious of the inevitability that major D-Day anniversaries will soon take place without World War II veterans, huge throngs of aficionados in uniforms and riding vehicles of the time, and tourists soaking up the spectacle, have flooded Normandy for the 80th anniversary.
The fair-like atmosphere fueled by World War II-era jeeps and trucks tearing down hedge-rowed lanes so deadly for Allied troops who fought dug-in German defenders, and of reenactors playing at war on sands where D-Day soldiers fell, leave open the question of what meaning anniversaries will have once the veterans are gone.
But at the 80th, they’re the VIPs of commemorations across the Normandy coast where the largest-ever land, sea and air armada punctured Hitler’s defenses in Western Europe and helped precipitate his downfall 11 months later.
Those who traveled to Normandy include women who were among the millions who built bombers, tanks and other weaponry and played other vital World War II roles that were long overshadowed by the combat exploits of men.
“We weren’t doing it for honors and awards. We were doing it to save our country. And we ended up helping save the world,” said 98-year-old Anna Mae Krier, who worked as a riveter building B-17 and B-29 bombers.
Feted wherever they go in wheelchairs and walking with canes, veterans are using their voices to repeat their message they hope will live eternal: Never forget.
“To know the amount of people who were killed here, just amazing,” 98-year-old Allan Chatwin, who served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, said as he visited Omaha, the deadliest of the Allied beaches on D-Day.
He quickly added: “I don’t know that amazing is the word.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Hit Man director Richard Linklater: Grown-up films 'out of fashion' in Hollywood. (We noticed.)
Chiquita Canyon hosts informational meetings on relief fund
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
By Perry Smith and Katherine Quezada Chiquita Canyon Landfill officials said a pair of in-person informational sessions hosted at Val Verde Park and Castaic Library, respectively, on Friday and Saturday […]
The post Chiquita Canyon hosts informational meetings on relief fund appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/chiquita-canyon-hosts-informational-meetings-on-relief-fund/
Synology stretches into a backup appliance, with object stores to come
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Would like to vanquish Veeam and Veritas, but tidying up backup rigs is an easier job
Computex Taiwanese storage vendor Synology has revealed a range of backup appliances.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/synology_backup_activeprotect/
Frustrated With University, Academic Workers Make UC Irvine The Sixth Campus To Enter Strike
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The LAist
UC Irvine’s teaching assistants, postdocs, and researchers are the latest to walk off the job in a dispute over the university’s handling of campus protests.
https://laist.com/news/education/academic-worker-strike-university-of-california-irvine
Students showcase biotechnology research
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
Students and visitors entering Building 600 on June 1 would later leave with newfound knowledge of plant and soil science, DNA barcoding and protein biomanufacturing,
The post Students showcase biotechnology research appeared first on .
Saugus school board discusses future of gender-specific events
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
Emotions ran high at Tuesday’s Saugus Union High School District governing board meeting as board members, district officials and attendees discussed how best to approach gender-specific events. The issue arose […]
The post Saugus school board discusses future of gender-specific events appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/saugus-school-board-discusses-future-of-gender-specific-events/
SCV 2024 baseball roundup
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
For the second straight year, a CIF baseball championship returned to the Santa Clarita Valley. Hart hoisted the CIF Division 2 trophy and earned coach Jim Ozella the ultimate prize […]
The post SCV 2024 baseball roundup appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/scv-2024-baseball-roundup/
Valencia incoming senior places third in biomimicry competition
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
Biomimicry— the art of emulating nature into human engineering. Emma Winter, 16, an incoming senior at Valencia High School, did just that, submitting her design through the Biomimicry Institute, and […]
The post Valencia incoming senior places third in biomimicry competition appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/valencia-incoming-senior-places-third-in-biomimicry-competition/
Volunteers help clear local hiking trails for National Trails Day
date: 2024-06-06, from: The Signal
In the hills and trails along Placerita Canyon Road, volunteers with SCV Trail Users gathered at the Golden Valley Ranch and East Walker Ranch open spaces to work on local […]
The post Volunteers help clear local hiking trails for National Trails Day appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/volunteers-help-clear-local-hiking-trails-for-national-trails-day/
Ocean Water Warning for June 6
date: 2024-06-06, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health cautions residents who are planning to visit the below Los Angeles County beaches to avoid swimming, surfing, and playing in ocean waters
https://scvnews.com/ocean-water-warning-for-june-6-2/
Democratic contraception access bill fails in US Senate
date: 2024-06-06, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — A bill to safeguard access to contraceptives failed to advance in a U.S. Senate vote on Wednesday, after congressional Democrats forced the vote in a bid to focus public attention on reproductive rights ahead of the November election.
The Right to Contraception Act, which would protect birth control access nationwide, got 51 votes in support and 39 against, but fell short of the chamber’s 60-vote threshold for advancing to a full debate.
The fight over reproductive rights is a flashpoint in U.S. politics, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that had recognized a national right to abortion access.
Last month, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump came under fire after comments that political rivals said suggested he would consider banning birth control, leading him to respond publicly that he would not support such a move.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer on Wednesday pointed to several states, including Nevada and Virginia, where Republican governors have vetoed efforts to protect legal access to contraception, saying that showed a need for federal legislation.
“We are kidding ourselves if we think the hard right will stop at overturning Roe,” he said.
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives said they would attempt a legislative maneuver to force a vote on the same bill, though they faced slim chance of success in the Republican-controlled chamber.
“Republicans have a choice to make: They can put aside their MAGA ideology and join us [to] get this bill passed, or they can triple down on their anti-freedom extremism in full view of the American people,” House Democrat Katherine Clark said on Tuesday.
Republican Representative Marc Molinaro, who won his district in 2022 by just 1.6%, said on Wednesday that he would cosponsor the legislation, the first Republican to do so.
Some Senate Republicans criticized the push.
“It’s an election year in which a Democratic incumbent president is running behind, so a decision has been made to raise abortion to a high profile,” said Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, referring to President Joe Biden. “You can’t normalize a procedure where the intent is to end a life.”
In a May Reuters/Ipsos survey of 3,934 U.S. residents 18 and older, 37% said Biden has a better approach to abortion, compared to 27% who said the same about Trump.
Schumer said Democrats would also vote on a bill next week to protect in vitro fertilization, which Senate Republicans previously voted against after an Alabama court made the fertility treatment used by millions of Americans to conceive effectively illegal in the state.
https://www.voanews.com/a/democratic-contraception-access-bill-fails-in-us-senate-/7644548.html
FTX’s $24B tax bill written down to just $200M
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
No, this isn’t the weird logic of cryptocurrency infecting the IRS. It’s a ‘Fight us and everyone loses even more’ kinda deal
Imploded cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes a lot of people a lot of money – but has convinced America’s tax collectors at the IRS to give it a massive discount on its $24 billion tax bill.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/ftx_tax_irs/
Expose Kubernetes services via inlets tunnels on AWS EC2
date: 2024-06-06, updated: 2024-06-06, from: Inlets.dev, cloud tunneling
Learn how to install an inlets tunnel server to AWS EC2 and expose services from within a private Kubernetes cluster.
https://inlets.dev/blog/2024/06/06/tunnel-k8s-via-aws-ec2.html
Elon Musk confirms 12K H100s ordered for Tesla were instead prioritized for xAI
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tycoon’s private firms got Nvidia GPUs first because automaker couldn’t use them yet
Comment Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed he redirected Nvidia H100 GPUs intended for the car manufacturer to X and xAI, two private firms he owns.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/elon_musk_confirms_h100_destined/
Big Auto And The Death Of Traffic Congestion Reform
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Lever News
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul reversed course and blocked congestion pricing at the last minute — months after taking more than $30,000 from state auto dealers.
https://www.levernews.com/big-auto-and-the-death-of-traffic-congestion-reform/
US House Republicans issue criminal referrals against Biden’s son, brother
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
washington — U.S. House Republicans issued criminal referrals Wednesday against President Joe Biden’s son and brother, accusing them of making false statements to Congress as part of the Republicans’ yearlong impeachment inquiry.
The Republican leaders of the House Oversight and Accountability, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees sent a letter to the Justice Department recommending the prosecution of Hunter Biden and James Biden and accusing them of making a “conscious effort” to undermine the House’s investigation.
Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s attorney, said in a statement that the referrals are “nothing more than a desperate attempt by Republicans to twist Hunter’s testimony so they can distract from their failed impeachment inquiry and interfere with his trial.”
James Biden ’s lawyer, Paul Fishman, echoed that sentiment, calling it a “baseless partisan action,” and reiterated that his client has “always maintained that Joe Biden never had any involvement in his business dealings.”
Accused of lying to gun dealer
The referrals to Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel David Weiss add to the legal challenges facing Hunter Biden, who is now on trial in a federal court in Delaware for three felony charges stemming from the purchase of a gun in October 2018. The 54-year-old has been accused by prosecutors of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application by saying he was not a drug user and illegally having the gun for 11 days.
On Capitol Hill, the Republicans pursued their wide-ranging investigation into Hunter Biden, separate from that federal case, are trying to tie the Democratic president to his son’s business dealings. Both Hunter and James Biden sat for hourslong interviews with lawmakers even as they failed to uncover evidence directly implicating Joe Biden in any wrongdoing.
Representative Jason Smith, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said testimony from IRS whistleblowers shows that Hunter Biden lied to Congress at least three times in his February 28 deposition.
“I think the Justice Department needs to look at that and act accordingly. When you lie to Congress, that is a serious violation of the law. It’s a felony,” said Smith. “The president’s son should not be treated any differently than any other American.”
The Justice Department, which will ultimately decide whether to take up the criminal referrals, declined to comment.
Inquiry becomes political liability
The focus on the Biden family resulting from Hunter Biden’s federal trial and the impeachment inquiry has proved to be a political and personal liability for the president. The proceedings are unfolding as the 2024 White House election looms, and allies of Joe Biden worry about the toll it will take on him. He is deeply concerned about the health and sustained sobriety of his only living son.
Since former President Donald Trump’s conviction on charges in New York, Republican leaders have assailed the Justice Department for what they claim is a “two-tiered” system of justice that targets conservatives. They play down the department’s current prosecution of Hunter Biden and the fact that other prominent Democrats have faced federal investigation during Joe Biden’s presidency.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that if Garland “wishes to demonstrate he is not running a two-tiered system of justice and targeting the president’s political opponents, he will open criminal investigations into James and Hunter Biden,” under the false statements and perjury statutes.
The false statements in question, according to the House committee chairmen, include references Hunter Biden made about what position he held at a corporate entity that received millions of dollars from foreign clients. The president’s son also “relayed an entirely fictitious account” about text messages between him and his Chinese business partner in which Hunter Biden allegedly invoked his father’s presence with him as part of a negotiation tactic, according to the Republican investigation.
There is also a focus on statements James Biden made about whether the president, while a private citizen, met with a former Biden family business partner.
House Democrats said Republicans are resorting to criminal referrals because their impeachment push has effectively flamed out despite 17 months of investigating the Biden family.
“This agonizingly protracted and completely fruitless investigation has proven only that President Biden was not part of, did not profit from, and took no official actions to benefit his family members’ business ventures,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a statement Wednesday.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-05, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
After a fine day reimplementing the debugger UI, a treat:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112566529392546315
Judge Rules City Of Santa Ana Must Revise Non-Citizen Voting Measure
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The LAist
The language could cast the measure in a favorable light, according to a lawsuit filed against the city.
https://laist.com/news/politics/judge-rules-city-of-santa-ana-must-revise-non-citizen-voting-measure
Biden congratulates India’s Modi as US looks forward to more Indo-Pacific cooperation
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
Washington — U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday congratulated Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his election victory, and Washington said it looked forward to further cooperation with New Delhi to ensure a free Indo-Pacific region.
“The friendship between our nations is only growing as we unlock a shared future of unlimited potential,” Biden said in a posting on social media platform X.
Modi, whose National Democratic Alliance retained power with a surprisingly slim majority in voting results announced on Tuesday, said he had received a call from Biden.
“[I] Conveyed that India-U.S. comprehensive global partnership is poised to witness many new landmarks in the years to come. Our partnership will continue to be a force for global good for the benefit of humanity,” Modi said on X.
The United States and India have deepened ties in recent years given shared concerns about China’s growing power, even though New Delhi has maintained its long-standing relationship with Russia despite the war in Ukraine, and human rights issues.
In a statement issued shortly after Biden’s congratulatory message, the U.S. State Department said Washington looked forward “to continuing to further our partnership with the Indian government to promote prosperity and innovation, address the climate crisis, and ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region.”
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Tuesday called the U.S.-Indian relationship “a great partnership,” although the U.S. had concerns about human rights, which it would continue to raise openly with New Delhi.
Ties have been tested by the discovery of assassination plots against Sikh nationalists in Canada and the United States. In November, U.S. authorities said an Indian government official had directed the plot in the attempted murder of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist and dual citizen of the United States and Canada.
Last month, the U.S. ambassador to India said Washington was satisfied so far with India’s moves to ensure accountability in the alleged plots, but many steps were still needed and there must be consequences for what was a “red line for America.”
Political analysts say Washington has been restrained in public criticism of Modi because it hopes India will act as a counterweight to an expansionist China.
EU data protection board says ChatGPT still not meeting data accuracy standards
date: 2024-06-05, from: OS News
OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance with European Union data rules, a task force at the EU’s privacy watchdog said. “Although the measures taken in order to comply with the transparency principle are beneficial to avoid misinterpretation of the output of ChatGPT, they are not sufficient to comply with the data accuracy principle,” the task force said in a report released on its website on Friday. ↫ Tassilo Hummel at Reuters I’m glad at least some authorities are taking the wildly inaccurate nonsense outputs of many “AI” tools seriously. I’m not entirely sure when a tool like ChatGPT can be considered “accurate”, but whatever it is now, is not it.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Senate GOP Blocks Bill to Guarantee Birth Control.
https://politicalwire.com/2024/06/05/senate-gop-blocks-bill-to-guarantee-birth-control/
Court halts Trump’s Georgia election interference case while on appeal
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
Atlanta — An appeals court has halted the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump and others while it reviews the lower court judge’s ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the case.
The Georgia Court of Appeals’ order on Wednesday prevents Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee from moving forward with pretrial motions as he had planned while the appeal is pending. While it was already unlikely that the case would go to trial before the November general election, when Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee for president, this makes that even more certain.
The appeals court on Monday docketed the appeals filed by Trump and eight others and said that “if oral argument is requested and granted” it is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 4. The court will then have until mid-March to rule, and the losing side will be able to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.
A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment on the appeals court ruling.
A Fulton County grand jury in August indicted Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a sprawling scheme to illegally try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four defendants have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors, but Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. It is one of four criminal cases against Trump.
Trump and eight other defendants had tried to get Willis and her office removed from the case, arguing that a romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest. McAfee in March found that no conflict of interest existed that should force Willis off the case, but he granted a request from Trump and the other defendants to seek an appeal of his ruling from the state Court of Appeals.
McAfee wrote that “an odor of mendacity remains.” He said “reasonable questions” over whether Willis and Wade had testified truthfully about the timing of their relationship “further underpin the finding of an appearance of impropriety and the need to make proportional efforts to cure it.” He said Willis could remain on the case only if Wade left, and the special prosecutor submitted his resignation hours later.
The allegations that Willis had improperly benefited from her romance with Wade resulted in a tumultuous couple of months in the case as intimate details of Willis and Wade’s personal lives were aired in court in mid-February.
June 12: COC Hosts Veteran Townhall
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The County of Los Angeles Military and Veterans Affairs next Townhall Meeting will be held Wednesday, June 12 at 5:30 p.m. at College of the Canyons.
https://scvnews.com/june-12-coc-hosts-next-veteran-townhall/
Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved.”
Bridgy has always been a useful product; Bridgy Fed is an easy way for folks on the fediverse and on Bluesky to be able to interact with each other. I’ve opted in and I expect many other people to do the same.
Ideally it wouldn’t be an opt-in - I think this kind of bridge is incredibly useful in its own right. I know it’s been fraught on the Mastodon side because of Bluesky’s provenance and former relationship to both Twitter and Jack Dorsey. I personally don’t see the issue at all: the more the merrier.
Ryan Barrett is brilliant: I really appreciate his ability to quietly add value by creating user-first technology solutions that speak for themselves.
<p>[<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/05/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-can-now-talk-to-each-other-with-bridgy-fed/">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-can-now-talk-to-each-other
June 24: VIA After Five Mixer at Bella Vida
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Connect with other businesses and attend the Valley Industry Association After Five networking mixer on Monday, June 24, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., at Bella Vida SCV Rotary Club
https://scvnews.com/june-24-via-after-five-mixer-at-bella-vida/
TikTok confirms CNN, other high-profile accounts hijacked via zero-day vulnerability
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Beware of zero-click malware sliding into your DMs
Miscreants exploited a zero-day in TikTok to compromised the accounts of CNN and other big names. The app maker has confirmed there was a cyberattack, and that it has scrambled to secure accounts and prevent any further exploitation.…
GNU Nano gains optional modern keybindings
date: 2024-06-05, from: OS News
GNU Nano, by far my favourite text editor when using the command line, released version 8.0 recently – and by recently I mean a month ago – and in it, there’s a pretty interesting additional feature that should make using Nano a little bit more straightforward for those not used to its key combinations. Command-line option –modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute. ↫ GNU Nano’s news page Basically, this option makes Nano’s key bindings a bit more in line with what you might expect as someone coming from a graphical environment. Of course, Nano’s keybindings are listed at the bottom of its user interface, but it’s still nice to have the option of making them more in line with the wider computing world. Instead of using the command-line option, you can also change the name of Nano’s executable, or a symlink to it, to start with “e”.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139884/gnu-nano-gains-optional-modern-keybindings/
Nothing CEO Carl Pei: Smartphones will be the main platform for “AI first hardware”
date: 2024-06-05, from: Liliputing
When OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei launched a new business called Nothing in 2021, the company promised to eliminate “the barriers between people and technology.” But so far what the company has actually built are a couple of unusual-looking smartphones and accessories like wireless earbuds, with some distinctive features like LED lights on the back. In […]
The post Nothing CEO Carl Pei: Smartphones will be the main platform for “AI first hardware” appeared first on Liliputing.
England’s Mysterious ‘Seahenge’ Monument May Have Been Built to Prolong Summer
date: 2024-06-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
One researcher thinks the structure was used for ancient rituals during a period of bitter cold
Kathy Hochul’s Climate Betrayal
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heatmap News
If it holds, then Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision today to delay congestion pricing indefinitely in New York will be a generational setback for climate policy in the United States.
It is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.
It is worse than the Mountain Valley pipeline, the 300-mile gas pipeline that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia got approved in 2022 in exchange for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act.
And it is worse than the Willow project in Alaska, the oil mega-project that President Joe Biden okayed last year under pressure from that state’s local and indigenous leaders.
It is so bad because it will set back the development of climate-friendly cities and rapid transit infrastructure in the United States for years if not decades. And it will deter other American cities from implementing the kind of time-saving, pollution-averting, anti-gridlock measure that the country desperately needs.
There is nothing good to be said for this decision. It is bad politics, bad economics, bad governance, and bad for the climate.
Let us briefly count the ways that it is destructive.
It is stupid coalition politics. Hochul has alienated her allies, including environmental groups, state budget hawks, and transit advocates. Bill McKibben, the longtime New Yorker writer who has become one of the country’s most famous climate activists, called Hochul’s decision “one of the most aggressive anti-environmental actions ever undertaken by a Democratic governor.”
In exchange, Hochul has delighted her Republican adversaries, who can praise her wise decision-making in the weeks to come — and therefore brandish their own bipartisan bonafides — but continue to campaign against congestion pricing through November. Congestion pricing is unpopular now, but in her fecklessness, Hochul has guaranteed that it will be a live issue in November.
It is nonsense budget politics. Hochul says that she has delayed congestion pricing because she is worried about the city’s recovery from the pandemic, but regardless of her reasons, she has now left a $1 billion hole in the transit authority’s budget. The New York Times reports that she wants to fill that hole by raising taxes on the state’s businesses.
But that means that she has taken a tax formerly charged to some New York residents and businesses — but which would also fall on New Jersey and Connecticut residents and businesses — and shifted it entirely to in-state entities. She has, in essence, cut taxes on out-of-state residents and raised taxes on New York businesses and consumers.
And instead of taxing the right to use roads in downtown Manhattan, which are a limited public resource, she will instead tax all business activity in the state. What good will that do for New York’s economy?
Those political and financial flaws might be forgiven if her decision was good for the planet. But don’t worry: It’s also bad climate politics.
Cars, SUVs, and trucks belch more climate pollution into the atmosphere than any other single economic activity in the U.S. Nearly 20% of America’s annual carbon pollution comes from individuals and families driving their private vehicles around on roads and highways. This is a far larger share of national pollution than is generated by more famous climate villains, such as air travel.
We have good ways of dealing with all that carbon pollution. In suburbs, small towns, and rural America, the best way to deal with that tailpipe pollution is to gradually transition from gasoline-burning cars to electric vehicles. In some places, the country can also experiment with using experimental, climate-friendly liquid fuels.
But in cities, people have better and cheaper options than getting EVs. We can stop requiring people to drive everywhere and encourage them to walk, bike, and take public transit instead. That will require, at times, treating the use of roads in city centers as the limited public resource that it is — which means charging cars and trucks to enter the most crowded downtown areas of certain cities at certain times of the day.
That’s what congestion pricing is: a way of encouraging cities to grow in pro-climate, pro-environmental ways. Such a policy has already been successfully implemented in London, Singapore, and other congested cities. Even as a city-dwelling car owner, I long wanted the city where I lived for a decade — Washington, D.C. — to adopt a similar policy. After all, when Stockholm started its congestion fee, the rate of asthma attacks among its children dropped by half.
So I looked forward to the start of congestion pricing in New York City, America’s biggest, densest, and most transit-friendly city. New York was bushwhacking a trail for everyone else to follow: If congestion policy was a success there, then other American cities could experiment with it in some form.
By pausing that trial before it has even begun, Hochul has essentially frozen our ability to experiment with congestion pricing anywhere else in the country. By shuttering the policy in New York, she has poisoned pro-climate urban politics everywhere. Now people will say: You saw what happened when New York tried to do congestion pricing. Do you really want to try that here?
In the past, when national Democrats have approved new pipelines or oil projects, they have argued that those projects will not affect the country’s carbon pollution because only demand for fossil fuels, and not the supply of them, drives carbon emissions. But what makes congestion pricing so powerful is that demand is precisely what it targets. Congestion pricing makes buses run faster, pays for the subway system, and pushes people and businesses to consider the social cost of their driving before they get in the car.
Congestion pricing, if implemented widely, can actually conserve fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions. Now Hochul has halted its progress everywhere.
She has made, in other words, a local mistake with national and even global consequences. It is such a foolhardy error that it instantly recasts Kathy Hochul’s climate record as governor.
Hochul has previously been seen as a center-left governor playing a difficult but moderate environmental hand. But is that really her record? She has struggled to build wind farms off the coast of New York, even though it is essential to decarbonizing the state’s power grid. She has so far failed to pass the NY HEAT Act, which would help the state transition away from using fossil fuels to heat its buildings. She has even failed to pass little climate measures that would fund the state’s more modest climate goals.
I would compare her to Senator Joe Manchin, the fossil-fuel-friendly West Virginia lawmaker who repeatedly refused to vote for Biden’s climate policy — except at least Manchin put his political reputation on the line when it mattered and ultimately negotiated, and voted for, the Inflation Reduction Act. At least Manchin has many qualities to recommend him: He was canny, risk-taking, proud, and courageous when it counted. Hochul is just a loser.
https://heatmap.news/economy/kathy-hochuls-climate-betrayal
Kathy Hochul’s Climate Betrayal
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heatmap News
If it holds, then Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision today to delay congestion pricing indefinitely in New York will be a generational setback for climate policy in the United States.
It is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.
It is worse than the Mountain Valley pipeline, the 300-mile gas pipeline that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia got approved in 2022 in exchange for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act.
And it is worse than the Willow project in Alaska, the oil mega-project that President Joe Biden okayed last year under pressure from that state’s local and indigenous leaders.
It is so bad because it will set back the development of climate-friendly cities and rapid transit infrastructure in the United States for years if not decades. And it will deter other American cities from implementing the kind of time-saving, pollution-averting, anti-gridlock measure that the country desperately needs.
There is nothing good to be said for this decision. It is bad politics, bad economics, bad governance, and bad for the climate.
Let us briefly count the ways that it is destructive.
It is stupid coalition politics. Hochul has alienated her allies, including environmental groups, state budget hawks, and transit advocates. Bill McKibben, the longtime New Yorker writer who has become one of the country’s most famous climate activists, called Hochul’s decision “one of the most aggressive anti-environmental actions ever undertaken by a Democratic governor.”
In exchange, Hochul has delighted her Republican adversaries, who can praise her wise decision-making in the weeks to come — and therefore brandish their own bipartisan bonafides — but continue to campaign against congestion pricing through November. Congestion pricing is unpopular now, but in her fecklessness, Hochul has guaranteed that it will be a live issue in November.
It is nonsense budget politics. Hochul says that she has delayed congestion pricing because she is worried about the city’s recovery from the pandemic, but regardless of her reasons, she has now left a $1 billion hole in the transit authority’s budget. The New York Times reports that she wants to fill that hole by raising taxes on the state’s businesses.
But that means that she has taken a tax formerly charged to some New York residents and businesses — but which would also fall on New Jersey and Connecticut residents and businesses — and shifted it entirely to in-state entities. She has, in essence, cut taxes on out-of-state residents and raised taxes on New York businesses and consumers.
And instead of taxing the right to use roads in downtown Manhattan, which are a limited public resource, she will instead tax all business activity in the state. What good will that do for New York’s economy?
Those political and financial flaws might be forgiven if her decision was good for the planet. But don’t worry: It’s also bad climate politics.
Cars, SUVs, and trucks belch more climate pollution into the atmosphere than any other single economic activity in the U.S. Nearly 20% of America’s annual carbon pollution comes from individuals and families driving their private vehicles around on roads and highways. This is a far larger share of national pollution than is generated by more famous climate villains, such as air travel.
We have good ways of dealing with all that carbon pollution. In suburbs, small towns, and rural America, the best way to deal with that tailpipe pollution is to gradually transition from gasoline-burning cars to electric vehicles. In some places, the country can also experiment with using experimental, climate-friendly liquid fuels.
But in cities, people have better and cheaper options than getting EVs. We can stop requiring people to drive everywhere and encourage them to walk, bike, and take public transit instead. That will require, at times, treating the use of roads in city centers as the limited public resource that it is — which means charging cars and trucks to enter the most crowded downtown areas of certain cities at certain times of the day.
That’s what congestion pricing is: a way of encouraging cities to grow in pro-climate, pro-environmental ways. Such a policy has already been successfully implemented in London, Singapore, and other congested cities. Even as an urban car owner, I long wanted the city where I lived for a decade — Washington, D.C. — to adopt a similar policy. After all, when Stockholm started its congestion fee, the rate of asthma attacks among its children dropped by half.
So I looked forward to the start of congestion pricing in New York City, America’s biggest, densest, and most transit-friendly city. New York was bushwhacking a trail for everyone else to follow: If congestion policy was a success there, then other American cities could experiment with it in some form.
By pausing that trial before it has even begun, Hochul has essentially frozen our ability to experiment with congestion pricing anywhere else in the country. By shuttering the policy in New York, she has poisoned pro-climate urban politics everywhere. Now people will say: You saw what happened when New York tried to do congestion pricing. Do you really want to try that here?
In the past, when national Democrats have approved new pipelines or oil projects, they have argued that those projects will not affect the country’s carbon pollution because only demand for fossil fuels, and not the supply of them, drives carbon emissions. But what makes congestion pricing so powerful is that demand is precisely what it targets. Congestion pricing makes buses run faster, pays for the subway system, and pushes people and businesses to consider the social cost of their driving before they get in the car.
Congestion pricing, if implemented widely, can actually conserve fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions. Now Hochul has halted its progress everywhere.
She has made, in other words, a local mistake with national and even global consequences. It is such a foolhardy error that it instantly recasts Kathy Hochul’s climate record as governor.
Hochul has previously been seen as a center-left governor playing a difficult but moderate environmental hand. But is that really her record? She has struggled to build wind farms off the coast of New York, even though it is essential to decarbonizing the state’s power grid. She has so far failed to pass the NY HEAT Act, which would help the state transition away from using fossil fuels to heat its buildings. She has even failed to pass little climate measures that would fund the state’s more modest climate goals.
I would compare her to Senator Joe Manchin, the fossil-fuel-friendly West Virginia lawmaker who repeatedly refused to vote for Biden’s climate policy — except at least Manchin put his political reputation on the line when it mattered and ultimately negotiated, and voted for, the Inflation Reduction Act. At least Manchin has many qualities to recommend him: He was canny, risk-taking, proud, and courageous when it counted. Hochul is just a loser.
https://heatmap.news/economy/kathy-hochul-nyc-congestion-pricing
The Dealmakers Aren’t Fretting About the IRA’s Future
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heatmap News
Almost every day, Donald Trump attacks clean energy and climate action. He assails electric vehicles, offshore wind, and calls climate change a hoax. He’s also up a little bit in the polls.
Everyone in and out of the clean energy and environmental movement knows this. So why, over two days at a conference hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy this week, did clean energy bankers, investors, lawyers, and operators seem pretty optimistic about much of the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden energy policies surviving into 2025 and beyond?
Pretty simply: Because there’s a lot of money being made — including in Republican-controlled states.
“Money is money,” Gina McCarthy, the former Environmental Protection Agency director and White House climate advisor, said during an on-stage interview. “Honestly, who is going to pull the plug on the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act without huge blowback from each of the individual states and governors?”
“I’ve been telling my clients that it’s very unlikely that we’re going to see substantial changes,” Mona Dajani, a partner at Baker Botts, told me. “There’s a lot of clean energy in traditionally Republican states. So do I see anything very material happening? No, I don’t. I think it’d be very unlikely”
It’s not surprising that lawyers and investment bankers would be optimistic about the Inflation Reduction Act. Much of the bill’s spending is channeled through tax credits, which require lawyers and investment bankers to arrange and write up deals between developers and investors.
Whether this optimistic consensus will bear out in 2025 remains to be seen (obviously), but that it exists at all in the present is a testament to a deliberate strategy. The legislation, along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, gave a wide cross section of industries, and regions a stake in the energy transition.
Even if it wouldn’t make these various elected officials and business leaders Democrats — Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, for instance, seems to be opening a new battery plant every week and is not supporting Biden’s reelection — it may turn them into supporters of climate policy, or at least give them a second thought about killing it.
At the core of the IRA are tax credits that, while they will soon be “technology neutral,” will still largely benefit and are modeled on tax credits for wind and solar. Those credits, the Production Tax Credit and the Investment Tax Credit, are decades old, and have historically been affirmatively extended under both Democratic and Republican presidents when the status quo would have meant their demise. To undo them under a second Trump administration would require Congress and the White House to agree affirmatively to toss them out.
“When I look at the composition of Congress, even with a new administration, I think it will be difficult to repeal it,” said Mit Buchanan, managing director of energy investment at JPMorgan Chase, speaking of the IRA during a panel at the conference. “There’s been good support on both sides of aisle in respect to renewable energy in red and blue states. Job creation means a lot.”
Texas and Florida are two of the standouts in clean energy investment, with Texas surpassing California in deploying utility-scale solar and leading the leading the country in wind generation. Florida, meanwhile, has the third-most solar installed among U.S. states.
Between the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, though, there’s spending that goes beyond wind and solar, including subsidies for oil industry darlings like carbon capture and sequestration, as well as hydrogen energy development.
“Carbon sequestration and hydrogen brings in industries that were traditionally hostile to renewables,” said Jordan Newman, a managing director and renewables investment banker at Wells Fargo, at the conference. A number of carbon sequestration infrastructure projects have popped up in Republican-voting states, including a carbon dioxide pipeline project in Iowa, while the sizable planned investments in hydrogen include a hub in Houston, of which Chevron and ExxonMobil are partners.
But the Biden administration and regulatory agencies run by Biden appointees are certainly acting as if large swaths of the administration’s climate policy are at risk. The Treasury Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have put out a flurry of rules and guidance before self-imposed deadlines at the end of this year and to attempt to front-run the ability of a Republican Congress and White House to undo regulations through the Congressional Review Act.
“Our mission and what we continue to do is seek to get as much of the guidance done right and done effectively on the most reasonable timeframe that we can, and we’ll continue to do that all the way through the end of this year,” Ethan Zindler, climate counselor at the Treasury Department, told the audience.
Even if much of the energy tax credits and subsidies for specific technologies like hydrogen and carbon sequestration could survive a change in administration, other parts of the IRA may be at greater risk, especially wind and especially especially offshore wind, for which Trump seems to have a special distaste.
“Offshore wind is challenging,” Meghan Schultz, the chief financial officer of Invenergy, which won a contract for an offshore wind project off the coast of New Jersey earlier this year, said on a panel.
She previewed a message for a potential second Trump administration, focusing on the industrial and job benefits of offshore wind: “If he were to be elected, it will be important that we’re working as an industry to educate this administration on the value these projects will bring, in clean energy and job creation and infrastructure.”
No matter what happens, business people tend towards the optimistic. Said Thomas de Swardt, chief commercial officer at D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments: “If it happens, we’ll sit around table and talk about how we restructure and reprice deals.”
https://heatmap.news/economy/trump-ira-money
Prince William shares update on Princess Catherine’s cancer battle
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
While it remains unknown what type of cancer she is getting treatment for, Kensington Palace shared a statement in May, saying that Princess Catherine has not set a date for her public return.
Circle of Hope to host Hoedown fundraiser
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
News release Get ready to dust off those cowboy boots and join Circle of Hope Cancer Wellness Center for its Hoedown for Hope barbecue and music fundraiser. The […]
The post Circle of Hope to host Hoedown fundraiser appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/circle-of-hope-to-host-hoedown-fundraiser/
To solve AI’s energy crisis, ‘rethink the entire stack from electrons to algorithms,’ says Stanford prof
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Think biologically not digitally to go from megawatts to watts, HAI gathering told
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) on Wednesday celebrated five years of cat herding, which is to say shepherding the responsible development of machine learning.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/a_high_five_for_stanford/
Bartender Developer Explains and Apologizes for Quiet Acquisition
date: 2024-06-05, from: TidBITS blog
After two days of uproar, the original developer behind the popular Mac menu bar utility Bartender has apologized for not being more upfront about selling the app to a development company.
https://tidbits.com/2024/06/05/bartender-developer-explains-and-apologizes-for-quiet-acquisition/
Police: Woman who died from gunshot wounds in San Francisco was shot in Oakland
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The approximate location of the shooting is very near Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.
Bay Area arts: 10 cool shows and concerts to catch this weekend
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
From free concerts to a world premiere musical about Stephen Sondheim, there is a lot to see and do in the Bay Area this weekend and beyond.
AGI by 2027?
date: 2024-06-05, from: Gary Marcus blog
Fun with charts
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/agi-by-2027
8 great day trips from Paris
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Thanks to France’s extensive and efficient rail network, all of the following day trips are within easy reach.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/05/8-great-day-trips-from-paris/
Meet the Simunauts: Ohio State Students to Test Space Food Solutions for NASA
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
By Savannah Bullard NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge kicks off its final eight-week demonstration this month, and a new crew is running the show. NASA’s partner for the Deep Space Food Challenge, the Methuselah Foundation, has teamed up with Ohio State University in Columbus to facilitate the challenge’s third and final phase. The university is […]
Pittsburg makes a play for tourist eyes and civic pride with new signs
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Pittsburg installs large block-letter city sign and gateway sign along with landscaping improvements
‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ review: Smith-Lawrence comedic chemistry gives it life
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Fourth entry in action-comedy franchise lackluster in a few areas.
Bartender Acquired by Applause Group
date: 2024-06-05, from: Michael Tsai
Juli Clover (Reddit, Hacker News, Mac Power Users Talk, AppleInsider): Popular Mac app Bartender appears to have been quietly sold approximately two months ago, with neither the prior owner nor the current owner providing customers or potential customers with information on the sale.[…]Bartender’s new owners replied to the Reddit thread and confirmed that Bartender had […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/06/05/bartender-acquired-by-applause-group/
Screen Time Bugs
date: 2024-06-05, from: Michael Tsai
Joanna Stern (tweet): Porn, violent images, illicit drugs. I could see it all by typing a special string of characters into the Safari browser’s address bar. The parental controls I had set via Apple’s Screen Time? Useless.Security researchers reported this particular software bug to Apple multiple times over the past three years with no luck. […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/06/05/screen-time-bugs/
Department of Public Services Raises Pride Flag In Solidarity With LGBTQ+
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services joined seven local advocate organizations in affirming its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, with the raising of the Progress Pride Flag Monday at its City of Industry Headquarters
https://scvnews.com/department-of-public-services-raises-pride-flag-in-solidarity-with-lgbtq/
The Marshall Star for June 5, 2024
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
LIFTOFF! NASA Astronauts Pilot First Starliner Crewed Test to Station NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are safely in orbit on the first crewed flight test aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft bound for the International Space Station. As part of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, the astronauts lifted off at 9:52 a.m. CDT June 5 […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-june-5-2024/
What is RansomHub? Looks like a Knight ransomware reboot
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Malware code potentially sold off, tweaked, back at it infecting victims
RansomHub, a newish cyber-crime operation that has claimed to be behind the theft of data from Christie’s auction house and others, is “very likely” some kind of rebrand of the Knight ransomware gang, according to threat hunters.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/ransomhub_knight_reboot/
LASD Asks Public’s Help Locating Missing Santa Clarita Man
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Missing Persons Unit is asking for the public’s help locating At-Risk Missing Person, Evan Chapman
4-acre brush fire reported in Gorman
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
Los Angeles County firefighters were called to battle a brush fire, dubbed the Cherry Fire, on California State Route 138 and Quail Lake Road in Gorman early Wednesday afternoon, according […]
The post 4-acre brush fire reported in Gorman appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/4-acre-brush-fire-reported-in-gorman/
Keck workers launch informational picket
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The demonstration aims to draw attention to ongoing contract negotiations between USC and workers at Keck School of Medicine of USC.
The post Keck workers launch informational picket appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/keck-workers-launch-informational-picket/
Why SF Giants sent Luis Matos back to minors 2 weeks after winning NL honors
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Matos has batted .153 with 10 strikeouts in 63 plate appearances since his OPS peaked after six-RBI game last month.
The chicken and egg problem of fighting another flu pandemic
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The spread of an avian flu virus has decimated flocks of birds (and killed barn cats and other mammals).
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/05/the-chicken-and-egg-problem-of-fighting-another-flu-pandemic/
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-06-05, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Breakfast this morning was tea, chia pudding, and all the drugs
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/112565759371436255
Pruneyard Cinemas in Campbell faces “significant” money challenge, seeks lease rework
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Pruneyard Cinemas in Campbell faces “significant” money challenges.
5 financial steps for new college grads in their first jobs
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
A solid financial foundation starts with creating a budget, saving for emergencies and retirement, being proactive about student loan bills and building credit.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/06/05/5-financial-steps-for-new-college-grads-in-their-first-jobs/
Meeting Jerry
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I applaud the Memorial Day tribute to Jerry Georges.
The post Meeting Jerry appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/meeting-jerry/
Biden dispatches top aides to press Hamas as Israel grapples with cease-fire plan
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
White House — President Joe Biden’s top aides are in the Middle East to push for a three-phase Gaza cease-fire plan that the U.S. leader announced last week as the latest offer from the Israeli war cabinet. The deal would see an initial six-week pause of fighting and secure the release of some hostages held by Hamas and some Palestinians detained in Israeli jails.
CIA director Bill Burns arrived in Doha Tuesday, and Brett McGurk, Biden’s top Middle East adviser, is in Cairo Wednesday, administration officials confirmed to VOA. The pair is expected to convey Biden’s message that Hamas should sign the deal, via key mediators Qatar and Egypt.
Earlier in the week, Biden spoke with the Emir of Qatar Amir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani, reiterating that the plan “offers a concrete roadmap for ending the crisis in Gaza.”
The deal is structured toward a permanent cease-fire in exchange for the release of all hostages and the reconstruction of Gaza. But neither party appears close to agreement.
Despite the Israeli war cabinet signing off on the proposal, shortly after Biden’s announcement Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed there will be no permanent cease-fire without “the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.”
In response, Hamas official Osama Hamdan declared Tuesday it could not agree without a clear Israeli position on a permanent cease-fire and complete withdrawal from Gaza.
“You’re going to hear a lot of things in the media, a lot of statements from a lot of different voices and a lot of different people,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said. He spoke aboard Air Force One Tuesday evening enroute to France where Biden is scheduled to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day on Thursday.
Hamdan’s declaration aside, Sullivan said the administration would only consider the group’s formal response as conveyed to the Qataris, who transmitted the proposal from Israeli negotiators to Hamas.
“We have not gotten that yet,” Sullivan said, noting that the U.S. is in “hourly contact” with Qatar.
What happens next?
The plan’s three-phase outline appears fundamentally similar to a proposal that Hamas said it had accepted in early May. But given the world’s condemnation of Israel’s actions on Rafah paired with a ruling by the top U.N. court ordering the government to halt its military offensive there, the group may seek to leverage its advantage on the negotiation table.
“There is no guarantee that Hamas won’t come back with additional conditions,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. negotiator on Middle East peace talks who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
Once Hamas provides its formal response, Netanyahu must present it to his entire coalition, Miller told VOA. “And that’s where things get to be very complicated.”
With far-right ministers of the coalition threatening to leave the government if Netanyahu agrees to a cease-fire, and his war cabinet members saying they would quit if he does not agree, the prime minister faces the risk of a collapsed coalition no matter what he decides. That could trigger early elections, potentially sending Netanyahu into the opposition and making him more vulnerable to a conviction in his corruption trial.
Biden’s announcement of the cease-fire plan has brought those pressures on Netanyahu to a head.
“I think Netanyahu is trying to buy his time and stretch this out and hope maybe that Hamas will actually be the one to say no more definitively,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine at the International Crisis Group.
The prime minister could also find alternative opposition parties to enter a temporary government, she told VOA. “It could be that Netanyahu has something up his sleeve to be able to go with the deal and still remain in power for a while.”
In an interview this week with Time magazine, Biden said “there is every reason” for people to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the conflict for his own political self-preservation.
He appeared to walk back the statement Tuesday when asked whether Netanyahu is playing politics with the war.
“I don’t think so. He’s trying to work out the serious problem that he has,” Biden said.
Biden under pressure
With polls suggesting Biden losing support from progressives and young voters over his support for Israel, securing a cease-fire ahead of the November election would appeal to swaths of Biden’s constituents.
“The Democrats would like to avoid the ugly optics of ‘Genocide Joe’ demonstrations at their August convention,” said Laura Blumenfeld, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Biden is set to be formally nominated as the party’s presidential nominee during the convention.
Meanwhile, Arab and Muslim Americans are having “difficult discussions” over whether to support Biden or his Republican opponent, said Muslim Public Affairs Council founder Salam Al-Marayati.
“On the one hand, no Republican has supported a cease-fire,” Al-Marayati told VOA. “On the other hand, the president himself has enabled genocide, has financed the genocide, has been a part, complicitly, of this genocide.”
Biden and his aides have rejected the characterization that Israel’s offensive in Gaza amounts to genocide.
From a domestic political point of view, Blumenfeld noted that Biden’s timing of the announcement on the cease-fire was “spot on.”
“It is one of multiple gestures meant to highlight his leadership,” she told VOA, noting a series of international engagements Biden is embarking on as the White House sought to highlight his global leadership.
Biden announced an executive order Tuesday on the migrant crisis along the U.S. southern border with Mexico. He is set to deliver a speech defending democracy on the beach of Normandy, France, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day. He’ll meet leaders of the world’s leading economies at the G7 summit in Italy later this month and host a NATO summit in July.
“We are mobilizing common action to solve the great challenges of our time,” Sullivan said in response to VOA’s question. “In these next six weeks, the president will try to put all that on display.”
Biden has invested much on his cease-fire strategy. But neither of the warring parties are in a hurry to end their conflict, Miller said.
“The Biden administration is clearly under the most pressure and the most urgency to see something happen,” he said, not just for domestic political aims but also the goal of advancing a historic agreement to normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia that could only happen with peace in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and reiterated that Hamas should agree “without further delay,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
The U.S. is also keen to keep in check Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah near the northern Israeli border with Lebanon, which has been fought in parallel to the Gaza war.
On this front, Biden is again dependent on Netanyahu. The prime minister said Wednesday Israel is prepared for “very strong action” against Hezbollah, saying he would restore security “one way or another.”
VOA’s Virginia Gunawan and Anita Powell contributed to this report.
Princess Cruises Named Official Cruise Line Partner of the Academy of Country Music
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Princess Cruises, the world’s most iconic cruise brand, today was named as the exclusive cruise line partner for the famed Academy of Country Music
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-05, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Amazing feat.
Bringing Vulkan to Linux on Apple Silicon in one month:
https://rosenzweig.io/blog/vk13-on-the-m1-in-1-month.html
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112565702066357538
High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Bristol researcher granted £375K to improve airborne wind energy systems
We may be inching closer to a post-turbine wind energy future if a grant awarded to a University of Bristol boffin for wind-harvesting, ground-tethered drone research is any indication of things to come. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/airborne_wind_energy_grant/
ONEXPLAYER X1 Mini is a small(er) Ryzen 7 8840U gaming tablet with an 8.8 inch display and detachable controllers
date: 2024-06-05, from: Liliputing
The ONEXPLAYER X1 Mini is a handheld gaming PC with an 8.8 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel LTPS display featuring a 144 Hz refresh rate, and AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor with Radeon 780M integrated graphics, and a pair of detachable controllers that let you quickly switch between using the computer as a handheld or a […]
The post ONEXPLAYER X1 Mini is a small(er) Ryzen 7 8840U gaming tablet with an 8.8 inch display and detachable controllers appeared first on Liliputing.
💽 Making the geek movie
date: 2024-06-05, from: Interesting, a blog on writing
Sure, the theoretical particle physicists get it… but will it play in Peoria?
https://inneresting.substack.com/p/making-the-geek-movie
Republican lawmakers criticize Biden’s limits on asylum seekers
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
U.S. lawmakers are divided on President Joe Biden’s executive order imposing new limits on asylum seekers at U.S. borders. As VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports, the debate over border security remains a tough issue ahead of general elections in November.
https://www.voanews.com/a/republican-lawmakers-criticize-biden-s-action-on-immigration/7644216.html
“Sun Bucks” Meal Program To Expand Summer Access Of Universal Meals For California’s Students
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond today commended the launch of SUN Bucks, a new federally funded food program designed to ensure that qualified children have consistent access to adequate nutrition, is now available for the summer.”
US, allies warn China aggressively ‘headhunting’ Western fighter pilots
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
Washington — China’s military appears to be intensifying its efforts to recruit current and former Western fighter pilots, employing new and more intricate tactics to snare Western expertise.
The United States and some of its closest intelligence partners issued a new warning Wednesday, cautioning the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is using private companies, including corporate headhunters, so that Western pilots are unaware of links to the Chinese military until it is too late.
The goal, according to a bulletin issued by the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — known as Five Eyes — is for China to better train its own fighter pilots while gaining better insights into how Western air forces operate, something that could erode Western advantages or even give Chinese fighter jets a boost in case of a conflict.
The bulletin said the PLA is recruiting through private companies based in South Africa and China, trying to lure Western pilots with lucrative salaries.
Other recruitment efforts include leveraging personal acquaintances, professional networking sites and online job platforms, which similarly obscure any links to the Chinese government or military.
“We’re issuing this joint bulletin today because this is a persistent threat that continues to evolve in response to Western countermeasures,” an official with the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center told VOA.
“Like any illicit enterprise that seeks to conceal its activities, there have been efforts to incorporate entities [companies] in different locations under different names,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the rationale behind Wednesday’s bulletin.
“There have also been variations in recruitment pitches and approaches,” the official added. “It’s critical that we keep our current and former service members informed about this threat, which is directly targeting them.”
The Five Eyes bulletin said the Chinese recruitment efforts appear to be targeting current and former military pilots from Five Eyes countries as well as those from France, Germany and other Western nations.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the allegations in the Five Eyes bulletin about efforts by the PLA to hire Western fighter pilots.
But it pushed back against the accusations that private companies with links to China are engaged in improper behavior.
“Countries should not generalize and abuse the concept of national security and smear relevant companies,” the embassy said in an email to VOA.
“The companies’ normal business activities should be respected,” the embassy added, saying that U.S. accusations are “not conducive to the healthy development of China-U.S. relations.”
VOA has contacted the Chinese Embassy in Washington for comment.
Concerns about Beijing’s pursuit of Western pilots and aviation expertise are not new.
British defense officials were sounding alarms about Chinese efforts to recruit retired members of the British Royal Air Force through companies in South Africa as far back as October 2022.
Australian defense officials raised similar concerns a month later, warning that retired Australian military personnel had an “enduring obligation” to protect state secrets and “to reveal any of those secrets is a crime.”
Britain, Australia and the other Five Eyes members have also taken action to curtail Beijing’s efforts.
The U.S. last year, for example, placed restrictions on 43 entities tied to Chinese efforts to recruit and hire Western fighter pilots.
The targeted companies included a flight school in South Africa, a security and an aviation company founded by a former U.S. Navy SEAL with operations in the United Arab Emirates, Kenya and Laos.
While such work may have diminished Beijing’s efforts, the U.S. and its intelligence partners warn China has responded aggressively, rolling out new recruitment efforts aimed not only at hiring former Western fighter pilots but hiring engineers and flight operation center personnel who also could give the PLA insights into the operations and tactics of Western air forces.
Wednesday’s bulletin advises current and former U.S. military personnel approached with suspicious recruitment pitches to contact their individual military services or the FBI.
Military personnel from other countries are encouraged to contact the appropriate defense agencies.
“PLA recruitment efforts continue to evolve,” U.S. NCSC Director Michael Casey said in a statement Wednesday.
The new warning “seeks to highlight this persistent threat and deter any current or former Western service members from actions that put their military colleagues at risk and erode our national security,” he added.
DuckDB promises greater stability with 1.0 release
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
In-process OLAP database flies the nest
DuckDB has become a fully fledged database release with its 1.0 iteration, promising a new data model and greater stability to enhance backwards compatibility.…
Starliner to the Stars
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft aboard launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, in this image from June 5, 2024. As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the flight test will help validate the transportation system, launch pad, rocket, spacecraft, in-orbit operations capabilities, and return to Earth […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/starliner-to-the-stars/
Student Protests Raise Questions, Inspire Hope, CSUN Prof Says
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
While the academic year winds down, Antastasiia Timmer, an assistant professor of criminology and justice studies at California State University, Northridge, said student activism over the war in Gaza is not over
https://scvnews.com/student-protests-raise-questions-inspire-hope-csun-prof-says/
All Booked | Richelle’s Recent Reads
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Indy’s Richelle Boyd tells us about what she’s been reading recently.
The post All Booked | Richelle’s Recent Reads appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/all-booked-richelles-recent-reads/
Guinness Names Ghana Toddler as the ‘World’s Youngest Male Artist’
date: 2024-06-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Ace-Liam Ankrah, who turns 2 in July, has already hosted a solo exhibition and sold 15 original pieces
130-Foot Snake Carving Slithers Through 2,000-Year-Old Rock Art Found in South America
date: 2024-06-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The conspicuous reptile renderings spotted along the Orinoco River likely functioned as territorial markers, akin to pre-Colombian road signs
Boeing’s Starliner makes it into orbit at long last – with human crew aboard
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Let’s get that brave duo to the ISS and then home to Earth safely
Boeing’s NASA-backed Starliner crew capsule, at long last, successfully blasted off from a Florida launch pad today with two brave humans onboard.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/boeing_starliner_launch_success/
After contentious Amazon datacenter fight, US county says it has learned a lesson
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘We love our farms’ says Culpeper, but we also like internet mega-souk and others setting up servers
Interview When we last checked in on Culpeper County, Virginia, folks there were contesting the construction of an Amazon datacenter while officials sought to attract more server-hosting estates to the area.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/datacenter_culpeper_amazon/
Why Big Oil and Santa Barbara County Cannot Be Friends
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
A new oil company, financed by Exxon, has reopened the fight.
The post Why Big Oil and Santa Barbara County Cannot Be Friends appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/why-big-oil-and-santa-barbara-county-cannot-be-friends/
The Dog Days Are Here in Santa Barbara
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Come find your new best friend during an adoption event June 8 on the State Street promenade.
The post The Dog Days Are Here in Santa Barbara appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/the-dog-days-are-here-in-santa-barbara/
Daily Deals (6-05-2024)
date: 2024-06-05, from: Liliputing
When Google announced new features coming to Chromebook Plus-branded laptops last month, the company also highlighted the fact that prices for Chromebook Plus systems used to start at $400, but now you can pick up some models for as little as $350. Costco’s got that beat though: the retailer is selling an Acer Chromebook Plus […]
The post Daily Deals (6-05-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-6-05-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How Would Congestion Pricing Have Worked in New York City?
Gifts From the Vine
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Recent fundraisers highlight the generosity of Santa Barbara County’s wine industry.
The post Gifts From the Vine appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/gifts-from-the-vine/
6 Primary Results That Could Have Big Implications for the Climate Movement
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heatmap News
Democracy is having a big year — heck, it’s having a big month. More people will vote in 2024 than in any other year in human history, and many of those elections are happening right now: In just the past four days, Mexicans elected a climate scientist to the presidency; Indians braved extreme heat to reelect Prime Minister Narendra Modi; and Donald Trump’s pal Nigel Farage announced his return to the scrum of British politics in the hopes of holding off an historic win by the Labour Party on July 4.
Americans still have another few months of suspense before their own general election, but voting is well underway stateside, too. In Tuesday’s primaries, voters cast ballots for local offices in Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — including in several races with significant implications for the climate.
While the results were a mixed bag, they also speak to the fact that climate change is increasingly unignorable by politicians, and it signals where campaigners and activists should focus their attention as the November election approaches. Here are six of the major takeaways:
Republican climate leaders can (probably?) win elections …
What happened: Mariannette Miller-Meeks won the First District Republican primary in Iowa
Why it matters: Miller-Meeks is the head of the House’s Conservative Climate Caucus and has championed wind, solar, and nuclear energy; her opponent, David Pautsch, attacked her for not being conservative enough on issues like abortion, the national debt, and her support of tax credits for carbon pipelines. Though Miller-Meeks’ history isn’t likely to impress too many climate activists — she’s been particularly sympathetic to the liquified natural gas industry, claiming, “If you want a cleaner, healthier planet, the best thing you could do is to export American oil and gas” — her victory over Pautsch in deep-red Iowa proves that being associated with the word “climate” isn’t an automatic black mark against a Republican in 2024. Still, it wasn’t a comfortable victory: Early Tuesday evening, the returns had looked pretty worrying for Miller-Meeks, and the slim margin in some areas suggested the risk of breaking with the party line.
… but that doesn’t mean they’ve broken the climate curse
What happened: Democratic voters in New Jersey weren’t convinced by Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, who lost the Eighth Congressional District primary to Rep. Rob Menendez, Jr.
Why it matters: Of all the candidates who ran in contested primaries on Tuesday, none seemed to position themselves more overtly as a climate candidate than Bhalla. As mayor of Hoboken, Bhalla created a Department of Climate Action & Innovation in part to adapt to a future of extreme flooding in the city, has sued Exxon Mobil for climate-related damages, and centered climate as a campaign priority, earning endorsements from environmental groups like the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters and Food & Water Action. While many different factors go into winning — and losing — a campaign (especially in a state like New Jersey), one lesson of the night is that “climate,” at least in so many words, might not be the selling point that progressives sometimes think it is. Case in point: Bhalla’s campaign page on climate framed electrification as a means of reducing the state’s “carbon footprint”; Menendez’s focused mainly on the economy and jobs.
Montana gets a front-row seat to the climate culture war
What happened: Tim Sheehy won the Republican Senate primary, setting him up to take on Democrat Jon Tester in one of the most nail-biting races of November
Why it matters: Retired Navy SEAL and aerial firefighter Tim Sheehy overcame a scandal involving a lie about his gunshot wound to take on Tester in a race that could decide the balance of the U.S. Senate — and, by extension, Biden’s climate agenda — in five months’ time. A Trump endorsee, Sheehy is not afraid of a good old-fashioned culture war, as evidenced by Bridger Aerospace, his aerial firefighting company, quietly removing references to environmental, social, and governance issues from its website after Sheehy entered the race. Any mention of climate change? That was gone, too. But Sheehy’s rhetoric during his primary campaign also reeked of the green boogeyman, with the candidate repeatedly using the term “climate cult” to dismiss Tester, Biden, and other perceived enemies. Though Tester, a working farmer, has championed climate-related causes in a way that has resonated even with many Republicans, Sheehy hasn’t yet appeared interested in debating the finer points of things like federal subsidies for going electric. Expect the attacks to get more colorful in the coming months; polls show Sheehy and Tester neck-and-neck.
The left really needs to start winning utility board elections
What happened: Voters in Montana winnowed down a crowded field of six Republican utility board candidates to three finalists
Why it matters: Utility boards are some of the most influential elected bodies that almost nobody pays attention to, and Republicans in red and red-leaning states like Arizona and Alaska tend to hold the edge even in bluer urban areas. In Montana, the Public Service Commission decides the energy mix of the region in and around Billings, Missoula, Bozeman, Helena, and Butte, and has been in Republican hands for two decades. That explains the high level of Republican interest in the primary races on Tuesday, where five candidates played musical chairs for two available seats. The apparent winners — Brad Molnar in District 2 and Jeff Welborn in District 3 (in addition to incumbent commissioner Jennifer Fielder, who ran unopposed) — have hit-and-miss records when it comes to renewable energy. Molnar, who was reelected to the seat he held from 2005 to 2012, told the Montana Free Press he’s concerned about the “xenophobia” of conservatives in his state and has been known to break from party lines in his votes, in addition to voicing some belief in climate change (though he doesn’t say we can do anything about it). Welborn, meanwhile, described himself to the Free Press as a “free market guy” interested in preventing rate hikes with an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy that includes new nuclear plants and hydrogen, though he’s previously sided with the local utility over Montana’s consumer advocate. In November, Welborn will face Leonard “Lenny” Williams, the uncontested Democrat in the race, who’s called the gerrymandered utility board districts a “racket.”
‘Climate’ might be a dirty word, but ‘environmental justice’ doesn’t have to be
What happened: Angel Charley easily won the New Mexico Democratic primary in Senate District 30, to the west of Albuquerque, on an environmental justice platform
Why it matters: With around 63% of the vote as of Wednesday morning, first-time candidate Angel Charley appeared to be the clear winner in her race against former state Senator Clemente Sanchez. Charley, the former director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, convinced voters in the recently redrawn district that climate goals aren’t different from popular policies like protecting vulnerable women living near extractive industries in their area, and can be pursued with projects like community solar development. As the experts I’ve spoken with have told me, sometimes the best way to move emissions-abating policies forward is by focusing on what climate activists might view more as positive externalities, but are more immediate to the communities in question. Charley’s victory on environmental justice grounds seems like further proof of concept. A Native American activist, Charley’s campaign focused largely on “lessening dependence on oil and gas and extractive industries, because there’s a correlation with violence against Native women when extractive industries are present.” Meanwhile, Sanchez’s campaign was heavily financed by corporate interests, including donations from an oil company, an auto dealer trade group, lobbyists, and utilities.
There’s one pipeline South Dakotans can’t get behind
What happened: 17 out of 19 Republican and Democratic sponsors of a recent bill attempting to block a CO2 pipeline in the state who were up for reelection won their primaries
Why it matters: Located between the shale oil fields of North Dakota and the storage terminals of Texas, South Dakota is no stranger to pipeline proposals. Plans for a new pipeline that would funnel carbon dioxide produced by the local ethanol industry to North Dakota to be stored underground, however, have become a contentious wedge issue in the state and appeared to be behind some of the primary results on Tuesday night. Of the more than a dozen sponsors of a recent failed bill that would have prohibited the use of eminent domain for the construction of pipelines carrying carbon oxide, all but two who ran appeared to have been reelected as of Wednesday morning; some of the state’s losing incumbents, on the other hand, were behind a compromise bill that attempted to split the difference between protecting landowners and allowing the pipeline project to proceed. The slim margins in some races — The South Dakota Searchlight points to Mykala Voita, a landowner rights candidate who beat incumbent Republican Sen. Erin Tobin by 48 votes, within the margin to trigger a recount — speak to the deep divides and disagreements in the state. That also goes for divisions within the major parties about the use of eminent domain and suspicions about the technology of carbon capture and storage more largely.
https://heatmap.news/politics/6-climate-primaries
Creativity and Community on Full Display at the Raab Writing Fellows Showcase at UC Santa Barbara
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The 2024 Raab Fellows cohort presented a wide range of writing projects highlighting the broad spectrum of student creativity.
The post Creativity and Community on Full Display at the Raab Writing Fellows Showcase at UC Santa Barbara appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Emergency patches released for critical vulns impacting EOL Zyxel NAS boxes
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
That backdoor’s not meant to be there?
Zyxel just released security fixes for two of its obsolete network-attached storage (NAS) devices after an intern at a security vendor reported critical flaws months ago.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/zyxel_emergency_patches_nas/
Santa Barbara County’s Proposed Bed-Tax Increase Moves Closer to November Ballot
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The tax measure would generate nearly $3 million annually from tourists lodging in unincorporated areas of the county.
The post Santa Barbara County’s Proposed Bed-Tax Increase Moves Closer to November Ballot appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This week's Jon Stewart is great. Must watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmxzQJt80XI
Can a Sales-Tax Measure Solve Santa Barbara’s Budget Woes?
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The city is pursuing a ballot measure to allow voters to decide on a half-cent sales tax that could net $15 million annually.
The post Can a Sales-Tax Measure Solve Santa Barbara’s Budget Woes? appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/can-a-sales-tax-measure-solve-santa-barbaras-budget-woes/
Hubble will transition to single-gyro mode to gain a few more years of operational life
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
So about that commercial servicing mission, hmm?
NASA has confirmed that the time has come: the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is to run in one-gyro mode from now on.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/hubble_to_transition_to_singlegyro/
Kids Discover Tyrannosaurus Rex Fossil in North Dakota
date: 2024-06-05, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The bones belonged to a dinosaur that was likely a teenager when it died. Only a handful of young T. rex skeletons have ever been found
Hunter Biden gun trial hears from FBI agent as first lady looks on
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
Wilmington, United States — Jurors at Hunter Biden’s trial heard testimony Wednesday from an FBI agent who investigated the U.S president’s son for allegedly buying a handgun while using crack cocaine.
On Tuesday the court heard that Hunter Biden — the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be prosecuted — was a heavy drug user and allegedly lied about this on the paperwork when purchasing the firearm.
He is also on trial in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware — his family’s political heartland — for illegal possession of the firearm, which he had for just 11 days in October 2018.
FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen testified how investigators retrieved evidence, including photographs apparently showing drugs, from a now infamous abandoned laptop that has been at the heart of Republican efforts to discredit the Biden family.
Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, could take the stand after Jensen according to the outline of the case given by the prosecution on Tuesday.
First Lady Jill Biden, was again in court Wednesday, as she has been for every day of the trial, while President Joe Biden has issued a statement saying he is “proud” of his son.
The case has been a distraction for Biden’s reelection campaign against Donald Trump. The president was in France on Wednesday to attend World War II D-Day commemorations and is in the midst of rolling out major initiatives on illegal migration into the United States and a proposed truce for Gaza.
The trial comes just days after Trump was convicted in a New York court on business fraud charges.
On Tuesday, the prosecutor in Wilmington played extracts from an audio version of Hunter Biden’s memoir “Beautiful Things,” recorded by Biden himself, in which he recalled his descent into addiction, when he would desperately seek out crack cocaine.
“I cooked [crack] and smoked. I cooked and smoked,” said the extract played to the court, taken from his audiobook.
But Hunter Biden’s lawyer said that he “was not using drugs when he bought that gun” and that it “was never loaded, never carried, never used” during the 11 days he owned it.
Biden, a Yale-trained lawyer and lobbyist-turned-artist, has stated that he has been sober since 2019.
The legal woes have reopened painful emotional wounds for the Biden family, stemming from his time as a drug addict and well before.
His brother Beau died from cancer in 2015, and his sister Naomi died as an infant in a 1972 car crash that also killed their mother, Neilia, Joe Biden’s first wife. Hunter and Beau were the only survivors of the accident.
If found guilty, Hunter Biden could face 25 years in prison, although as a first-time offender, jail time is unlikely.
The president’s son has long been the target of hard-right Republicans trying to embarrass Joe Biden, and Trump allies have investigated him at length in Congress on allegations of corruption and influence-peddling. No charges have ever been brought.
Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China and Ukraine have also formed the basis for attempts by Republican lawmakers to initiate impeachment proceedings against his father. Those efforts too have gone nowhere.
The White House said last year that there would be no presidential pardon for Hunter Biden in case of a conviction.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-05, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Work starts on rewriting in SwiftUI the advanced importers in Godot:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112564933314216221
Mountain Rain or Snow Volunteers Broke Records This Winter
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
The Mountain Rain or Snow project asks volunteers to track rain, snow, and mixed precipitation all winter long—and this was a winter like no other! This season, 1,684 people submitted precipitation observations—that’s about a third more than last season. These volunteers submitted over 32,110 observations, breaking last year’s record by over 10,000. Some observers excelled by sending in hundreds of observations—Patrick Thorson submitted […]
UK tribunal greenlights $17.4B advertising monopoly case against Google
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chocolate Factory entangled in yet another anti-competitive claim
The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) has ruled that a class action lawsuit accusing Google of anti-competitive practices can proceed.…
LIFTOFF! NASA Astronauts Pilot First Starliner Crewed Test to Station
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
Editor’s note: This release was updated June 5, 2024, to include instructions on how to attend the post-docking briefing on Thursday, June 6. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are safely in orbit on the first crewed flight test aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft bound for the International Space Station. As part of NASA’s Boeing […]
Beelink EQ13 is an Alder Lake-N mini PC with an integrated power supply
date: 2024-06-05, from: Liliputing
The Beelink EQ13 is a 126 x 126 x 39mm (5″ x 5″ x 1.5″) computer with an Intel Alder Lake-N quad-core processor configured to run at up to 25 watts, support for two displays and two Ethernet connections, and an integrated power supply that allows you to connect the mini PC to a wall jack […]
The post Beelink EQ13 is an Alder Lake-N mini PC with an integrated power supply appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/beelink-eq13-is-an-alder-lake-n-mini-pc-with-an-integrated-power-supply/
OpenAI insiders demand the right to blow whistle without fear of retaliation
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘Current and former employees should retain their freedom to report their concerns to the public’ open letter says
Current and former Google DeepMind and OpenAI staff have signed an open letter calling for support and protection for whistleblowers and accountability among companies at the leading edge of AI development.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/openai_whistleblowing_open_letter/
Pro-Palestine Stanford students barricade themselves inside office of university president
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Protesters say they’ll have to be removed by force if demands aren’t met.
Kurtenbach: A’s and B’s — Oakland’s new minor-league team shows The Town is still big-league
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The difference between the A’s and B’s games Tuesday night in Oakland was night and day.
India Election Results—Continuity, with Some Welcome Surprises
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: RAND blog
In the recent India election, the ruling party performed worse than generally expected, losing its majority for the first time since 2014. Still, it is likely to return to power with enough seats among its alliance partner to earn a majority. While this sounds like a recipe for political instability, it need not be so.
AMD drops Windows 10 support for new chipsets and processors, while Microsoft expands testing efforts for new Windows 10 features
date: 2024-06-05, from: OS News
Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy. While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting the 16% IPC boost on Zen 5 and the big AI performance leap delivering up to 50 TOPS on the NPU side, an interesting drawback of the Ryzen AI 300 series that has managed to avoid getting media attention is the lack of support for Windows 10. While this was just an unconfirmed rumour last month even though it was suggested by a supposed Lenovo China manager, we have now got confirmation from AMD itself that the report, that Strix point and newer CPUs and APUs will not support Windows 10 is true. ↫ Sayan Sen at NeoWin Official support for Windows 10 is ending next year, so there is some reason to AMD’s madness, but at the same time, almost 70% of Windows users are currently using Windows 10, and leaving those users behind might not be the best idea AMD ever had. There is an argument to be made that at least a reasonable number of these people are still using Windows 10 not out of their own volition, but because of Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements, and as such, anyone buying a new AMD machine will just opt for the latest version of Windows out of habit, but I still think there’s a sizable contingent of people who actively choose Windows 10 over 11 for a whole host of reasons. On a strongly related note, despite 2025 marking the end of regular support for Windows 10, Microsoft yesterday announced it’s expanding the the number of Insider channels for new Windows 10 features from one to two, adding a Beta tier below the existing Release Preview tier. Microsoft, too, will have to come to terms with the fact that with 70% of Windows users using Windows 10, they might not even be able to drop support for the operating system as early as next year. While this 70% number will surely slowly decrease over the next 12 months, with many people simply being unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations, I have a suspicion we might see an extension on that 2025 date.
Building another big fediverse platform
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
Purely hypothetically, I wonder what it would take to raise enough money to build another first-class fediverse platform for the mass market.
Not because there’s anything wrong with Mastodon (or Threads or Flipboard), but I think the fediverse would be healthier with another big platform in the mix.
https://werd.io/2024/building-another-big-fediverse-platform
A computer can never be held accountable
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
I love this IBM slide circa 1979, which is more relevant today than ever:
Simon Willison asked about the provenance. Jonty Wareing weighed in:
It was found by someone going through their father’s work documents, and subsequently destroyed in a flood.
I spent some time corresponding with the IBM archives but they can’t locate it. Apparently it was common for branch offices to produce things that were not archived.
The original source confirmed this a few years ago.
Still, it’s a really pertinent message, which is proving to be more timeless than expected.
https://werd.io/2024/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable
Microsoft expects further concessions for Teams amid EC antitrust probe
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Despite unbundling video and chat app from Office, Redmond ‘committed to find a resolution to regulators’ concerns’
Microsoft says it will likely take “additional steps” in a bid to resolve the European Commission antitrust investigation into its bundling of Teams with Office.…
Officials reach $8.5 million settlement with Colorado woman who was left handcuffed in a police car that was hit by a train
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Body and dash camera video released by police showed Yareni Rios-Gonzalez screaming for help as the train approached and slammed into the vehicle.
Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’
date: 2024-06-05, from: Quanta Magazine
Many microbes and cells are in deep sleep, waiting for the right moment to activate. Biologists discovered a widespread protein that abruptly shuts down a cell’s activity — and turns it back on just as fast.The post Most Life on Earth is Dormant, After Pulling an ‘Emergency Brake’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Carving Into Carbonates at Old Faithful Geyser
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
This past week on Mars, Perseverance made a pit stop near Overlook Mountain to abrade a rock called Old Faithful Geyser. This target is situated within the Western side of the Margin Unit, an area around the upper edge of Jezero Crater that is astrobiologically-interesting due to its abundant carbonate. Carbonate-bearing rocks have been a […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/carving-into-carbonates-at-old-faithful-geyser/
A new stock exchange may be coming to Dallas
date: 2024-06-05, from: Marketplace Morning Report
When we do the numbers, we tell you what’s happening on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. Now, a couple of Wall Street financial firms are backing an upstart in Texas that wants to challenge the dominance of the two big players in New York. Then, China’s generative AI business has gotten its first infusion of cash from a foreign investor. Plus, does Boston regret not hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics?
HPE Q2 sales rise was brought to you by the letters A and I
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Shipments of servers used for artificial intelligence jump more than 100% to $900M, share price up double digits
Two magical letters, A and I, helped lift Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s share price by as much as 15 percent in after-hours trading following a ramp in orders for systems to train and run customers’ AI models.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/hpe_q2_2024/
Drowning of 11-year-old girl in Alameda Creek brings water warnings from authorities
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Dana Nino Gonzalez drowned in an area of the creek adjacent to Niles Canyon Road, north of Mission Boulevard.
Sols 4205-4206: Curiosity Would Like One of Each, Please!
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, June 3, 2024 You know that feeling at the ice cream shop when you’re presented with so many tantalizing options and you have to narrow it down to just a few to taste test, and then you have to strategize how to fit all the best flavors in your bowl? That’s […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4205-4206-curiosity-would-like-one-of-each-please/
A jab back at Brexit (or a kick in the teeth)
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
I grew up in Britain, but I was able to be there because of my European citizenship. When I moved to the US it was because my mother was terminally ill; I’d always assumed that I would go back. When the Brexit vote happened, I took it extremely personally: in lots of ways, the British public voted to throw people like me out.
In the interim, some people have assured me that, no, it’s not people like me. After all, I have a British accent, and if you didn’t actually know, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I was British. Of course, that’s a hugely xenophobic reflex: my British accent makes me okay, but someone else’s Polish accent means that they’re not. I stand with the people who more obviously come from somewhere else; I do, too. All of us are (or, I suppose, were) an active part of British society, integral parts of communities, and so on.
Brexit was offensive, stupid, counterproductive, and xenophobic. I’m not glad that Britain has been suffering the consequences of this own-goal, because so many of my friends still live there, and so many communities are suffering. Spitefully wishing ill on people who are hurting isn’t a good look. But I certainly have no love for the people who voted for this travesty.
It’s not fun to be barred from living in the place I called home. It happened at a time in my life when it was becoming apparent that there was a terminal, genetic disease that runs in my family; multiple family members had it, and I hadn’t yet had the genetic test that suggested my sister and I weren’t going to get it. It was the same year that Trump became President on a similarly anti-immigrant platform. Overall, it was A Bad Time.
Oddly, then, I’m not unhappy to see Nigel Farage run for Prime Minister. Obviously, he’s among the worst people alive, as if the worst impulses of British society had been congealed, Doctor Who style, into a comic book villain with an angry toad for a face. Two of his children are even dual European citizens, because the hypocrisy is part of the schtick for these people. But because he’s running, he’s going to split the Conservative vote, with the hard right voting for Farage and the people who claim they’re not hard right voting for whoever the Conservative leader of the week will be on — who picked this day?! — July 4th. (It’ll be Rishi Sunak or a slowly-decomposing head of iceberg lettuce. Let’s see.)
Keir Starmer is not a giant leap of an improvement: a John Major impersonator who would have comfortably been a Tory candidate in 1995. But at least he’s not one of the guys who brought about Brexit and all of the ludicrous policies that followed. It’s something. A jab back for all the people who have been hurt over the last 14 years since hog aficionado David Cameron was first elected with the help of a last-minute coalition assist from Nick Clegg, who, of course, now leads international face-saving for Meta.
A Conservative loss is the foothills of the foothills of the foothills of the work to be done to rebuild. But it would, at least, be a baby step forward. And even then, I’m ready to be disappointed, because, really, nothing in this arena has gone well since forever, and I, for one, have lost the ability to be really optimistic.
https://werd.io/2024/a-jab-back-at-brexit-or-a-kick-in-the
A long-awaited birth control option for men may be closer to reality
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
The experimental product is a hormonal gel that men rub on their shoulders once daily. Over time, it blocks the production of sperm in the testes.
Sols 4202-4204: Sticking Around
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Friday, May 31, 2024 Our most recent drive delivered us, as planned, right alongside ‘Whitebark Pass.’ This last drive was only about 9 metres, but Curiosity has been doing a lot of travelling lately and this weekend we’re giving the rover a well-deserved break from driving – but not a break from […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4202-4204-sticking-around/
First sign of GenAI Winter?
date: 2024-06-05, from: Gary Marcus blog
Investors appear to have taken note
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/first-sign-of-genai-winter
Intel gets $11B from Apollo for joint venture at Irish chip fab
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Frees up some of the cash Chipzilla’s already sunk into Fab 34
Intel is to pocket $11 billion from private equity biz Apollo Global Management in exchange for 49 percent of a joint venture that will effectively run Intel’s fabrication plant in Ireland.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/intel_gets_11b_from_apollo/
How shots instead of pills could change California’s homeless crisis
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Doctors on the front lines of California’s homelessness and mental health crises are using monthly injections to treat psychosis in their most vulnerable patients.
Biden, with France visit, looks to past and future of global conflicts
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
US President Joe Biden is in France to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landing and to underscore the need for a strong transatlantic alliance in the face of Russian aggression. He’ll also take part in a formal state visit hosted by France’s president, and will meet face-to-face with Ukraine’s president, who has been invited to (somber ceremonies marking this decisive battle that led to the end of the World War II. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Paris. Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this report
San Jose housing development near downtown gets key loans for project
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
A large new hotel could sprout near downtown San Jose and the city’s two mega malls.
Bay Area man sentenced to life after committing sexual assault in Northern California
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Azel Maynard has an extensive criminal history involving multiple felonies and prior strikes. In October 2021, Maynard was convicted by plea of robbery in Solano County where he was to be sentenced to six years in state prison.
Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">Microsoft’s Recall software seems like a horrible idea:
“Surprise! It turns out that the unencrypted database and the stored images may contain your user credentials and passwords. And other stuff. Got a porn habit? Congratulations, anyone with access to your user account can see what you’ve been seeing. Use a password manager like 1Password? Sorry, your 1Password passwords are probably visible via Recall, now.”
Worse, it’s going to be built into Windows 11 for all compatible hardware, in a way that will make it hard or impossible to disable. This doesn’t make sense to me: which privacy-conscious CIO (just for example, one working in a well-regulated industry where privacy is a legal requirement) would allow this to roll out? This is yet another reason for Windows 10 to remain the most popular version.
It also seems like nobody at Microsoft (or nobody at Microsoft with power) has considered the potentially serious social implications of what they’re building:
“Victims of domestic abuse are at risk of their abuser trawling their PC for any signs that they’re looking for help. Anyone who’s fallen for a scam that gave criminals access to their PC is also completely at risk.”
I’m increasingly concerned about what Apple will be rolling out on Monday. We’re hearing quite believable rumors that it’ll be AI-based, but is it going to be Apple’s take on the same thing? That, too, has the potential to be a disaster.
Once again, I can’t believe that the only way to get away from this stuff will be to run Linux on the desktop.
<p>[<a href="https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-suicide
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Maybe Joe Biden should run an ad that's a riff on this Jimi Hendrix classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPifXX0foU
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This Lay's commercial makes me happy. Will it make me more likely to buy their product? Probably, and for no good reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1YE2unlkk
A Suspected Human Smuggler Used AirTags to Track and Control The Woman He Brought Into the U.S.
date: 2024-06-05, from: 404 Media Group
A man allegedly involved in a Russia-based smuggling operation is accused of placing at least seven AirTags on his ex-wife’s car to surveil her.
https://www.404media.co/airtags-stalking-fbi-human-smuggling-case/
Apple made once-unlikely deal with Sam Altman to catch up in AI
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
An OpenAI agreement is due to be announced at the Apple’s developer conference next week.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump is planning his next crime.
https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/donald-trump-is-plotting-his-next-crime/
Podcast: A Massive Google Leak
date: 2024-06-05, from: 404 Media Group
We got a massive internal Google database. We also talk about deepfake laws, and the earliest example of the All Eyes on Rafah image.
https://www.404media.co/404-media-podcast-a-massive-google-leak-week-41/
Databricks’ $1B Tabular buy raises questions around table format wars
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Keeping things neutral will be harder, say critics, as tiny startup acquired
In September last year it was a company with around 25 employees, all working remotely. Last night, Tabular was bought by analytics and machine learning platform Databricks for a reported $1 billion.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/databricks_buys_tabular_for_1b/
‘Team Fortress 2’ Botters Use AI Voice to Defame Critic
date: 2024-06-05, from: 404 Media Group
Team Fortress 2’s botting problem has escalated to doxing, swatting, and defaming people who call attention to it.
https://www.404media.co/team-fortress-2-bot-hosters-use-ai-voice-to-defame-critic/
Online Privacy and Overfishing
date: 2024-06-05, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">“The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth.”
The key, as Bruce Schneier argues here, is not to compare with our own baselines, but to take a step back and consider what a healthy ecosystem would look like in its own right.
The underlying story here is that Microsoft caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks, and people were less worried about the attacks themselves than about how Microsoft found out about them. It’s a reasonable worry, and I thought the same thing: if Microsoft found this, then they’re likely more aware of the contextual uses of their platform than we might assume.
This is certainly less private than computing was twenty or thirty years ago. But it’s not a major iteration on where we were five years ago, and without intervention we’re likely to see more erosion of user privacy over the next five years.
So what should our standards for privacy be overall? How should we expect a company like Microsoft to treat our potentially sensitive data? Should we pay more for more security, or should it just be a blanket expectation? These are all valid questions - although I also have ready, opinionated answers.
Perhaps the more important question is: who has the right to come to a conclusion about these questions, and how will they be enforced? As of now, it’s still open.
<p>[<a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/online-privacy-and-overfishing.html">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/online-privacy-and-overfishing
‘The night we wanted’: Oakland Ballers relish first game at Raimondi Park
date: 2024-06-05, from: San Jose Mercury News
Despite losing to the Yolo High Wheelers, the Oakland Ballers enjoyed the opportunity to play in front of their home fans at Raimondi Park for the first time
A Pledge to ‘Extend the Glide’
date: 2024-06-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
It was an extraordinary run for humankind, but we will soon reach the end of our glide.
The post A Pledge to ‘Extend the Glide’ appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/05/a-pledge-to-extend-the-glide/
The World Needs Way More Carbon Dioxide Removal
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: A large wildfire is burning out of control in northwestern Turkey • Intense storms killed at least 11 people in South Africa • It will be 109 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix today, and tomorrow will be hotter.
THE TOP FIVE
- Report: Global carbon dioxide removal must quadruple
A team of international researchers this week published a new report on the state of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as it relates to global climate goals. The top-line takeaway is that CDR must quadruple if we want to stay in line with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. While stopping new greenhouse gas emissions is the top priority in curbing global warming, experts agree CDR will be needed to address legacy emissions, which can remain in the atmosphere for decades.
Current CDR efforts – from reforestation to direct air capture technology – remove about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. That’s far short of the 7-9 billion metric tons that will need to be removed annually by 2050. But the report’s authors say there are signs that CDR development is slowing down. They call for more investment to support the “high ambitions” of CDR companies, and want countries to weave CDR policies into their national climate action plans to spark demand and help CDR scale. Currently just 1.1% of investment in climate-tech startups goes toward CDR. In April, a report found that the U.S. will need to spend $100 billion per year by 2050 to make CDR a viable climate solution.
One really interesting insight from the report is that grant money is flowing steadily toward CDR research and development, especially in the U.S. and Canada: There were fewer than 50 third-party research grants for CDR in the year 2000, compared to 1,160 in 2022.
Somewhat relatedly, Swiss carbon removal company Climeworks yesterday unveiled new “generation 3” technology that it said can suck up twice as much carbon from the atmosphere using half the amount of energy as its previous designs.
- Researchers warn climate change is heating Earth’s groundwater
A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience finds that the Earth’s groundwater is warming up due to climate change. For the study, researchers created a model to estimate changes in groundwater temperatures in varying global warming scenarios. Their model shows that by the end of the century, groundwater could be between 2.1 and 3.5 degrees Celsius (or between 3.8 and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer on average than it is today. This would be bad news for ecosystems that rely on groundwater, as well as for humans: “As groundwater warms, there is increased risk of pathogen growth which impacts drinking water quality – potentially affecting the lives of many people,” said co-author Dr. Gabriel Rau of the University of Newcastle. The warming will vary by region, but parts of North America will see some of the most intense warming rates.
- China unveils world’s largest solar farm
The world’s largest solar farm just came online. The 5-gigawatt, 200,000-acre farm is located in China’s Xinjiang region, and was officially connected to China’s grid on Monday. It’s one piece of China’s larger “megabase” initiative to install 455 GW of wind and solar. The new farm will generate about 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, making it “powerful enough to meet the electricity demands of a country the size of Luxembourg or Papua New Guinea,” as Anthony Cuthbertson at the Independent put it. The second- and third-largest solar farms (by capacity) are also located in China. A recent report from the International Energy Agency called China the world’s “renewable powerhouse” because it accounts for nearly 60% of the world’s new renewable capacity that will become operational by 2028.
- German floods spread into neighboring countries
Southern Germany has been absolutely hammered by torrential rain in recent days, resulting in overflowing rivers and deadly floods. Five people have died in the disaster. To give you a sense of how bad the situation is, more than a month’s worth of rain fell in the region between Friday and Monday, and water levels in the city of Passau rose by 32 feet. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reminded everyone that this kind of weather is not normal, saying that “we must not neglect the task of halting man-made climate change.”
Cleanup
begins in a flooded town in
Germany.Thomas
Niedermueller/Getty Images
The rain is easing up now and some towns are starting their cleanup efforts, but all that water has to go somewhere, and BBC reports it’s headed down the Danube River into Austria, Hungary, and possibly Slovakia. Already the river burst its banks in the Austrian city of Linz, and Austria has halted all shipping activity in the river.
- California city votes to cancel contentious geoengineering study
A first-of-its-kind geoengineering research project in California has been officially canceled. The research, conducted by a team from the University of Washington, involved spraying sea salt aerosol particles into the air using an instrument situated on a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, California. This process has been pitched as a way to brighten clouds and reflect the sun’s rays to cool the planet. Because studies on manipulating the climate are so controversial, the researchers kept the project on the downlow until it was up and running, and this lack of transparency – rather than any safety concerns – seems to have really rubbed city officials the wrong way. The Alameda City Council voted this morning to reject the experiment. “You didn’t start out on the right foot,” Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft told the researchers.
The dispute may be a little preview of things to come. “There’s a fair number of people who think there shouldn’t be research [on geoengineering], and these early experiments have become a proxy battleground for this larger question about how to think about the development of these technologies,” David Keith, director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago, told The Washington Post.
THE KICKER
The Thomas Edison Birthplace Museum in Ohio is now powered by rooftop solar.
https://heatmap.news/technology/cdr-carbon-dioxide-removal-report
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-05, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Nice optimization guide for VisionPro environments:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112564047630870837
Microsoft revives Windows 10 Beta Channel even though OS doesn’t have long left
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Windows Insiders set to get first hands on feature updates
Microsoft is reopening the Windows 10 Beta Channel for Windows Insiders in a clear sign that there is still life in the old dog.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/windows_10_beta_channel/
Amazon’s AI Warehouses Isolate Workers and Hinder Union Organizing, New Report Finds
date: 2024-06-05, from: 404 Media Group
The report finds that Amazon workers in robotic warehouses feel more isolated at work, which makes it difficult to unionize.
NASA Launches Second Small Climate Satellite to Study Earth’s Poles
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
The second of NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) two satellites is communicating with ground controllers after launching at 3:15 p.m. NZST, Wednesday (11:15 p.m. EDT, June 4). Data from these two shoebox-size cube satellites, or CubeSats, will better predict how Earth’s ice, seas, and weather will change in a warming world […]
Our First Transformer of the Month: Matt Dosberg
date: 2024-06-05, from: NASA breaking news
It is impossible to pinpoint a single, static definition of what makes a “Digital Transformer.” Although Matt Dosberg’s official title is Digital Transformation and IT Innovation Lead for Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), his full contributions to NASA require a lengthier description. He is the nexus for everything under the Digital Transformation (DT) umbrella at […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/our-first-transformer-of-the-month-matt-dosberg/
Make an LED glowing prom dress using RP2040
date: 2024-06-05, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Want to sparkle on the dance floor and be the shining star of the ball (literally)? Brighten up the room by creating your own light-up dress with shimmering RP2040-controlled NeoPixels.
The post Make an LED glowing prom dress using RP2040 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/make-an-led-glowing-prom-dress-using-rp2040/
4 cuffed following probe into holiday scheme for cybercrooks
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Public officials allegedly bribed to allow extradition-dodging travel
Four arrests were made this week as part of an international probe into two overlapping corruption schemes that allowed cybercrims on INTERPOL watch lists to travel freely without flagging any alerts.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/four_arrested_in_scheme_to/
Reimagining what streets and sidewalks can be
date: 2024-06-05, from: Marketplace Morning Report
At the height of pandemic lockdowns, folks stayed in yet also desperately wanted to get out. Enter the open streets movement, which advocates for roads being temporarily closed off to cars and expanded for pedestrians and public space. Now, advocates in Brooklyn are pushing to make some of those changes more permanent. Plus, manufacturing and construction appear to lose steam, and the Amazon Labor Union will link up with Teamsters.
Biden, with France visit, looks to past and future of global conflicts
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
The White House; Paris — U.S. President Joe Biden landed Wednesday in France to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy invasion — and plans to use the occasion to underscore the need for a strong transatlantic alliance in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Biden will meet Ukraine’s president, and with surviving American veterans of the 1944 beach invasion, said national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Biden will use the events, Sullivan said, to “talk about, against the backdrop of war in Europe today, the sacrifices that those heroes and those veterans made 80 years ago and how it’s our obligation to continue their mission to fight for freedom.”
Sullivan, who spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Paris, said Biden will also deliver a speech on Friday at Normandy that will cover “the existential fight between dictatorship and freedom” — all while overlooking a 30-meter tall cliff that Army Rangers had to scale under enemy gunfire to win the battle that eventually led to France’s liberation and the demise of Nazi Germany.
“And he’ll talk about the dangers of isolationism and how, if we bow to dictators, fail to stand up to them, they keep going and ultimately America and the world pays a greater price,” he said.
Biden will also attend a state visit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, in addition to face-to-face talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been invited to the somber ceremonies marking this decisive battle that led to the end of World War II.
American presidents have regularly made the journey for this critical anniversary, and Biden is no exception.
“The president is very much looking forward to going to Normandy over the course of the next two days of this week to commemorate the service and the sacrifice, the bravery of the soldiers, Allied and American alike, who fought in D-Day in that invasion, conducted Operation Overlord and really spelled through that operation, the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany, and the beginning of something even more impactful, and that’s this rules-based international order that we all still continue to enjoy today,” John Kirby, White House national security communications adviser, told VOA at the White House.
Here, analysts say, history offers lessons.
“The D-Day landings were the Western Allies’ military statement that authoritarian regimes could not change boundaries by force,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ”That countries could not just be invaded, and that authoritarian regimes of the type that Nazi Germany constituted — particularly with its terrible oppression of subjugated peoples, particularly the Jews — were not acceptable and not just not acceptable, but would be destroyed.”
Analysts say Biden’s Ukraine goals will be overshadowed by his increasingly unpopular support of another conflict.
“Even though obviously Ukraine is the top priority for the Europeans, they are seeing how the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza is undermining European security in two different ways,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.
“First of all, it is really destroying Western credibility in the broader international community and in the Global South — any talk about the rules-based international order at this point, will get laughed at, given what the Biden administration has done.”
This trip to France, a close ally, comes at the start of six weeks of high-level U.S. involvement in high-stakes summits — including a peace summit on Ukraine, a summit of leaders of the Group of Seven, or G7, leading industrialized countries, and a summit of NATO members.
VOA asked Sullivan what this set of diplomatic events could mean for peace in Europe, and beyond.
“I think we need to send a clear message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that he cannot outlast us, and that he cannot divide us,” he replied. “And we have been very good at holding the line on those two messages, and this is going to be a great opportunity over the coming weeks to not just put a period at the end of that sentence, but an exclamation point.”
Patsy Widakuswara contributed from the White House.
Commission investigating Russian and Belarusian influence in Poland begins its work
date: 2024-06-05, from: Associated Press, World News
The Polish prime minister says that a special commission tasked with investigating Russian and Belarusian influence in Poland is starting its work.
Brian Richards | What Happens if Trump Wins?
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
If former President Donald Trump becomes future President Trump, what will that mean to our republic? Will it mean an end to our democracy, despite the United States not being […]
The post Brian Richards | What Happens if Trump Wins? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/brian-richards-what-happens-if-trump-wins/
Ron Perry | Shouting from the Rooftops
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
Two recent letters to the editor should be shouted from the rooftops! “Undervalued educators” by Lisa Storaker (May 30) and “The state of the prostate” by Paul McGuire (May 29). […]
The post Ron Perry | Shouting from the Rooftops appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/ron-perry-shouting-from-the-rooftops/
Italian court re-convicts Amanda Knox of slander for wrongly accusing man of killing
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
FLORENCE — An Italian court re-convicted Amanda Knox of slander on Wednesday, even after she was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate while the two were exchange students in Italy.
The court found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing. But she will not serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served.
Knox, who had returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in 2011 to participate in the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud.
But her lawyer, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very embittered.”
Knox had written on social media ahead of the hearing that she hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”
The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.
Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic as the case was vociferously argued on social media, then in its infancy.
Knox’s retrial was set by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of questioning days after Kercher’s murder, deprived of both a lawyer and a competent translator.
Earlier in the hearing, Knox had asked the eight Italian judges and civil jury members to clear her of the slander charge.
In a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox had told the court that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,’’ Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement, sitting alongside them on the jury bench. She told them:”I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”
The case continues to draw intense media attention, with photographers massing around Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and their legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing. A camera knocked her on the left temple, her lawyer Luca Luparia Donati said. Knox’s husband examined a small bump on her head as they sat in the front row of the court.
Despite Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, doubts about her role persisted, particularly in Italy. That is largely due to the accusation she made against Lumumba.
Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two small children. She returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after four years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court that overturned the initial guilty verdict in the murder case against both Knox and Sollecito.
She remained in the United States through two more flip-flop verdicts before Italy’s highest court definitively exonerated the pair of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime.
In the fall, Italy’s highest Cassation Court threw out the slander conviction that had withstood five trials, ordering a new trial, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform allowing cases that have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are found.
This time, the court has been ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. as she was held for questioning overnight into the small hours of Nov. 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher scream, and pointed to Lumumba for the killing.
Hours later, still in custody at about 1 p.m., she asked for pen and paper and wrote her own statement in English, questioning the version that she had signed.
“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote.
From meatballs to metaverse – IKEA’s flatpack fantasy lands on Roblox
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Swedish furniture giant has 10 paid in-game jobs to fill
First Ryanair, now flatpack chairs – IKEA is coming to Roblox.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/ikea_roblox_jobs/
Tackling potty-mouth chatbots to leaky LLMs. What’s life like in Microsoft’s AI red team?
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Group founder reveals all to The Reg
Interview Sometimes people want to abuse AI systems to leak corporate secrets. Other times they just want to force an LLM to talk like a pirate.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/microsoft_ai_red_team_tackles/
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, retains power
date: 2024-06-05, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Following India’s national elections, it might be harder for Modi to push his economic policies through, as his party didn’t win enough seats to have a parliamentary majority. Then, China is looking to compete in generative AI and Saudi Arabia is investing in one of its biggest start-ups. And Poland is voting in European Union elections this weekend, and a major point of contention is Europe’s support for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Sudakov heads to Euro 2024 with dreams of soccer glory and a hometown behind enemy lines
date: 2024-06-05, from: Associated Press, World News
Ukrainian soccer star Heorhiy Sudakov is on course to achieve his dream of becoming one of the best players in Europe. His dream of returning home seems more distant.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-euro-2024-preview-ae09814c0d1d4896ea16688d691a1e91
Michael Reagan | Democrats Go on Trial in November
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
Mark my words. Democrats will be sorry on Nov. 5 because of what they did last week in New York City. They and their friends in the liberal media can […]
The post Michael Reagan | Democrats Go on Trial in November appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/michael-reagan-democrats-go-on-trial-in-november/
Nokia demos upper 6 GHz band for mobile, but UK wants it shared with Wi-Fi
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Splitting hotly contested spectrum could get messy
Nokia and Swedish telco Telia have completed a pilot deployment using the upper 6 GHz spectrum band, hoping to add capacity and coverage for future expansion. However, some regulators such as the UK’s Ofcom think this band should be available for both mobile and Wi-Fi.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/nokia_upper_6_ghz_spectrum/
Gary Horton | Ex-President Felon and His Party of Lawlessness
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
We like to say of our justice system in America that, “You’re presumed innocent until proven guilty.” Well, innocence is no longer presumed. Twelve honest jurors, approved and selected by […]
The post Gary Horton | Ex-President Felon and His Party of Lawlessness appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/gary-horton-ex-president-felon-and-his-party-of-lawlessness/
Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
In praise of knowing the requirements before you start cranking out code
A study has found that software projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/
How California Broke Its Electricity Bills
date: 2024-06-05, from: Heatmap News
Rooftop solar is four times more expensive in America than it is in other countries. It’s also good for the climate. Should we even care about its high cost?
Yes, says Severin Borenstein, an economist and the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In a recent blog post, he argued that the high cost of rooftop solar will shift nearly $4 billion onto the bills of low- and middle-income Californians who don’t have rooftop solar. Similar forces could soon spread the cost-shift problem across the country.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Borenstein about who pays for rooftop solar, why power bills are going up everywhere, and about whether the government should take over electric utilities. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Severin Borenstein: Let me start by saying, there are two big problems with the way we do this. One is the equity issue, which I’m sure we’ll get back to, which is that it turns out this extra money, when you get it by charging people for kilowatt-hours, takes a disproportionate share of the income from low-income people.
The other is, when you set a price for electricity that is way above the actual cost of providing that electricity, it’s going to discourage people from electrifying things. Now, it’s also going to discourage people from just using more electricity, and people who love conservation say, well, we should have higher rates to encourage conservation. I think that’s misguided beyond some point, and we are way beyond that point in many areas.
But setting that aside for a moment, we need people to electrify. If we’re going to reduce greenhouse gases, the way we’re going to electrify […] is by people switching to electric transportation instead of burning gasoline, and people switching to electrification for heating, hot-water heating, cooking, clothes drying, all the things where you have a choice of using natural gas. In both of those cases, if you overcharge for electricity, you are discouraging people from doing that sort of electrification.
I will give you the extreme example — again, in California. Right now, even with California’s well known very high gasoline prices, gasoline and electricity are about at parity. That is, you don’t save money fueling your car with electricity. If you compare a Prius to a Tesla Model 3, which are about the same interior size, you don’t save money when you switch to a Tesla Model 3, for fueling. That’s nuts. You should be saving three-quarters of the cost of fueling by switching to electricity.
Likewise, when we start talking about heat pumps, now, there’s one other aspect of this which is often not appreciated. Not only are we overcharging for electricity, we are undercharging for gasoline. So even with all the taxes — and I’ve done a bunch of work on this — if you look at the price of gasoline almost everywhere in the country … Actually, if you believe the social cost of carbon is over $100 a ton, everywhere in the country, gasoline is underpriced. We’re not charging enough to reflect the full cost.
So it’s even worse than just the overpricing of electricity. We’re really putting our thumb on the scale in the wrong direction when it comes to getting people to electrify transportation. And it’s also true with natural gas, though to a lesser extent. If we’re going to consider the social cost of carbon over $100 a ton, natural gas is also underpriced pretty much everywhere in the country.
So we want people to adopt heat pumps. We want people to put in heat pump water heaters. But we’re really sending economic signals to tell them not to.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-18-severin-borenstein
NASA launches first crewed flight of Boeing Starliner spacecraft to ISS
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
The Savvy Senior | How to Find Reliable Health Information Online
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, How can I tell if the health info on a website is trustworthy? I usually do a Google search on a symptom, drug or health condition […]
The post The Savvy Senior | How to Find Reliable Health Information Online appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/the-savvy-senior-how-to-find-reliable-health-information-online/
ASML and Imec unveil pricy High NA EUV playground for chipmakers
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Because who doesn’t love a $373M toy?
ASML and Belgian R&D biz Imec have opened a lab giving chipmakers access to the latest High NA EUV lithography equipment and associated tools to accelerate development of their next-gen products.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/asml_imec_high_na_euv/
USC Chabad co-directors’ house vandalized, motive unclear
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Rabbi Dov and Runya Wagner’s house has also served as USC’s Chabad House for the past five years.
The post USC Chabad co-directors’ house vandalized, motive unclear appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/usc-chabad-co-directors-house-vandalized/
Lebanese army says gunman shot at US embassy
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/lebanese-army-says-gunman-shot-at-us-embassy/7643428.html
Cloudy With A Chance Of Disaster
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Lever News
As climate change increases the likelihood of deadly landslides, cities like Juneau are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
https://www.levernews.com/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-disaster/
Classifieds – June 5, 2024
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition. Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the Classifieds.
The post Classifieds – June 5, 2024 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/classifieds-june-5-2024/
Airbus shows off uncrewed AI-powered Wingman for fighter pilots
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
I feel the need, the need for … a Euro-made military drone
Updated AI-piloted drones that accompany and assist human-piloted fighter jets are very much on military minds – and Airbus is showing off its take on the technology. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/airbus_wingman_drone/
Today in SCV History (June 5)
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1968 – Saugus resident Elizabeth Evans struck by bullet meant for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-june-5/
On the championship track: USC ready for NCAA Championships
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
USC’s men’s and women’s track athletes go for the ultimate prize this week.
The post On the championship track: USC ready for NCAA Championships appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/on-the-championship-track-usc-ready-for-ncaa-championships/
Daily Trojan alum wins Pulitzer Prize
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The USC adjunct professor won the award for his work with the Los Angeles Times.
The post <em>Daily Trojan</em> alum wins Pulitzer Prize appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/daily-trojan-alum-wins-pulitzer-prize/
Take a closer look, oil is all around
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
While we should focus on clean energy, Big Oil also needs to be transparent.
The post Take a closer look, oil is all around appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/take-a-closer-look-oil-is-all-around/
NCAA reaches historic $2.8 billion settlement with athletes
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The impacts of the NCAA settlement create a new playing field for the Trojans.
The post NCAA reaches historic $2.8 billion settlement with athletes appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/ncaa-reaches-historic-2-8-billion-settlement-with-athletes/
We romanticize the immediate spark in friendships
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The post We romanticize the immediate spark in friendships appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/we-romanticize-the-immediate-spark-in-friendships/
girl in red brilliantly rocks the Greek Theatre
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The indie artist brought fall feelings and positive reflections to her latest tour.
The post girl in red brilliantly rocks the Greek Theatre appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/girl-in-red-brilliantly-rocks-the-greek-theatre/
Stand up, speak up, dress up
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Political activism can come in many forms, one of which is the garments we wear.
The post Stand up, speak up, dress up appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/stand-up-speak-up-dress-up/
Start the party with these ‘songs of the summer’
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Break down these 2010s hits — including the new champion of this summer.
The post Start the party with these ‘songs of the summer’ appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/start-the-party-with-these-songs-of-the-summer/
USC celebrates the beginning of Pride Month over Zoom
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Students, faculty and staff discussed the importance of representation and unity.
The post USC celebrates the beginning of Pride Month over Zoom appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/06/05/usc-celebrates-the-beginning-of-pride-month-over-zoom/
Microsoft paid Tenable a bug bounty for an Azure flaw it says doesn’t need a fix, just better documentation
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Let customers interfere with other tenants? That’s our cloud working by design, Redmond seems to say
A vulnerability — or just Azure working as intended, depending on who you ask — in Microsoft’s cloud potentially allows miscreants to wave away firewall rules and access other people’s private web resources.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/tenable_azure_flaw/
All CIF First Team Selections for Spring Sports, Girls Softball
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The All CIF First Team selections for spring sports Girls Softball have been announced by the California Interscholastic Federation, Southern Section
https://scvnews.com/all-cif-first-team-selections-for-spring-sports-girls-softball/
US denies Houthis struck USS Eisenhower
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-denies-houthis-struck-uss-eisenhower/7643392.html
LimeNET Micro 2.0 Developer Edition Campaign Launches
date: 2024-06-05, from: Lime Microsystems news
The crowdfunding campaign for LimeNET Micro 2.0 has launched today on Crowd Supply and purchasing options include the LimePSB RPCM board-only, a complete LimeNET Micro 2.0 kit, and also a deluxe kit which includes the Amarisoft 5G stack with core network, plus two 5G smartphones and ten SIM cards.
The post LimeNET Micro 2.0 Developer Edition Campaign Launches appeared first on Lime Microsystems.
https://limemicro.com/news/limenet-micro-2-0-developer-edition-campaign-launches/
India’s IT minister defeated in bid for lower house seat
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Probably won’t cost him his job, meaning India’s messy tech to-do list remains his problem
India’s Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, has lost his bid for election to the lower house of India’s parliament, the Lok Sabha…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/india_it_minister_loss/
Australia drops legal action that aimed to have X take down stabbing vid
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Musky network celebrates free speech win … after not opposing takedown of similar fare
Australia’s eSafety commissioner has ended legal action that aimed to compel social network X to take down a video depicting a knife attack on a clergyman classified as an act of terror under local law.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/australlia_ends_x_takedown_case/
SuperMicro CEO predicts liquid cooling will rack up 2,900 percent growth in two years
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Upgrading to improve density is the new green
Computex SuperMicro CEO Charles Liang expects liquid cooling will be installed in 30 percent of racks the company ships next year – vast growth, given the market for such kit has been moribund for decades.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/supermicro_liquid_cooling_boom/
Treasury: the West should stop China from supplying Russia’s war machine
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
Hamas won’t support Biden peace plan without Israeli assurances of permanent cease-fire
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
The Palestinian militant group Hamas on Tuesday said it could not agree to a peace deal without a clear Israeli position on a permanent cease-fire and complete withdrawal from Gaza. The decision followed Israeli leaders’ pledge to continue military operations until Hamas is destroyed, despite a cease-fire proposal announced by President Joe Biden days earlier. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has the story.
Newhall School District celebrates student art, theater
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
Students from across the Newhall School District got to show off their art pieces, and some had the chance to show parents how hard they’ve been working in theater production, […]
The post Newhall School District celebrates student art, theater appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/newhall-school-district-celebrates-student-art-theater/
Hart school board expected to appoint interim superintendent
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
The William S. Hart Union High School District governing board is expected on Wednesday to appoint three people to administrative positions, one being an interim superintendent. The board previously met […]
The post Hart school board expected to appoint interim superintendent appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/hart-school-board-expected-to-appoint-interim-superintendent/
CIF Releases Spring Sports All CIF First Team Selections, Boys Volleyball
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The All CIF First Team selections for spring sports Boys Volleyball have been announced by the California Interscholastic Federation, Southern Section
https://scvnews.com/cif-releases-spring-sports-all-cif-first-team-selections-boys-volleyball/
Study finds Earth warming at record rate, no evidence of climate change accelerating
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
The definition of an AI PC is now even muddier, helping no-one – not even AIs
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger wants benchmarks to go beyond TOPS but warns we’re in for months of uncertainty
Computex Analysis The dominant theme at this year’s Computex conf in Taiwan is that tens of millions of “AI PCs” will sell this year, and more the year after. But despite all the enthusiasm, the qualities of an AI PC have become even more uncertain – and clarity is many months away.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/ai_pc_confusion/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11144-an-intellectual-yes-and-never-deny-it-an-intellectual-is
Congressman Kim wins Democratic Senate primary in New Jersey
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
Trenton, New Jersey — Representative Andy Kim won the Democratic Senate primary in the U.S. state of New Jersey on Tuesday, putting him in a strong position for the general election in the blue-leaning state. The win comes a day after Democratic Senator Bob Menendez filed to run as an independent amid his federal corruption trial.
Kim, a three-term congressman who launched his campaign after charges against Menendez were announced last year, rose to the top in the state’s dominant political party over a relatively short period. A former Obama national security official, he defeated an incumbent Republican in a 2018 House race and won a court ruling that toppled a unique-to-New Jersey system widely viewed as giving political bosses influence over who wins primaries.
“Our win today is a stunning victory for a people-powered movement that mobilized against corruption and stood up to the machine politics of New Jersey,” Kim said in a statement.
Kim’s victory comes after a bruising start to the primary, when a battle between him and New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy began to take shape. Murphy, a first-time candidate and the spouse of Governor Phil Murphy, bowed out of the contest, saying she did not want to engage in a negative campaign against a fellow Democrat. On Tuesday, Kim defeated labor leader Patricia Campos-Medina and longtime grassroots organizer Lawrence Hamm, who remained on the ballot.
Menendez, a three-term incumbent senator, declined this year to seek re-election as a Democrat but filed Monday in Trenton to run as an independent. He has said he hopes to be cleared of the charges this summer.
Democrats’ tight hold on control of the Senate means they can hardly afford a competitive race in a state widely viewed as safe for the party. It’s unclear how the trial of Menendez will end and how his candidacy could affect the race. Republicans are eager to exploit his run as a wedge to divide the Democratic vote.
https://www.voanews.com/a/congressman-kim-wins-democratic-senate-primary-in-new-jersey/7643333.html
Report: Hate, extremism on the rise ahead of US election
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
A report released Tuesday says hate and extremism in the United States rose in 2023, with record numbers of white nationalists and anti-LGBTQ groups trying to undermine the country’s inclusive democracy. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias breaks down the researchers’ findings and the implications for the November presidential election.
https://www.voanews.com/a/report-hate-extremism-on-the-rise-ahead-of-us-election-/7643329.html
Three-way exercise aims to reassure Finland amid Russian threat
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
On May 31, U.S. troops concluded first joint exercises practicing the reinforcement of Northern Finland in case of an attack from Russia. Both Norway and Finland have recently signed new defense pacts with the U.S. military giving access to bases in the far north of their territories. In this report for VOA, Henry Wilkins speaks to Finland’s minister of defense and U.S. officers about what this means for the region.
July 1: SCV Water Announces New Customer Care Hours
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency has announced new extended Monday-Thursday hours, 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. effective July 1. The SCV Water Customer Care public lobby at 24631 Avenue Rockefeller Valencia, CA 91355 will now be closed Friday-Sunday
https://scvnews.com/july-1-scv-water-announces-new-customer-care-hours/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-06-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I asked ChatGPT the life expectancy of a 77-year old obese man who gets no exercise and eats horrible food.
https://chatgpt.com/share/d699780c-89ac-4eb9-a68f-62f3e6267e79
China: US nuclear weapons in South Korea would undermine its security
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
washington — China said it opposes a deployment of nuclear weapons to South Korea as it would pose danger to regional countries. Beijing was reacting to a report suggesting the United States should take such a measure to enhance deterrence against threats from North Korea.
“If the U.S. deploys tactical nuclear weapons in Asia-Pacific region, it will be a dangerous move that will seriously threaten the security of regional countries and undermine regional peace and stability,” said Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
“We will continue to handle Korean Peninsula affairs based on their merits and our own position,” he said in a statement sent to VOA on Monday. The embassy spokesperson described China’s position on the Korean Peninsula as ensuring peace and stability and advancing political settlement that suits the common interests of all parties.
The remarks were made in response to a report released May 29 by U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, calling for a major boost to U.S. military buildup and readiness against countries such as North Korea and China.
In the report, “Peace Through Strength,” Wicker suggested the U.S. explore new options, such as a “nuclear sharing agreement in the Indo-Pacific and re-deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean Peninsula.”
He said these would “bolster deterrence on the Korean peninsula” as North Korea “continues to build more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States and our allies in the Indo-Pacific.”
In response to Wicker’s report, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told VOA’s Korean Service on Friday that “the United States does not assess returning nuclear weapons to the Indo-Pacific as necessary at this time” and “has no plans to forward deploy nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula.”
The spokesperson continued, “U.S. security commitments to allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region are steadfast and U.S. extended deterrence commitments to the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Australia remain ironclad.”
In 1991, the U.S. withdrew from South Korea its nuclear weapons, which had been stationed there since the late 1950s. The U.S. has been providing extended deterrence commitment to South Korea and Japan, which means the U.S. military would use its full range of capabilities, including nuclear weapons, to defend its allies.
Washington and Seoul will hold their third Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) meeting next week in Seoul to discuss ways to enhance extended deterrence, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday.
The NCG was set up under the Washington Declaration announced in April last year when U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol held a bilateral summit in Washington.
On Sunday, after the U.S., South Korean and Japanese defense chiefs met in Singapore, the three countries announced they will conduct their first trilateral, multi-domain exercises, dubbed Freedom Edge, this summer.
Robert Peters, a research fellow for Nuclear Deterrence and Missile Defense at the Heritage Foundation, told VOA via email, “The United States should seriously consider redeploying nonstrategic nuclear weapons to [South] Korea” as they would help strengthen deterrence.
Nonstrategic nuclear weapons refers to low-yield tactical nuclear weapons designed to be used on the battlefield.
However, Thomas Countryman, who recently served as acting undersecretary of arms control and international security under the Biden administration, said “such a deployment would draw [South Korea’s] attention away from building conventional capabilities that are more essential to continued deterrence.”
Out of 200 tactical nuclear weapons the U.S. has in its active inventory, 100 are located in Europe and the other 100 are stored as a strategic reserve in the U.S, according to Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation.
“With the Russian aggression over Ukraine, it is hard to imagine the United States taking any significant number of weapons out of Europe,” said Bennett.
“With China on the rise, the United States will be inclined to leave its strategic reserve in the United States and certainly not deploy it in South Korea where it could potentially be vulnerable to Chinese or North Korean interdiction,” he continued.
Gary Samore, former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration, said, “The U.S. military opposes the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons or any nuclear weapons to [South] Korea, because they would be vulnerable to a North Korean attack.”
Japan would not object to the U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in South Korea “as long as they remain under U.S. control,” said David Maxwell, vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. “It is only when South Korea develops its own nuclear weapons, would it potentially kick off an arms race in the region.”
Supes Ask Fish, Wildlife Dept. for Increased State Resources for Wildlife Education
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion introduced by Supervisor Kathryn Barger that will ask the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for increased state resources to educate and safeguard Sierra Madre and surrounding foothill communities from black bear and other wildlife encounters.
All the datacenter roadmap updates Intel, AMD, Nvidia teased at Computex
date: 2024-06-05, updated: 2024-06-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
We sifted through hours of presentations so you don’t have to
Computex At the annual Computex conference in Taipei this week Intel, AMD, and Nvidia showed off their latest datacenter and AI kit, and offered a tantalizing glimpse of what’s coming next on their respective roadmaps.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/chipmakers_computex_roadmaps/
COC Sends Four Members of Women’s Soccer to the Next Level
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
College of the Canyon women’s soccer is sending four players from its 2023 team to play at the next level after a signing ceremony held last week
https://scvnews.com/coc-sends-four-members-of-womens-soccer-to-the-next-level/
Supes Extend Cap on Rentals in Unincorporated L.A. County
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 on Tuesday, June 4 to extend the the current 4% rental increase cap on rental units located in unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County for another six months, through Dec. 31, 2024. The supes also voted to impose a new rent cap pf 3% as of Jan. 1,
https://scvnews.com/supes-extend-cap-on-rentals-in-unincorporated-l-a-county/
Scout helps SCV Food Pantry with storage
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
The lifting, sawing, painting, sweating and building that had been going on for some time at the Kaladjikian house in Saugus came to a rewarding conclusion Friday in Newhall. The […]
The post Scout helps SCV Food Pantry with storage appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/scout-helps-scv-food-pantry-with-storage/
Garcia supports House passage of ICC bill
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
News release Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, voted in favor of H.R. 8282, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which passed the House. This bill would impose sanctions on the International […]
The post Garcia supports House passage of ICC bill appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/garcia-supports-house-passage-of-icc-bill/
Barger casts dissenting vote as county extends rent caps
date: 2024-06-05, from: The Signal
News release Supervisor Kathryn Barger cast one of two dissenting votes Tuesday as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to extend the current 4% rental increase cap […]
The post Barger casts dissenting vote as county extends rent caps appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/barger-casts-dissenting-vote-as-county-extends-rent-caps/
Hart Baseball Coach Ozella Named CIF Division 2 Coach of the Year
date: 2024-06-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The All CIF First Team selections for spring sports have been announced by the California Interscholastic Federation. For Division 2 William S. Hart High School Baseball Coach Jim Ozella was named Coach of the Year
https://scvnews.com/hart-baseball-coach-ozella-named-cif-division-2-coach-of-the-year/
White House pushes cease-fire deal despite lack of enthusiasm from Israel, Hamas
date: 2024-06-05, from: VOA News USA
white house — Despite Israeli leaders pledging to continue military operations until Hamas is destroyed and Hamas saying it cannot accept a deal without Israeli commitment to a permanent cease-fire, mediators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar continue to push through a cease-fire proposal that President Joe Biden said last week had been agreed to by Israel.
VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara spoke with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby about why Biden chose to announce the proposal instead of the Israelis, and what the challenges are to reaching a truce in Gaza.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
VOA: President Joe Biden announced the cease-fire proposal on behalf of the Israelis, and then he rallied the G7 and the U.N. Security Council to support it. Can you explain the thinking behind his strategy?
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby: It was important to lay bare to the public what this proposal said, especially right after it was transmitted to Hamas, so that everybody can see how impactful this can be, so everybody can see what the eventual outcome might be, which is a permanent cessation of hostilities as a possibility from Phase Two. Also, because we want to make sure that Hamas knows that the world now knows what’s in this proposal and what’s at stake.
VOA: Is the strategy partly to empower Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu not to buckle under pressure from his right-wing governing partners? How confident is the president that the Israelis will go through with this?
Kirby: The Israelis have said it themselves – it’s their proposal, they’re signing up to it, they’re acknowledging it, they’re owning it, as they should. And we have every expectation that they’ll continue to back this proposal because it is theirs and it is in their interest. It’s also in Hamas’ interest. They say they want the war to end; this is a path to end that war.
VOA: I understand what happens now is we’ll wait for the formal response from Hamas, however …
Kirby: Well, look, there could be some bartering and negotiations going forward. We’ll see what Hamas comes back with.
VOA: The U.S. has said that it supports Israel’s goal to destroy Hamas’ governing and military capabilities. Are the administration and Israel aligned in terms of the parameters of what that means?
Kirby: We believe that we are aligned, that we both want to see the hostages home. Certainly, the Israelis want that. We want to see a Gaza that is not governed by Hamas. We want to see a Hamas that can’t threaten Israel the way they did on Oct. 7. And we believe through our conversations with our Israeli counterparts that they too want to see the suffering in Gaza alleviated. Now, that said, they have a right and responsibility to continue to go after Hamas. And we’re going to continue to help them do that. How they do that matters, and we’re still having conversations with them about what’s going on in Rafah.
VOA: We have the experience of Iraq, to understand what the implications of rooting out the Baath Party means. Does our understanding of that inform our strategy toward what Israel should do with Hamas?
Kirby: We’re not trying to compare this to the Baath Party in Iraq in that situation. These are totally two different situations. Look, we agree with Israel, not on everything, certainly. But we agree with them on the big things: They shouldn’t have to live next door to a terrorist threat. They shouldn’t have to be victimized the way they were on the 7th of October. They shouldn’t have to see Gaza governed by Hamas. All of those things are true. And we’re going to continue to work with them to defeat that threat. At the same time, it’s important for this war to come to an end, as the president said, and the best way to do that is to get those hostages out because that leads to a temporary cease-fire, which can lead to a more permanent cessation of hostilities.
VOA: Phase One is a six-week full and complete cease-fire, according to the president. Can Israel target Hamas leaders during this time?
Kirby: They are allowed to continue, of course, their operations in Rafah unless or until we get a cease-fire in place. If we can get this hostage deal inked, if Hamas agrees to it, then an immediate cease-fire takes place for six weeks. And that means that there will be no military operations in Rafah or anywhere else in Gaza.
VOA: Including targeting of Hamas leaders?
Kirby: The fighting comes to an end for the period of the cease-fire.
VOA: Including on targets?
Kirby: The fighting comes to an end.
VOA: You said the Israel Defense Forces’ recent actions in Rafah have not reached your definition of a major ground operation, which the U.S. does not support without credible Israeli plans to protect civilians. But hundreds have been killed just in recent days, and a million people have fled from Rafah. Isn’t this, in effect, the same result that the U.S. wants Israel to avoid?
Kirby: Look, we don’t want any civilian casualties, whether it’s from a targeted operation, an airstrike or something bigger than that. The right number of civilian casualties is zero. None of them are acceptable, nor should they be acceptable. But we have not seen Israel go into Rafah in a large, concerted, concentrated way. We have not seen major ground operations in Rafah. They are doing what they said they were going to do –going after Hamas leaders in a targeted, precise way. We’re going to continue to watch this, obviously, and watch it closely.
VOA: Why is a major ground operation the criteria for the U.S. red line when most of the civilians have been killed in airstrikes? Why not the number of civilian deaths as the red line, if you say that the correct number is zero?
Kirby: The correct number is zero. And again, what we’ve told the Israelis is what the president said: that if they go in a heavy-handed way, major ground operations in Rafah in the population centers, that’s going to cause us to have to relook at our own Gaza policy and the support that we’re providing them. We have not seen them take that sort of a step right now. And again, we’re watching it closely.