Gorman
fire reaches 500 acres, evacuations taking place
date: 2024-06-15, from: The Signal
Los Angeles County Fire Department personnel were battling a large fire
in Gorman that has the potential to reach 1,000 acres on Saturday
afternoon, according to fire officials. The fire […]
Personnel with the Los Angeles County Fire Department responded to a
vegetation fire on Sierra Highway in Agua Dulce that grew to 120 acres
on Saturday afternoon, according to fire […]
Complaints
about non-citizen voting center on US voter ID laws
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for
president, says people are voting illegally in U.S. elections, including
immigrants. One California city is moving to impose voter identification
rules that violate state voting laws. Genia Dulot reports.
Meghan
Markle called out for debuting new jam hours before Kate Middleton’s
royal return
date: 2024-06-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
Meghan Markle and her new raspberry jam have annoyed royal fans who
believe all the attention Saturday should have been on Kate’s appearance
at Trooping the Color.
On
Father’s Day, this LGBTQ+ couple celebrates the friend who helped make
their family dream reality
date: 2024-06-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
David Titterington had a sense of what his childhood friend would ask
him when she led him into a photo booth at a mutual friend’s wedding
roughly a decade ago. As the countdown for the second photo ticked, Jen
Wilson popped the question: Will you be my sperm donor?
Italian
Premier Meloni describes Putin’s cease-fire offer for Ukraine as
‘propaganda’
date: 2024-06-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni on Saturday dismissed a cease-fire
offer for Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin as “propaganda,”
as she wrapped up a Group of Seven summit that saw a deal reached for a
$50 billion loan to Ukraine.
Missouri
woman’s murder conviction tossed after 43 years. Her lawyers say a
police officer did it
date: 2024-06-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
A judge has overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman who was a
psychiatric patient when she incriminated herself in a 1980 killing.
Sandra Hemme has spent 43 years behind bars. Her attorneys argue the
killing actually was committed by a now-discredited police officer.
Judge Ryan Horsman ruled late Friday that Hemme had established evidence
of actual innocence. Her attorneys says this is the longest time a women
has been been incarcerated for a wrongful conviction. The judge said
Hemme must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her.
Prosecutors didn’t immediately respond to a phone message from The
Associated Press seeking comment.
A
Japanese climber dies while trying to scale a mountain in northern
Pakistan and another is missing
date: 2024-06-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
A Japanese climber has died while trying to scale one of the highest
mountains in northern Pakistan and a search is still underway to find
his missing colleague, officials said Saturday.
First
responders pay their respects to fallen Palmdale firefighter
date: 2024-06-15, from: The Signal
Local first responders paid their respects, following the line-of-duty
death of Los Angeles County Firefighter Andrew Pontious, as a procession
transported the fallen firefighter through the Santa Clarita Valley past
[…]
Trump
Michigan trip includes Black church, far-right activists’ meeting
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
DETROIT, MICHIGAN — Donald Trump will use back-to-back stops Saturday
to court Black voters and a conservative group that has been accused of
attracting white supremacists as the Republican presidential candidate
works to stitch together a coalition of historically divergent interests
in the battleground state of Michigan.
Trump is scheduled to host an afternoon roundtable at an African
American church in downtown Detroit. Later he will appear at the
“People’s Convention” of Turning Point Action, a group that the
Anti-Defamation League says has been linked to a variety of
extremists.
Roughly 24 hours before Trump planned to address the conference,
well-known white supremacist Nick Fuentes entered Turning Point’s
convention hall surrounded by a group of cheering supporters. He was
quickly escorted out by security.
Fuentes created political problems for Trump after Fuentes attended a
private lunch with the former president and the rapper formerly known as
Kanye West at Trump’s Florida estate in 2022.
Trump’s weekend plans underscore the evolving political forces
shaping the presidential election this fall as he tries to deny
Democratic President Joe Biden a second term.
Few states are expected to matter more in November than Michigan,
which Biden carried by less than 3 percentage points four years ago. And
few voting groups matter more to Democrats than African Americans, who
made up the backbone of Biden’s political base in 2020. But now, less
than five months before Election Day, Black voters are expressing modest
signs of disappointment with the Democrat.
Michael Whatley, the new chairman of the Republican National
Committee, told Michigan Republicans at a dinner Friday that the state
could not be more important.
“Everybody knows if we don’t win Michigan, we’re not going to have a
Republican in the White House,” Whatley said. “Let me be more blunt: If
we don’t win Michigan, we’re not going to have Donald Trump in the White
House.
“We are going to determine the fate of the world in this election in
November,” he said.
Trump argues that he can pull in more Black voters due to his
economic and border security message, and that his felony indictments
make him more relatable.
Democrats are offering a competing perspective.
“Donald Trump is so dangerous for Michigan and dangerous for America
and dangerous for Black people,” Michigan Lieutenant Governor Garlin
Gilchrist II, who is African American, said Friday.
He said it was “offensive” for Trump to address the Turning Point
conference, which was taking place at the same convention center that
was “the epicenter of their steal the election effort.”
Indeed, dozens of angry Trump loyalists chanting “Stop the count!”
descended on the TCF Center, now named Huntington Place, the day after
the 2020 presidential election as absentee ballots were being counted.
Local media captured scenes of protesters outside and in the lobby.
Police prevented them from entering the counting area.
The protests took place after Trump had tweeted that “they are
finding Biden votes all over” in several states, including Michigan.
The false notion that Biden benefited from widespread voter fraud has
been widely debunked by voting officials in both parties, the court
system and members of Trump’s former administration. Still, Trump
continues to promote such misinformation, which echoed throughout the
conservative convention over the weekend.
Speaking from the main stage, Turning Point founder and CEO Charlie
Kirk falsely described the conference location as “the scene of a
crime.”
Such extreme rhetoric does not appear to have hurt Trump’s standing
with Black voters, however.
Among Black adults, Biden’s approval has dropped from 94% when he
started his term in January 2021 to just 55%, according to an Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll published in
March.
About 8 in 10 Black voters have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, with
roughly two-thirds saying they have a “very unfavorable” view of him,
according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in June. About 2 in 10 Black
voters have a very or somewhat favorable view of Trump.
Trump won 8% of the Black vote in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. And
in what is expected to be a close election, even a modest shift could be
consequential.
Maurice Morrison, a 67-year-old lifelong Detroit resident, plans to
attend Trump’s church appearance. Morrison acknowledged that Trump, for
whom he voted twice before and plans to again, is deeply unpopular in
his community and even inside his home.
“Once he decided to run for president as a Republican, that
automatically made him racist. That’s his middle name now — ‘Trump is
racist’ — everybody I talk to, all the people I know, my family,” said
Morrison, who is Black.
Meanwhile, thousands of conservative activists, most of them young
and white, were eagerly awaiting Trump’s keynote address Saturday
night.
Enhancing
Accessibility and Recreation Through Our Trail System
date: 2024-06-15, from: City of Santa Clarita
By City Manager Ken Striplin One of my favorite parts about our
community is the ability to walk, bike or ride along our trails and
paseos. With over 100 miles of trails keeping us connected throughout
neighborhoods and along our streets, pedestrian safety and accessibility
is always a top priority when designing new roads, parks […]
US
diplomat warns China’s provoking of Taiwan risks conflict
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
Taipei, Taiwan — Outgoing director of the American Institute in
Taiwan, Sandra Oudkirk, has warned China against aggressive moves in the
region that could spark a larger conflict.
Oudkirk made the comment in response to a question at a June 14
farewell news conference.
“The United States is profoundly devoted to a status quo in the
straits and in the region … that is one of peace and stability. And that
is why we have consistently urged the PRC [People’s Republic of China]
to avoid coercive or provocative actions both in the Taiwan Straits and
in other areas like the South China Sea and off Japan, because
provocative actions are almost by definition dangerous,” she said. “They
run the risk of a miscalculation or an accident that could spark a
broader conflict.”
During Oudkirk’s three-year term, China conducted three
island-circling military exercises against Taiwan, causing an
unprecedented level of tension in the history of the American Institute
in Taiwan, or AIT, which serves as Washington’s de facto embassy.
China considers self-governing Taiwan a breakaway province that must
one day be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.
The U.S., like many countries, does not recognize Taiwan as a country
in order to have relations with China. But Washington maintains informal
diplomatic relations with Taipei through the AIT, along with direct
trade and defense ties, and supports Taiwan as a self-governing
democracy.
Oudkirk reiterated U.S. support for Taiwan’s defense capabilities
against Chinese aggression, saying that bolstering Taiwan’s ability to
defend itself was AIT’s “top priority.”
“We look forward to the delivery of the military capabilities” from
the long-awaited U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, she said. Worth nearly $20
billion, they were purchased over the past several years but have seen
delays in delivery.
Oudkirk blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for affecting supply chains but
said the delays were gradually unwinding and to “watch this space.”
The U.S. in early June approved an $80 million sale of F-16 fighter
jet spare and repair parts to Taiwan.
China’s defense ministry declared Beijing’s strong opposition to the
arms sales on June 7 and urged Washington to withdraw them
immediately.
Amid concerns about a potential defense vacuum in Taiwan, some
analysts have suggested the U.S. move some arms and ammunition
production to Taiwan.
In response, Taiwan’s Defense Minister Wellington Koo said on June 11
that the two countries are moving toward “possible joint production,”
reported Taiwanese media.
Meanwhile, Oudkirk noted that Taiwan is looking at becoming a
component supplier for the U.S. defense industry.
“We have had a variety of delegations come through Taiwan looking at
cybersecurity, looking at unmanned systems, drones. I can tell there is
a lot of interest there but there are still some steps in terms of
meeting the standards that the U.S. puts down for its defense industrial
base that Taiwan’s private companies would have to meet.”
Tzu-yun Su, an associate research fellow at the Institute for
National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, told VOA the technical
issues for Taiwan and U.S. defense companies to expand cooperation are
not big, but a major hurdle is corporate governance.
“The confidentiality of the companies, personnel safety control and
information network security will be the three major factors,” said Su.
“At the same time, the government laws must be connected. If Taiwanese
companies can keep up with these regulations and management aspects,
they will have a relatively good chance of entering the U.S. defense
supply chain.”
Asked about concerns that U.S. policy to Taiwan could change if
President Joe Biden is not reelected in November, Oudkirk said, “In the
United States, unlike on almost any other issue of foreign policy or
domestic policy, there is a broad-based, bipartisan consensus on policy
towards Taiwan. So, I do not think an election would necessarily change
that.”
The American Institute in Taiwan announced in late May that Raymond
Greene will succeed Oudkirk as head of the office in Taipei sometime
this summer.
From
G7 to fundraiser: Biden balances geopolitics with campaign
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — After flying through the night across nine time zones,
from southern Italy to Southern California, U.S. President Joe Biden is
shifting his focus from Russia’s challenge of Western unity to raking in
big money for his reelection campaign at a Hollywood fundraiser
featuring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
Biden went straight from the Group of Seven summit of wealthy
democracies, where Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine took center stage, to Los Angeles and the glitzy gathering
unfolding Saturday night at the Peacock Theater. The journey was only
broken up by a layover to refuel outside Washington.
Former President Barack Obama is joining headliners Clooney and
Roberts, and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel will interview all of them
onstage. In a text message to donors beforehand, Roberts called it “a
crucial time in the election.” Kimmel wrote in his own text that
presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump “will hate this, so let’s do
it.”
Luminaries from the entertainment world have increasingly lined up to
help Biden’s campaign, hoping to provide a fundraising jolt and to
energize would-be supporters to turn out ahead of Election Day against
Trump.
But appearing with stars this time means Biden is skipping a summit
in Switzerland about ways to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. Vice President
Kamala Harris is representing the United States.
It’s a stark reminder that his responsibilities as president and his
reelection effort can sometimes conflict.
“We are going to see an unprecedented and record-setting turnout from
the media and entertainment world,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood
mogul, major Democratic donor and co-chair of Biden’s campaign, said in
a statement.
A Biden fundraiser in March at Radio City Music Hall in New York
featured late-night host Stephen Colbert interviewing the president,
Obama and former President Bill Clinton. It raised a then-record $26
million, but the California event will bring in at least $28 million,
according to the Biden campaign.
Still, Trump has hauled in even bigger numbers.
He outpaced Biden’s New York event in April, raking in $50.5 million
at a gathering of major donors at the Florida home of billionaire
investor John Paulson. The former president’s campaign and the
Republican National Committee announced they had raised a whopping $141
million in May, padded by tens of millions of dollars in contributions
that flowed in after Trump’s guilty verdict in his criminal hush money
trial.
That post-conviction bump came after Trump and the Republican Party
announced collecting $76 million in April, far exceeding Biden and the
Democrats’ $51 million for the month and narrowing a fundraising
advantage Biden built earlier in the race.
Despite
gains, Native Americans still face voting barriers
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Native Americans today say they still face barriers to
casting their votes, six decades after U.S. President Lyndon Johnson
signed the Voting Rights Act.
Many live miles away from voter registration and polling sites and
lack access to reliable transportation.
Others may not have traditional mailing addresses and cannot satisfy
voter registration requirements. Voting by mail can be “iffy,” according
to O.J. Semans, a Sicangu Lakota citizen living on the Rosebud
Reservation in South Dakota and co-executive director of Four
Directions, a voting rights advocacy group that has worked on behalf of
tribes in several states.
“You must remember, the old Pony Express [mail delivery on horseback]
wasn’t meant for reservations. It was for outposts and settler towns,”
Semans said. “The U.S. Postal Service has neglected every Indian
reservation in the United States when it comes to ensuring we have
equality.”
A 2023 study of mail service on the Navajo Nation — the largest
reservation in the U.S. — notes that when deciding where to open post
offices during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. Postal
Service picked locations that would “advance military objectives and
serve the interests of Anglo-American settlers.”
“Post Offices are fewer and farther from each other on reservation
communities; there are fewer service hours; and we show in a mail
experiment that letters posted on reservations are slower and less
likely to arrive,” the study said.
Post offices exist on Seman’s Rosebud Reservation, but they no longer
accept general delivery.
“So, if you want to vote by mail, you can request an absentee ballot
and fill it out. But you’d never get the ballot back,” he said.
States pass restrictive laws
The 1965 Voting Rights Act banned traditional forms of voter
discrimination such as literacy tests, character assessments and other
practices widely used to disenfranchise minority voters.
It authorized the federal government to oversee voter registration
and election procedures in certain states and localities with histories
of discriminatory practices, and it also required those jurisdictions to
obtain “preclearance” from the Justice Department or a federal court
before changing voting laws or procedures.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the formula for deciding
which localities needed preclearance as unconstitutional, opening the
way for states to pass new voting laws.
During a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing in 2021, Jacqueline
De Leon, an enrolled member of the Isleta Pueblo and a staff attorney at
the Native American Rights Fund, or NARF, described some conditions for
Indigenous voters.
“In South Dakota, Native American voters were forced to vote in a
repurposed chicken coop with no bathroom facilities and feathers on the
floor,” she testified.
In Wisconsin, Native Americans were required to cast their ballots
inside a sheriff’s office.
NARF, tribes fight back
In 2021, President Joe Biden created the Interagency Steering Group
on Native American Voting Rights to report on barriers facing Native
voters.
“Native American communities have not been immune, but indeed have
been packed or divided by district lines that dilute their vote or
otherwise discriminate,” the group reported.
In November 2021, North Dakota’s Republican-led legislature approved
a new legislative map that separated state House districts on the Turtle
Mountain Indian Reservation and the Fort Berthold reservation, home to
the Three Affiliated Tribes.
The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Spirit Lake tribes filed a
federal lawsuit arguing that the new map violated the Voting Rights Act
by packing the Turtle Mountain band — that is, concentrating them into a
single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts,
and cracking — or dividing — the Spirit Lake tribe across districts to
dilute their voting power.
“A conservative judge found this was a clear violation of the Voting
Rights Act,” De Leon told VOA. “And rather than protect its Native
constituents where there was a violation, the state has appealed, trying
to just block the cost of action as opposed to remediating the
discrimination.”
Arizona passed a law in 2022 requiring voters to provide proof of
their physical address.
“And that was really an attack on the Native vote because about
40,000 homes in Indian Country in Arizona don’t have traditional
addresses on them or any way to prove residential location,” De Leon
said.
With NARF’s support, the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River
Indian Community in 2022 filed suit in U.S. District Court for Arizona.
In 2023, the court ruled in their favor, finding that the address
requirements violated tribe members’ constitutional right to vote.
With five months to go before November’s general election, Semans
said, Indigenous voting rights activists must stay vigilant.
“With this new Supreme Court, even rulings that we got years ago that
were positive for Indian country could change before then,” he said.
“Things can change on a dime.”
Worst
of rainfall that triggered Florida floods is over
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida — Although more rain could trigger
additional isolated Florida flooding, forecasters say the strong,
persistent storms that dumped up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) in
southern parts of the state appear to have passed.
Some neighborhood streets in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas
still have standing water, although it is rapidly receding, officials
said.
“The worst flooding risk was the last three days,” said Sammy Hadi, a
meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami. “The heaviest
rainfall has concluded.”
The no-name storm system pushed across Florida from the Gulf of
Mexico at roughly the same time as the early June start of hurricane
season, which this year is forecast to be among the most active in
recent memory amid concerns that climate change is increasing storm
intensity.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held a media briefing in Hollywood,
south of Fort Lauderdale, and said while more rain was coming, it’s
likely to be more typical of South Florida afternoon showers this time
of year.
“We are going to get some more rain today, maybe throughout the
balance of the weekend. Hopefully it’s not approaching the levels that
it was, but we have a lot of resources staged here, and we’ll be able to
offer the state’s assistance,” he said.
DeSantis said the state has deployed about 100 pumps in addition to
what cities and counties are using to try to clear water from
streets.
Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said while
flooding was extensive, there were no reports of destroyed homes and
very few of severely damaged homes. No deaths or serious injuries have
been reported.
“We don’t think there’s going to be enough damage to necessarily
qualify for a federal disaster declaration,” DeSantis said. But he added
the storms may have affected enough business to qualify for Small
Business Administration assistance.
The downpours hit Tuesday and continued into Wednesday, delaying
flights at two of the state’s largest airports and leaving vehicles
waterlogged and stalled in some of the region’s lowest-lying streets.
The main problem was hundreds of vehicles that were stranded on streets
as people were unable to navigate the flood waters.
“Looked like the beginning of a zombie movie,” said Ted Rico, a tow
truck driver who spent much of Wednesday night and Thursday morning
helping to clear the streets of stalled vehicles. “There’s cars littered
everywhere, on top of sidewalks, in the median, in the middle of the
street, no lights on. Just craziness, you know. Abandoned cars
everywhere.”
Plus, the money tap opens for a major river, good news about crime
rates, ride-share drivers catch a break, and your medical debt gets a
clean bill of health.
An interview with Julia Schleck, who argues that rather than serving
the public good, universities should be a forum to define and debate the
public good
I wasn’t ready for another dog. I’d been pretty attached to Lacey, a
40-pound terrier we had adopted after her career in the entertainment
industry came to an abusive halt. Her […]
Ask
the Motor Cop | Can you circle back to the U-turn question?
date: 2024-06-15, from: The Signal
Question: Hi Jerry, I enjoy reading your columns and I find them
educational. The topics are a reminder of what I might have known in the
past but have forgotten. […]
I usually ignore Ms. Lois Eisenberg’s letters, but this latest (June 6)
is just too good to pass up. As usual, it is filled with unsupported
assertions that amount to […]
European
Commission may be about to put the squeeze on Apple for its App Store
rules
date: 2024-06-15, updated: 2024-06-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
iBiz potentially facing hefty penalties under the Digital Markets Act
The European Commission is said to be preparing to file charges against
Apple alleging that its “steering” rules, imposed on third-party
developers distributing software through the App Store, violate Europe’s
Digital Markets Act (DMA).…
The
Time Ranger | SCV Sasquatch Offered a Job Hauling Trash?
date: 2024-06-15, from: The Signal
That orange orb menacingly rising in the east? That’s what we old-timers
call, “the sun.” Some of you saddlepals might be hiding under blanket or
pillow. Some of you may […]
So I turn on the news …. We’ve got wars raging in Ukraine and Israel.
We’ve got nuke-carrying Russian warships visiting Cuba. We’ve got 4,000
illegal immigrants a day crossing […]
Robert
Lamoureux | What to do when a car is stuck in your toilet
date: 2024-06-15, from: The Signal
Question: Hi Robert. I’m not sure if this is a new one or not, but I
need an answer pretty quickly, please. We have a 2-year-old son, who
just flushed […]
date: 2024-06-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Sharing my home has helped me pay my mortgage and property taxes for the
last decade, an economic lifeline that gave me the flexibility to care
for my aging parents while still supplementing my income.
date: 2024-06-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
As I witnessed a stunning series of events unfold on my UC Santa Barbara
campus, two equally strong parts of me struggled for ascendancy —
journalist and Jewish student.
US
city repeals ban on psychic readings as industry gains more
acceptance
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
NORFOLK, Virginia — Ashley Branton has earned a living as a psychic
medium for seven years, helping a growing number of people with heavy
choices about toxic relationships, home purchases and cross-country
moves.
And while the tarot cards are never wrong, she said, they didn’t see
this one coming.
The City Council in Norfolk, Virginia, repealed a 45-year-old ban
this week on “the practice of palmistry, palm reading, phrenology or
clairvoyance, for monetary or other compensation.”
Soothsaying, it turned out, had been a first-degree misdemeanor and
carried up to a year in jail.
“I had no idea that was even a thing,” Branton said with a laugh
Thursday among the crystals in her Norfolk shop, Velvet Witch, where she
also performs tarot readings and psychic healings. “I’m glad it’s never
come down on me.”
It’s unclear exactly why this city of 230,000 people on the
Chesapeake Bay, home to the nation’s largest Navy base, nullified the
1979 ordinance. Versions of the ban had existed for decades before.
Norfolk spokesperson Kelly Straub said in an email that it was
repealed “because it is no longer used.” City Council members said
little during their vote Tuesday, although one joked that “somebody out
there predicted that this was going to pass.”
Jokes aside, the city’s repeal comes as the psychic services industry
is growing in the U.S., generating an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue
last year and employing 97,000 people, according to a 2023 report from
market research firm IBIS World.
In late 2017, a Pew Research Center survey found that most American
adults identify as Christians. But many also hold New Age beliefs, with
4 in 10 believing in the power of psychics. A 2009 survey for the Pew
Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project found about 1 in 7
Americans had consulted a psychic.
Branton, 42, who previously worked as a makeup artist, said the
market is expanding for psychic mediums because social media has fueled
awareness. An aversion to organized religion also plays a role, along
with the nation’s divisive politics and a growing sense of uncertainty,
particularly among millennials and younger generations.
“Ever since COVID, people have been carrying this weight. They’re
just carrying so much,” Branton said.
“And people are starting to do inner work,” she continued. “They’re
starting to take care of their mental health. And they’re starting to
take care of the spiritual aspect.”
Branton said she considers her work a calling. Psychic gifts run in
her family, and she’s had them her whole life.
“I always had interactions with spirits,” she said. “I’ve always been
an empath. I can feel people’s energies.”
Branton said she’s built up her clientele through word of mouth,
without any advertising.
“I’m very proud of that,” she said. “There’s going to be scammers and
people out here doing this for just the money. Obviously, this is my way
of living now. But it was never about money for me.”
In 2022, AARP warned of scam psychics who prey on “people who are
grieving, lonely or struggling emotionally, physically or
financially.”
And some bans remain in place. In October, the police chief in
Hanover, Pennsylvania, told a witchcraft-themed store that any
complaints about tarot card readings would prompt an investigation, The
New York Times reported.
The police chief cited an old state law that makes it illegal to
predict the future for money. In 2007, the city of Philadelphia cited
the same law when it shut down more than a dozen psychics, astrologers
and tarot-card readers, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Fortune telling bans stemmed from anti-witchcraft and anti-vagrancy
laws in 18th century England, said Charles McCrary, a professor of
religious studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The American laws took hold in the mid-19th century, an era of
growing concern about fraudulent business practices, McCrary said. But
the Spiritualism movement, which often involved channeling the dead, was
also growing in popularity, particularly among the middle and upper
classes.
“There was something about these white, Spiritualist women that I
think troubled a lot of people,” McCrary said.
“Part of what made it threatening was it couldn’t be written off as
something that poor people do or something for the marginal,” he added.
“It was very popular. And so more mainstream Christians found it
especially threatening. And a lot of people were Christians who also did
seances.”
Such laws faced little scrutiny from the courts at first, said David
L. Hudson, a law professor at Belmont University in Nashville,
Tennessee, and a fellow with the Freedom Forum think tank in
Washington.
The Ohio Supreme Court upheld a state law in 1928 that regulated
fortune telling, writing that “liberty of speech is not license to speak
anything that one pleases freed from all criminal or civil
responsibility.” Other courts reasoned that fortune telling was
commercial speech, which received no First Amendment protection until
the mid-1970s.
More recently, courts have increasingly viewed bans on fortune
tellers with skepticism on First Amendment grounds. Maryland’s Supreme
Court ruled in 2010 that fortune telling for a fee is protected free
speech.
“We’ve come a long way, both in terms of social norms and social
acceptance,” Hudson told The Associated Press, likening psychic readings
to tattoos. “But also there’s been a massive development of First
Amendment law … It’s very disfavored to entirely ban a medium of
expression.”
Even though Norfolk’s ban was practically forgotten and no longer
enforced, Carol Peterson is relieved about the repeal. She owns the
Crystal Sunflower, a store in Norfolk that offers tarot card readings
and vibrational sound therapy. She is also a civilian geologist for the
military.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I could get a class one misdemeanor,’”
Peterson said.
“People have this misconceived notion that tarot is evil or demonic,”
Peterson added. “But you’re helping people tap into their highest self
for their journey. And if people would be more curious instead of
judgmental, I think that they would be pleasantly surprised.”
Reported
birth of rare white buffalo calf fulfills Lakota prophecy
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
HELENA, Montana — The reported birth of a rare white buffalo in
Yellowstone National Park fulfills a Lakota prophecy that portends
better times, according to members of the American Indian tribe who
cautioned that it’s also a signal that more must be done to protect the
earth and its animals.
“The birth of this calf is both a blessing and warning. We must do
more,” said Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the
Lakota, Dakota and the Nakota Oyate in South Dakota, and the 19th keeper
of the sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe and Bundle.
The birth of the sacred calf comes as after a severe winter in 2023
drove thousands of Yellowstone buffalo, also known as bison, to lower
elevations. More than 1,500 were killed, sent to slaughter or
transferred to tribes seeking to reclaim stewardship over an animal
their ancestors lived alongside for millennia.
Erin Braaten of Kalispell took several photos of the calf shortly
after it was born on June 4 in the Lamar Valley in the northeastern
corner of the park.
Her family was visiting the park when she spotted “something really
white” among a herd of bison across the Lamar River.
Traffic ended up stopping while bison crossed the road, so Braaten
stuck her camera out the window to take a closer look with her telephoto
lens.
“I look and it’s this white bison calf. And I was just totally,
totally floored,” she said.
After the bison cleared the roadway, the Braatens turned their
vehicle around and found a spot to park. They watched the calf and its
mother for 30-45 minutes.
“And then she kind of led it through the willows there,” Braaten
said. Although Braaten came back each of the next two days, she didn’t
see the white calf again.
For the Lakota, the birth of a white buffalo calf with a black nose,
eyes and hooves is akin to the second coming of Jesus Christ, Looking
Horse said.
Lakota legend says about 2,000 years ago — when nothing was good,
food was running out and bison were disappearing — White Buffalo Calf
Woman appeared, presented a bowl pipe and a bundle to a tribal member,
taught them how to pray and said that the pipe could be used to bring
buffalo to the area for food. As she left, she turned into a white
buffalo calf.
“And some day when the times are hard again,” Looking Horse said in
relating the legend, “I shall return and stand upon the earth as a white
buffalo calf, black nose, black eyes, black hooves.”
A similar white buffalo calf was born in Wisconsin in 1994 and was
named Miracle, he said.
Troy Heinert, the executive director of the South Dakota-based
InterTribal Buffalo Council, said the calf in Braaten’s photos looks
like a true white buffalo because it has a black nose, black hooves and
dark eyes.
“From the pictures I’ve seen, that calf seems to have those traits,”
said Heinert, who is Lakota. An albino buffalo would have pink eyes.
A naming ceremony has been held for the Yellowstone calf, Looking
Horse said, though he declined to reveal the name. A ceremony
celebrating the calf’s birth is set for June 26 at the Buffalo Field
Campaign headquarters in West Yellowstone.
Other tribes also revere white buffalo.
“Many tribes have their own story of why the white buffalo is so
important,” Heinert said. “All stories go back to them being very
sacred.”
Heinert and several members of the Buffalo Field Campaign say they’ve
never heard of a white buffalo being born in Yellowstone, which has wild
herds. Park officials had not seen the buffalo yet and could not confirm
its birth in the park, and they have no record of a white buffalo being
born in the park previously.
Jim Matheson, executive director of the National Bison Association,
could not quantify how rare the calf is.
“To my knowledge, no one’s ever tracked the occurrence of white
buffalo being born throughout history. So I’m not sure how we can make a
determination how often it occurs.”
Besides herds of the animals on public lands or overseen by
conservation groups, about 80 tribes across the U.S. have more than
20,000 bison, a figure that’s been growing in recent years.
In Yellowstone and the surrounding area, the killing or removal of
large numbers of bison happens almost every winter, under an agreement
between federal and Montana agencies that has limited the size of the
park’s herds to about 5,000 animals. Yellowstone officials last week
proposed a slightly larger population of up to 6,000 bison, with a final
decision expected next month.
But ranchers in Montana have long opposed increasing the Yellowstone
herds or transferring the animals to tribes. Republican Gov. Greg
Gianforte has said he would not support any management plan with a
population target greater than 3,000 Yellowstone bison.
Heinert sees the calf’s birth as a reminder “that we need to live in
a good way and treat others with respect.”
“I hope that calf is safe and going to live its best life in
Yellowstone National Park, exactly where it was designed to be,” Heinert
said.
Some
Mexican shelters see crowding as Biden’s asylum ban takes hold
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
MATAMOROS, Mexico — Some shelters south of the U.S. border are caring
for many more migrants now that the Biden administration stopped
considering most asylum requests, while others have yet to see much of a
change.
The impact appears uneven more than a week after the temporary
suspension took effect. Shelters south of Texas and California have
plenty of space, while as many as 500 deportations from Arizona each day
are straining shelters in Mexico’s Sonora state, their directors
say.
“We’re having to turn people away because we can’t, we don’t have the
room for all the people who need shelter,” said Joanna Williams,
executive director of Kino Border Initiative, which can take in 100
people at a time.
About 120 are in San Juan Bosco shelter in Nogales, across the border
from the Arizona city with the same name, up from about 40 before the
policy change, according to its director, Juan Francisco Loureiro.
“We have had a quite remarkable increase,” Loureiro said Thursday.
Most are Mexican, including families as well as adults. Mexico also
agreed to accept deportees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and
Venezuela.
A shelter in Agua Prieta, a remote town bordering Douglas, Arizona,
also began receiving more Mexican men, women and children last weekend —
40 on Sunday, more than 50 on Monday and then about 30 a day. Like those
sent to Nogales, most had entered the U.S. farther west, along the
Arizona-California state line, according to Perla del Angel, a worker at
the Exodus Migrant Attention Center.
Mexicans make up a relatively large percentage of border arrests in
much of Arizona compared to other regions, which may help explain why
Nogales is affected. Mexicans are generally the easiest nationality to
deport because officials only have to drive them to a border crossing
instead of arranging a flight.
In Tijuana, directors of four large shelters said this week that they
haven’t received a single migrant deported since the asylum ban took
effect. Al Otro Lado, a migrant advocacy group, consulted only seven
migrants on the first full day operating an information booth at the
main crossing where migrants are deported from San Diego.
“What there is right now is a lot of uncertainty,” said Paulina
Olvera, president of Espacio Migrante, who houses up to 40 people
traveling in families, predominantly from Mexico, and has others
sleeping on the sidewalk outside. “So far what we’ve seen is the rumors
and the mental health impact on people. We haven’t seen returns
yet.”
Biden administration officials said last week that thousands have
been deported since the new rule took effect on July 5, suspending
asylum whenever arrests for illegal crossings hit a trigger of 2,500 in
a single day. The officials, who briefed reporters on condition of
anonymity, were not more specific. The halt will remain in effect until
arrests fall below a seven-day daily average of 1,500.
“We are ready to repatriate a record number of people in the coming
days,” Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant homeland security secretary for border
and immigration policy, told Spanish-language reporters after the policy
was announced.
The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to a
request for figures on Friday and neither did the National Immigration
Institute in Mexico.
Microsoft
answered Congress’ questions on security. Now the White House needs to
act
date: 2024-06-15, updated: 2024-06-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Business as usual needs a real change
Feature Microsoft president Brad Smith struck a
conciliatory tone regarding his IT giant’s repeated computer security
failings during a congressional hearing on Thursday – while also
claiming the Windows maker is above the rule of law, at least in China.…
G7
leaders discuss economic threats from China, AI ethics
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
On Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden wrapped up meetings in Italy with
leaders of the Group of Seven democracies. The leaders focused on
threats they say China poses to the global economy and artificial
intelligence ethics championed by Pope Francis. Patsy Widakuswara
reports from Brindisi, Italy.
Speaker:
House will sue for Biden’s Justice Department interview audio
date: 2024-06-15, from: VOA News USA
washington — Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that the House of
Representatives would go to court to enforce the subpoena against
Attorney General Merrick Garland for access to President Joe Biden’s
special counsel audio interview, hours after the Justice Department
refused to prosecute Republicans’ contempt-of-Congress charge.
“It is sadly predictable that the Biden administration’s Justice
Department will not prosecute Garland for defying congressional
subpoenas even though the department aggressively prosecuted Steve
Bannon and Peter Navarro for the same thing,” Johnson said in a
statement.
In a letter to Johnson earlier Friday, a Justice Department official
cited the agency’s “long-standing position and uniform practice” to not
prosecute officials who don’t comply with subpoenas because of a
president’s claim of executive privilege.
The Democratic president last month asserted executive privilege to
block the release of the audio, which the White House says Republicans
want only for political purposes. Republicans moved forward with the
contempt effort anyway, voting Wednesday to punish Garland for refusing
to provide the recording.
Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte noted that the
Justice Department under presidents of both political parties has
declined to prosecute in similar circumstances when there has been a
claim of executive privilege.
Accordingly, the department “will not bring the congressional
contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to
prosecute the attorney general,” Uriarte said in the letter to Johnson.
The letter did not specify who in the Justice Department made the
decision.
Republicans were incensed when special counsel Robert Hur declined to
prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents and quickly
opened an investigation. GOP lawmakers — led by Representatives Jim
Jordan and James Comer — sent a subpoena for audio of Hur’s interviews
with Biden, but the Justice Department turned over only some of the
records, leaving out audio of the interview with the president.
Republicans have accused the White House of suppressing the tape
because they say the president is afraid to have voters hear it during
an election year.
A transcript of the Hur interview showed Biden struggling to recall
some dates and occasionally confusing some details — something longtime
aides say he’s done for years in both public and private — but otherwise
showing deep recall in other areas. Biden and his aides are particularly
sensitive to questions about his age. At 81, he’s the oldest-ever
president, and he is currently seeking another four-year term.
The attorney general has said the Justice Department has gone to
extraordinary lengths to provide information to the lawmakers about
Hur’s investigation. However, Garland has said releasing the audio could
jeopardize future sensitive investigations because witnesses might be
less likely to cooperate if they know their interviews might become
public.
In a letter last month detailing Biden’s decision to assert executive
privilege, White House counsel Ed Siskel accused Republicans of seeking
the recordings so they can “chop them up” and distort them to attack the
president. Executive privilege gives presidents the right to keep
information from the courts, Congress and the public to protect the
confidentiality of decision-making, though it can be challenged in
court.
The Justice Department noted that it also declined to prosecute
Attorney General Bill Barr, who was held in contempt in 2019. The
Democratically controlled House voted to issue a referral against Barr
after he refused to turn over documents related to a special counsel
investigation into former President Donald Trump.
The Justice Department similarly declined to prosecute former Trump
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after he was held in contempt of
Congress for ceasing to cooperate with the January 6 committee
investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Years before that,
then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt related to the
gun-running operation known as Operation Fast and Furious. The Justice
Department also took no action against Holder.
Navarro and Bannon, two former Trump White House officials, were
prosecuted for contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the
January 6 committee. They were both found guilty at trial and sentenced
to four months in prison.
Conspiracy
theorist Jones’ personal assets being sold for $1.5B Sandy Hook
debt
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
houston — A federal judge Friday ordered the liquidation of
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ personal assets but dismissed his
company’s separate bankruptcy case, leaving the future of his Infowars
media platform uncertain as he owes $1.5 billion for his false claims
that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
Judge Christopher Lopez approved converting Jones’ proposed personal
bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation, but threw out the attempted
reorganization of his company, Austin, Texas-based Free Speech Systems.
Many of the Sandy Hook families had asked that the company also be
liquidated.
If Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy reorganization had been converted
to a liquidation, Jones could have lost ownership of the company, its
social media accounts, the Infowars studio in Austin, and all copyrights
as the company’s possessions were sold. Jones smiled as the judge
dismissed the company’s case.
It wasn’t immediately clear what will happen to Free Speech Systems,
Infowars’ parent company that Jones built into a multimillion-dollar
moneymaker over the past 25 years.
One scenario could be that the company and Infowars are allowed to
keep operating while efforts to collect on the $1.5 billion debt are
made in state courts in Texas and Connecticut, where the families won
lawsuits against Jones, according to lawyers involved with the case.
Another scenario is that lawyers for the Sandy Hook families go back
to the bankruptcy court and ask Lopez to liquidate the company as part
of Jones’ personal case, because Jones owns the business, lawyers
said.
Lopez said his sole focus in determining whether to dismiss Free
Speech Systems’ case or order a liquidation was what would be best for
the company and its creditors, including the Sandy Hook families. Lopez
also said Free Speech Systems’ case appeared to be one of the longest
running of its kind in the country, and it was approaching a deadline to
resolve it.
“This case is one of the more difficult cases I’ve had,” said Lopez.
“When you look at it, I think creditors are better served in pursuing
their state court rights.”
Many of Jones’ personal assets will be sold off, but his primary home
in the Austin area and some other belongings are exempt from bankruptcy
liquidation. He already has moved to sell his Texas ranch worth about
$2.8 million, a gun collection and other assets to pay debts.
In the lead-up to Friday’s hearing, Jones had been telling his web
viewers and radio listeners that Free Speech Systems was on the verge of
being shut down because of the bankruptcy. He urged them to download
videos from his online archive to preserve them and pointed them to a
new website of his father’s company if they want to continue buying the
dietary supplements he sells on his show.
“This is probably the end of Infowars here very, very soon. If not
today, in the next few weeks or months,” Jones told reporters before
Friday’s hearing. “But it’s just the beginning of my fight against
tyranny.”
Jones has about $9 million in personal assets, according to the most
recent financial filings in court. Free Speech Systems, which employs 44
people, has about $6 million in cash on hand and about $1.2 million
worth of inventory, according to J. Patrick Magill, the chief
restructuring officer appointed by the court to run the company during
the bankruptcy.
Jones and Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy protection in
2022, when relatives of many victims of the 2012 school shooting that
killed 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, won
lawsuit judgments of more than $1.4 billion in Connecticut and $49
million in Texas.
The relatives said they were traumatized by Jones’ comments and his
followers’ actions. They have testified about being harassed and
threatened by Jones’ believers, some of whom confronted the grieving
families in person saying the shooting never happened and their children
never existed. One parent said someone threatened to dig up his dead
son’s grave.
Santa Clarita Valley nonprofit Fostering Youth Independence recently
held a “Celebration of Everything,” its annual event appreciating the
many volunteers who make such a difference in the lives of Santa Clarita
Valley foster youth and celebrating 18 youth for education
milestones.
McCaul
raises concerns over USAGM ability to vet staff
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
on Wednesday outlined what he described as failures by the U.S. Agency
for Global Media to adequately investigate allegations and whistleblower
complaints.
A 73-page report described a three-year investigation into
whistleblower complaints about an employee at the USAGM network Voice of
America, or VOA, including allegations of falsifying credentials and the
mishandling of a contract.
Chairman Michael McCaul, a Republican representative from Texas,
said, “Given the important work of USAGM and VOA to provide accurate
news around the world, I am extremely concerned about the agency’s
serious investigative blunders despite the alarming complaints.”
McCaul described the case as “the tip of the iceberg” in a statement,
and staff representing Republicans on the committee said on background
that it feeds into previous concerns about whether the agency properly
vets foreign-born staff. However, the report focuses on the
investigation into one employee.
The report found “credible evidence” of wrongdoing, including that
the employee in question did not hold a doctorate or equivalent from a
French university as stated on a resume; mishandled a major contract;
awarded “excessive” overtime pay to favored employees; and “faced
persistent complaints” about an “abrasive leadership style.”
Because the incident involves a personnel issue at VOA, which does
not typically comment on such matters, the network is not naming the
employee.
The report further notes that an investigation under former President
Donald Trump’s appointed leadership at VOA had found grounds to dismiss
the senior staff member in 2021 after an investigation that included the
handling of a $950,000 contract.
After a change in administration, the McCaul report notes, the
termination was reversed, and the employee was moved to a new
department.
An independent investigation by the Office of Special Counsel, or
OSC, released in May 2023, described the case as a “particularly complex
matter” and said it was “beyond the scope of this review to evaluate the
merits of several allegations made against the individual; however, CEO
Office involvement will be examined.”
The OSC added that the USAGM Labor and Employee Relations
investigators tasked with looking into the allegations “faced intense
pressure” to conclude in 2021 that the employee should be
terminated.
The report by McCaul includes testimony and interviews with senior
USAGM and VOA officials and staff. It states that once the agency was
provided evidence to support the claims of falsified credentials, USAGM
moved to issue a reprimand to the employee.
Staff representing Republicans on the committee, speaking to VOA on
background, said that during the committee investigation, they found
USAGM had failed to thoroughly investigate the whistleblower complaints
and other issues regarding oversight and negligence.
The staff said the report’s findings and USAGM’s apparent failure to
take appropriate action reflect wider and far-reaching concerns about
the agency, including whether political bias played a role.
A statement emailed to VOA and attributed to USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett
said her office “cannot comment on specific personnel matters.”
But, Bennett said, “We unequivocally reject the Committee’s
allegations that the agency’s investigation of an employee’s background
was politicized, corrupt or mismanaged in any way.”
Noting that the agency stands by its final decision in investigating
complaints, the statement said its staff “made tremendous efforts to
locate evidence relevant to the matter in question, and aggressively
pursued every possible avenue to conduct a thorough investigation.”
Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents the employee in question, told
VOA via email, “The Committee’s one-sided report continues an
unexplained vendetta that has spanned two Administrations” against his
client.
He charged the report included “many incomplete, misinterpreted and
defamatory conclusions.”
But, Zaid said, he “agrees with the Committee on two things.”
“First, there is a great deal of confusion surrounding the
equivalency of French and American Ph.D.s, including among various
experts,” he said. “Second, USAGM has mishandled this investigation from
the beginning, particularly by interfering with [the client’s] right to
counsel and denying [the client’s] appropriate due process.”
He noted that “contrary to a footnote in the report,” USAGM did not
share details with Zaid, in his capacity as the employee’s attorney, or
keep him updated about what the agency was doing in regard to the McCaul
investigation.
Members of McCaul’s staff told VOA on background that the committee
intends no ill will toward the employee but that as a congressional
oversight board it is their duty to investigate whistleblower complaints
and follow the facts.
The main focus of the report is on whether the employee held an
advanced degree, as stated on the person’s resume and on the VOA
website. McCaul’s report says it was able to quickly establish three
years ago that the credentials were incorrect.
Zaid told VOA that attorneys have “repeatedly provided documentation”
to confirm the degree, and enough evidence exists to show the
qualification “has been properly described.”
Gregory Meeks, the leading Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, issued a statement that called McCaul’s report “one-sided.”
Meeks said, however, that USAGM should “address the Committee’s
oversight questions and concerns.”
The findings in McCaul’s report serve as a case study of a wider
problem, according to the committee staff, who spoke on background.
The report calls for the employee to be terminated as per the earlier
Labor and Employee Relations investigation and for USAGM to rectify its
vetting process.
“USAGM’s actions raise questions about the agency’s ability to vet
its own staff, and I am extremely concerned Democrats who criticized the
agency under the last administration have gone silent instead of working
in good faith to serve Americans who deserve transparency and
accountability,” McCaul said in a statement.
It requests the agency deliver a report to Congress on vetting
procedures within 90 days.
Hunter
Biden drops laptop lawsuit against Giuliani, Costello
date: 2024-06-14, from: The Signal
By Katabella Roberts Contributing Writer President Joe Biden’s son,
Hunter Biden, has agreed to drop a lawsuit against former New York City
mayor Rudy Giuliani and his ex-lawyer Robert Costello. The […]
Can you
blow a PC speaker with a Linux kernel module?
date: 2024-06-14, from: OS News
Sometimes you come across a story that’s equally weird and
delightful, and this is definitely one of them. Oleksandr Natalenko
posted a link on Mastodon to a curious email sent to the Linux Kernel
Mailing List, which apparently gets sent to the LKML every single year.
The message is very straightforward. Is it possible to write a kernel
module which, when loaded, will blow the PC speaker? ↫ R.F. Burns on the
LKML Since this gets sent every year, it’s most likely some automated
thing that’s more of a joke than a real request at this point. However,
originally, there was a real historical reason behind the inquiry, as
Schlemihl Schalmeier on Mastodon points out. They link to the original
rationale behind the request, posted to the LKML after the request was
first made, all the way back in 2007. At the time, the author was
helping a small school system manage a number of Linux workstations, and
the students there were abusing the sound cards on those workstations
for shenanigans. They addressed this by only allowing users with root
privileges access to the sound devices. However, kids are smart, and
they started abusing the PC speaker instead, and even unloading the PC
speaker kernel module didn’t help because the kids found ways to abuse
the PC speaker outside of the operating system (the BIOS maybe? I have
no idea). And so, the author notes, the school system wanted them to
remove the PC speakers entirely, but this would be a very fiddly and
time-consuming effort, since there were a lot of PCs, and of course,
this would all have to be done on-site – unlike the earlier solutions
which could all be done remotely. So, the idea was raised about seeing
if there was a way to blow the PC speaker by loading a kernel module.
If so, a mass-deployment of a kernel module overnight would take care of
the PC speaker problem once and for all. ↫ R.F. Burns on the LKML So,
that’s the original story behind the request. It’s honestly kind of
ingenious, and it made me wonder if the author got a useful reply on the
LKML, and if such a kernel module was ever created. The original thread
didn’t seem particularly conclusive to me, and the later yearly
instances of the request don’t seem to yield much either. It seems
unlikely to me this is possible at all. Regardless, this is a very weird
bit of Linux kernel lore, and I’d love to know if there’s more going on.
Various parts of the original rationale seem dubious to me, such as the
handwavy thing about abusing the PC speaker outside of the operating
system, and what does “abusing” the PC speaker even mean in the first
place? As Natalenko notes, it seems there’s more to this story, and I’d
love to find out what it is.
Between Feb. 19 and Feb. 20 the Los Angeles County Department of
Public Health experienced a phishing attack in which a hacker was able
to gain log-in credentials of 53 Public Health employees through a
phishing email, compromising the personal information of more than
200,000 individuals.
“The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis
to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts
to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public.
Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at
risk.”
Reading this, it certainly seems indefensible, although unfortunately
not out of line with other US foreign policy efforts. Innocent people
died because of this US military operation.
It’s a reflection of the simple idea, which seems to have governed US
foreign policy for almost a century, that foreign lives matter less in
the quest for dominance over our perceived rivals.
Even if you do care about America more than anywhere else, this will
have hurt at home, too. The internet being what it is, it also would
make sense that these influence campaigns made their way back to the US
and affected vaccine uptake on domestic soil.
The whole thing feels like the military equivalent of a feature built by
a novice product manager: someone had a goal that they needed to hit,
and this was how they decided to get there. But don’t get me wrong: I
don’t think this was an anomaly or someone running amok. This was
policy.
June
21: Summer Fire Risks Highlighted at Safety Press Conference
date: 2024-06-14, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As the Santa Clarita Valley officially welcome hot summer weather,
the city of Santa Clarita, county of Los Angeles and public safety
officials are urging residents to keep their families, pets and
properties safe from wildfires this season.
June
22: Fourth Annual Win Place Home Cabaret Fundraiser
date: 2024-06-14, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Fourth Annual Win Place Home Cabaret Fundraiser will be held
Saturday, June 22 from 7 p.m. - 9 p.m. at Win Place Home, 16257 Lost
Canyon Road, Canyon Country, CA, 91387.
Apple
set to be first big tech group to face charges under EU digital law
date: 2024-06-14, from: OS News
Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition
on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new
digital rules to target a Big Tech group. The European Commission has
determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to
allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store
without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close
knowledge of its investigation. ↫ Javier Espinoza and Michael Acton This
was always going to happen for as long as Apple’s malicious compliance
kept dragging on. The rules in the Digital Markets Act are quite clear
and simple, and despite the kind of close cooperation with EU lawmakers
no normal EU citizen is ever going to get, Apple has been breaking this
law from day one without any intent to comply. European Union regulators
have given Apple far, far more leeway and assistance than any regular
citizen of small business would get, and that has to stop. The possible
fines under the DMA are massive. If Apple is found guilty, they could be
fined for up to 10% of its global revenue, or 20% for repeated
violations. This is no laughing matters, and this is not one of those
cases where a company like Apple could calculate fines as a mere cost of
doing business – this would have a material impact on the company’s
numbers, and shareholders are definitely not going to like it if Apple
gets fined such percentages. As these are preliminary findings, Apple
could still implement changes, but if past behaviour is any indication,
any possibly changes will just be ever more malicious compliance.
Summer
Fire Risks Highlighted at Multi-Agency Safety Press Conference
date: 2024-06-14, from: City of Santa Clarita
Residents Can See Fire Equipment, Helicopters and Brush-Clearing Goats
in Action on June 21 As we officially welcome hot summer weather, the
City of Santa Clarita, County of Los Angeles and public safety officials
are urging residents to keep their families, pets and properties safe
from wildfires this season. To educate residents about the wildfire […]
Join us online in Zoom for demos of personal sites, recent
breakthroughs, discussions about the independent web, and meet IndieWeb
community members! Homebrew Website club is for all levels and areas of
IndieWeb interest, whether curious, creative, a coder, or all the above.
Join us online in Zoom for demos of personal sites, recent
breakthroughs, discussions about the independent web, and meet IndieWeb
community members! Homebrew Website club is for all levels and areas of
IndieWeb interest, whether curious, creative, a coder, or all the above.
Join us online in Zoom for demos of personal sites, recent
breakthroughs, discussions about the independent web, and meet IndieWeb
community members! Homebrew Website club is for all levels and areas of
IndieWeb interest, whether curious, creative, a coder, or all the above.
Join us online in Zoom for demos of personal sites, recent
breakthroughs, discussions about the independent web, and meet IndieWeb
community members! Homebrew Website club is for all levels and areas of
IndieWeb interest, whether curious, creative, a coder, or all the above.
Scriptnotes,
Episode 641: What Characters Know, Transcript
date: 2024-06-14, from: John August blog
The original post for this episode can be found here. John August:
Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig
Mazin. John: You are listening to Episode 641 of Scriptnotes, a podcast
about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what do your characters […] The post
Scriptnotes,
Episode 641: What Characters Know, Transcript first appeared on
John August.
Stanford
Internet Observatory wilts under legal pressure during election
year
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Because who needs disinformation research at times like these
The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which for the past five years
has been studying and reporting on social media disinformation, is being
reimagined with new management and fewer staff following the recent
departure of research director Renee DiResta.…
June 15-16:
Partial Road Closure Copper Hill Bridge
date: 2024-06-14, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita has announced a partial road closure for
Saturday, June 15 and Sunday, June 16 on the Copper Hill bridge. The
westbound lanes on the Copper Hill Bridge will be closed for temporary
striping, demolition and construction.
Microsoft
chose profit over security and left US government vulnerable to Russian
hack, whistleblower says
date: 2024-06-14, from: OS News
Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a
critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian
hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security
Administration, among others. ↫ Renee Dudley at ProPublica In light of
Recall, a very dangerous game.
Google’s own Project Zero security research effort, which often finds
and publishes vulnerabilities in both other companies’ and its own
products, set its sights on Android once more, this time focusing on
third-party kernel drivers. Android’s open-source ecosystem has led to
an incredible diversity of manufacturers and vendors developing software
that runs on a broad variety of hardware. This hardware requires
supporting drivers, meaning that many different codebases carry the
potential to compromise a significant segment of Android phones. There
are recent public examples of third-party drivers containing serious
vulnerabilities that are exploited on Android. While there exists a
well-established body of public (and In-the-Wild) security research on
Android GPU drivers, other chipset components may not be as frequently
audited so this research sought to explore those drivers in greater
detail. ↫ Seth Jenkins They found a whole host of security issues in
these third-party kernel drivers in phones both from Google itself as
well as from other companies. An interesting point the authors make is
that because it’s getting ever harder to find 0-days in core Android,
people with nefarious intent are looking at other parts of an Android
system now, and these kernel drivers are an inviting avenue for them.
They seem to focus mostly on GPU drivers, for now, but it stands to
reason they’ll be targeting other drivers, too. As usual with Android,
the discovered exploits were often fixed, but the patches took way, way
too long to find their way to end users due to the OEMs lagging behind
when it comes to sending those patches to users. The authors propose
wider adoption of Android APEX to make it easier to OEMs to deliver
kernel patches to users faster. I always like the Project Zero studies
and articles, because they really take no prisoners, and whether they’re
investigating someone else like Microsoft or Apple, or their own company
Google, they go in hard, do not surgarcoat their findings, and apply the
same standards to everyone.
Court
denies US request to sell yacht it says belongs to sanctioned Russian
oligarch
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
washington — A New York court has denied the U.S. government the
right to sell a superyacht that it alleges belongs to sanctioned Russian
oligarch Suleyman Kerimov.
The ruling means that U.S. taxpayers will continue to foot the bill
for roughly $740,000 a month for the 106-meter Amadea’s upkeep and
insurance.
The luxury vessel, with an estimated value of $230 million, is at the
center of a legal battle over the enforcement of U.S. sanctions against
Russia. American prosecutors allege that Kerimov and his proxies routed
dollar transactions through U.S. financial institutions to maintain the
yacht, which would constitute a sanctions violation.
In May 2022, the island nation of Fiji confiscated the Amadea and
later transferred it to the United States. The U.S. government would
like to sell the yacht and transfer the proceeds to Ukraine.
But that procedure, known as civil forfeiture, grew more complicated
when another Russian billionaire, Eduard Khudainatov, who is not under
U.S. sanctions, claimed the Amadea actually belongs to him.
In court filings, the Justice Department has termed Khudainatov a
“straw owner” for Kerimov. Khudainatov denies that.
The legal battle over Amadea could take a while. Until it concludes,
the U.S. government is paying roughly $600,000 for the yacht’s upkeep
and $140,000 for its insurance each month.
In a bid to decrease those expenses, the U.S. government requested
permission to sell the vessel and convert its value into cash. That
practice is relatively common in civil forfeiture cases when an asset is
rapidly depreciating in value or its upkeep is excessively costly.
But on Tuesday, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of
New York ruled that the cost of maintaining Amadea was not
“excessive.”
To assess “whether the maintenance costs of the Amadea are excessive,
the court must not look solely at the total dollar amount of the
maintenance costs, but must principally consider whether those amounts
are more than what is usual as compared to the maintenance costs for
other similar yachts,” the judge wrote in the ruling.
The U.S. government could not prove the expenses met that standard,
the court ruled. The Justice Department has the right to appeal the
decision.
Two days after the ruling, lawyers representing Khudainatov and the
company that directly owns the Amadea filed a memorandum opposing the
U.S. government’s efforts to strike Khudainatov from the case.
Prosecutors allege that Khudainatov is not the yacht’s actual owner,
meaning he lacks standing to contest its forfeiture.
But the memorandum, which includes declarations from yacht employees
and contractors, argues that Khudainatov is the true owner and, thus,
the Amadea is not subject to forfeiture at all.
The U.S. government’s attempts to strike Khudainatov from the case
are “nothing more than a desperate attempt to steal the Amadea by
default,” Adam Ford and Renee Jarusinsky, counsel for Khudainatov and
the ownership company, said in a statement.
“Mr. Khudainatov is, and always has been, the rightful owner of the
Amadea,” they continued. “We are confident that the truth will prevail
and the boat will be returned. Until then, this costly burden that the
government has placed on the American people will continue to grow
heavier.”
LASD
Sheriff Explorer Program is Open to Youth 14-20
date: 2024-06-14, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Santa Clarita
Valley Station is calling all motivated youth aged 14-20 to become a
member of the LASD Sheriff Explorer Program.
The Valley Industry Association will present its annual VIA Bash 2024
with the theme “Color My World”, Friday, Oct. 18 with cocktails
beginning at 6 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Valencia,
24500 Town Center Drive, Valencia, CA
Meta
won’t train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws
down
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Facebook parent calls step forward for privacy a ‘step backwards’
Meta has caved to European regulators, and agreed to pause its plans to
train AI models on EU users’ Facebook and Instagram users’ posts — a
move that the social media giant said will delay its plans to launch
Meta AI in the economic zone.…
NASA and Boeing will discuss Starliner’s mission and departure from
the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Boeing Crew
Flight Test in a pre-departure media teleconference at 12 p.m. EDT
Tuesday, June 18. NASA, Boeing, and station management teams will
evaluate mission requirements and weather conditions at available
landing locations in the southwestern […]
VP Harris to
address Ukraine summit, meet Zelenskyy
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will attend the
international Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland this weekend, where
she will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and address
world leaders.
She will underscore that the outcome of the war with Russia affects
the entire world, a U.S. official said, and push for a maximum number of
countries to back the notion that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is a
violation of the U.N. Charter’s founding principles and that Ukraine’s
sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.
Harris, who will spend less than 24 hours at the gathering in
Lucerne, Switzerland, will be standing in for President Joe Biden at the
event. The president will be just ending his participation at the G7
summit in Italy and returning to the United States to attend a
fundraiser for his reelection campaign in Los Angeles.
Harris will meet with Zelenskyy and will address the summit’s plenary
session. Biden met Zelenskyy at the G7 summit, where they signed a
U.S.-Ukraine bilateral security agreement, and in France for events
surrounding the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
Harris was to depart for Switzerland on Friday night, arrive Saturday
midday and spend several hours at the event before flying back to
Washington.
Then, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will
represent the United States at the summit on Sunday and help establish
working groups on returning Ukrainian children from Russia and energy
security.
Russia was not invited to the event and has dismissed it as futile.
China, a key Russian ally, says it will not attend the conference
because it does not meet Beijing’s requirements, including the
participation of Russia.
The senior U.S. official said Russia’s absence would not affect the
summit but expressed regret at Beijing’s decision.
Ninety-two countries and eight organizations plan to attend.
The United States has contributed billions of dollars in weaponry to
help Ukraine fight the war begun by Russian President Vladimir Putin,
although the latest massive package of aid from Washington was delayed
for months by disagreements in Congress.
General: Keynote (YouTube, Hacker News, Lobsters, MacRumors, TidBITS,
Mac Power Users Talk, The Verge) Sessions (Spreadsheet, via Daniel
Jalkut) Videos Unofficial WWDC App (Script to Title Videos in
EagleFiler) Beta OS Downloads (Requirements, Installer, Create Install
Disk With DropDMG, How to Install) Xcode Beta Sample Code What’s New:
Bento Boxes Apple API Changes List Apple […]
Apple (via Ivan Krstić, ArsTechnica): Apple Intelligence is the
personal intelligence system that brings powerful generative models to
iPhone, iPad, and Mac. For advanced features that need to reason over
complex data with larger foundation models, we created Private Cloud
Compute (PCC), a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed
specifically for private AI processing. For the […]
SCV
School Food Services Agency Offers Free Summer Meals
date: 2024-06-14, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley School Food Services Agency has announced it
is serving free meals to students under the Seamless Summer Option now
through Aug. 2.
Benjamin Mayo (Hacker News): App Review has rejected a submission
from the developers of UTM, a generic PC system emulator for iPhone and
iPad. The open source app was submitted to the store, given the recent
rule change that allows retro game console emulators, like Delta or
Folium. App Review rejected UTM, deciding that a […]
NASA
Announces Winners of 2024 Student Launch Competition
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
Over 1,000 students from across the U.S. and Puerto Rico launched
high-powered, amateur rockets on April 13, just north of NASA’s Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of the agency’s
annual Student Launch competition. Teams of middle school, high school,
college, and university students were tasked to design, build, and
launch a […]
600 US troops
remain in Niger as withdrawal continues
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
Pentagon — About 600 U.S. military personnel remain in Niger, as
American troops continue to withdraw from the country before a
mid-September deadline, according to a senior U.S. defense official.
“We are on track to be done before the 15th of September,” the senior
U.S. defense official told reporters Friday, speaking on the condition
of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues. However, the official
cautioned that the rainy season could potentially slow withdrawal
efforts.
Last month, U.S. and Nigerien leaders agreed to a phased withdrawal
of American forces from Niger after being in the country for more than a
decade.
At that time, there were about 900 U.S. military personnel in Niger,
including active duty, civilians and contractors, according to two U.S.
officials, who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity ahead of the
withdrawal agreement.
The withdrawal agreement between the U.S. and Niger confirmed
protections and immunities for U.S. personnel and approved diplomatic
clearances for withdrawal flights “to ensure smooth entries and
exits.”
American forces were deployed in Niger to help local militaries
combat Islamist terrorists in the Sahel.
The United States has used two military bases in the country — Air
Base 101 in Niamey and Air Base 201 in Agadez — to monitor various
terror groups. Most U.S. forces in Niger are currently based in the
latter, which cost the U.S. $110 million to build, and began drone
operations in 2019.
Niger’s natural resources have increased its importance to global
powers, and its location had provided the U.S. with the ability to
conduct counterterror operations throughout much of West Africa.
Countries in the region, including Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Burkina
Faso, have seen an expansive rise in extremist movements.
According to the Global Terrorism Index, an annual report covering
terrorist incidents worldwide, more than half of the deaths caused by
terrorism last year were in the Sahel.
Niger’s neighbor, Burkina Faso, suffered the most, with 1,907
fatalities from terrorism in 2023.
Unless the U.S. can find another base to use in West Africa,
counterterror drones will likely have to spend most of their fuel supply
flying thousands of kilometers from U.S. bases in Italy or Djibouti,
severely limiting their time over the targets and their ability to
gather intelligence.
“That’s a significant policy matter that the U.S. is grappling with
right now,” the senior U.S. defense official told reporters Friday.
Coup forced withdrawal
Tensions between the U.S. and Niger began in 2023 when Niger’s
military junta removed the democratically elected president from
power.
After months of delay, the Biden administration formally declared in
October 2023 that the military takeover in Niger was a coup, a
determination that prevented Niger from receiving a significant amount
of U.S. military and foreign assistance.
In March, after tense meetings between U.S. representatives and
Niger’s governing military council, the junta called the U.S. military
presence illegal and announced it was ending an agreement that allowed
American forces to be based in the country.
During that meeting, the U.S. and Niger fundamentally disagreed about
Niger’s desire to supply Iran with uranium and work more closely with
Russian military forces.
NASA
Joins National Space Council in Celebration of Black Space Week
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
Each year, Black Space Week celebrates the achievements of Black
Americans in space-related fields. To kick-off Black Space Week 2024,
NASA is collaborating with the National Space Council for the Beyond the
Color Lines: From Science Fiction to Science Fact forum on Monday, June
17, at 11:30 a.m. EDT at the National Museum of African […]
Clearview
AI reaches ‘creative’ settlement with privacy suit plaintiffs: A
conditional IOU
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Biz too broke, class too big to settle now; agrees to pay in limited
circumstances like an IPO, liquidation
Unable to afford a settlement with “virtually anyone in the United
States whose face appears on the internet,” data-scraping facial
recognition firm Clearview AI has decided that an IOU for a chunk of the
company’s future value will have to do. …
Introduction Last time, we started our MiSTer journey and could run
the various cores that didn’t require the add-on memory expansion
module. I finally received the memory expansion board, so now
theoretically I can run any of the MiSTer computers, consoles and arcade
games. For game consoles, this seems to be the case as all […]
NASA
to Discuss Outcome of 5th Biennial Asteroid Threat Exercise
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will host a virtual media briefing at 3:30 p.m. EDT, Thursday,
June 20, to discuss a new summary of a recent tabletop exercise to
simulate national and international responses to a hypothetical asteroid
impact threat. The fifth biennial Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop
Exercise was held April 2 and 3, 2024, at the Johns Hopkins […]
“What generative AI creates is not any one person’s creative expression.
Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken
from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data
points that the models are based upon. Those data points were taken
without permission, consent, compensation or even notification because
the logistics of doing so would have made it logistically improbable and
financially impossible.”
This is a wonderful piece from
Heather Bryant that explores the
humanity - the effort, the emotion, the lived experience, the community,
the unique combination of things - behind real-world art that is created
by people, and the theft of those things that generative AI represents.
It’s the definition of superficiality, and as Heather says here, living
in a world made by people, rooted in experiences and
relationships and reflecting actual human thought, is what I hope for.
Generative AI is a technical accomplishment, for sure, but it
is not a humanist accomplishment. There are no shortcuts to the
human experience. And wanting a shortcut to human experience in
itself devalues being human.
NASA-Led
Mission to Map Air Pollution Over Both U.S. Coasts
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
This summer between June 17 and July 2, NASA will fly aircraft over
Baltimore, Philadelphia, parts of Virginia, and California to collect
data on air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. The campaign
supports the NASA Student Airborne Research Program for undergraduate
interns. The East Coast flights will take place from June 17-26.
Researchers and […]
The ‘Just for the Halibut’ Fishing tournament fundraiser recently
crowned this year’s winners. In first place was Billy Katkov, who hauled
in a 19.78 lb. halibut. Jeffrey McElroy took second with a 14.78 lb.
catch and Nathan Lins was third with a 9.84 pounder. The event was
started 35 years ago by Steve Bray, but […]
NASA’s
Wallops Flight Facility to Launch Student Experiments
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
More than 50 student and faculty teams are sending experiments into
space as part of NASA’s RockOn and RockSat-C student flight programs.
The annual student mission, “RockOn,” is scheduled to launch from
Wallops Island, Virginia, on a Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket
Thursday, June 20, with a launch window that opens at 5:30 a.m. EDT. An
[…]
Summary
of the Ninth DSCOVR EPIC and NISTAR Science Team Meeting
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
Introduction The ninth Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) Earth
Polychromatic Camera (EPIC) and National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) Advanced Radiometer [NISTAR] Science Team Meeting
(STM) was held virtually October 16–17, 2023. Over 35 scientists
attended, most of whom were from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
(GSFC), with several participating from other NASA field […]
China
Isn’t Giving Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te Any Honeymoon
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: RAND blog
Since the inauguration of new Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, China
has ramped up threatening rhetoric and activities against the island.
This trend at best will lead to heightened tensions and at worst could
bring about full-blown war that prompts American military
intervention.
The final version of the 2024-25 budget will come to the Avalon City
Council on Tuesday, June 18. The proposed budget for the city as a whole
increased 6.1%, according to Finance Director Matt Baker. He presented
the council with a draft—repeat, draft—of the budget at the June 4
meeting. Remember that all numbers are […]
NASA’s
Hubble Restarts Science in New Pointing Mode
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
NASA successfully transitioned operations for the agency’s Hubble
Space Telescope to an alternate operating mode that uses one gyro,
returning the spacecraft to daily science operations Friday. The
telescope and its instruments are stable and functioning normally.
Hubble went into safe mode May 24 due to an ongoing issue with one of
its gyroscopes (gyros), […]
The
Little Weather Balloon Company Taking on Google DeepMind
date: 2024-06-14, from: Heatmap News
It’s been a wild few years in the typically tedious world of weather
predictions. For decades, forecasts have been improving at a slow and
steady pace — the standard metric is that every decade of development
leads to a one-day improvement in lead time. So today,
our four-day forecasts are about as accurate as a one-day forecast was
30 years ago. Whoop-de-do.
Now thanks to advances in (you guessed it) artificial intelligence,
things are moving much more rapidly. AI-based weather models from tech
giants such as
Google
DeepMind,
Huawei,
and
Nvidia
are now consistently beating the standard physics-based models for the
first time. And it’s not just the big names getting into the game —
earlier this year, the 27-person team at Palo Alto-based startup
Windborne one-upped DeepMind to become the world’s most accurate weather
forecaster.
“What we’ve seen for some metrics is just the deployment of an AI-based
emulator can gain us a day in lead time relative to traditional models,”
Daryl Kleist, who works on weather model development at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. That is, today’s
two-day forecast could be as accurate as last year’s
one-day forecast.
All weather models start by taking in data about current weather
conditions. But from there, how they make predictions varies wildly.
Traditional weather models like the ones NOAA and the European Centre
for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts use rely on complex atmospheric
equations based on the laws of physics to predict future weather
patterns. AI models, on the other hand, are trained on decades of prior
weather data, using the past to predict what will come next.
Kleist told me he certainly saw AI-based weather forecasting coming, but
the speed at which it’s arriving and the degree to which these models
are improving has been head-spinning. “There’s papers coming out in
preprints almost on a bi-weekly basis. And the amount of skill they’ve
been able to gain by fine tuning these things and taking it a step
further has been shocking, frankly,” he told me.
So what changed? As the world has seen with the advent of large language
models like ChatGPT, AI architecture has gotten much more powerful,
period. The weather models themselves are also in a cycle of continuous
improvement — as more open source weather data becomes available, models
can be retrained. Plus, the cost of computing power has come way down,
making it possible for a small company like Windborne to train its
industry-leading model.
Founded by a team of Stanford students and graduates in 2019, Windborne
used off-the-shelf Nvidia gaming GPUs to train its AI model, called
WeatherMesh — something the company’s CEO and co-founder, John Dean,
told me wouldn’t have been possible five years ago. The company also
operates its own fleet of advanced weather balloons, which gather data
from traditionally difficult-to-access areas.
Standard weather balloons without onboard navigation typically ascend
too high, overinflate, and pop within a matter of hours (thus becoming
environmental waste, sad!). Since it’s expensive to do launches at sea
or in areas without much infrastructure, there’s vast expanses of the
globe where most balloons aren’t gathering any data at all.
Satellites can help, of course. But because they’re so far away, they
can’t provide the same degree of fidelity. With modern electronics,
though, Windborne found it could create a balloon that autonomously
changes altitude and navigates to its intended target by venting gas to
descend and dropping ballast to ascend.
“We basically took a lot of the innovations that lead to smartphones,
global satellite communications, all of the last 20 years of progress in
consumer electronics and other things and applied that to balloons,”
Dean told me. In the past, the electronics needed to control Windborne’s
system would have been too heavy — the balloon wouldn’t have gotten off
the ground. But with today’s tiny tech, they can stay aloft for up to 40
days. Eventually, the company aims to recover and reuse at least 80% of
its balloons.
The longer airtime allows Windborne to do more with less. While globally
there are more than 1,000 conventional weather balloons launched every
day, Dean told me, “We collect roughly on the order of 10% or 20% of the
data that NOAA collects every day with only 100 launches per month.” In
fact, NOAA is a customer of the startup — Windborne already makes
millions in revenue selling its weather balloon data to various
government agencies.
Now, with a
potentially
historic hurricane season ramping up, Windborne has the
potential to provide the most accurate data on when and where a storm
will touch down.
Earlier this year, the company used WeatherMesh to run a case study on
Hurricane Ian, the Category 5 storm that hit Florida in September 2022,
leading to over 150 fatalities and $112 billion in damages. Using only
weather data that was publicly available at the time, the company looked
at how accurately its model (had it existed back then) would have
tracked the hurricane.
Very
accurately, it turns out. Windborne’s predictions aligned neatly
with the storm’s actual path, while the National Weather Service’s model
was off by hundreds of kilometers. That impressed Khosla Ventures, which
led the company’s $15 million Series A funding round earlier this month.
“We haven’t seen meaningful innovation in weather since The Weather
Channel in the 90s. Yet it’s a $100 billion market that touches
essentially every industry,” Sven Strohband, a partner and managing
director at Khosla Ventures, told me via email.
With this new funding, Windborne is scaling up its fleet of balloons as
it prepares to commercialize. The money will also help Windborne advance
its forecasting model, though Dean told me robust data collection is
ultimately what will set the company apart. “In any kind of AI industry,
whoever has the top benchmark at any given time, it’s going to
fluctuate,” Dean said. “What matters is the model plus the unique
datasets.”
Unlike Windborne, the tech giants with AI-based weather models —
including, most recently,
Microsoft
— aren’t gathering their own data, instead drawing solely on publicly
accessible information from legacy weather agencies.
But these agencies are starting to get into the game, too. The European
Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has already created its own
AI-based model,
the
Artificial Intelligence/Integrated Forecasting System, which it
runs in parallel to its traditional model. NOAA, while a bit behind, is
also looking to follow suit.
“In the end, we know we can’t rely on these big tech companies to just
keep developing stuff in good faith to give to us for free,” Kleist told
me. Right now, many of the top AI-based weather models are open source.
But who knows if that will last? “It’s our mission to save lives and
property. And we have to figure out how to do some of this development
and operationalize it from our side, ourselves,” Kleist said, explaining
that NOAA is currently prototyping some of its own AI-based models.
All of these agencies are in the early stages of AI modeling, which is
why you likely haven’t noticed weather predictions making a pronounced
leap in accuracy as of late. It’s all still considered quite
experimental. “Physical models, the pro is we know the underlying
assumptions we make. We understand them. We have decades of history of
developing them and using them in operational settings,” Kleist told me.
AI-based models are much more of a black box, and there’s questions
surrounding how well they will perform when it comes to predicting rare
weather events, for which there might be little to no historical data
for the model to reference.
That hesitation might not last long, though. “To me it’s fairly obvious
that most of the forecasts that would actually be used by users in the
future will come from machine learning models,” Peter Dueben, head of
Earth systems modeling at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather
Forecasting, told me. “If you just want to get the weather forecast for
the temperature in California tomorrow, then the machine learning model
is typically the better choice,” he added.
That increased accuracy is going to matter a lot, not just for the
average weather watcher, but also for specific industries and interest
groups for whom precise predictions are paramount. “We can tailor the
actual models to particular sectors, whether it’s agriculture, energy,
transportation,” Kleist told me, “and come up with information that’s
going to be at a very granular, specific level to a particular
interest.” Think grid operators or renewable power generators who need
to forecast demand or farmers trying to figure out the best time to
irrigate their fields or harvest crops.
A major (and perhaps surprising) reason this type of customization is so
easy is because once AI-based weather models are trained, they’re
actually orders of magnitude cheaper and less computationally intensive
to run than traditional models. All of this means, Kleist told me, that
AI-based weather models are “going to be fundamentally foundational for
what we do in the future, and will open up avenues to things we couldn’t
have imagined using our current physical-based modeling.”
Hamilton
Cove Real Estate, Straight Up Builders win softball
date: 2024-06-14, from: Catalina Islander
Bravo’s Landscaping and Hamilton Cove Real Estate opened the night
for Catalina Co Ed Softball. Bravo’s Landscaping’s Sebastian Sanchez hit
a solo home run in the top of the first. Bravo’s Landscaping added three
more runs in the second. After two quick outs Tyler Engel hit a solo
home run. Two more runs followed off […]
T-Mobile
US joins suppliers on $2.7B DoD contract for next-gen comms
services
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Expansive Spiral 4 program to boost capabilities with cutting-edge tech
T-Mobile US was this week picked as a wireless provider by the
Department of Defense to supply telecoms services and equipment for the
US Navy as part of a ten-year contract worth $2.67 billion in total.…
A new exhibit at the Catalina Island Museum for Art & History
highlights the museum’s seven-decade role in preserving the island’s
unique history and art. With a growing permanent collection, the museum
unveils previously unseen captivating artifacts in the exhibition. On
display until fall 2024, the exhibit shares curious artifacts, photos,
and paintings revealing Catalina […]
Supreme
Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban
on bump stocks, a rapid-fire gun accessory that was used in the
deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The high court’s conservative majority found that the Trump
administration did not follow federal law when it changed course from
previous administrations after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country
music festival with assault rifles equipped with bump stocks.
The accessory allows a rate of fire comparable to machine guns.
The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes,
sending thousands of people fleeing in terror as hundreds were wounded
and dozens were killed in 2017.
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said a
semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun
because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with one pull
of the trigger.
“A bump stock does not alter the basic mechanics of bump firing, and
the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional
shot,” he wrote in an opinion that contained multiple drawings of guns’
firing mechanisms.
He was joined by his fellow conservatives. Justice Samuel Alito wrote
a short separate opinion to stress that Congress can change the law to
equate bump stocks with machine guns.
Changing the definition of a bump stock through regulation rather
than legislation took pressure off Republicans in Congress to act or
justify inaction in the face of the Las Vegas massacre during Trump’s
presidency.
In a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia
Sotomayor pointed to the Las Vegas gunman. “In murdering so many people
so quickly, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he
relied on bump stocks,” she said, reading a summary of her dissent aloud
in the courtroom. Sotomayor said that it’s “deeply regrettable” Congress
has to act but that she hopes it does.
Former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign team said it respects
the court’s decision in a statement that quickly pivoted to politics,
touting his endorsement by the National Rifle Association. President Joe
Biden did not have an immediate comment.
The ruling came after a Texas gun shop owner challenged the ban,
arguing the Justice Department wrongly classified the accessories as
illegal machine guns.
The Biden administration said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives made the right choice for the gun accessories,
which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a
minute.
It marked the latest gun case to come before the high court. A
conservative supermajority handed down a landmark decision expanding gun
rights in 2022 and is weighing another gun case challenging a federal
law intended to keep guns away from people under domestic violence
restraining orders.
The arguments in the bump stock case, though, were more about whether
the ATF had overstepped its authority than the Second Amendment.
Justices from the court’s liberal wing suggested it was “common
sense” that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a
machine gun under federal law. Conservative justices, though, raised
questions about why Congress had not acted to ban bump stocks, as well
as the effects of the ATF changing its mind a decade after declaring the
accessories legal.
The high court took up the case after a split among lower courts over
bump stocks, which were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican
President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that
bump stocks didn’t transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns.
The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging after the shooting
in Las Vegas and another mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high
school that killed 17 people.
Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part
that rests against the shoulder. They harness the gun’s recoil energy so
that the trigger bumps against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing
the gun to fire at a rate comparable to a traditional machine gun.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump
stocks.
The plaintiff, Texas gun shop owner and military veteran Michael
Cargill, was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group
funded by conservative donors such as the Koch network. His attorneys
acknowledged that bump stocks allow for rapid fire but argued that they
are different because the shooter has to put in more effort to keep the
gun firing.
Government lawyers countered that the effort required from the
shooter is small and doesn’t make a legal difference. The Justice
Department said the ATF changed its mind on bump stocks after doing a
more in-depth examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting and came to
the right conclusion.
There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went
into effect in 2019, requiring people to either surrender or destroy
them, at a combined estimated loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said
in court documents.
The following is the Avalon’s Sheriff’s Stations significant
incidents report for the period of June 6 to June 12, 2024. All suspects
are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Many people
who are arrested do not get prosecuted in the first place and many who
are prosecuted do not get convicted. […]
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes
thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together.
This week, we discuss getting people to talk to us, and collapsing
civilizations on the internet.
After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature
and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature,
Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall
altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re
going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders. Today,
we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview)
feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview
experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a
preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the
coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows
Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview)
available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon. ↫ Pavan Davuluri on the
Windows blog It’s incredible just how much Microsoft has bungled the
launch of this feature, as it’s now almost overshadowing everything else
that comes with these new ARM laptops. They rushed to shove machine
learning into a major feature, and didn’t stop to think about the
consequences. Typical Silicon Valley behaviour.
NASA’s
LRO Spots China’s Chang’e 6 Spacecraft on Lunar Far Side
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) imaged China’s Chang’e 6
sample return spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on June 7. Chang’e
6 landed on June 1, and when LRO passed over the landing site almost a
week later, it acquired an image showing the lander on the rim of an
eroded, 55-yard-diameter (about […]
U.S. and NATO leaders in Brussels are at odds over the extent to
which Ukrainians can use Western-provided weapons to hit military
targets inside Russian territory. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb
has more.
Johnson
Celebrates LGBTQI+ Pride Month: Meet Michael Chandler
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
Michael Chandler has provided configuration and data management
support at Houston’s Johnson Space Center for the last 13 years. After
roughly seven years supporting the Exploration Systems Development
Division, Chandler transitioned to the Moon to Mars Program Office in
2019. He and his team work to ensure that the baseline for Moon to Mars
products, […]
A
Giant Interstellar Cloud May Have Once Enveloped Earth, Potentially
Causing Ice Ages
date: 2024-06-14, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Astronomers suggest this cold, dense cloud compressed our sun’s
protective field between two and three million years ago, leaving the
Earth exposed to cosmic material
Argon
ONE V3 case for the Raspberry Pi 5 moves all the ports to one side,
optionally adds an M.2 slot
date: 2024-06-14, from: Liliputing
Raspberry Pi’s credit card-sized computers typically make use of the
limited space by putting the USB and Ethernet ports on one side of the
board and the video output ports on another. But sometimes it’s nice to
have all the ports on one side. Enter accessories like the new Argon ONE
V3 case for the […]
LuckFox
Pico Ultra is a micro dev board with PoE and a Rockchip RV1106
ARM/RISC-V chip
date: 2024-06-14, from: Liliputing
The LuckFox Pico Ultra is a single-board computer designed for headless
computing applications (there’s no HDMI or DisplayPort video output). It
measures just 50 x 50mm (2″ x 2″) and features USB Type-C and Type-A
ports, an onboard microphone, a 10/100 Ethernet port with an optional
Power Over Ethernet (PoE) module, optional support for WiFi 6 […]
Voyager
1 makes stellar comeback to science operations
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Engineers coax veteran probe back to health
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal
science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began
spouting gibberish at the end of 2023.…
Four years ago, the pandemic sent the world economy into disarray. Panic
buying led to widespread backlogs, with shipping gridlocks so bad you
could see them in satellite images. It all revealed a troubling reality:
Our global supply chain is incredibly fragile. Where did things go
wrong? We discuss. Also, Tesla shareholders voted to restore CEO Elon
Musk’s pay package valued at $44.9 billion, so let’s talk about how CEO
pay gets determined.
Supreme
Court strikes down Trump-era ban on gun ‘bump stocks’
date: 2024-06-14, from: San Jose Mercury News
Trump had pushed for the ban in response to a 2017 mass shooting that
killed 58 people at an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas. Bump stocks
allow a shooter to convert a semi-automatic rifle into a weapon that can
fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.
The
Brainstem Fine-Tunes Inflammation Throughout the Body
date: 2024-06-14, from: Quanta Magazine
The evolutionarily ancient part of the brain that controls breathing and
heart rate also regulates the immune system — a discovery about the
brain-body axis made by experts on taste.
Investigation
underway into rare, unsafe ‘Dutch roll’ experienced by a Boeing 737 Max
during Oakland-bound flight
date: 2024-06-14, from: San Jose Mercury News
The incident occurred almost three weeks ago and was added to a FAA
database this week. There were 175 passengers and six crew onboard,
according to the airline.
Johnson
Celebrates LGBTQI+ Pride Month: Meet Margaret Kennedy
date: 2024-06-14, from: NASA breaking news
Although surrounded by the big and bold missions of human
spaceflight, Margaret Kennedy, an aerospace systems engineer on the
Human Health and Performance Contract, still appreciates the little
things. Ask about her favorite NASA experience to date and she will tell
you it is getting to show her badge to the gate guards at Houston’s
[…]
Imagine a life where you dictate your own schedule, free from the
confines of a traditional job.
That’s a thought experiment I’ve been playing with lately: what would it
look like if this was my last ever job? How might I optimize my
lifestyle for freedom?
By that I don’t mean that it would be the last time I needed to earn
money. I work in non-profit news;
nobody does this because they want to become rich beyond their wildest
dreams. Even tech salaries feel distant from this vantage point. To be
clear, I’m doing this work because it’s important, and I have no plans
to leave.
Regardless, I think it’s an important thought experiment. What if this
was the last time I worked a job with regular hours and a boss and a
hierarchy? What would it look like to have a lifestyle that was less
bound to working norms, so that I could choose how to spend my day, or
my week, or my year?
This desire to seek a lifestyle less bound by traditional working norms
is shaped by two big influences:
My working life in startups, which was very much self-driven
My own parents, who had their own publishing startup for a key part of
my childhood.
My parents’ ability to dictate their schedules and norms meant that I
was able to have childhood experiences — in particular, trips to
mainland Europe and the US — that would have been much harder otherwise.
(These things didn’t need all that much money; they needed
time.) That lifestyle did something else important, too: it
showed me that it was attainable, and that a person doesn’t
need a 9-5 to live. That perspective, in turn, allowed me to
become a founder and build new things.
I would like to do the same for our son. Honestly, selfishly, I would
also like to do it for me.
What are the roads to more independence when you aren’t independently
wealthy?
Here are some options I’ve considered:
Startups
The first potential path to independence is through entrepreneurship.
I’ve founded two startups in my life. The first one was bootstrapped for
the first couple of years before raising a round from British investors;
the second was kicked off with a small amount ($50K) of accelerator seed
money.
My life has changed since then. In particular, my capital needs have
shot up. There’s a child and daycare and a mortgage in the picture,
which is radically different from my life as a twenty-something prepared
to live on Pot Noodles and scrape by with little money. A working life
of open source, mission-driven startups, and non-profit news means that
my savings are meager and wouldn’t support a new venture. A friends and
family round is out of the question for me, as it is for anyone who
doesn’t come from wealth.
Building a startup means working hard on it while holding down my day
job, until it reaches the point where it has enough traction to raise a
seed round. The barrier for that traction is rising steadily; it
probably needs to be making tens of thousands of dollars a month for a
seed investor to find it interesting. Still, that isn’t insurmountable —
particularly with a co-founder. I have more product, engineering, and
organizational growth skills than ever before, and I believe that I
could do it.
But also: at the point where it’s making tens of thousands of
dollars a month, assuming a low running cost, that’s more than enough to
sustain me! It doesn’t need to be a high-growth startup. It could be a
small business that is content to do quite well.
A Zebra, perhaps. The
disadvantage is that the upside is limited: it’s unlikely to make me
wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. But what if that isn’t the goal? If
the goal is freedom, a modest income is wonderful.
Consulting or Coaching
I have coaching training, and I’ve previously coached founders across a
portfolio of mission-driven startups. In many ways, my roles as a CTO /
Head of Engineering / Director of Technology have been largely
coaching-based too: effective 1:1s and frameworks for feedback are the
lifeblood of building a team.
I’ve also got strong product design and design thinking training, and
have run workshops and design sprints with many teams. I understand
product fundamentals, how to instill product thinking in a team, and can
shepherd a product (and product team) from insight to launch.
And I’m technical. I can architect software and write code; I can advise
teams about how to think about new technologies like AI, or how to build
their own software. I’ve done this in many different contexts, many,
many times.
So I think I can offer a lot. The challenge with consulting of any kind,
though, is that it’s essentially a freelance job: you’re working from
contract to contract, or from session to session, which means that
you’re constantly having to sell yourself for the next thing, at least
until your reputation has reached the point where people are asking for
you.
Perhaps a retainer model would work: enough people subscribing to
receive your attention and you have a steady income. Too many, though,
and you can’t support them all. Too few, and you need to be in sales
mode all the time. Still, it seems attractive from the provider end; the
question, of course, is whether any customers would actually go for
that. My guess is probably not — at least until you have enough glowing
referrals.
Selling Products
In a way, this seems like the most attractive option: sell a finite
product that doesn’t require your direct involvement, so that you can
spend your time building the next product to sell, until you
have a portfolio of products that sell without you and generate a
reasonable income.
There are plenty of influencers who peddle “passive income”. My strong
belief is that they’re all scammers, and that the dream of financial
independence is what they’re all actually selling. Still, there
are clearly people who sell things on the internet, and some of them do
quite well.
These include:
Books: Yay for books! Of course, the idea that you’ll
make an income from books alone is a pipe dream. Even bestselling
published authors often don’t leave their jobs until they’ve had a few
successes in a row. There are more books being published and it’s harder
to break out. Full disclosure: I am writing a book! But I don’t expect
it to cover my costs. I’m doing it because there’s a story I want to
tell. (And then I’ll do it again, because there are more stories to
tell.)
Courses: Do people really make a lot of money from
these? I mean, maybe. It feels like courses mostly fall into the same
category as books: something you do because you want to share some
knowledge or potentially demonstrate some expertise, but not something
you do as a money-making venture in its own right.
Apps: Hmm. This was a great idea in 2008. Some software
really does support independent developers, though — but my suspicion is
that the software that does the best are actually services,
which fit better into my “startup / small business” description above.
A Portfolio
I think this is the real answer: it isn’t just one thing. Likely, a
repeatable income is cobbled together from threads of at least some of
the above elements: building a service, offering coaching or consulting,
and selling individual products.
One danger here is that attention is spread too thinly: because multiple
threads are required, you necessarily have less time to spend on each.
Consequently, the quality of each element may suffer.
This approach no longer puts all eggs in one basket, which means there’s
(in theory) more tolerance for one thread to fail. But it also means
that you’re spinning plates in order to try and keep them all working.
Because there’s less time for each, and attention is split, there’s a
real chance of all of them failing.
Still, overall, it feels like the most resilient approach, with the most
room for experimentation. It’s by no means the least work, but
minimizing work isn’t the goal: that would be maximizing freedom, which
isn’t the same thing.
What do you think? Have you made this leap? Did it work for you? I’d
love to learn more.
Ukraine
busts SIM farms targeting soldiers with spyware
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Russia recruits local residents to support battlefield goals
Infrastructure that enabled two pro-Russia Ukraine residents to break
into soldiers’ devices and deploy spyware has been dismantled by the
Security Service of Ukraine (SSU).…
The emergence of a conflict between Qualcomm and Arm over desktop
chip dominance feels like a revival of one of the PC industry’s most
important conflicts.
Tesla
shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
The value falls but the rocket man still gets his gas money
Human ingenuity is not sufficient to construct a violin small enough to
lament the fortunes of Elon Musk. The serial entrepreneur, polymath and
media figure is facing the knowledge that the nominal value of his stock
options from electric car company Tesla fell by $8 billion in the time
it took to persuade shareholders to hand them over.…
Current conditions: Mexico recorded its hottest
June day ever, with temperatures reaching 125.4 degrees Fahrenheit •
Southern China is bracing for heavy rain that could last through next
week • It is warm and sunny in Italy’s Puglia region, where the 50th G7
summit will wrap up tomorrow.
THE TOP FIVE
An update on extreme flooding in Florida – and across the globe
Much of south Florida remains under water as a tropical storm system
dumps buckets of rain on the region. The deluge began Tuesday and will
continue today with
“considerable
to locally catastrophic urban flooding,” but should diminish over
the weekend,
according
to the National Weather Service. In Hallandale Beach, near Fort
Lauderdale, about 20 inches of rain had fallen by Thursday with more on
the way. Seven million people in the state were under flood watches or
warnings.
Joe
Raedle/Getty Images
Flooding
in Hallandale Beach and Hollywood, Florida.
Joe
Raedle/Getty Images
Spain,
Indonesia,
Chile,
and
Moscow
are also experiencing extreme flooding due to excessive rainfall.
Tesla shareholders re-approve Musk’s pay package
In case you missed it: Tesla shareholders voted yesterday to re-approve
CEO Elon Musk’s enormous pay package. “The vote puts to bed a variety of
rumors and threats surrounding the electric car company,”
wrote
Andrew Moseman at Heatmap, “including, most seriously, that Musk
would neglect Tesla in favor of his other companies if he didn’t get his
way and might consider leaving for good, taking his talents for
artificial intelligence and autonomous driving elsewhere. With his
colossal payday back in place, he appears likely to stay and to push
Tesla toward those fields.” The shareholders also
voted
to reincorporate the company in Texas.
Oil trade group sues EPA over tailpipe rules
The American Petroleum Institute yesterday filed a federal lawsuit
against the EPA to block the agency’s
new
tailpipe emissions rules. The standards “strengthen greenhouse gas
emission limits, in terms of grams of CO2 per mile, that automakers will
have to adhere to, on average, across their product lines,” Heatmap’s
Emily Pontecorvo
explained
when the rules were announced in March. The regulations will encourage
manufacturers to make more electric vehicles. API is the largest oil
trade group in the U.S. and includes industry giants Exxon Mobil and
Chevron. Attorneys general from 25 states are also suing the EPA over
the same emissions rules. As Reutersreported,
“the U.S. auto industry has largely endorsed the new tailpipe
standards.”
El Niño is officially over
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration yesterday
declared
the El Niño weather pattern officially over and
said
La Niña will likely be upon us sometime between July and September:
NOAA
El Niño, combined with human-caused climate change, has brought record
warm temperatures and drought conditions across the world, but weather
experts worry the shift toward La Niña could make matters worse. Right
now we’re in a sort of in-between zone – neither El Niño or La Niña –
and “summers between the phases have
higher-than-average
temperatures,”
reportedGrist. And La Niña is expected to supercharge storms
in the Atlantic, making for a severe hurricane season.
Insurance industry keeps underestimating natural disaster costs
The insurance industry apparently keeps underestimating the severity of
natural disasters.
According
to the Financial Times, reinsurer Swiss Re is warning the
industry that its annual models have been “off by factors as opposed to
10 or 20%,” as insured losses topped $100 billion last year for the
fourth year in a row and may very well do so again this year. The
inaccuracy comes down to a lack of data, Swiss Re said, adding that it
is investing heavily in improving its own disaster prediction models.
THE KICKER
Officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, will break ground today on
a
transit microgrid that will eventually power 200 zero-emission buses
and be the largest renewable energy-powered bus depot in the U.S.
Bay
Area attorney on trial for child sexual assaults is found not guilty on
16 of 17 counts, with jurors hung on one
date: 2024-06-14, from: San Jose Mercury News
With the jury verdict, James Glenn Haskell— who was charged with
crimes for between October 2018 and up until early February 2022, when
his four adopted children were removed from the Vacaville home he shared
with wife Emily — avoided the possibility of receiving two life
sentences had the verdicts gone against him.
Fans
mourn passing of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s oldest otter
date: 2024-06-14, from: San Jose Mercury News
Rosa lived to the age of 24. Along with being the oldest otter at the
aquarium, Rosa was one of the longest-lived individuals of her species.
In the wild, female sea otters live for about 15-20 years, according to
the aquarium.
Israel is withholding $35 million in tax revenues from the Palestinian
Authority, which provides limited self-governance for the Palestinian
people in the West Bank. The move threatens to worsen an already dire
financial situation there, even as a war devastates Gaza, the other
Palestinian enclave. Plus, big questions linger following the end of a
strike at University of California campuses. And Wells Fargo fired some
employees for “fake working.”
“Our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no
longer know the truth when we see it. And when we don’t know how to
weigh different truths, or to coordinate among different real-world
experiences to look behind the veil, there is either cacophony or a
single victor: a loudest voice that wins.”
This is a piece about information, trust, the effect that AI is already
having on knowledge.
When people said that books were more trustworthy than the internet, we
scoffed; I scoffed. Books were not infallible; the stamp of a
traditional publisher was not a sign that the information was correct or
trustworthy. The web allowed more diverse voices to be heard. It allowed
more people to share information. It was good.
The flood of automated content means that this is no longer the case.
Our search engines can’t be trusted; YouTube is certainly full of the
worst automated dreck. I propose that we reclaim the phrase pink
slime to encompass this nonsense: stuff that’s been generated by a
computer at scale in order to get attention.
So, yeah, I totally sympathize with the urge to buy a real-world
encyclopedia again. Projects like Wikipedia must be preserved at all
costs. But we have to consider if all this will result in the effective
end of a web where humans publish and share information. And if that’s
the case, what’s next?
From the BBC World Service: Every year, more than a million Muslims from
around the globe make a pilgrimage in Mecca. But there’s a lucrative
trade in fake permits, and the number of scams has caused raised
concerns for Saudi authorities. Then, Thailand scraps a planned $8
tourism fee for visitors arriving by air. And Virgin Australia is set to
allow dogs and cats to fly in the main cabin of its planes.
French state
bidding for piece of Atos, offers €700M
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Big data + security division could be owed by the government and its
people
The French government has confirmed an offer of €700 million ($748
million) for key assets of ailing IT services giant Atos, following the
company’s acceptance of a restructuring deal earlier this week.…
<p>This is the 42nd edition of <em>People and Blogs</em>, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jessica Nickelsen and her blog, <a href="https://discombobulated.co.nz">discombobulated.co.nz</a></p>
If I’m not mistaken I discovered Jess thanks to her
100 blog post. There’re
enough ideas in there to power a blog for at least a few years.
To follow this series subscribe to
the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every
Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the
interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the
RSS feed.
If you’re enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it
grow, consider supporting on
Ko-Fi.
Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I’m Jessica. Jess really. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve
lived in New Zealand on and off since 1990, when my family moved here
from the States. My mother is a kiwi and Dad’s american. They met when
my dad came out to NZ as a ski instructor in the 60s.
I had a “very American” childhood and briefly went to Junior High School
before moving. One of my favourite stories from that time is that
everyone at my new school wanted to know if my old school was “like
Beverly Hills 90210.” I had to break it to them that no, my junior high
in Vancover, Washington wasn’t exactly the same, though we did have
lockers and foosball tables and fake-cheese nachos for lunch, haha.
I went to university in NZ - a place called Otago University in Dunedin.
It’s a university town waaaaay down in the South Island. It’s an awesome
city, a bit wild–it even has an albatross colony. I started off as
pre-med, because I always enjoyed science and maths at school, but then
veered off when I failed Chemistry. I studied music, archaeology,
geology, history, english. At one point I was going to do my degree in
geology but then at the end I wound up doing English literature. Later
on when I was working in IT and bored, I finished my honours degree,
part-time. Somehow I studied the Old Norse language (we translated
excerpts from the Eddas, as well as some amazing prose stuff) and also
wrote my thesis on Literature and Technology. I think I’ve always been
all over the place.
I still work in IT, and it’s still boring, even though I am just part
time these days (my husband and I have an eleven-year-old daughter and I
do all the runaround stuff with her too). But maybe that lets me focus
on everything else I do. I have a lot of hobbies, but I’ve probably run
out of room to talk about them here. But a few that could be worth
mentioning are my writing of course, as well as some assistant editorial
stuff I do for Utopia Science Fiction magazine. I like taking photos and
develop film as well. I play piano and do karate. I knit socks. I was a
video game reviewer for ten years too.
What’s the story behind your blog?
I actually have a few blogs. I think you found me through my writing
one? I was wanting to self-publish some books and thought I needed a
blog with my name on it to do it properly. That one has all of my books
on it, but I guess my “real” blog is the one at discombobulated.co.nz,
though that’s had a few iterations over the years.
It started out in 2000, when I was doing my “OE” (or Overseas
Experience, what kiwis call the migration of most NZ young people
overseas for an indefinite period of time) in Dublin. I lived and worked
there for about three years. I had another boring IT job and decided
when I was sitting around waiting for releases (I was working as a
localisation engineer at Microsoft) I might as well do something online.
I found a service called Diary-x that some of your readers might
remember. My domain in those days was herself.diary-x.com, but the blog
itself was named “Discombobulated in Dublin.” A sort of Sleepless in
Seattle reference, I guess, but I really was discombobulated in those
days so it seemed to fit.
That all fell over, and the owner confessed that he hadn’t made any
backups, or the backups had failed, or something. It was my first
introduction to the concept of resiliency and I guess it was a good
lesson, because I still adhere to the concept of
3-2-1
with most of my stuff. Later I moved to Wordpress like everyone else,
and I think it was then that I first bought my domain
(discombobulated.co.nz). I like having a ‘co.nz’ domain. I think it’s
cute. I’m in the process of trying to bring over all of my old wordpress
posts but that may take some time.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
My blog is a completely personal one, so I don’t tend to write multiple
drafts or get proofreading done. I figure any typos or weirdness is just
part of the experience, which is less about a professional image and
more of a slice-of-life moment.
I’ve always struggled with the way blogging changed so much and became
just another way for people to market things or sell you stuff. I really
did enjoy how it was back in the early days, where you would follow
people and get a sense of their internal monologues, what it was like
for them to live in certain places. I’ve always loved having little
windows into other people’s lives.
So basically my process is, I go, “hm, it’s been a while, I should
probably do a blog post.” And sometimes I start with the weather, or I
have some news I want to write about. Or I look back through some recent
photographs and find one I want to write about. Sometimes I note down
quotes I like from books I’m reading, or the post might turn into a
longer piece about an actual topic. But most of the time they are just
stream-of-consciousness brain dumps. (Sorry.)
I guess it is pretty self-absorbed, really, writing like this and making
it public. But I just think back on those blogs that I really loved in
the past, and how it made me feel when I read them. And I sort of want
to re-create that, I guess. So those are my touchstones, in a way. A
vague guiding principle.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the
physical space influences your creativity?
I’m not too concerned about where I write, although I really don’t like
the feeling that someone might be behind me, looking over my shoulder. I
used to work in an open office, back in my office IT days, and I could
never get used to the feeling.
For the most part I write at my desk in my study–I have a mac mini and a
nice big screen. (I also work from home, but that’s on a windows
machine, so everything is pretty separate.) I’m also quite happy typing
in bed on my laptop too; for some reason generally I find writing in bed
works really well for me. On the weekends I really like opening the door
to the balcony by the bed and sitting there to write.
I keep quite a few notebooks and I journal in those, but composing a
blog post in a notebook feels a little strange. Recently I’ve set up a
chair outside the study, under some punga ferns that hang over the fence
there, and I have found that sitting there with a notebook, and brain.fm
on my headphones has been pretty wild in terms of getting into the zone.
Probably like most people I’m drawn to beautiful photos of desks in
minimal offices, or a spot at a beautiful cafe, but to be honest by the
time I’m in the flow of writing I hardly even notice my surroundings.
I’m in that in-between space, somewhere between the text on the screen
and my brain.
I’d love to work other places apart from home, but the libraries in New
Zealand are pretty much public spaces these days, and because most of
them are small and suburban (our big one in Wellington is currently out
of action due to earthquake strengthening) there aren’t many places to
just find a quiet desk. There’s also a bit of a mood among cafes where
they don’t seem to like you “bludging” a seat for too long. Of course
there are coworking spaces–I even signed up for one a while ago, but
they are pretty expensive and it’s just a bit hard to justify.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech
stack?
Sure! My writing blog is one of those Jekyll templates hosted on GitHub
pages, though I am looking at simplifying that. (It also got a really
bad score on the websitecarbon.com website, which is another reason I’m
considering moving.) What I do really like about it is that I have the
site mirrored locally, and I can edit the html and css in Zed
(https://zed.dev) (currently my code
editor of choice, though I sometimes go back to Vim). I like writing a
post in a text file and then pushing a copy out to where it’s hosted. It
feels more like writing that way.
My personal blog is similar, though I use Blot.im for that. All the
files sit on Dropbox, and everything just syncs and updates as I edit
them. I have the templates and structure sitting there and it’s very
easy to make changes.
I recently implemented a weird sort of flow though, involving Obsidian
and an automator folder monitoring workflow. I have, in Obsidian, a Blog
folder, with drafts and posts subfolders. I create a draft blog post
based on a template I’ve created with the right YAML front matter, write
it in Obsidian, and then when I’m ready, I drag it over to the posts
folder. Once it arrives there, automator kicks in and makes a copy to my
Blot folder.
I like writing blog posts in markdown in Obsidian; everything syncs to
GitHub pretty easily. The only faff is with implementing photos, which I
usually resize by hand and copy to an assets folder within the Blot
structure. But it’s easy enough to implement without too much flicking
around.
I don’t know if this seems really weird or not. But I’ve come to realise
that I really dislike writing anything in a web browser; everything just
feels very slow and mouse-oriented. My next challenge is to try and find
a newsletter option that I can use in a similar way. If anyone has any
suggestions I’d love to hear them!
Both my domains are registered through 1stdomains.nz. I couldn’t even
tell you why I first signed up with them. The site is a bit clunky but I
like that they are a kiwi company.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do
anything differently?
Going way back, I think despite everything that happened with the
diary-x fiasco, it was a really great place to hang out and meet other
people online. (I even reconnected with someone on micro.blog who I had
been friends with back in those days; it was very surreal!) I think all
I would do differently really is make sure I kept even some basic text
copies of what I’d written–even the wayback machine hasn’t been able to
find everything.
I do think that using Wordpress was a bit of a lesson in how hard it can
be to get everything out of a hulking CMS. Yes there are some good
scripts that can do it, but I still have over three hundred posts that I
have to now go back through and sort the links for images. It’s just
turned into a complete chore.
More recently, I think I wish I’d just used the shortened version of my
name for the author blog. Jess Nickelsen rather than Jessica Nickelsen.
It seems like a small thing, but Jess feels more like me. Maybe I’ll
just do it, heh!
Financial question since the web is obsessed with money: how much does
it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost or does it generate some
revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?
The domain names are around $30 NZ a year, each. Blot is about $20 USD a
year, because I got in on early pricing quite a few years ago. I think
it’s around $60 a year now.
(I also have mini blogs with omg.lol; those are $20 USD a year but I
think I subscribed when they were having a sale. I also pay for
micro.blog because I really like what they are doing there and it’s a
lovely community. That’s $5 USD a month.)
I don’t have anything against people monetising their blogs at all, but
don’t you think that a monetised blog has a different feel? They become
more…performative? Less of a window and more of a presentation? I guess
in my mind I separate those sort of blogs out into the same realm as
recipe blogs or youtube channels. It becomes more about a business and
less about openness. And while I completely understand that for some
people this is their main form of income, I almost wish there was
another name for “this sort of thing,” other than “blog.”
I’m really still just working out my thoughts on the whole thing. Maybe
my stumbling block is that I’m a Gen-Xer who remembers when all of this
was just a giant playground, and now it’s all become quite serious.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out?
And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
Ohh, this is hard. There are so many interesting blogs out there, and I
love that this is a problem. It was awesome to see you interviewing some
bloggers who I genuinely love reading (like Adrianna Tan, Derek Sivers
and Winnie Lim). Here are a few other blogs that I really like:
arnoldhoogerwerf.nl - he does
all sorts of interesting field recordings in nature and sometimes makes
films to accompany them
wonderpens.ca -
though they are a stationery shop, this is a commercial blog I genuinely
enjoy; sincere and well-written, with lovely photography.
saigonboy.me I discovered this blog
while I was investigating Montaigne.io (which still looks pretty cool; a
blog created via apple notes?) This is a snippety sort of travel blog,
with illustrations rather than photographs. I really like it.
danwang.co - Dan Wang pretty much does
just one post a year, but I’ve been reading them for a few years now and
always feel smarter and more human after reading them.
muan.co - I like Mu-An Chiou’s blog (it’s
dreamy) but she’s also got a nice mix of personal and professional there
too.
robertvanvliet.com - Robert
Van Vliet’s blog is a nice example of how I’d like to bring my two blogs
together. He also seems quite dreamy and artsy as well as being techy,
which is a nice combination.
brainbaking.com - I think Winnie
Lim also recommended this blog. It’s another one of my favourites as
well.
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
Thanks to mental floss I was able to track down the very first web page
I think I ever visited on the internet:
Strawberry Pop-Tart
Blow-Torches. It gave me such genuine delight to know this page
still exists!
Also check out Anthony Alvarado’s DIY Magic. It’s such a great
book on creativity!
This was the 42nd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed
this interview with Jess. Make sure to
follow her blog
(RSS) and get in
touch with her if you have any questions.
Awesome supporters
You can support this series on
Ko-Fi and all supporters
will be listed here as well as on the
official site of the
newsletter.
suggest a person to
interview next. I’m especially interested in people and blogs outside
the tech/web bubble.
<hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:hello@manuelmoreale.com">Email me</a> ::
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/guestbook">Sign my guestbook</a> ::
<a href="https://ko-fi.com/manuelmoreale">Support for 1$/month</a> ::
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/supporters">See my awesome supporters</a> ::
<a href="https://buttondown.email/peopleandblogs">Subscribe to People and Blogs</a></p>
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the globular
cluster NGC 2005. It’s not an unusual globular cluster in and of itself,
but it is a peculiarity when compared to its surroundings. NGC 2005 is
located about 750 light-years from the heart of the Large Magellanic
Cloud (LMC), which is the Milky Way’s largest satellite […]
AI
Octopus predicts results of Euro 2024: It isn’t looking good for
England
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Who needs a real live cephalopod?
The Euro 2024 international football tournament gets underway today, and
we’re delighted to report that AI has finally been turned into something
useful in the form of a virtual pundit for sports fans.…
How
Apache Spark lit up the tech world and outshone its big data
brethren
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
El Reg queries author Matei Zaharia on a decade of the project
Interview Big data is no longer hailed as the “new
oil.” It has gone out of fashion, both in terms of hype and because its
foundational technology – Apache Hadoop – was surpassed by cloud-based
blob storage such as AWS S3. However, a sister project born in the big
data era has become more influential in the modern world of LLMs and
internet-scale data systems.…
John Boston |
D-Day & the Busted Circle of J.Q. Adams
date: 2024-06-14, from: The Signal
D-Day was last week. That would be the World War II turning-point
invasion of Europe. Not the robust brassiere cup size. June 6, 1944, was
six years before I was […]
Why aren’t you angry? Imagine if many high-ranking members of Congress
conspired to lie to you. Would you be mad? Now imagine after those
high-ranking officials conspired to lie to […]
I always find it quite amusing when people on the left applaud our
courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, whenever their rulings
favor a left-wing position. The most […]
Dan Walters |
Californians’ Crime Stance Hardening
date: 2024-06-14, from: The Signal
Over the past dozen years, Democrats have gained, lost and finally
nailed down supermajorities in the California Legislature. Now they hold
more than 75% of its 120 seats. Having achieved […]
We just returned from Napa Valley, attending the Napa Collective Barrel
Auction, one of the top wine charity events in the world. My future
columns will cover that. While there […]
We
need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this
network
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Downside: High chance of injury. Upside: Permanent bragging rights at
performance reviews
On CallThe Register knows that readers often
put themselves in harm’s way to ensure tech keeps ticking over, which is
why each Friday we salute those efforts with a fresh installment of On
Call – the reader-contributed column that details true tales of tech
support.…
Microsoft
cancels universal Recall release in favor of Windows Insider
preview
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Wider release coming real soon – promise – after the Windows faithful
give it a thrashing
Microsoft has cancelled the wide release of Recall – the controversial
tool for Copilot+ PCs that takes regular snapshots of a machine to
create a record of everything users do with their machines – and will
instead make it available only to Windows Insiders for the foreseeable
future.…
Reading Time: 36minutes Hello everyone, hello
hello – firstly THANKYOU to everyone who shared the Tiny Awards link
over the past week, it is HUGELY appreciated and I would thank each and
every one of you personally if that wouldn’t involve a degree of
stalking that would almost certainly make you exceptionally
uncomfortable. If you would like to…
Microsoft’s
controversial “Recall” feature delayed: won’t ship as a day one feature
for Copilot+ PCs as initially planned
date: 2024-06-14, from: Liliputing
Microsoft’s Copilot PC+ initiative launches on June 18, when the first
PCs with NPUs meeting the company’s minimum requirements for on-device
AI performance hit the streets. On these laptops with Qualcomm
Snapdragon X Plus or Elite professors, Windows will be able to leverage
the NPU for things like upscaling photos, providing real-time
transcripts for video […]
@Dave Winer’s
linkblog (date: 2024-06-14, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This is what we don't do in software – study each others' creations.
You can barely get anyone to even look at the simplest stuff.
Amazing how people bet their whole careers and businesses without any
information on what other people are creating. No wonder new generations
of software knock out previous generations. No one has any curiosity,
respect.
Japan’s
space agency helps to target advertising with satellite photos of
crops
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-14, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Some would say ads for cabbage are futile – can pics from space at least
make them timely?
Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and marketing agency Dentsu
have developed a means to use snaps captured by satellites to smooth out
agricultural supply chains and enhance advertising.…
South
Florida rainstorms lead to flight delays, streets jammed with stalled
cars
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida — A tropical disturbance that brought a rare
flash flood emergency to much of southern Florida delayed flights at two
of the state’s largest airports and left vehicles waterlogged and
stalled in some of the region’s lowest-lying streets.
“Looked like the beginning of a zombie movie,” said Ted Rico, a tow
truck driver who spent much of Wednesday night and Thursday morning
helping to clear the streets of stalled vehicles. “There’s cars littered
everywhere, on top of sidewalks, in the median, in the middle of the
street, no lights on. Just craziness, you know. Abandoned cars
everywhere.”
Rico, of One Master Trucking Corp., was born and raised in Miami and
said he was ready for the emergency.
“You know when it’s coming,” he said. “Every year it’s just getting
worse, and for some reason people just keep going through the
puddles.”
Travelers across the area were trying to adjust their plans on
Thursday morning. More than 50 centimeters of rain had fallen in some
areas of South Florida since Tuesday, with more predicted over the next
few days.
Ticket and security lines snaked around a domestic concourse at Fort
Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport just before noon Thursday.
The travel boards showed about half of that terminal’s flights had been
canceled or postponed.
Bill Carlisle, a Navy petty officer first class, had spent his
morning trying to catch a flight back to Norfolk, Virginia. He had
arrived at Miami International Airport about 6:30 a.m., but 90 minutes
later he was still in line and realized he couldn’t get his bags checked
and through security in time to catch his flight.
“It was a zoo,” said Carlisle, a public affairs specialist. He was
speaking for himself, not the Navy. “Nothing against the [airport]
employees — there is only so much they can do.”
He used his phone to book an afternoon flight out of Fort Lauderdale.
He took a shuttle the 32 kilometers north, only to find that the flight
had been canceled. He was then heading back to Miami for a 9 p.m.
flight, hoping it wouldn’t get canceled by the heavy rains expected
later in the day. He was resigned, not angry.
“Just a long day sitting in airports,” Carlisle said. “This is kind
of par for the course for government travel.”
Wednesday’s downpours and subsequent flooding blocked roads, floated
vehicles and even delayed the Florida Panthers on their way to Stanley
Cup games in Canada against the Edmonton Oilers.
The disorganized storm system was pushing across Florida from the
Gulf of Mexico at roughly the same time as the early June start of
hurricane season, which this year is forecast to be among the most
active in recent memory amid concerns that climate change is increasing
storm intensity.
The disturbance has not reached cyclone status and was given only a
slight chance to form into a tropical system once it moves into the
Atlantic Ocean after crossing Florida, according to the National
Hurricane Center.
In Hallandale Beach, Alex Demchemko was walking his Russian spaniel
Lex along the still-flooded sidewalks near the Airbnb where he’s lived
since arriving from Russia last month to seek asylum in the U.S.
“We didn’t come out from our apartment, but we had to walk with our
dog,” Demchemko said. “A lot of flashes, raining, a lot of floating cars
and a lot of left cars without drivers, and there was a lot of water on
the streets. It was kind of catastrophic.”
On Thursday morning, Daniela Urrieche, 26, was bailing water out of
her SUV, which got stuck on a flooded street as she drove home from work
on Wednesday afternoon.
“In the nine years that I’ve lived here, this has been the worst,”
she said. “Even in a hurricane, streets were not as bad as it was in the
past 24 hours.”
The flooding wasn’t limited to the streets. Charlea Johnson spent
Wednesday night at her Hallendale Beach home barreling water into the
sink and toilet.
“The water just started flooding in the back and flooding in the
front,” Johnson said.
By Wednesday evening, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and mayors in
Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Miami-Dade County each declared a state
of emergency.
It’s already been a wet and blustery week in Florida. In Miami, about
15 centimeters of rain fell Tuesday and 17 centimeters fell in Miami
Beach, according to the National Weather Service. Hollywood got about 12
centimeters.
More rain was forecast for the rest of the week, with some areas
getting another 15 centimeters of rain.
The western side of the state, much of which has been in a prolonged
drought, also got some major rainfall. Nearly 16.5 centimeters of rain
fell Tuesday at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, the weather
service said, and flash flood warnings were in effect in those areas as
well.
Forecasts predict an unusually busy hurricane season.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates there
is an 85% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season will be above
average, predicting between 17 and 25 named storms in the coming months,
including up to 13 hurricanes and four major hurricanes. An average
season has 14 named storms.
US President Joe Biden and leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy
democracies are meeting in Italy, underscoring support for Ukraine’s
fight against Russia’s invasion and the need for a cease-fire in Gaza.
White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara is traveling with the
president and brings this report from Borgo Egnazia, the G7 summit
venue.
American
held by Taliban needs urgent medical care, UN expert says
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
GENEVA — The Taliban must provide Ryan Corbett, an American held in
Afghanistan for nearly two years, with immediate medical care to prevent
irreparable harm to his health or even his death, a United Nations
expert said on Thursday.
“The Taliban must provide Ryan Corbett with medical treatment in a
civilian hospital without delay,” said Alice Jill Edwards, the U.N.
special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment.
Corbett, an aid worker, has been held without charge in conditions
“utterly inadequate and substantially below international standards,”
she said.
“This is having a significant impact on his physical and mental
health, which is declining rapidly,” Edwards added. She said she had
raised the issue directly with the Taliban.
“Without adequate medical care, he is at risk of irreparable harm or
even death,” she said.
The United States is in contact with Edwards’ office and welcomes
efforts to call for more humane conditions for Corbett and others held
by the Taliban, a spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the United
Nations in New York said.
“We consider Ryan’s detention to be wrongful and we will continue to
work securing his immediate release,” the spokesperson said.
Corbett and his family moved to Afghanistan in 2010. He worked with
nongovernmental organizations and then started his own — Bloom
Afghanistan — to bolster the country’s private sector through
consulting, microfinance and project evaluation.
He left with his family following the Taliban takeover in 2021 but
continued working with his organization, returning in January 2022 to
renew his business visa.
Despite having a valid visa, he was arrested by the Taliban in August
2022 after he returned to pay and train his staff, his lawyers said. A
German and two Afghans with whom Corbett was arrested have since been
released.
The U.N. expert said Corbett has developed several medical problems,
including ringing in his ears, and severe weight loss. He has also
repeatedly expressed intentions of suicide and self-harm.
The United States has had no diplomatic presence in Kabul since it
fell to the Taliban in August 2021 as U.S. troops pulled out after 20
years of war.
Blue
Origin, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance picked to vie for Pentagon
contracts
date: 2024-06-14, from: VOA News USA
washington — The U.S. Department of Defense picked Jeff Bezos’ Blue
Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United
Launch Alliance (ULA) to compete for national security space missions,
making initial selections under a $5.6 billion award program.
The Pentagon did not say which of the companies’ rockets it selected
but noted seven companies bid for entry into the program, which seeks
rockets that must be ready to fly their first missions to space by
December.
The three companies are the first to be selected under the Pentagon’s
lucrative National Security Space Launch Phase 3 procurement program, a
multibillion-dollar competition among U.S. rocket companies vying to
launch some of the country’s most sensitive military and intelligence
satellites into space for roughly the next decade.
SpaceX and ULA, two titans in the launch industry, have since 2020
been the Pentagon’s primary rocket launch providers under a predecessor
program, called Phase 2. That program gave ULA a 60% share of all
Pentagon missions through 2027, with SpaceX getting the rest.
But in the program’s third phase, the Pentagon has sought a wider
variety of companies for its space missions into the next decade, mainly
to stimulate more competition in the U.S. launch sector.
The announcement on Thursday brings Bezos’ rocket launch and human
spaceflight company Blue Origin into a competitive arena it has long
wanted to enter as it tries to bring its giant New Glenn rocket to
market and ramp up its competitive footing with SpaceX.
SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket has dominated the launch
industry while the company test launches its next-generation Starship
rocket, a massive, fully reusable launch system that Musk sees as
crucial to flying humans into space and launching large batches of
satellites into orbit.
While ULA’s workhorse Atlas 5 rocket nears retirement, its
next-generation Vulcan rocket is poised to become the company’s
centerpiece launcher. Vulcan first launched this year, and its second
mission – a crucial step to receive certification for Pentagon missions
– has been delayed but is expected to fly later this year.
The three companies did not immediately reply to requests for comment
about their rockets’ role in the Pentagon program.
The Pentagon’s Phase 3 program is divided into two categories, Lane 1
and Lane 2. Lane 1, the category of Thursday’s announcement, allows more
novel or specialized rockets to fly national security missions that have
less-stringent requirements. More companies, such as Rocket Lab, are
expected to be added to Lane 1 in the coming years.
The U.S. Space Force, which manages the launch procurement program,
said Blue Origin received $5 million to provide an assessment of how it
will meet the Pentagon’s launch requirements. SpaceX and ULA – companies
Space Force is more familiar with – each got $1.5 million.
Lane 2, whose awards are expected in autumn, will tap three companies
whose rockets are capable of meeting a wider variety of national
security mission requirements, indicating the most experienced players
such as SpaceX and ULA will be most fit for awards.
Hart
school district honors excellence in spring sports
date: 2024-06-14, from: The Signal
A host of athletes at William S. Hart Union High School District schools
were honored at last week’s governing board meeting for their success
during the spring postseasons. Both the […]
SCV School
Food Services Agency offers summer meals
date: 2024-06-14, from: The Signal
News release Santa Clarita Valley School Food Services Agency announced
that it is serving free meals to students under the Seamless Summer
Option now through Aug. 2. All children 18 […]
News release Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, voted in favor of the
FY2025 Defense Appropriations bill, which passed out of the House
Committee on Appropriations and will now advance to the […]
Earth planning date: Wednesday, June 12, 2024 Planning today was
defined by the decision about whether or not to drill at “Mammoth
Lakes,” the potential drill target that we selected on Monday. This
decision is made based on the answer to two questions. First, does this
location meet our science objectives? On Monday, we undertook […]
Microsoft
bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the
cloud working as intended
date: 2024-06-14, updated: 2024-06-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
‘It’s not our job to find the culprits – That’s what we’re paying you
for’ lawmaker scolds Brad Smith
Lawmakers on Thursday grilled Microsoft president Brad Smith about the
Windows giant’s businesses dealing in China — and the super-corp’s
repeated security failings — at a time when Beijing-backed spies are
accused of breaking into Microsoft-hosted email accounts of American
government officials.…
New merch is now live! You can buy hoodies and mugs and help support
Redox development! All proceeds that come to us go directly into our
development budget. If you would rather just donate to Redox directly,
we have Patreon and Donorbox, or check out our Donate Page for more
options. Coffee Mug! Presenting the awesome new Redox coffee mug!
Approximately $8 from the sale of each mug goes to Redox to help us fund
development.
First order of business is to shorten “text oriented web” to TOW.
It’s easier to type and say. I’m considering the bootstrapping process
from three vantage points.
content author
the server software
client software
The TOW approach is avoids invention in favor of reuse. HTTP protocol
is well specified and proven. Common
Mark has a specification as does YAML. TOW documents are UTF-8 encoded. A
TOW document is a composite of Common Mark with YAML blocks. TOW
documents combined with HTTP provide a simplified hypertext
platform.
TOW seeks to simplify the content author experience. TOW removes most
of the complexity of content management systems rendering processes. A
TOW document only needs to be place in a directory supported by a TOW
server. In that way it is as simple as Gopher. The
content author should only need to know Markdown, specifically
the Common Markdown syntax. If
they want to create interactive documents or distribute metadata about
their documents they will need to be comfortable creating and managing
YAML blocks embedded in their Common Mark document. Use of YAML blocks
is already a common practice in the Markdown community.
Describing content forms using YAML has several advantages. First it
is much easier to read than HTML source. YAML blocks are not typically
rendered by Markdown processor libraries. I can write a simple
preprocessor which tenders the YAML content form as HTML. Since HTML is
allowed in Markdown documents these could then be run through a standard
Markdown to HTML converter. In the specific case of Pandoc a filter
could be written to perform the pre-processor step. It should be
possible to always render a TOW document as an HTML5 document. This is
deliberate, it should be possible to use the TOW documents to
extrapolate a traditional website. …
Joe
Raedle/Getty Images
Flooding
in Hallandale Beach and Hollywood, Florida.
Joe
Raedle/Getty Images
NOAA
