News gathered 2024-07-03
(date: 2024-07-03 09:07:53)
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
A good ad from Biden/Harris.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-gY2e4j1jg
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Seth Godin lists the software he loves and uses.
https://seths.blog/2024/07/software-done-well/
SpamSieve 3.0.5
date: 2024-07-03, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/spamsieve-3-0-5/
After boosting ties, Japan, S. Korea, US try to keep them going
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
Seoul, South Korea — The United States, Japan and South Korea last week held what in some ways could be seen as their most important joint military exercise ever — and an indication of enhanced future cooperation.
The inaugural Freedom Edge drill involved a U.S. aircraft carrier and multiple Japanese and South Korean ships and planes, mirroring other recent trilateral exercises held since the three countries intensified defense cooperation.
But, importantly, this drill for the first time took place across multiple domains, including land, sea, air and cyber — a crucial step toward allowing the countries’ militaries to work together more seamlessly and in a wider range of warfighting scenarios.
The drill reflects a bigger effort by Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, which are trying to advance cooperation toward a more formalized stage that will be harder for future leaders to overturn.
In recent months, the three countries have not only expanded the frequency of their engagement but also taken steps to ensure that it lasts — an attempt to solidify a partnership that could reshape northeast Asian geopolitics.
The steps include establishing a regular pattern of joint military exercises, activating a channel for sharing real-time data on North Korean missile launches, and exploring the creation of a permanent office to boost coordination.
During meetings among senior officials, the countries have also increasingly emphasized shared values for the region, such as a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” in the hopes of providing a more durable foundation for cooperation.
The moves attempt to fulfill the vision laid out in August, when U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol held the first standalone summit among the leaders of the three countries.
South Korea key
A primary goal of the so-called Camp David summit was to create a framework for collaboration that could withstand domestic political fluctuations in each country.
A major concern was South Korea, where commitment to the trilateral partnership has often wavered. Those efforts appear to be yielding progress, according to a growing number of South Korea-based observers.
“Cooperation is now entering a level of institutionalization that will make it considerably more difficult for future administrations in Seoul to change,” said Jeffrey Robertson, a professor of diplomatic studies at Seoul’s Yonsei University.
The depth of trilateral ties has long hinged on whatever government is in power in South Korea.
The South Korean left opposes closer cooperation with Japan without more steps by Tokyo to atone for atrocities committed during its 1910-1945 colonization of Korea.
South Korea’s leaders also have been reluctant to sign up for any multilateral efforts that anger China, the military and economic giant that lies just beyond its border.
Changing views
South Korea’s outlook toward its neighbors, however, appears to be shifting.
Opinion polls suggest that South Korean perceptions of China have declined precipitously, as Beijing becomes more authoritarian at home and more assertive in expanding its regional influence.
Meanwhile, views on Japan appear to be improving, especially among young people.
South Korea’s national security establishment has also expressed growing fears about North Korea, which has rapidly expanded its nuclear arsenal and become much more hostile toward Seoul.
For Yoon, a conservative who took office in 2022, the solution was to align his country more closely with the United States. Yoon also mended ties with Japan, quickly accelerating trilateral cooperation.
Reasons for optimism
The big question is whether Yoon’s approach will outlast his presidency, given that his predecessor, the left-leaning Moon Jae-in, reversed many of the Japan-friendly policies of previous administrations.
Peter Lee, a research fellow at the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a conservative research group, says he is optimistic. Although he concedes that South Korean public attitudes toward Japan remain generally unfavorable, he points to opinion polls conducted by his organization suggesting consistently strong support for South Korean participation in U.S.-led multilateral initiatives.
“This suggests that future ROK presidents will struggle to withdraw or terminate their participation in these partnerships, at least for populist purposes,” Lee said.
Another potential deterrent is that each step toward formalizing trilateral engagement adds a layer of commitment, making it politically riskier for any future South Korean administration to reverse, many observers say.
Not so fast
Others think that Yoon’s policies are on much shakier ground.
Moon Chung-in, a senior foreign affairs adviser in multiple left-leaning governments, rejected the notion of a permanent change in South Koreans’ views toward their neighbors.
“Yoon and Biden do not see this. But Japanese political leaders are well aware of the volatility, and that’s why they are not making major concessions,” Moon said.
Seoul-Tokyo ties can “easily degenerate,” Moon maintained, unless Japan takes further steps to address unresolved historical disputes.
Many in South Korea also worry that enhanced trilateral cooperation could provoke a counter-reaction from U.S. foes in the region, ultimately leading to increased instability.
As evidence, they cite last month’s decision by North Korea and Russia to restore a Cold War-era mutual defense treaty — a move both sides described as necessary to counter U.S. moves in Asia.
If the regional security dilemma worsens, some fear that China could eventually respond by enhancing its own security cooperation with North Korea and Russia.
For many South Korean liberals, the best way to avoid such a scenario with China is to take a more cautious approach to Japan and the United States.
“China is near and powerful,” Moon said. “What other options do we have but to maintain good relations? This is common sense.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/after-boosting-ties-japan-s-korea-us-try-to-keep-them-going/7683682.html
Patelco banking services AWOL amid ransomware ruckus
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Late fees? Don’t worry, the credit union has you covered
San Francisco-based Patelco Credit Union confirms its service outage was the result of ransomware and has pulled systems offline.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/patelco_ransomware_outage/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
President Kamala Harris.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/president-kamala-harris
Bay Area heat wave, Northern California wildfires and power shutoffs continue as temperatures soar
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
An excessive heat warning for interior cities is in effect until Tuesday. A heat advisory was also announced for coastal cities surrounding San Francisco Bay.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Adam Mosseri on the first year of Threads.
https://www.platformer.news/threads-175-million-users-adam-mosseri-interview/
San Jose: East Bay men charged with months-long theft of Safeway gas
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
The defendants are accused of a scheme that charged thousands of gallons of diesel fuel to identity theft victims and sold it to a San Leandro trucking company.
All Booked | Lucky Streak
date: 2024-07-03, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Some amazing books I’ve been lucky enough to find lately.
The post All Booked | Lucky Streak appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/03/all-booked-lucky-streak/
LeBron James to re-sign with Lakers for reported 2-year, $104 million deal
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
The 39-year-old James will stay in L.A. for his 22nd NBA season with a deal that will include a player option for the 2025-26 season and a no-trade clause
Ban on schools’ gender notification policies heads to Gov. Newsom. Will he sign it?
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
The bill would stop California schools from notifying parents if a student starts using different pronouns or identifies as a gender other than what’s on school records.
Tractor Supply Company and America’s culture wars
date: 2024-07-03, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Tractor Supply Company — a farm, lawn and home improvement chain mainly in rural areas — recently announced it would abandon most of its diversity and climate advocacy goals. Now, the head of the National Black Farmers Association is calling for the resignation of Tractor Supply’s CEO. But first, we’ll unpack how markets are responding to “the Trump trade.” And later: job cuts at John Deere, the first Esports World Cup and traction for indie game studios.
Linux Mint 22 beta sprinkles Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Taste at your own risk
The Linux Mint project has released the beta version of version 22, codenamed “Wilma” and featuring the latest Cinnamon desktop.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/linux_mint_22_beta/
Map: Thompson Fire and evacuation zones at Lake Oroville
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
Almost 50 square miles on Lake Oroville’s west shore was under evacuation order for the Thompson Fire.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/03/map-thompson-fire-and-evacuation-zones-at-lake-oroville/
Dr. Love: a pocket-sized love tester arcade game
date: 2024-07-03, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Dr. Love is a credit card-sized version of those famously reliable love tester machines found in old-fashioned arcades.
The post Dr. Love: a pocket-sized love tester arcade game appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/dr-love-a-pocket-sized-love-tester-arcade-game/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-03, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Can not stop laughing at this
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112723016258727641
To save spotted owls, US officials plan mass killing of another owl species in West Coast forests
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
The plan calls for killing up to 470,000 barred owls over three decades after the birds from the eastern U.S. encroached into the territory of two West Coast owls: northern spotted owls and California spotted owls.
NASA Announces its Artemis II Backup Crew Member for Moon Mission
date: 2024-07-03, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has selected astronaut Andre Douglas as its backup crew member for the agency’s Artemis II test flight, the first crewed mission under NASA’s Artemis campaign. Douglas will train alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. In the event a NASA astronaut is unable […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-its-artemis-ii-backup-crew-member-for-moon-mission/
In stunning reversal, Gavin Newsom backs down on crime measure
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The LAist
The governor withdraws the proposed ballot measure that he and Democratic legislative leaders just announced. He says he ran out of time to add amendments to ensure its success.
https://laist.com/news/politics/in-stunning-reversal-gavin-newsom-backs-down-on-crime-measure
Frequently Asked Questions about using AI in Windows apps
date: 2024-07-03, from: Windows Developer Blog
The post Frequently Asked Questions about using AI in Windows apps appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/faq
California’s Death Valley may tie daily record of 129F on Sunday
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
The all-time high in Death Valley is 134F set on July 10, 1913.
Cook like a championship pitmaster with recipe for smoky chicken wings
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
Smoky Al Pastor Wings recipe has chicken marinate in a sweet and spicy pineapple adobo sauce, then it is smoked and tossed in a flavorful glaze.
NASA’s Planetary Radar Tracks Two Large Asteroid Close Approaches
date: 2024-07-03, from: NASA breaking news
The Deep Space Network’s Goldstone planetary radar had a busy few days observing asteroids 2024 MK and 2011 UL21 as they safely passed Earth. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently tracked two asteroids as they flew by our planet. One turned out to have a little moon orbiting it, while the […]
Gov. Newsom drops anti-crime measure days after announcing it
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
The governor withdraws the proposed ballot measure that he and Democratic legislative leaders just announced. He says he ran out of time to add amendments to ensure its success.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/03/gavin-newsom-backs-down-on-crime-measure/
Quick Cook: A fresh fig salad with cashew cream and arugula
date: 2024-07-03, from: San Jose Mercury News
This easy salad recipe takes advantage of summer’s lush produce.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/03/quick-cook-a-fresh-fig-salad-with-cashew-cream-and-arugula/
Kernel tweaks improve Raspberry Pi performance, efficiency
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There’s a lot of room for improvement in modern computing, from the low end to the very high
Two separate development efforts are improving both Raspberry Pi power management and memory efficiency – one using tools built for massive clusters.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/kernel_tweaks_rapsberry_pi/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-03, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Well this was a fabulous talk, and went into the subtle problems I had struggled with in the past (assume memory bound vs load) and I am now quite happy with my new gained understanding.
From: @steve
https://discuss.systems/@steve/112718139126665166
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112722835481968443
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
My blogroll feed list in OPML, suitable for import into most feed reading software.
https://feedland.com/opml?screenname=davewiner&catname=blogroll
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-07-03, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
They now sell Covid-like tests that can do a handful of Flu tests, all in one go.
Plot twist: only accredited doctor offices can buy it.
So a 10 dollar test becomes a 200 dollar test.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112722774871698226
VOA Exclusive: On board as US Coast Guard searches for migrants
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
Between the southernmost tip of the United States and Cuba lies a body of water called the Florida Straits. Coast Guard vehicles patrol these waters daily, looking for migrants illegally trying to enter the U.S. VOA earlier this year got an exclusive flight with the U.S. Coast Guard on patrol. VOA’s Senior Washington Correspondent Carolyn Presutti takes us along on the ride. (Camera and produced by: Mary Cieslak)
What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?
date: 2024-07-03, from: Quanta Magazine
If you cover a surface with tiles, repetitive patterns always emerge — or do they? In this week’s episode, mathematician Natalie Priebe Frank and co-host Janna Levin discuss how recent breakthroughs in tiling can unlock structural secrets in the natural world.The post What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-tiling-patterns-teach-us-20240703/
What to Make of Q2 EV Sales
date: 2024-07-03, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Hurricane Beryl could bring up to 9 feet of storm surge to Jamaica • Northeastern India, already flooded, is expecting more rain • Last month beat June 2023 as the hottest June ever recorded.
THE TOP FIVE
- Car companies see EV growth in Q2 sales reports
Many automakers are reporting Q2 U.S. sales and deliveries this week. Let’s take a look at how the EV numbers are shaping up:
General Motors
Deliveries: 21,930 EVs,
up
40% compared to Q2 last year, and up 34% compared to Q1. EV
registrations are up 17% YTD, “outpacing the industry average of 10%.”
Sales of its LYRIQ EV were up 26% on Q1.
Rivian
Deliveries: 13,790 EVs,
in
line with expectations. The company still expects to produce 57,000
vehicles this year.
Toyota (and Lexus)
Sales:
247,347 “electrified vehicles” (including hybrids). EV sales for the
entire first half of the year were up 68% and accounted for 38% of total
sales volume,
“an
all-time best-ever.”
Kia
Sales: 17,980
BEVs, up 131% year-over-year. In June, overall U.S. sales for the brand
were down 6.5% YOY, but EV sales specifically were up 125%,
according
to calculations from Inside EVs.
Hyundai
Sales: 38,657 fully-electric vehicles (plus 26 hydrogen fuel
cell SUVs, fwiw) in the U.S.,
up
15% compared to Q2 2023. IONIQ 5 sales were up 51%. KONA SUV sales
were up 26%. Hybrid sales are up 42% for the quarter.
Tesla, for its part, reported 443,956 global EV deliveries, “a smaller-than-expected 5% drop,” but the brand is still losing its dominance.
The sales figures, while encouraging, don’t necessarily suggest EV growth will accelerate, analysts told Reuters. “We’re expecting this period of time to have bumps along the way for the next few years as the transition goes from early adopters to mainstream buyers and we’re going to see this happen for a long time,” said Sam Fiorani, vice president at research firm AutoForecast Solutions. “Some quarters will be up, some quarters will be down, but all in all, it won’t be as strong a growth as we saw over the last few years.”
- Power outages plague California as temperatures soar
Some Californians are experiencing power outages as an intense heat wave sends temperatures spiking across the state. Yesterday more than 11,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers in the Bay Area were without electricity. Some of the outages this week will be planned power shutoffs intended to prevent fires, but wasn’t one of them. The heat wave is expected to break records and last into next week. “High temperatures are forecast to reach into the 105-115F range throughout interior California away from the immediate coastline, as well as into much of the Desert Southwest,” the National Weather Service said. July marks the start of the “peak period” for power emissions in the U.S., which lasts through September. Power emissions for the first half of 2024 are already up 5.2% compared to the same period last year as residents turn up their air conditioning to battle early-season heat waves.
- Biden announces $504 million for 12 tech hubs
The Biden administration yesterday announced a new funding round of $504 million in grants to 12 “tech hubs,” some of which are focused on scaling up clean tech:
- $21 million for Nevada’s Tech Hub, which is focusing on lithium batteries and electric vehicle materials.
- $45 million for South Carolina and Georgia’s Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy, which is focusing on the clean energy supply chain.
- $19 million for South Florida’s ClimateReady Tech Hub focused on sustainable and climate-resilient infrastructure.
- $51 million for Ohio’s Sustainable Polymers Tech Hub focused on sustainable production of rubbers and plastics.
- Google blames AI growth for emissions spike
Google’s greenhouse gas emissions climbed by 13% last year compared to the year before, and were up 48% from 2019, the company reported. The company blames artificial intelligence for rising power demand. Back in 2021, the tech giant pledged to be net zero by 2030. Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt now says that is an “extremely ambitious goal” that “is not going to be easy.” Microsoft’s emissions are also on the rise because of energy-intensive data centers, up 29% compared to 2020.
- Study finds alarming glacial loss in Alaskan icefield
Global warming is speeding up glacial ice loss in a major Alaskan icefield, and could push the field over a tipping point sooner than previously expected, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers found that the Juneau Icefield, which covers about 1,500 square miles, is melting twice as quickly as it was in 2010 and has lost a quarter of its ice volume since the 18th century. “The fate of Alaska’s ice matters tremendously for the world,” explained climate reporter Raymond Zhong at The New York Times. “In no other region of the planet are melting glaciers predicted to contribute more to global sea-level rise this century.” Current melting projections suggest ice loss for the Juneau Icefield will accelerate after 2070, but the researchers suggest this projection may be “too small and underestimate glacier melt in the future.”
THE KICKER
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, currently on the International Space Station, captured the awesome and terrifying size of Hurricane Beryl. The bottom picture peers into the storm’s eye.
Matthew Dominick/NASA
Matthew Dominick/NASA
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/ev-sales-q2-tesla-gm
Google: AI Potentially Breaking Reality Is a Feature Not a Bug
date: 2024-07-03, from: 404 Media Group
“While these uses of GenAI are often neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ content policies or terms of services, their potential for harm is significant.”
https://www.404media.co/google-ai-potentially-breaking-reality-is-a-feature-not-a-bug/
Supreme Court rules for Jan. 6 defendant who challenged obstruction charge
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
By Matthew Vadum Contributing Writer The Supreme Court ruled last week in favor of Jan. 6 defendant Joseph Fischer, a former police officer charged under an accounting reform law after he […]
The post Supreme Court rules for Jan. 6 defendant who challenged obstruction charge appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Podcast: Your Identity Hacked, Yet Verified
date: 2024-07-03, from: 404 Media Group
An ID verification service for TikTok, Uber, and X exposed drivers’ licenses; the FBI think it knows who is behind a Zoom Bombing ring; and Fiverr freelancing are offering to dox people for $30.
https://www.404media.co/podcast-your-drivers-license-exposed-404-media-podcast/
Ensemble Theatre Celebrates Santa Barbara at Fundraiser
date: 2024-07-03, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
DeVine Shares ETC’s Recent Marks of Success at Musical Tribute
The post Ensemble Theatre Celebrates Santa Barbara at Fundraiser appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/03/ensemble-theatre-celebrates-santa-barbara-at-fundraiser/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Olbermann calls on Biden to resign, making Harris the incumbent.
International students find community during Pride Month
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/international-students-find-community-during-pride-month/7683487.html
Vodafone, VMO2 shuffle spectrum to woo watchdog amid merger moves
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vodafone chasing Three, but BT’s complained borged entity would have ‘disproportionate’ capacity
UK telcos Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) have struck a new network sharing agreement with a provision that seems aimed at smoothing the path for Vodafone’s planned merger with Three.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/vodafone_vmo2_network_sharing/
Fourth of July Holidays in Space
date: 2024-07-03, from: NASA breaking news
It may seem remarkable that no American spent the Fourth of July holiday in space for the first 21 years of human spaceflight. Not until 1982 and the 35th U.S. human spaceflight did Americans awaken in space on Independence Day, and then bring their spacecraft back to Earth later in the day to a rousing […]
https://www.nasa.gov/history/fourth-of-july-holidays-in-space-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Backing Biden, Pelosi Calls Questions About Debate Performance ‘Legitimate.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/us/politics/biden-debate-pelosi.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Biden Plunges in Swing States in Leaked Post-Debate Poll.
https://puck.news/biden-plunges-in-swing-states-in-leaked-post-debate-poll/
Homeland Security: Chinese migrants deported on charter flight
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/homeland-security-chinese-migrants-deported-on-charter-flight/7683475.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How To Save The News.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/07/02/how-to-save-the-news/
An AI boom means surging emissions
date: 2024-07-03, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Artificial intelligence requires an enormous amount of electricity. Google, with AI now added, says it increased its carbon emissions last year, despite a pledge to reach net-zero by 2030. So what are Google and other companies doing to address efficiency issues? We’ll discuss. Then, tomorrow is the United Kingdom’s general election, and the harsh realities of economic stagnation are on the minds of many voters there.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/an-ai-boom-means-surging-emissions
Japan’s digital minister declares victory against floppy disks
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The war on the relic is finally won. Now on to fax machines?
Japan’s digital minister, Taro Kono, confirmed that the Japanese government has finally rid itself of floppy disks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/japan_floppy_disk_victory/
Here Are Your Holiday Week Reads
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Lever News
A roundup of The Lever’s best recent longreads.
https://www.levernews.com/here-are-your-beach-reads/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. On Netflix, highly recommended, esp the episode on end of the USSR and East Germany. If you think what we need is a dictator, see what it's like when it's over.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/turning-point-bomb-cold-war-release-date-trailer-news
It’s the last day of campaigning in the U.K. election
date: 2024-07-03, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The United Kingdom goes to the polls in the general election tomorrow — and polling suggests the economy is the No. 1 issue with voters. We hear the key economic anxieties voters are voicing. Then, the Esports World Cup kicks off today in Saudi Arabia, and there are calls in China for greater restrictions on the sale of hyper-realistic silicone face masks.
Gary Horton | COC Sabotaging Board Threatens SCV Well-Being
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
College of the Canyons is one of the prime jewels of the Santa Clarita Valley. Lead by Dianne Van Hook for 36 years, COC today reigns as an esteemed dynamo […]
The post Gary Horton | COC Sabotaging Board Threatens SCV Well-Being appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/gary-horton-coc-sabotaging-board-threatens-scv-well-being/
Phyllis Walker | Honoring the History of Our Flag
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
The history of the U.S. flag as shared by Santa Clarita Elks Lodge 2379 officers at their annual Flag Day Ceremony on June 14 is very timely with Independence Day […]
The post Phyllis Walker | Honoring the History of Our Flag appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/phyllis-walker-honoring-the-history-of-our-flag/
Michael Reagan | Democrats Hung Biden Out to Dry
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
Going into Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on CNN, the big question was whether Biden could last 90 minutes. We found out he couldn’t last 90 seconds. It was […]
The post Michael Reagan | Democrats Hung Biden Out to Dry appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/michael-reagan-democrats-hung-biden-out-to-dry/
FERC Is Already Split Over the End of Chevron
date: 2024-07-03, from: Heatmap News
As decades of administrative law were being rendered irrelevant last week by a landmark Supreme Court decision denying regulators deference in their interpretations of ambiguous legal statues, one such regulator, Mark Christie, already had some ideas about what do with this new development.
Christie, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s sole Republican member, had taken issue with FERC Order No. 1920, which was unveiled in May and established a new set of rules requiring transmission planners to be more proactive in assessing their future needs and how to pay for them. The order was decided in a 2-1 vote along partisan lines and was largely hailed by environmental and climate groups, who saw it as a way to encourage building out the transmission necessary to bring more wind and solar onto the grid.
To some conservatives, however, the order would remove states from their rightful role in the transmission planning process and stick ratepayers with the cost of infrastructure they never asked for. The rule is already being challenged by state utility commissions, Republican state attorneys general, and the country’s largest regional transmission organization in a FERC process known as request for rehearing. Lawsuits will almost certainly follow.
Those lawsuits will play out on the new terrain laid out by Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court decision rendered last week, which overturned a decades-old legal principle known as Chevron deference. Named for the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which established the notion that courts should defer to agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous statutory language to justify their rulemaking activity, Chevron deference formed the legal foundation for much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus.
In Christie’s lengthy and impassioned dissent to the order, however, he signaled that he thought that foundation might be crumbling.
“The final rule does not deserve a shred of deference under Chevron,” Christie wrote. Unlike past transmission planning rules that had survived legal challenge, this new order was “pretextual” and “heavy handed.” An earlier transmission case case that reached the Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals in 2014, South Carolina Public Service Authority v. FERC, upholding FERC’s ability to mandate transmission planning was, Christie wrote, decided in favor of FERC because it “upheld precisely because it was only mandating processes, not outcomes,” whereas the new rule “nakedly intends to produce very specific outcomes.” Christie was basically painting a red flag on the order for the bull of the judicial process to run through.
Once Chevron deference was no longer in force, Christie issued an update to that dissent, writing in a statement on Friday that the “most important legal lifeline that Order No. 1920 needed was pulled away today, and the final rule’s chances of surviving court challenges just shrank to slim to none.” He referred to outstanding petitions for rehearing the order as “devastating takedowns.” Without Chevron to lean on, he prognosticated, “the Commission can wait for a court to strike down” 1920, or it can answer “those many petitions asking for rehearing or amendments with a new opportunity for amendments.”
In other words, the order should not have had Chevron’s protection, but now that it doesn’t, it’s toast.
On Monday, the Commission’s Democratic Chairman Willie Phillips released a statement (because there was nothing else going on in the legal world that day) arguing that the Commission’s ability to regulate both planning and the distribution of costs “has long been recognized by bipartisan majorities of the Commission and U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,” adding that “nothing in the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision overturning the Chevron doctrine calls that conclusion into question.”
He also gave a preview of how the Commission will likely defend the rule in federal court. Order No. 1920 “fits easily within the South Carolina precedent,” he wrote. “It does not promote particular public policies, does not dictate specific outcomes, does not include any selection mandate whatsoever, and employs only the lightest touch possible on cost allocation by simply restating the well-established cost causation principle.”
In conclusion, according to Phillips, Christie’s statement “does not provide a logical or reasonable basis for calling into question whether we have that authority in the first place.”
“It’s not every day that two FERC commissioners just decide to release their thoughts on the latest Supreme Court case,” Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, told me.
FERC’s likely argument rests on two legal pillars. The first is that FERC gets its authority from the Federal Power Act, which calls for utility rates to be “just and reasonable” and not “unduly discriminatory or preferential.” FERC has argued that this gives it power over practices that directly affect rates, including transmission planning, which the D.C. Circuit affirmed in South Carolina.
In a
separate
2016 case, the Supreme Court ruled that FERC could make rules on
practices that directly affect wholesale electricity rates but not
retail sales. This case did not depend on Chevron, with Justice
Elena Kagan writing in her opinion that the justices “think FERC’s
authority clear.” The combined D.C. and Supreme Court precedent, Peskoe
said, adds up to FERC having “authority when something directly affects
rates.”
But in this new legal environment, these precedents may not be enough
for a fresh case against FERC’s transmission planning authority.
“What does happen now? Who knows,” University of Richmond law professor
Joel Eisen told me. “What you would expect now is for litigants to say
that any major FERC order, including this one, is inconsistent with the
statutory authority that the agency has. They would cite Loper
Bright to say that the court has to make an independent
judgment that FERC has interpreted law to grant authority to do sweeping
change to transmission planning, and that is simply no longer the case,”
Eisen said.
Much of FERC’s more than 1,300-page order is devoted to detailed analysis of the electricity market as it stands now and how it will evolve over time, justifying the new transmission planning rules. It’s this record, Eisen said, that might let the order survive in a post-Chevron world, even when FERC asserting that the Federal Power Act gives it the right to set rules may be insufficient on its own.
“That may not have been done as an explicit nod to whether a court might uphold it under Chevron going forward. “It seems to me at least that in this new landscape, what will matter is the robustness of the agency grounded in its expertise,” Eisen told me. “The voluminous record supporting 1920 may be persuasive to a federal court.”
But, as Eisen and Peskoe both warned, which federal court may be as important — if not more so — than any argument FERC makes.
Will FERC’s arguments about the nature of the electricity market and precedents relating to interpretation of the Federal Power Act fly in, say, a Texas federal court in the Fifth Circuit, where state utility commissions or Republican attorneys general may file suit? District and appeals court judges in the Fifth Circuit have shown great eagerness to throw out Biden-era rules, with a federal judge in Louisiana only this week blocking the Biden administration’s pause on approving new natural gas export terminals.
“If it goes to the Fifth Circuit,” Peskoe said, “that will be bad news.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/ferc-transmission-chevron
BT bets big on AI with ServiceNow to cut legacy baggage
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Promises no pink slips despite service desk in crosshairs
BT Group expects to cut its use of third-party support staff in service desk roles after it has introduced GenAI technology from ServiceNow.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/bt_servicenow_savings/
RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tributes paid to passionate LGBTQ+ equality champion
Obit Tech entrepreneur Bruce Wayne Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect, died last month at the age of 76 at his home in Palmdale, California.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/wordperfect_bruce_bastian/
How Europe and America Are Weatherproofing Climate Policy
date: 2024-07-03, from: Heatmap News
Jesse is on vacation until August, so this is a special, Rob-only summer episode of Shift Key.
The far right is rising across Europe. The global order seems to be deteriorating. And American politics is careening toward a crisis. Where does climate policy go from here?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob chats with two leaders at Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates-funded climate venture capital and advocacy group. They are Ann Mettler, a former EU official who is now Breakthrough’s vice president for Europe, and Aliya Haq, its vice president for U.S. policy and advocacy. We talk about why Europe was surprised by the Inflation Reduction Act, where American policy goes from here, and how to prepare climate policy for an era of rising geopolitical tensions and security concerns.
This episode of Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Can you give me a compare-contrast on how European policymakers used to think about climate change versus how they’re thinking about it now?
Ann Mettler: Well, as I said, they used to approach them primarily through, we will decarbonize our economy and then, you know, we’ve done our job. But again, going back to the 8% of global CO2 emissions, it’s a drop in the bucket. So, I mean, we really needed to have the focus on global emissions and how we can help address these.
But coming back to your original question, Europe has had two really major shocks. One is obviously 2022, the war in Ukraine breaks out. We have the most serious energy crisis, acute security crisis, we’ve frankly ever had, since the Second World War. And so energy resilience and security are now very important issues.
Then the second big shock — of course on a different magnitude — was really the Americans getting into the climate game. The IRA was sort of a thunderclap on this side of the Atlantic. I honestly cannot say how … it was a moment of humility that within one legislative mandate, the U.S. could really put itself out there and become something that … I think it’s a very serious competitor in this space.
Of course, I personally think that we shouldn’t think in terms of competition because the fact is that both Europe and the United States are behind. So I think if we had a more joined up approach, it would create bottomless opportunity to accelerate the energy transition on both sides of the Atlantic.
Meyer: It is funny because I do feel like, to some degree, Europe was a little — it was surprising to me how much Europe was taken by surprise by the IRA. When the IRA passed, I remember reading the European press, and then a lot of the initial coverage was around business tax rates and stuff, just relatively fiddly aspects of the law that we don’t talk about anymore. And then it felt like it took a few months — it was until November that I remember Macron talking about it during a visit to the U.S. — that it felt like the continent even began to realize the scale of what the U.S. was trying to do with the law.
Aliya Haq: I’ll say as a, you know, aging, grizzled climate activist, that after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, we’re so used to being behind Europe and … you know, decades and decades of trying and never getting further, and then having a law passed that we could then say with a straight face, we’ve taken the largest climate action in global history, that really did feel good.
But I was glad that, you know, that initial reaction, this kind of race to the bottom — like, how dare you, this isn’t good for global competitiveness — and eventually the Europeans kind of coming around realizing, well, wait, we’ve wanted the U.S. to take action for a while, maybe this is a good thing, was funny.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-22-breakthrough-energy
Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chill out, no fridge required
The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been investigating exotic materials in pursuit of solid-state cooling devices without needing refrigerants or moving parts.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/ornl_solid_state_cooling/
The Savvy Senior | Do You Need a Digital Will?
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, My wife and I had our estate plan – including a will, power of attorney and advance directive – drawn up about 10 years ago but […]
The post The Savvy Senior | Do You Need a Digital Will? appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/the-savvy-senior-do-you-need-a-digital-will/
A vote of thanks to our Trustees
date: 2024-07-03, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
Tuesday 11 June 2024 will be remembered as one of the most important days in the history of Raspberry Pi. The successful introduction of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s commercial subsidiary on the London Stock Exchange is a genuinely remarkable achievement. I want to put on record my huge congratulations and thanks to Eben Upton, Martin…
The post A vote of thanks to our Trustees appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-vote-of-thanks-to-our-trustees/
R9OS: Plan 9 in Rust
date: 2024-07-03, from: OS News
R9 is a work-in-progress effort to build a Plan 9 kernel to Rust. It was started a couple years back by the maintainers of the Harvey OS distribution of Plan 9, who threw in the towel after “loss of traction”. R9 is a reimplementation of the plan9 kernel in Rust. It is not only inspired by but in many ways derived from the original Plan 9 source code. ↫ R9OS GitHub page For now, the project is obviously mostly focused on running in virtual machines, specifically Qemu, in which it can be run using a variety of architectures: aarch64, x86-64 (with or without kvm), and RISC-V.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140049/r9os-plan-9-in-rust/
Reasons to use your shell’s job control
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: Julia Evans
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/03/reasons-to-use-job-control/
Figma pulls AI design tool for seemingly plagiarizing Apple’s Weather app
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI is ‘like the fast food of creativity’
Web and app design toolmaker Figma has temporarily pulled its generative AI “Make Design” feature because it seems to think Apple’s Weather app is the be-all and end-all of mobile forecasting.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/figma_plagiarizes_apple/
Today in SCV History (July 3)
date: 2024-07-03, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1925 – By letter, Wyatt Earp beseeches his friend William S. Hart to portray him in a movie, to correct the “lies about me.” Hart never did. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-3/
What was the ‘first American novel’? On this Independence Day, a look at what it started
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — In the winter of 1789, around the time George Washington was elected the country’s first president, a Boston-based printer quietly launched another American institution.
William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, published anonymously by Isaiah Thomas & Company, is widely cited as something momentous: the first American novel.
Around 100 pages long, Brown’s narrative tells of two young New Englanders whose love affair abruptly and tragically ends when they learn a shocking secret that makes their relationship unbearable. The dedication page, addressed to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia” (the United States), promised an exposé of “the Fatal consequences of Seduction” and a prescription for the “Economy of Human Life.”
Outside of Boston society, though, few would have known or cared whether The Power of Sympathy marked any kind of literary milestone.
“If you picked 10 random citizens, I doubt it would have mattered to any of them,” says David Lawrimore, an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho who has written often about early U.S. literature. “Most people weren’t thinking about the first American novel.”
What the first American novel was like
Subtitled The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth, Brown’s book is in many ways characteristic of the era, whether its epistolary format, its Anglicized prose, its unidentified author, or its pious message. But The Power of Sympathy also includes themes that reflected the aspirations and anxieties of a young country and still resonate now.
Dana McClain, an assistant professor of English at Holy Family University, notes that Brown was an outspoken Federalist, believing in a strong national government, and shared his contemporaries’ preoccupation with forging how a stable republican citizenry. The letters in The Power of Sympathy include reflections on class, temperament and the differences between North and South, notably the “aristocratic temper” of Southern slaveholders that endangered “domestic quietude,” as if anticipating the next century’s Civil War.
Like many other early American writers, fiction and nonfiction, Brown tied the behavior of women to the fate of the larger society. The novel’s correspondents fret about the destabilizing “power of pleasure” and how female envy “inundates the land with a flood of scandal.” Virtue is likened to a “mighty river” that “fertilizes the country through which it passes and increases in magnitude and force until it empty itself into the ocean.”
Brown also examines at length the ways novels might be a path to corruption or a vehicle to uplift, mirroring current debates over the banning and restrictions of books in schools and libraries.
“Most of the novels with which our female libraries are overrun are built upon on a foundation not always placed on strict morality, and in the pursuit of of objects not always probable or praiseworthy,” one of Brown’s characters warns. “Novels, not regulated on the chaste principles of true friendship, rational love, and connubial duty, appear to me totally unfit to form the minds of women, of friends, or of wives.”
Brown was likely more interested in shaping minds than in literary glory.
“The Great American Novel” is a favorite catchphrase but wasn’t coined until the 1860s. During Brown’s lifetime, novels were a relatively crude art form and were valued mostly for satire, light entertainment or moral instruction. Few writers identified themselves as “novelists”: Brown was known as a poet, and essayist and the composer of an opera.
Even he recognized the book’s lower stature, writing in the novel’s preface: “This species of writing hath not been received with universal approbation.”
How it became considered the first
The Power of Sympathy was commonly cited as the first American novel in the 1800s, but few bothered debating it until the 20th century. Scholars then agreed that honors should belong to the first written and published in the United States by an author born and still residing in the country.
Those guidelines disqualified such earlier works as Charlotte Ramsay Lennox’s The Life of Harriot Stuart and Thomas Atwood Digges’ Adventures of Alonso.
Another contender was Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca, a prose adventure by college students Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, both of whom went on to prominent public careers. Written around 1770, the manuscript was later believed lost and wasn’t published in full until 1975.
Brown’s novel was unexamined for so long that only in the late 19th century did the public even discover he had written it. Many had credited the Boston poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, whose family had endured a scandal similar to the one in The Power of Sympathy.
In 1894-95, editor Arthur W. Brayley of the Bostonian serialized the novel in his magazine, identifying Morton as the author. But after being contacted by Brown’s niece, Rebecca Vollentine Thompson, Brayley published a lengthy correction, titled “The Real Author of the Power of Sympathy.”
Thompson herself added a preface to a 1900 reissue, noting that Brown was close to Morton’s family and alleging that the publication had been “suppressed” because Brown had bared an “unfortunate scandal.”
A clockmaker’s son, Brown was a Boston native, likely born in 1765. He was well-read, connected, culturally conservative and politically minded; one of his first published writings was an unflattering poem about Daniel Shays, the namesake for the 1786-87 rebellion of impoverished Revolutionary War veterans in Massachusetts. Brown is also the author of several posthumous releases, including the play The Treason of Arnold and the novel Ira and Isabella.
His unofficial standing as “America’s First Novelist” did not lead to broader fame. The novel, currently in print through a 1996 edition from Penguin Classics, remains more of interest to specialists and antiquarians than to general readers.
Brown was not yet 30 when he died in North Carolina, in 1793, from what is believed to be malaria. He apparently never married or had children. No memorials or other historical sites are dedicated to him. No literary societies have been formed in his name.
His burial site is unknown.
Let the Sun Shine In
date: 2024-07-03, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Quick updates to brighten your home on a budget.
The post Let the Sun Shine In appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/03/let-the-sun-shine-in/
Tech luminaries warn United Nations its Digital Compact risks doing more harm than good
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and more from orgs like IETF, W3C, IANA worry if techies are ignored the web could end up centralized
Thirty-nine senior figures who have made significant contributions to the online world have written to the United Nations, urging it to reconsider some elements of its Global Digital Compact – an effort to “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all.”…
Two horses struck and killed on I-5
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
Two horses were stuck and killed in a vehicular collision on westbound Interstate 210 approaching Interstate 5 on Tuesday night, according to the California Highway Patrol. “We got the call […]
The post Two horses struck and killed on I-5 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/two-horses-struck-and-killed-on-i-5/
Uncle Sam using manual processes to oversee restrictions on Huawei, other Chinese tech companies
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Outdated tech at Bureau of Industry and Security leaves licensing open to human error
The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) – the agency Washington relies on to implement export licensing controls to ensure sanctioned technology doesn’t reach certain nations – revealed on Tuesday it’s struggling to handle a massively increased workload caused by the ever-growing number of Chinese companies added to the US Entity List, thanks to geriatric technology and systems.…
VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through ‘devirtualization’, says Gartner
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hype Cycle for datacenter techs also includes augmented reality, new types of memory, nuke power
Analyst firm Gartner has published its 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, and added virtual-to-physical migrations – aka “devirtualization” – to its list of ideas that are set to take off, thanks to Broadcom’s licensing changes.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/gartner_datacenter_hype_cycle_2024/
Santa Barbara’s Beloved Bartenders
date: 2024-07-03, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Meet the friendly folks who’ve been pouring your cocktails for decades.
The post Santa Barbara’s Beloved Bartenders appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/santa-barbaras-beloved-bartenders/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
MTV News Website Saved by Internet Archive After Being Pulled.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mtv-news-saved-internet-archive-1235051776/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution."
Robert Towne, Oscar-winning writer of ‘Chinatown,’ dies at 89
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other acclaimed films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne died Monday surrounded by family at his home in Los Angeles, said publicist Carri McClure. She declined to comment on a cause of death.
In an industry that gave birth to rueful jokes about the writer’s status, Towne for a time held prestige comparable to the actors and directors he worked with.
Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the signature films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control.
The rare “auteur” among screen writers, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles onto the screen.
“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”
Recognizable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three other times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” said “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne’s success came after a long stretch of working in television, including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and on low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. As Beatty worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set while the movie was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions were uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favorite ghost writer. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” among others and referred to himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.”
But Towne was credited by name for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private detective asked to follow the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir but cast Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey across a grander and more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate into a timeless detective tale and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in movie history, words of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/robert-towne-oscar-winning-writer-of-chinatown-dies-at-89/7683228.html
Microsoft Stores all close their doors in China
date: 2024-07-03, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Slump in Surface sales suspected as one reason for move online
Microsoft has closed its physical shops in mainland China, leaving sale of its products to partners and online sellers, including its own website.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/03/microsoft_china_stores_close/
Biden meeting with Democratic governors to allay fears about mental fitness for campaign, 2nd term
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/democrats-publicly-voicing-worries-about-biden-campaign/7683222.html
Biden announces measures to protect against extreme weather
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
As the Caribbean sees its first Category 5 hurricane of the year, scientists warn that extreme weather is here to stay due to climate change. Aru Pande reports from Washington, where U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced new climate resilience measures. Kim Lewis contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-announces-measures-to-protect-against-extreme-weather/7683204.html
Golden Valley baseball hires new head coach
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
Golden Valley High School announced Marc Kennedy as its new baseball coach on Monday. Kennedy gets the bump up to head coach for the 2025 season after three seasons as […]
The post Golden Valley baseball hires new head coach appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/golden-valley-baseball-hires-new-head-coach/
Man arrested on suspicion of trespassing, battery on a peace officer
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
A 43-year-old transient man was arrested on Monday on suspicion of refusing to comply and battery on a peace officer after reportedly refusing to leave a business, according to Santa […]
The post Man arrested on suspicion of trespassing, battery on a peace officer appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/man-arrested-on-suspicion-of-trespassing-battery-on-a-peace-officer/
Saugus softball coach let go after summer camp
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
Just a day after the team’s summer camp and months after another successful season, Saugus softball head coach Amanda Clark was let go by the administration. Clark, a math teacher, […]
The post Saugus softball coach let go after summer camp appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/saugus-softball-coach-let-go-after-summer-camp/
Mother of slain deputy succumbs to lymphoma
date: 2024-07-03, from: The Signal
John March described a peaceful Monday in Lake Arrowhead for Memorial Day Weekend. He and his wife, Barbara March, shared some wine and pizza and relaxed with their adult children […]
The post Mother of slain deputy succumbs to lymphoma appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/mother-of-slain-deputy-succumbs-to-lymphoma/
How US Supreme Court’s immunity decision could impact presidential race
date: 2024-07-03, from: VOA News USA
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks out against Monday’s Supreme Court decision giving former presidents immunity from prosecution for actions falling within their official job duties. The ruling doesn’t dismiss former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case, but does delay it. Dora Mekouar reports.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-03, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Manton took a look at Blue Sky "Starter Packs" which he says is very much like a blogroll.
https://www.manton.org/2024/07/02/finally-experimenting-with.html
Stay Cool, Safe During the Fourth of July Holiday
date: 2024-07-03, from: SCV New (TV Station)
With an excessive heat warning in effect this week, the city of Santa Clarita strongly urges residents to prioritize heat safety and preparedness during the Fourth of July Parade and the holiday weekend
https://scvnews.com/stay-cool-safe-during-the-fourth-of-july-holiday/
PgBouncer 1.23.0 released
date: 2024-07-03, from: PostgreSQL News
PgBouncer 1.23.0 has been released. This release contains a number of new features along with a variety of improvements and bug fixes. Highlights are: User name maps can now be used in authentication configuration. In multi-process PgBouncer setups, it is now possible to do rolling restarts. Replication connections can go through PgBouncer.
See https://www.pgbouncer.org/2024/07/pgbouncer-1-23-0 for more information, the detailed changelog, and download links.
PgBouncer is a lightweight connection pooler for PostgreSQL.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgbouncer-1230-released-2889/
Port of Hueneme Cares About Air Data Just a Click Away
date: 2024-07-02, from: Port Hueneme
Port makes significant investments in air quality monitoring equipment and web-based data-sharing Download Press Release Contact: Letitia Austin Public and Gov’t Relations Manager Laustin@Portofh.org [Port Hueneme, CA – June…
The post Port of Hueneme Cares About Air Data Just a Click Away appeared first on The Port of Hueneme.
https://www.portofhueneme.org/air-quality-data-available-to-the-public-in-oxnard-and-port-hueneme/
The history of Alt+number sequences, and why Alt+9731 sometimes gives you a heart and sometimes a snowman
date: 2024-07-02, from: OS News
Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released. In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren’t present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. ↫ Raymond Chen Another Raymond Chen story, and this one involves hearts, snowmen, different editing controls, codepages, and more. In other words, just another Tuesday for Chen.
So much for green Google … Emissions up 48% since 2019
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI datacenters blamed for the increase, even as Chocolate Factory bets on AI to fix it
With six years left for Google to meet its 2030 “net zero” climate commitment, the web giant has admitted its carbon emissions are rising.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/google_datacenter_emissions/
Stay Cool and Safe During the Fourth of July Holiday
date: 2024-07-02, from: City of Santa Clarita
With an excessive heat warning in effect this week, the City of Santa Clarita strongly urges residents to prioritize heat safety and preparedness during the Fourth of July Parade and the holiday weekend. Residents planning to attend the parade are encouraged to stay hydrated by bringing extra water. Wear lightweight, light-colored and loose-fitting clothing, and […]
The post Stay Cool and Safe During the Fourth of July Holiday appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
https://santaclarita.gov/blog/2024/07/02/stay-cool-and-safe-during-the-fourth-of-july-holiday/
In 2nd quarter, Trump raises $331M, Biden raises $264M for campaigns
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
Dangerously high heat builds in California, south central US
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
sacramento, california — Swaths of California sweltered Tuesday and things were only expected to get worse during the Fourth of July holiday week for parts of the United States with nearly 90 million people under heat alerts.
The torrid conditions were being caused by a ridge of high pressure just off the West Coast and a separate ridge that spawned heat warnings and advisories from Kansas and Missouri to the Gulf Coast states, according to the National Weather Service.
California’s capital, Sacramento, was under an excessive heat warning expected to last until Sunday night, with temperatures forecasted to reach between 40.5-46 Celsius (105-115 Farenheit).
John Mendoza, 35, called it a “firehose of heat” as he walked around the Capitol on Tuesday morning with an iced coffee in his hand. By 9 a.m., he had already been in a pool once — and planned to go back later in the day.
“I felt like I needed to be submerged in water,” he said.
Darlene Crumedy of Fairfield, about an hour’s drive from Sacramento, said she doesn’t use air conditioning because it’s too expensive.
“I’m good, I have a hundred fans,” she said, adding she tries to stay inside and drink cold water.
An analysis by The Associated Press found that heat killed more than 2,300 people in the U.S. last year, setting a record. That figure is likely a major undercount, dozens of experts told AP reporters.
Dr. Arthur Jey, an emergency services physician with Sutter Health in Sacramento, told reporters that getting out of the heat is important, along with wearing a hat and loose clothes, hydration and watching out for signs of heat stroke.
“With heat stroke, it looks like a stroke,” Jey said, describing symptoms that may include acting unusual, significant headaches, blurry vision, profuse sweating and then no sweating.
“And that’s a really big deal,” Jey said. “So we want to prevent them getting even close to heat stroke.”
California’s heat was expected to spread from north to south over the week, with the worst of it focused on interior areas including the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and the southern deserts. But warnings extended out to just short of the coast.
The heat arrived with gusty, dry winds in the northern part of the state, where the utility Pacific Gas & Electric implemented public safety power shutoffs in parts of 10 counties to prevent wildfires from being ignited by downed or damaged electrical wires.
PG&E said about 12,000 customers were told their power could be cut and given information about centers where they could obtain ice, water, snacks, Wi-Fi and other necessities.
California has had a spate of spring and early summer wildfires feeding on abundant grasses spawned by back-to-back wet winters. The largest current blaze, dubbed the Basin Fire, was 17% contained Tuesday after charring more than 54 square kilometers of the Sierra National Forest in eastern Fresno County.
https://www.voanews.com/a/dangerously-high-heat-builds-in-california-south-central-us-/7682855.html
Begin Again
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Our new “Mom Brain” parenting columnist Shannon Kelley takes a humbling turn around the potter’s wheel.
The post Begin Again appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/begin-again/
LISTEN: The End of Libraries as We Know Them?
date: 2024-07-02, from: Internet Archive Blog
The publishers’ lawsuit against our library is featured in the latest episode of “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.” Listen in as Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian, […]
https://blog.archive.org/2024/07/02/listen-the-end-of-libraries-as-we-know-them/
Caring Together Santa Barbara County Hosts Free Caregiver Resource Event in South County
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Caring Together Santa Barbara County, in collaboration with the Friendship Center and other esteemed community partners, invites caregivers supporting older
The post Caring Together Santa Barbara County Hosts Free Caregiver Resource Event in South County appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
War on Texas law requiring ID to savor smut online heads to Supreme Court
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Talk about painfully invasive processes
A Texas law requiring adults to show their ID to access online pornography will be heard by the US Supreme Court, setting up a potential domino effect that could undo - or reinforce - similar laws in 18 other states.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/texas_adult_content_id_law/
Celebrate the Fourth of July Responsibly
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, CA – July 2, 2024 The Santa Barbara Police Department reminds drivers to be the real heroes of
The post Celebrate the Fourth of July Responsibly appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/celebrate-the-fourth-of-july-responsibly/
Wilk’s Bill to Make Wildfire Settlements Tax-free Clears First Assembly Committee
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
California State Sen. Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) hs announced his bill to make wildfire settlement payments tax-free cleared its first hurdle in the Assembly, passing out of the Committee on Revenue and Taxation
Judge rules to protects migrant shelter on US-Mexico border, accuses Texas of harassment
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
McAllen, Texas — A judge blasted efforts by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to shutter one of the oldest and largest migrant shelters on the U.S.-Mexico border in a scathing ruling Tuesday, accusing the Republican of “outrageous” conduct over his claims that the shelter encourages migrants to enter the country illegally.
Judge Francisco X. Dominguez ruled that Paxton’s attempts to enforce a subpoena for records of migrants who have been served at Annunciation House in the past few years violated the El Paso shelter’s constitutional rights. The judge’s ruling prevents Paxton from seeking the records and protects the shelter from what Dominguez called “harassment and overreaching” by Paxton’s office.
Paxton’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but the state is expected to appeal.
Annunciation House is one of several nonprofit groups that help migrants from which Paxton’s office has sought information in recent months. Team Brownsville, which assists migrants who are dropped off by federal agents in the border city of Brownsville, received a letter demanding documents in May. Paxton is also suing Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley seeking testimony.
Dominguez wrote that he previously expressed concern that Paxton’s office had not identified which laws Annunciation House was allegedly breaking.
“The record before this Court makes clear that the Texas Attorney General’s use of the request to examine documents from Annunciation House was a pretext to justify its harassment of Annunciation House employees and the persons seeking refuge,” he wrote.
“In fact, the record before the Court now establishes that the Attorney General was seeking evidence of alleged criminal activity all along,” Dominguez continued. “This is outrageous and intolerable.”
Paxton alleged that by providing shelter to migrants regardless of their legal status, Annunciation House was facilitating illegal immigration and human smuggling, and operating a stash house.
State officials visited the El Paso shelter in early February demanding immediate access to records — including medical and immigration documents — of migrants who had received services there since 2022. Officials from Annunciation House, a Catholic nonprofit that oversees a network of shelters, said they were willing to comply but needed time to determine what they could legally share without violating their clients’ constitutional rights.
Investigators who sought to access records the day after requesting entry were not allowed inside the shelter. Jerry Wesevich, the attorney representing Annunciation House, said that corporations under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
Wesevich expressed relief after the ruling and said it could affect other organizations. He also questioned why Paxton wanted to close the shelter.
“All that’s going to mean is more people in El Paso streets. Who does that help? All it does is provide a narrative of chaos on the border, which is a narrative that some people politically want to promote,” Wesevich said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7682819.html
MADD Awards Presented to Pair of SCV Sheriff’s Station Deputies
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) recently presented deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department with the highly esteemed MADD Award. This award recognizes their unwavering commitment to road safety and dedication to preventing the devastating consequences of drunk driving
https://scvnews.com/madd-awards-presented-to-pair-of-scv-sheriffs-station-deputies/
FDA approves 2nd Alzheimer’s drug that modestly slows disease
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials have approved another Alzheimer’s drug that can modestly slow the disease, providing a new option for patients in the early stages of the incurable, memory-destroying ailment.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Eli Lilly’s Kisunla on Tuesday for mild or early cases of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. It’s only the second drug that’s been convincingly shown to delay cognitive decline in patients, following last year’s approval of a similar drug from Japanese drugmaker Eisai.
The delay seen with both drugs amounts to a matter of months — about seven months, in the case of Lilly’s drug. Patients and their families will have to weigh that benefit against the downsides, including regular IV infusions and potentially dangerous side effects like brain swelling.
Physicians who treat Alzheimer’s say the approval is an important step after decades of failed experimental treatments.
“I’m thrilled to have different options to help my patients,” said Dr. Suzanne Schindler, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s been difficult as a dementia specialist — I diagnose my patients with Alzheimer’s and then every year I see them get worse and they progress until they die.”
Both Kisunla and the Japanese drug, Leqembi, are laboratory-made antibodies, administered by IV, that target one contributor to Alzheimer’s: sticky amyloid plaque buildup in the brain. Questions remain about which patients should get the drugs and how long they might benefit.
The new drug’s approval was expected after an outside panel of FDA advisers unanimously voted in favor of its benefits at a public meeting last month. That endorsement came despite several questions from FDA reviewers about how Lilly studied the drug, including allowing patients to discontinue treatment after their plaque reached very low levels.
Costs will vary by patient, based on how long they take the drug, Lilly said. The company also said a year’s worth of therapy would cost $32,000 — more than the $26,500 price of a year’s worth of Leqembi.
The FDA’s prescribing information tells doctors they can consider stopping the drug after confirming via brain scans that patients have minimal plaque.
More than 6 million Americans have Alzheimer’s. Only those with early or mild disease will be eligible for the new drug, and an even smaller subset are likely to undergo the multistep process needed to get a prescription.
The FDA approved Kisunla, known chemically as donanemab, based on results from an 18-month study in which patients given the treatment declined about 22% more slowly in terms of memory and cognitive ability than those who received a dummy infusion.
The main safety issue was brain swelling and bleeding, a problem common to all plaque-targeting drugs. The rates reported in Lilly’s study, including 20% of patients with microbleeds, were slightly higher than those reported with competitor Leqembi. However, the two drugs were tested in slightly different types of patients, which experts say makes it difficult to compare the drugs’ safety.
Kisunla is infused once a month compared to Leqembi’s twice-a-month regimen, which could make things easier for caregivers who bring their loved ones to a hospital or clinic for treatment.
Exploring Generative AI on the Command Control Power Podcast
date: 2024-07-02, from: TidBITS blog
In this wide-ranging podcast conversation, Adam Engst and hosts Joe Saponare and Jerry Zigmont explore some of the deeper questions surrounding generative AI.
https://tidbits.com/2024/07/02/exploring-generative-ai-on-the-command-control-power-podcast/
EFF wants FTC to treat lying chatbots as ‘unfair and deceptive’ in eyes of the law
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And hit AI operators ‘with all the fines’, says Cory Doctorow
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has proposed that the FTC apply rules prohibiting unfair trade practices to punish those operating deceptive chatbots.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/eff_ftc_chatbot/
Banksy Takes Credit For an Inflatable Migrant Raft That Floated Across a Glastonbury Crowd
date: 2024-07-02, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The street artist’s latest stunt is thought to be a criticism of the U.K.’s immigration policies
The Future of Writing: How AI Will Reshape Our Tools
date: 2024-07-02, from: Om Malik blog
Earlier this morning while reading The Wall Street Journal, I learned that Bruce Bastian, co-creator of WordPerfect, the word-processing software, had died at 76. His life was consequential, as his obituary so eloquently elaborates. I haven’t thought of WordPerfect for a long time. And probably neither have many others who think of Microsoft Word and …
https://om.co/2024/07/02/from-wordperfect-to-perfect-word-with-ai/
In Memoriam: Cary Stuart Soltz1936–2024
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
It has taken me a while to write about my father, who died on March 4. Summarizing our relationship and
The post In Memoriam: <br> Cary Stuart Soltz<br>1936–2024 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/in-memoriam-cary-stuart-soltz1936-2024/
Figma AI
date: 2024-07-02, from: Michael Tsai
Emanuel Maiberg (tweet, Hacker News): The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app. Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking it to make […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/02/figma-ai/
“Filter Unknown Senders” in Messages.app
date: 2024-07-02, from: Michael Tsai
Garrett Murray: I had no idea the “filter unknown senders” setting for Messages did much more than it implies. It actually creates a root-level menu that gives you several filter views that are very useful… why isn’t this enabled by default? The filters also properly respect your pins and such, and your chosen view is […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/02/filter-unknown-senders-in-messages-app/
Interpretación simultánea en español comenzará en las reuniones del Concejo Municipal de Goleta
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
GOLETA, CA – 2 de Julio, 2024 – ¡Corramos la voz! A partir de la próxima reunión del Concejo Municipal
The post Interpretación simultánea en español comenzará en las reuniones del Concejo Municipal de Goleta appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Spanish Interpretation to Begin at Goleta City Council Meetings
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
GOLETA, CA – July 2, 2024 – Spread the word! Starting at the next Goleta City Council meeting on July 16, 2024,
The post Spanish Interpretation to Begin at Goleta City Council Meetings appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Sept. 15: Presbyterian Church Hosts Grief, Loss Recovery Group
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The First Presbyterian Church of Newhall is hosting an eight-week grief and loss recovery group, scheduled to run 2-3:30 p.m. on eight consecutive Sundays, Sept. 15 through Nov. 3.
https://scvnews.com/sept-15-presbyterian-church-hosts-grief-loss-recovery-group/
US Army: We want to absorb private-sector AI ‘as fast as y’all are building them’
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
How about a nice game of chess instead?
The US Army is keen to integrate commercial private-sector AI algorithms into its operations and it’s hoping industry can also figure out how to address the inevitable security concerns that will come from the move.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/us_army_private_sector_ai/
Biden says ignoring climate change is deadly, irresponsible
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-says-ignoring-climate-change-is-deadly-irresponsible/7682736.html
Satellite imagery shows China expanding spy bases in Cuba
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
Washington — New satellite images of Cuba show signs the country is installing improved intelligence capabilities at four military bases with suspected links to China, potentially providing Beijing with a network of facilities that could be used to spy on the United States.
The imagery, presented in a report Tuesday by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, was taken in March and April. It indicated new or recent construction at three sites near the capital, Havana, as well as work on a previously unreported site not far from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
“Without access to classified materials, pinpointing the specific targets of these assets is nearly impossible,” the report said. “Nonetheless, the growth of space-monitoring equipment at sites like Bejucal and Calabazar is notable given that Cuba lacks its own satellites or space program.”
Bejucal is the largest of the four sites, according to CSIS analysts and first came to prominence during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the base was used to store nuclear weapons for the Soviet Union.
More recently, it has gained prominence as a major signals intelligence monitoring station, suspected to be tracking electronic communications for China.
The new satellite pictures show evidence that Bejucal has seen expansive updates, including a new electronic antenna enclosure.
Two other sites near Havana — Wajay and Calabazar — have seen growth as well, with CSIS analysts citing evidence of an expanding and evolving mission, including the installation of antennae, radar dishes and other equipment that could help those using it to monitor satellites.
The final site, El Salao, appears to be still under construction. But its location, not far from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay near the city of Santiago de Cuba, and the structures themselves, could be cause for concern for the U.S.
The imagery collected by CSIS shows progress on what appears to be an antenna array with a diameter of 130 to 200 meters (425 to 655 feet). Similar arrays, according to the analysts, have shown the ability to track signals up to 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles).
The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the CSIS report. But it follows a report last year by The Wall Street Journal that China was paying Cuba several billion dollars to build a spy facility.
U.S. officials later said that China had upgraded its intelligence facilities in Cuba in 2019 but that U.S. pushback had prevented Beijing from achieving its goals.
“We’re confident that we can continue to meet our security commitments,” said Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder while briefing reporters Tuesday.
“We know that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] is going to continue to try to enhance its presence in Cuba, and we will continue to keep working to disrupt that,” he said in response to a question from VOA. “We’re continuing to monitor this closely, taking steps to counter it.”
China on Tuesday rejected the findings of the CSIS report, with the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Washington calling them “nothing but slander.”
“The U.S. side has repeatedly hyped-up China’s establishment of spy bases or conducting surveillance activities in Cuba,” Liu Pengyu told VOA in an email.
“The U.S. should immediately stop its malicious smearing of China,” Liu said, adding, “The U.S. is no doubt the leading power in terms of eavesdropping and does not even spare its Allies [sic].”
Cuba also pushed back against the CSIS report, singling out a write-up in The Wall Street Journal.
“Without citing a verifiable source or showing evidence, it seeks to scare the public with legends about Chinese military bases that do not exist and no one has seen,” according to a post by Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio on the X social media platform.
The CSIS report says monitoring stations in Cuba could help China to acquire needed capabilities and insights as it tries to militarily surpass the United States.
“Collecting data on activities like military exercises, missile tests, rocket launches, and submarine maneuvers would allow China to develop a more sophisticated picture of U.S. military practices,” the report said.
“Cuban facilities would also provide the ability to monitor radio traffic and potentially intercept data delivered by U.S. satellites as they pass over highly sensitive military sites across the southern United States,” the report said.
Such monitoring stations could also help China gain access to what the report describes as a “treasure trove of data” from commercial communications transiting the southeastern U.S.
https://www.voanews.com/a/satellite-imagery-shows-china-expanding-spy-bases-in-cuba/7682716.html
Daily Deals (7-02-2024)
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
Amazon Prime Day is still two weeks away, but Amazon is kicking things off early by offering a 5-month subscription to Amazon Music Unlimited for free to new subscribers with a Prime members, as well as a 3-month free subscription to Audible Premium Plus. You can also pick up an Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet […]
The post Daily Deals (7-02-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-7-02-2024/
Volunteer Crew to Exit NASA’s Simulated Mars Habitat After 378 Days
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
The four volunteers who have been living and working inside NASA’s first simulated yearlong Mars habitat mission are set to exit their ground-based home on Saturday, July 6. NASA will provide live coverage of the crew’s exit from the habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston at 5 p.m. EDT. NASA will stream the […]
Campus entrances to remain restricted for the foreseeable future
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Senior University administrators will soon decide whether restrictions will extend into the fall.
The post Campus entrances to remain restricted for the foreseeable future appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/07/02/campus-entrances-to-remain-restricted-for-the-foreseeable-future/
DMV’s Driver Safety Team Provides New Online Access
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California Department of Motor Vehicles has introduced a new online case management system that provides faster response times. The modern digital system provides drivers, as well as their attorneys, with a more convenient way to interact with the Driver Safety office at the
https://scvnews.com/dmvs-driver-safety-team-provides-new-online-access/
NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for Space Telescope Mission
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has selected Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for the COSI (Compton Spectrometer and Imager) mission. The firm-fixed-price contract has a value of approximately $69 million, which includes launch services and other mission related costs. The COSI mission currently is targeted to launch August 2027 on a SpaceX […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-launch-services-contract-for-space-telescope-mission/
Main Entrance to Central Park Closed for Parking Lot Paving
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita has issued a traffic alert for residents traveling to Central Park, 27150 Bouquet Canyon Road, Santa Clarita, CA 91350.
https://scvnews.com/main-entrance-to-central-park-closed-for-parking-lot-paving/
NASA’s ECOSTRESS Maps Burn Risk Across Phoenix Streets
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Roads and sidewalks in some areas get so hot that skin contact could result in second-degree burns. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have mapped scorching pavement in Phoenix where contact with skin — from a fall, for example — can cause serious burns. The image shows land surface temperatures across a […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/ecostress/nasas-ecostress-maps-burn-risk-across-phoenix-streets/
Charlotte the ‘Pregnant Virgin’ Stingray Dies After Diagnosis of Reproductive Disease
date: 2024-07-02, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The animal drew attention earlier this year for becoming pregnant despite having no male ray in her tank
County Offers Cooling Centers, Summer Pool Program
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As an excessive heat warning descends upon portions of North County this week, including the Santa Clarita Valley, Los Angeles County officials remind SCV residents of county resources that bring free or low-cost heat relief.
https://scvnews.com/county-offers-cooling-centers-summer-pool-program/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Highlighting journalism on Mastodon.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/
Studying Hurricane Beryl from Space
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captured this image of Hurricane Beryl in the Caribbean on July 1, 2024, while aboard the International Space Station, and posted it to X. The Category 4 hurricane had winds of about 130 mph (215 kph). Hurricanes – tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or the eastern Pacific Ocean […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/studying-hurricane-beryl-from-space/
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-07-02, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
I’m backing this lovely little animal card game from a local game creator. Do you have a little one that’s into animals? Do they love animal facts? What about battling them?
https://gamefound.com/en/projects/bespoke-games/natturuval
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/112718451494832438
Lagniappe for July 2024
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Explore Lagniappe for July 2024 featuring: Gator Speaks Conversations filled the room with anticipation for the day ahead. NASA’s Stennis Space Center hosted Take Our Children to Work Day on June 27 with a day set aside for children of employees to see up close the work carried out at NASA Stennis by its diverse […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/lagniappe-for-july-2024/
NASA Will Pay SpaceX Up to $843 Million to Destroy the International Space Station
date: 2024-07-02, from: Smithsonian Magazine
After the end of this decade, the company will guide the aging laboratory into the Pacific Ocean, where many retired spacecrafts have been deposited
Oct. 26-27: Mission Opera Presents ’Cold Sassy Tree
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley opera company, Mission Opera opens its seventh Season Oct. 26-27 with “Cold Sassy Tree” by Carlisle Floyd, an American opera in English, based on the 1989 historical American novel by Olive Ann Burns.
https://scvnews.com/oct-26-27-mission-opera-presents-cold-sassy-tree/
How a NASA Engineer Supports the Commercialization of Space
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Chris Barnett-Woods’ favorite movie growing up – Back to the Future – led him to dream of one day building a DeLorean automobile. Instead, the electrical engineer is doing something never imagined as he helps NASA support the commercialization of space for the benefit of all. “If there is any interest, always apply to work […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/chris-barnett-woods-nasa-engineer/
European Commission shoots down Facebook’s “pay or consent” model
date: 2024-07-02, from: OS News
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s Facebook’s turn to be slapped on the fingers with a ruler – a metric ruler, of course – because of its malicious compliance with the DMA. Today, the Commission has informed Meta of its preliminary findings that its “pay or consent” advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In the Commission’s preliminary view, this binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks. ↫ European Commission press release The European Commission’s preliminary conclusion takes issue with Facebook’s binary choice between “pay for zero ads” and “full-on tracking and all the ads”. According to the DMA, Facebook must offer users the option of an equivalent experience with less tracking, and the company doesn’t offer such an option to users. In addition, Facebook’s proposal does not allow users to “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data”. It’s important to note that this is not some sort of definitive ruling of finding; it’s preliminary, and Facebook now has the opportunity to state its case and formulate its arguments. If the eventual ruling is that Facebook does not comply, the company is liable for fines up to 10% of its yearly worldwide turnover, which can rise up to 20% for repeated infractions.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140126/european-commission-shoots-down-facebooks-pay-or-consent-model/
UN telecom watchdog wags finger at Russia for satellite interference
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
European neighbors say interference comes from Moscow and Kaliningrad, Kremlin claims it didn’t find anything
The UN’s Radio Regulations Board (RRB) has asked Russia to play nice with Europe and not interfere with satellites.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/russia_satellite_interference/
Is This Really How It All Ends?
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Lever News
Biden’s blackmail strategy relies on you thinking there’s no alternative - even though there is.
https://www.levernews.com/is-this-really-how-it-all-ends/
New York judge postpones Trump sentencing until mid-September
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/new-york-prosecutors-won-t-oppose-trump-sentencing-delay/7682511.html
Interview with Xinchuan Huang
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Let’s start with your childhood, where you were born, where you’re from, your young years, your family at the time, what your parents did, and how early it was in your life that you decided you’d like to pursue a career like the one you’re pursuing now? I was born in a small town in […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/interview-with-xinchuan-huang/
How Researchers Solved the Mystery of This 2,000-Year-Old Shipwreck
date: 2024-07-02, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new analysis of nuts, timber and other items found onboard the Kyrenia shipwreck is shedding new light on the vessel’s timeline
Sustaining the Transatlantic Alliance: 75 Years of RAND Insights on NATO
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: RAND blog
For seven decades, RAND has been at the forefront of analytical efforts to rethink the issues, options, and trade-offs NATO has confronted. A new report examines seminal RAND analyses on four of NATO’s strategic challenges.
Two meetings coming up – WROCC on Wednesday, developers on Saturday
date: 2024-07-02, from: RiscOS Story
The Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) will be holding their next meeting on Wednesday, 3rd July, at 7:45pm, with a ‘Potpourri’ topic – i.e. a mix of various short talks, rather than one to cover the whole meeting. The first talk will be delivered by Peter Richmond, who will take a look at Draw in a segment entitled ‘Things to do with Draw’. Chris Hughes will then look at the RISC OS Developments’ network stack and Wi-Fi, as well as the latest Beta version of Pinboard 2, covering some…
https://www.riscository.com/2024/wrocc-wednesday-developers-saturday/
Tau Fruit Fly Quarantine Lifted in SCV
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Thanks to the cooperation and diligence of Santa Clarita Valley area residents and local agricultural officials, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, working in coordination with the United States Department of Agriculture and the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner, has declared an end to the Tau fruit fly quarantine following the eradication of the invasive pest.
https://scvnews.com/tau-fruit-fly-quarantine-lifted-in-scv/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Josh Marshall on the Debate and Its Aftermath.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-thoughts-on-the-debate-and-its-aftermath
Exiled Hong Kong activists feel strain after bounty imposed on them
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — Two exiled Hong Kong activists say bounties imposed on them last year are causing fear and anxiety as they conduct their advocacy work from U.S. soil amid concerns for their safety.
Anna Kwok expected to face retaliation from the Hong Kong government when she became the executive director of the Washington-based advocacy organization Hong Kong Democracy Council in November 2022. Hong Kong authorities imposed a bounty on her and seven others on July 3, 2023.
Frances Hui, who is the policy and advocacy coordinator for the U.S.-based Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, was one of an additional five who had bounties imposed on them in December.
The 13 are accused of violating a controversial national security law that went into effect in the former British colony in July 2020.
Despite being mentally prepared, Hui and Kwok said they felt shocked when the Hong Kong government issued arrest warrants and bounties worth $127,635 for them and the other overseas Hong Kong activists last year. Hui said the bounty felt like “a death certificate” as it confirmed she would not be able to set foot in Hong Kong again.
“After learning about the bounty imposed against me, I suddenly felt like everything was out of my control because I could no longer get in touch with my family and close people in Hong Kong,” she said, adding that the event pushed her life onto a completely different path.
“I’m officially a wanted fugitive, and whoever in Hong Kong is associated with me will get into trouble,” Hui told VOA by phone.
While Hui described the experience as “jarring and shocking,” Kwok said she didn’t realize how the bounties could affect her until her bank account in Hong Kong was frozen.
“At first, I was surprised for only 10 seconds and immediately went into work mode, thinking about how to use this incident to advance our advocacy agenda in media interviews,” said Kwok.
“When I checked my Hong Kong bank account at 11 p.m. on July 3, 2023, I noticed my asserts were frozen and I suddenly realized the real-life implications of the bounty on my head,” Kwok told VOA by phone.
These activists “betrayed their country, betrayed Hong Kong, disregarded the interests of Hong Kong people, and continue to endanger national security even when abroad,” the chief superintendent of Hong Kong’s National Security Department, Li Kwai-wah, said at a December 14 press conference.
Eric Lai, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Asian Law in the United States, said the Hong Kong government hopes to create a chilling effect that will further disconnect people in Hong Kong from overseas activists by issuing arrest warrants and bounties.
“It’s a silencing tactic to both people around the bounty holders and the bounty holders themselves,” he told VOA by phone, adding that it is part of the Hong Kong government’s efforts to surveil, harass and intimidate political dissidents in exile.
In addition to imposing bounties on more than a dozen activists, Hong Kong authorities canceled the passports of overseas activists last month. In the U.K., three men were charged in May with spying on members of the Hong Kong diaspora community on behalf of the territory’s intelligence service.
Threat to mental health, personal safety
Apart from targeting overseas activists, Hong Kong authorities have interrogated family members of the activists, including Hui’s mother and Kwok’s brothers and parents.
Hui said the interrogations of her family members made her realize that her activism abroad could affect those who are still in Hong Kong. She said that is one way that Hong Kong authorities have limited her freedom.
“It’s a very lonely experience to know that whatever I do could be connected to people who are associated with me; but I also know that if I stop my activism now, that’s exactly what the Chinese Communist Party would want, to intimidate and silence me,” she said.
In addition to the sense of loneliness, Hui said the bounty has increased her fear of threats to her safety.
“I have become extra cautious about talking to people, even those in the Hong Kong diaspora community, and my heightened sensitivity toward security issues has also contributed to my increased level of anxiety,” she said, adding that she is trying hard not to let fear dictate her advocacy work.
As for Kwok, the fear for her safety became real when she began to receive death threats shortly before leaders convened for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, held in November in San Francisco. At the time, she was planning to attend protest rallies against Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I started receiving death threats and threats of raping me in my inbox, and those accounts are not afraid of using brutal language or insinuating physical harm against me,” she told VOA. She said the messages would appear in her inbox in a coordinated fashion.
While she was shocked about the explicitness of those threats, she tried to take steps to rein in her fear, including maintaining regular contact with close friends, playing with her cats or diving into the world of fiction.
These steps “help to assure me that things are okay and I’m doing something impactful, which is an important realization to me,” Kwok said.
Despite their efforts to overcome the fear created by the bounties, Hui and Kwok say the Hong Kong government’s efforts to launch transnational repression are a threat to the entire diaspora community.
“I think my personal experience shows that there are still many gaps in implementing protection mechanisms against transnational repression in many countries,” Kwok said, adding that the moves initiated by Hong Kong authorities are damaging trust within the diaspora community.
While Hong Kong authorities try to isolate some overseas activists, Hui said she will continue to concentrate her advocacy efforts on speaking up for activists who have been imprisoned in Hong Kong.
“There is a sense of mission for me, and I hope I can continue to advocate for those who can’t,” she said.
In response to criticisms made by the activists, the Hong Kong government said the extraterritorial effect of the national security law is fully in line with the principles of international law and common practices adopted by several countries.
“Absconders should not think they can evade criminal liability by absconding from Hong Kong, [because] ultimately, they will be held accountable for their acts constituting serious offences endangering national security and be sanctioned by law,” a Hong Kong government spokesperson told VOA in a written response.
Texas lawmaker is first Democrat to publicly call for Biden to step down as party’s nominee
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
washington — A House Democratic lawmaker has become the first in the party to publicly call for President Joe Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee for president, citing Biden’s debate performance failing to “effectively defend his many accomplishments.”
Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas said in a statement Tuesday that Biden should “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”
“My decision to make these strong reservations public is not done lightly nor does it in any way diminish my respect for all that President Biden has achieved,” Doggett said. “Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw. I respectfully call on him to do so.”
Senior Democratic leaders have been expressing support for Biden following the recent debate.
How the Supreme Court Just Changed Climate Law, According to 9 Lawyers
date: 2024-07-02, from: Heatmap News
The word “consequential” barely touches the importance of the Supreme Court’s decisions this term, as two cases — Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors — took a wrecking ball to the stability of the administrative state. Courts will no longer give deference to regulators to interpret statute and will permit new challenges against existing rules. Essentially, depending on whom you ask, anything goes.
So naturally, we had to ask. While the legal universe is still digesting these rulings, climate and environmental law experts had plenty of opinions about them, as lawyers tend to do. Here’s what we heard:
Michael Gerrard, professor and faculty director at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School
The Supreme Court has been on a campaign to weaken environmental regulation. In 2016, it halted implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan without explanation. In 2022, it issued the devastating opinion in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, finding that the EPA couldn’t go very far in using the Clean Air Act to fight climate change because the statute isn’t specific enough. In 2023, the court in Sackett v. EPA greatly reduced the coverage of the Clean Water Act.
That campaign intensified this year. On June 27, 2024, in Ohio v. EPA, it struck down a life-saving Clean Air Act rule based on exceedingly narrow technical grounds that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her dissent, found were completely off base. The same day, in SEC v. Jarkesy, the Court said that agencies could not use long-established administrative processes to impose certain kinds of penalties. On June 28, the court reversed the Chevron doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. On July 1, in Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors, it said that corporate defendants can challenge federal regulations long past the usual statute of limitations. And this campaign may continue: on June 24 the Supreme Court agreed to hear Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which may shrink the coverage of the National Environmental Policy Act.
The next election will determine whether the 6-3 conservative majority may be enlarged and rejuvenated to last another generation, or — depending on the fates — may shrink or be reversed.
Scott Lemieux, professor of political science at the University of Washington
For good reason, the last day of the Supreme Court’s term will be known for its decision giving presidents incredibly broad immunity from criminal prosecution. But another decision that will play a major role in restricting the ability of the executive branch to protect the environment should not be neglected. Corner Post effectively eliminated what had been a six-year statute of limitations for challenging federal regulations. The impact of Corner Post will amplify the effect of last week’s opinion overturning the Chevron decision, which had held that the judiciary should defer to reasonable legal interpretations made by the executive branch.
The Court announcing that it will take a much more aggressive role in replacing the judgment of regulatory experts in the executive branch with their own judgments will have particularly dire consequences for environmental regulations. What they see as “excessive” environmental regulation is one of the central reasons why conservative legal activists wanted the Chevron doctrine overruled. It’s not a coincidence that last week, the court also prevented a federal regulation of air pollutants from going into effect, one of a long series of Roberts court rulings undermining environmental regulation. And in a darkly comic illustration of what a bad idea it is to replace the judgment of EPA experts with that of arrogant, power-hungry judges, in his opinion for the court, Justice Gorsuch confused “nitrous oxide” (commonly known as “laughing gas”) and “nitrogen oxides” (the pollutant the EPA sought to regulate.)
People who want to stop environmental regulation will not be laughing when considering the effects of this Supreme Court term. Conservative lawyers will aggressively forum-shop for judges hostile to environmental regulations to bring challenges even to long-settled rules, and the authority of the EPA will be under constant threat as the planet continues to warm.
Stan Meiburg, executive director of the Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University, formerly of the Environmental Protection Agency
The combined effect of the Comer Post and Loper decisions may not be immediate, but they will be profound. They will make it harder for agencies to do their work, and easier for challengers (especially very well-funded challengers) to attack and delay actions.
The two opinions are hard to reconcile. In Loper, the opinion cites Chevron as “fostering unwarranted instability” in the law, but in Comer Post, the court has added extreme instability by leaving open-ended the question of when a regulation is ever settled. The only common thread is the seeming desire of the court to aggrandize the power of the courts.
Specific to climate, notwithstanding the statement in the opinion that Loper does not reopen prior holdings that used the Chevron framework, it is hard to imagine that such challenges will not be forthcoming. In particular, opponents of the finding in Massachusetts v. EPA may see Loper and Comer Post as an opportunity to reopen that 2007 case, especially as the court seems quite ready and willing to overturn past precedents.
Finally, we have examples of how pre- Chevron litigation worked under the Clean Air Act — and these examples should give as much pause to conservatives as to progressives. Courts are not likely to function well as regulatory agencies. The original Chevron decision was favored by conservatives at the time; post-Chevron, conservatives may regret that they got what they asked for.
Kym Meyer, litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center
The Supreme Court’s rulings this session jeopardize critical environmental protections and climate progress and are likely to wreak chaos across the regulatory landscape. In Corner Post the Supreme Court upended the statute of limitations for challenging many government regulations, opening the door to hundreds of new corporate challenges to long-established protections we all take for granted. And in Loper Bright, the court displaced the long-standing Chevron doctrine by shifting power to judges and sidelining the expertise of agency staff who live and breathe the science and safety concerns that federal agencies specialize in.
In combination, the cases tip the balance of power away from everyday Americans that depend on commonsense protections to industry groups that believe they will financially benefit without any limitations in place. We’re ready to fight back to make sure this conservative supermajority doesn’t leave us with a patchwork of inconsistent rulings and an annihilation of the regulatory structure and critical protections that keep us safe and healthy.
Sanjay Narayan, managing attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program
The Supreme Court’s decisions, in combination, make it clear that the Court intends to insert itself as, in Justice Kagan’s words, the country’s “administrative czar.” Those decisions give courts control over a wide array of scientific, technical, and policy choices necessary to effectively implement our laws protecting clean air, clean water, and affordable and reliable energy (and much more). That is likely to prove corrosive to climate policy; judges lack the accountability, expertise, and experience of agencies like the EPA or the Department of Energy.
But the primary drivers of decarbonization — economics and public investments to accelerate the clean energy transition, like the Inflation Reduction Act — remain relatively insulated from judicial interference. So while the court’s decisions make the likely pathway to decarbonization less steady, science-driven, and predictable, it should not derail our ongoing progress towards achieving our climate goals over the long term.
Josiah Neeley, resident fellow and director of Texas-related programs at the R Street Institute
Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court’s decisions in Corner Post and Loper Bright will make it easier for plaintiffs to prevail in legal challenges to environmental regulations. But we should be careful to keep things in perspective. The end of Chevron deference means that agency interpretations of statutes will get more judicial scrutiny than they did before, but even under Chevron deference it was limited by such things as the major questions doctrine. Agency interpretations are still likely to prevail in many cases. Similarly, while the changes to when the statute of limitations begins to run will allow additional challenges to be brought, a regulation that has already survived earlier legal challenges is likely to be upheld again if challenged by a new plaintiff later on. Agencies like EPA or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission do not need to be insulated from judicial review in order to be able to function. If they do, that suggests a deeper problem with the administrative state.
Adam Orford, assistant professor at University of Georgia School of Law
In its regulatory jurisprudence this term, the Supreme Court has fundamentally changed the playing field for environmental regulation, making it much more difficult for agencies to use the flexibility that Congress has attempted to provide to protect the environment. This is likely to be felt especially where agencies are trying to tackle new problems using older statutes. The ball is now in Congress’s court to protect the American people by regularly improving the nation’s environmental laws, ensuring that federal regulatory programs that prevent pollution and preserve our country’s natural resources for future generations are not lost forever over legal technicalities.
Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice
Taken together, Corner Post and Loper Bright fire the starting gun for an onslaught of lawsuits challenging long-settled regulatory programs. (They also sound the dinner bell for amoral corporate law firms.)
Judicial conservatives have long proclaimed the need for judicial minimalism and caution. Judges, they say, are not elected, and have no business making policy from the bench. They should decide individual cases and focus on the facts in front of them to avoid ripple effects that they can’t foresee and can’t easily fix.
This conservative supermajority is instead heedlessly pursuing a political agenda. By rewriting settled precedents to pursue a holy war against federal regulations, the court is truly legislating from the bench. And in justifying all this by citing idiosyncratic views of the separation of powers, the court is practically holding a new constitutional convention behind closed doors.
Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
The Supreme Court has made it clear that legal precedents and the plain language of statutes will not slow their crusade to destroy the modern regulatory state at the behest of their wealthy benefactors. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson got it right in her dissent in Corner Post: “At the end of a momentous Term, this much is clear: The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the Court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.”
This tsunami of lawsuits will result in less consistent statutory interpretations based on individual courts’ views on government regulation generally and on the matter at hand. The court’s power grab lays bare the importance of civil society and elected officials finding ways to rebalance the relationships between the three branches of government and supporting the ability of federal agencies to implement federal laws effectively.
https://heatmap.news/climate/supreme-court-loper-corner-post
A Supreme Court Decision with a Body Count
date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Karpf’s blog
The Supreme Court majority are extremist, partisan ideologues. They are not subtle about it.
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/a-supreme-court-decision-with-a-body
Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Time to upgrade that receiver if you’re one of the few Swiss that still don’t have one able to receive DAB+ signals
Swiss radio listeners will soon have to toss out their old sets, as the country plans to end analog FM broadcasting on December 31, 2024, in favor of a total conversion to digital.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/switzerland_to_end_2024_with/
US will pay Moderna to develop pandemic flu vaccine
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-will-pay-moderna-to-develop-pandemic-flu-vaccine-/7682394.html
No rest for the wiry as Cisco Nexus switches flip out over latest zero-day
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Command injection bug being abused by suspected Chinese spies – patch up
Cisco switch owners should probably apply the patch that just dropped for a vulnerability that was exploited in April as a zero-day to install malware on an array of its Nexus switches.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/cisco_nexus_zero_day/
AYANEO Pocket DMG goes up for pre-order in China (Game Boy-like handheld game console with OLED display and Snapdragon G3x Gen 2)
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
The AYANEO Pocket DMG is a handheld game system with a design inspired by classic consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, but modern hardware including a high-resolution OLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 processor, and game controller inputs that include an analog stick, touchpad, and trigger buttons positioned part-way down the back of […]
The post AYANEO Pocket DMG goes up for pre-order in China (Game Boy-like handheld game console with OLED display and Snapdragon G3x Gen 2) appeared first on Liliputing.
MSI MS-C918 is a palm-sized Intel N100 mini PC
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
The MSI MS-C918 is a compact desktop computer that measures just 80 x 80 x 36mm (3.15″ x 3.15″ x 1.42″) or a little thicker (40.7mm / 1.6″) if you use the system’s optional rubber feet to elevate the bottom. But it’s also a pretty versatile little system with support for up to two 4K displays, […]
The post MSI MS-C918 is a palm-sized Intel N100 mini PC appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/msi-ms-c918-is-a-palm-sized-intel-n100-mini-pc/
Does Biden Himself Matter for Climate Policy?
date: 2024-07-02, from: Heatmap News
Joe Biden was not a late arrival to the cause of arresting climate change, even if for most of his career he was better known for advancing the interests of the credit card industry than for environmental passion. He introduced an early climate bill in 1987, and though it didn’t do much (the bill, which eventually passed, set up a task force to study the issue), he can legitimately claim to have been there early. As president he has spoken with sincere feeling about climate; even through the muddle of his first debate with Donald Trump, he managed to say that “the only existential threat to humanity is climate change,” one of the clearest statements he made all evening.
After his first debate with Donald Trump and the doubts it raised about his ability to serve out another term, it’s natural to wonder whether we’re approaching a high water mark of action on climate, and that after this president the tide will again gradually recede. When we elect a president, we elect a person who has their own values and priorities — but we also elect not only the large group of policy personnel that accompanies them but on top of that an entire political party that determines what course they will take. It’s easy to lose sight of that fact when so much attention is focused on the individual who occupies the Oval Office, as though politics were a story with a singular protagonist whose will determines the outcome of events.
But the truth is that the next Democrat in the White House — whether it’s Kamala Harris or someone else — would not be able to backslide on this issue even if they wanted to. Aggressive climate action is now woven into the Democratic Party’s governing agenda for the foreseeable future.
This is partly a story about polarization, which can sometimes have positive effects. Not too long ago, the parties contained an ample amount of ideological diversity; there were Northern liberal Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats. Though it was race that powered the realignment that began in the 1960s, one by one nearly every major policy issue polarized cleanly along party lines. Which means that once a party decides an issue is important to them, every elected official has to get on board if they have ambitions for higher office.
Intra-party disagreement on policy hasn’t entirely disappeared, but it takes place within a much narrower band of alternatives, and on some issues there is almost no disagreement at all. There used to be pro-choice, pro-gun reform Republicans and pro-life, pro-gun Democrats, but they all either left office or changed their positions. With Joe Manchin retiring this year, there will be almost no prominent fossil fuel advocates left in the Democratic Party.
Few politicians have been more diligent in shifting with their party than Biden, who spent a career carefully positioning himself precisely where the center of Democratic gravity was. This is why he has been a much more progressive president than one might have thought, especially given that he was considered the “moderate” alternative to the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primaries. On almost no issue is that more clear than on climate, where he can accurately claim to have done more than any president in history.
If you look back at what the primary candidates were saying in 2020, most of the differences were small. Biden and others promised to pursue net-zero emissions for the nation by 2050, while a few set their target at 2045. Sanders’ plans were the most enthusiastically optimistic (100% renewables in energy and transportation by 2030; $16.3 trillion in green spending), but all of them had committed to making climate action a policy centerpiece of their administrations.
That includes Kamala Harris, who has sometimes been the public face of the administration’s climate efforts. To anyone wondering whether Harris feels the urgency of climate action in her bones, the answer is that it doesn’t really matter. If you’re a Democrat, you have to pursue that goal because the entire party, from members of Congress to activists to voters, will demand it.
That goes as well for the Democratic governors who are likely future presidential contenders, either this year if Biden steps aside or in 2028. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan signed a package of measures to bring her state to 100% clean energy by 2040, and has pushed a comprehensive “Healthy Climate Plan” that addresses energy, transportation, residential decarbonization, and climate resilience. California’s Gavin Newsom has put climate at the center of his governorship, attacking oil companies, spending tens of billions of dollars on climate initiatives, and signing a law banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. J.B. Pritzker in Illinois has signed legislation to achieve 100% clean energy and pushed a comprehensive climate strategy. Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania has walked a more careful line in the third-largest coal-producing state (unlike the others, he has to contend with a legislature partly controlled by Republicans), but he has advocated a carbon pricing program and touts a variety of efforts to reduce emissions in the state.
In other words, any Democratic governor with national ambitions has to be able to tell voters that in their state they made progress on climate. It isn’t enough to say they agree with the party’s basic orientation; they have to show results, just as a Republican governor will have to demonstrate that they limited abortion access and expanded gun rights.
That doesn’t mean progress is guaranteed even when an administration committed to climate action is in office, as recent Supreme Court rulings make clear. But if it was something of a surprise to see the moderate Joe Biden do as much as he did on climate, his Democratic successors will have to take this administration’s record as a baseline, and at least try to do no less. They won’t have a choice.
https://heatmap.news/politics/replace-biden-climate
New York disbars Giuliani as court finds he repeatedly lied about election
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, federal prosecutor and legal advisor to Donald Trump, was disbarred in the state on Tuesday after a court found he repeatedly made false statements about Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The decision was handed down by a New York appeals court in Manhattan.
The court ruled that Giuliani be “disbarred from the practice of law, effective immediately, and until the further order of this Court, and his name stricken from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law in the State of New York.”
Giuliani has already had his New York law license suspended for false statements he made after the election.
Giuliani was the primary mouthpiece for Trump’s false claims of election fraud after the 2020 vote, standing at a press conference in front of Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside Philadelphia on the day the race was called for Democrat Joe Biden over the Republican Trump and saying they would challenge what he claimed was a vast conspiracy by Democrats.
Lies around the election results helped push an angry mob of pro-Trump rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to stop the certification of Biden’s victory.
Despite OS shields up, half of America opts for third-party antivirus – just in case
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Wisdom of the oldies or just a traditional fear of malware?
Nearly half of Americans are using third-party antivirus software and the rest are either using the default protection in their operating system – or none at all.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/third_party_secutity/
LG Gram SuperSlim (2024) is a 2.2 pound Intel Meteor Lake laptop with a 15 inch OLED display (available now for $800)
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
The latest version of the LG Gram SuperSlim notebook is a thin and light laptop with a 15.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel OLED display, an Intel Meteor Lake-H processor, LPDDR5x-7467 memory and PCIe Gen 4 storage. It weighs just 2.18 pounds and measures less than half an inch thick. LG is currently selling a model […]
The post LG Gram SuperSlim (2024) is a 2.2 pound Intel Meteor Lake laptop with a 15 inch OLED display (available now for $800) appeared first on Liliputing.
Jgs Font
date: 2024-07-02, from: Tilde.news
https://adelfaure.net/tools/jgs/
The Supreme Court Is Slowly Breaking the EPA
date: 2024-07-02, from: Heatmap News
Perhaps it’s futile to talk about any Supreme Court decision this term other than the justices’ unprecedented ruling in the Trump case. The court’s decision to grant broad immunity to the president from criminal prosecution could reshape the modern presidency and empower Donald Trump during his potential — and increasingly likely — second term.
That ruling, too, will have profound practical implications for Americans who care about climate change. During his presidency, Trump flexed his power to slow the energy transition, bury scientific reports, and attack protesters. What will happen now that he is unbound?
But just as the court was expanding the president’s personal authority, it was confining and shrinking the power of any president to address climate change or regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
In a series of important rulings over the past week, the Supreme Court sharply limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon pollution. These rulings could resonate for years to come, no matter who wins the White House in November.
It did so by focusing on a corner of federal law that is often overlooked by the mass public: administrative law, the body of rules that govern how federal agencies constrain and regulate the private sector. Although Americans rarely interact with these rules, they affect the water we drink, air we breathe, and the food and drugs that we ingest.
Taken together, the four cases — Loper Bright Enterprises, Corner Post, Jarkesy, and Ohio v. EPA — are not as high-profile as the Supreme Court’s broad grant of immunity to Trump. But they could substantially weaken the EPA for decades to come, stymying its ability to write and enforce rules limiting carbon pollution. They could also slow down the permitting and construction of new clean energy infrastructure.
“All of these decisions — all four of them — inflate the role of the courts relative to the bureaucracy. This is part of a longstanding campaign by the conservative legal movement to bring the administrative state to judicial heel,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told me.
“Congress has not comprehensively addressed climate change but the agencies are trying to,” Emily Hammond, an environmental law professor at George Washington University, told me. “What these cases do, all together, is fairly comprehensively limit the ability of agencies to protect health and human safety and try to mitigate climate change.”
“It’s a shocking and scary grab of power by a court that is rapidly discarding principles that we’ve been able to rely on and expect for a long time,” she added.
In the first case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court repealed a 40-year-old tenet of American regulatory law that said courts should generally defer to executive agencies such as the EPA when interpreting an ambiguous law. In the second, Corner Post v. Board of Governors, the court opened the door to lawsuits targeting federal regulations that have been on the books for years. Instead of allowing companies to challenge a new rule during the first six years after it was published, the court ruled that companies can challenge a new rule during the six years after the rule begins to affect them. That seemingly allows companies to challenge federal regulations long after they have been issued and treated as settled law.
In the EPA’s case, these two cases may have less influence than it may seem— not because the EPA won’t be subject to these precedents, but rather because the agency receives so little deference from the justices already.
The high court has asserted since 2022 that agencies cannot write new rules on questions of “vast economic and political significance” without clear authorization from Congress. This principle, called the “major questions doctrine,” was first invoked by the justices to overturn the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that restricted greenhouse gas pollution from power plants in part by setting up an interstate carbon trading scheme. But the doctrine would seem to constrain almost any EPA attempt to regulate activities related to climate change, Carlson said. The EPA’s recent attempt to limit tailpipe pollution from cars — in addition to rules cutting carbon pollution from heavy-duty trucks — could run astray of the major questions doctrine.
“At least in my mind, in terms of what regulations will be challenged and how, the major questions doctrine poses the biggest threat to regulatory authority,” Carlson said.
The Corner Post ruling, which effectively extends the statute of limitations for suing over new regulations, may also mean less for the EPA than for other agencies. That’s because virtually every EPA climate protection is already battled over in court, and once a court has decided whether a given regulation is legal, everyone has to abide by that precedent.
“Most rules worth challenging will already have been challenged,” Bagley said.
The EPA may escape, too, from the worst of the Corner Post ruling, but only because its rules are almost always litigated within the first six years of their life anyway, Carlson told me. That means companies probably won’t need to sue after that, as they might want to do for other federal regulations.
Even if those cases have a muted effect on the EPA, however, the other two rulings — which have received less attention so far — could prove far more restrictive to the agency’s authority.
In one case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the court ruled 6-3 that the SEC cannot use an in-house tribunal of administrative judges to impose a civil penalty on a company. Instead, the agency must grant the company a full jury trial in federal court. But many other agencies, including the EPA, also use administrative judges and in-house trials to punish individuals or companies for breaking the law. Each year, the EPA imposes hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on companies that violate the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
Over the next few years, federal judges — and eventually the Supreme Court — will have to decide whether the Jarkesy ruling affects all executive agencies, including the EPA. If they decide it does, then it could slow down the agency’s efforts to penalize polluting companies by forcing virtually every decision into an already overworked court system.
But perhaps the most ominous ruling, Bagely said, is the one in a lawsuit concerning the EPA itself. On Thursday, in Ohio v. EPA, the court blocked the agency’s “good neighbor” rule, meant to limit how much air pollution upwind states can release into downwind states. The five-justice majority did so not only because it disagreed about the agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but also because the justices felt that the EPA had not properly addressed a few of the more than 1,100 comments about the rulemaking that it had received from the public. As such, they stayed the rule — temporarily blocking it from being enforced — and sent the case back down to a lower court.
That decision could change how every court views the rulemaking process, Bagley told me. Whenever the EPA drafts a new environmental rule, it receives thousands of public comments criticizing and praising different aspects of the proposal. Under a law called the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies deal with the public, it must respond to the substance of each of those comments before it can finalize and enforce the rule.
The EPA did respond to the comments at the center of the Ohio case, but Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, decided the agency did not address a few specific concerns sufficiently.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett issued a dissent — joined by the court’s liberals — and castigated Gorsuch for focusing on “an alleged procedural error that likely had no impact” on the EPA’s actual anti-pollution plan.
“Given the number of companies included and the timelines for review, the court’s injunction leaves large swaths of upwind States free to keep contributing significantly to their downwind neighbors’ ozone problems for the next several years,” Barrett wrote.
“The reason this worries me in the environmental context is that every major environmental action is going to come with 1,000, 2,000 — 3,000 public comments,” he said. “What the court did here is flyspeck those comments,” meaning it looked for a tiny error and used it to justify pausing the entire rule. That’s despite the fact that the Clean Air Act, which the EPA was enforcing in the Ohio case, says that the courts must already meet an unusually high standard to intervene in an agency’s response to public comments.
“By flyspecking these comments … it increases the incentive to submit lots and lots of comments” in the hope that the EPA misses one of them. In those comments, “industry groups strew rakes all over your lawn in the hope that you’ll step on one — eventually an agency will.”
That has dire implications for the EPA’s ability to propose new climate rules, he said, but more broadly it affects any regulatory proceeding where the federal government has to reply to hundreds or thousands of public comments. In recent years, for insurance, some Democrats and many clean energy developers have grown frustrated with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires the government to study the environmental impact of any action that it takes. NEPA seems to particularly hamstring clean energy projects, such as transmission lines and geothermal wells.
NEPA does not require that agencies minimize a project’s impact to the environment; only that the government study all potential impacts. But as part of the NEPA process, the government must respond to public comments about the proposed action. It can receive hundreds or thousands of comments about a given NEPA case.
That means virtually every NEPA process could now be subject to the same high level of scrutiny that the court imposed on the EPA in Ohio v. EPA. “This is a dramatic intensification of the stringency of judicial review across a number of domains,” Bagley said.
It is ironic, at best, that these sharp new limits on executive agencies’ ability to regulate carbon pollution came from the same Court that vastly expanded the president’s immunity under the law.
“This is a court that is hostile to environmental regulation,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor and the former acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me. “I don’t think there’s any other way to view it.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/supreme-court-epa
Rainbow Family moves to new Northern California campsite after ouster
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Rainbow Family campers were still declining to apply for the permit that the Forest Service requires of all groups larger than 75 people.
The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich
date: 2024-07-02, from: John August blog
John welcomes Simon Rich (Man Seeking Woman, Miracle Workers) to look at how he crafts a comedic premise. Using his work on SNL, his time writing Inside Out at Pixar and his plethora of short stories, they look at how he develops a funny idea into a story with narrative and emotional punch. We also […] The post The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-comedic-premise-with-simon-rich
PeerJ Awards – Half-year Roundup 2024
date: 2024-07-02, from: PeerJ blog
2024 has marked a remarkable surge for PeerJ Awards, celebrating a grand total of 29 recipients across 14 conferences in the first half of the year! Tailored primarily towards students and early career researchers (ECRs), PeerJ Awards grant winners with a free publication in any of the PeerJ journals (subject to peer review), along with […]
https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284889414/peerj-awards-half-year-roundup-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This is the only RSS 2.0 spec.
https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html
Trove of Tombs Sheds Light on How Ancient Egyptian Families Lived—and Died
date: 2024-07-02, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The finds include mummies from many social classes, some of whom were buried alongside relatives after succumbing to disease
US Supreme Court to weigh in on flavored e-cigarette products
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court took up an e-cigarette case Tuesday, weighing whether the Food and Drug Administration wrongly blocked the marketing of sweet, flavored products amid a surge in vaping by young people.
Vaping companies argue the FDA unfairly denied more than a million applications to market fruit or candy flavored versions of nicotine-laced liquid that’s heated by the e-cigarette to create an inhalable aerosol.
The case comes as the FDA undertakes a sweeping review after years of regulatory delays intended to bring scientific scrutiny to the multibillion-dollar vaping market, which includes thousands of flavored vapes that are technically illegal but are widely available in convenience stores, gas stations and vape shops. The FDA recently approved its first menthol-flavored electronic cigarettes for adult smokers.
The agency says the sweet, flavored e-liquids pose a “serious, well-documented risk” of enticing more young people to pick up a nicotine habit. In 2020, nearly 20% of high school students and almost 5% of middle school students used e-cigarettes, and almost all of those kids used flavored products, the agency said in court documents.
The agency says companies were blocked because they couldn’t show the possible benefits for adult smokers outweighed the risk of underage use. The companies say they had prepared detailed plans to avoid appealing to young people.
The companies scored a victory when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with vaping companies and tossed out orders denying the marketing of e-liquids with names like “Jimmy The Juice Man in Peachy Strawberry.”
The 5th Circuit found the agency was unfair because it required the companies, without warning, to present studies showing that flavored products would help with smoking cessation.
The FDA appealed that finding to the Supreme Court. The justices are expecting to hear the case in the fall.
Other appeals courts have sided with the FDA, which regulates new tobacco products under a 2009 law aimed at curbing youth tobacco use.
Vaping companies have long claimed their products can help blunt the toll of smoking, which is blamed for 480,000 U.S. deaths annually due to cancer, lung disease and heart disease.
Youth vaping has declined from all-time highs in recent years, but about 10% of high schoolers still reported e-cigarette use last year.
https://www.voanews.com/a/supreme-court-to-weigh-in-on-flavored-e-cigarette-products/7682165.html
Report: New “Google AI” features will debut with the Pixel 9 including an image generator and screenshot index & search tool
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
Google already offers a bunch of optional AI features for its Pixel smartphones including Circle to Search, and a bunch of photography tools, and “Magic Eraser” and “Magic Editor” tools in Google Photos. But Android Authority has obtained some leaked screenshots suggesting that Google is preparing to launch even more AI features for Pixel smartphones. Grouped […]
The post Report: New “Google AI” features will debut with the Pixel 9 including an image generator and screenshot index & search tool appeared first on Liliputing.
Where’s the toughest place to find an apartment in California?
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Silicon Valley ranks as the hardest. Western Los Angeles County the easiest.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/02/wheres-the-toughest-place-to-find-an-apartment-in-california/
Big Fremont apartment complex lands buyer in $100 million-plus deal
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
A big apartment complex in Fremont has been bought for well over $100 million.
Back from the Edge
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
An animal lover’s faithful work to overcome dog behavior problems.
The post Back from the Edge appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/back-from-the-edge/
FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Anniversary time and both are going strong into their 30s
The FreeDOS project celebrates its 1994 beginnings, about a week before Amazon – and just a year after FreeBSD got started.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/freedos_30_freebsd_31/
International students see opportunity at Colorado State University
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
The Western U.S. state of Colorado is a popular destination for international students. Colorado State University in Fort Collins is one of the state’s largest. Svitlana Prystynska takes a look at what draws so many students from other countries. Videographer: Volodymyr Petruniv
Sun family returns to Los Gatos after yearlong world tour
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Travels took them to 21 countries on 4 continents.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/02/sun-family-returns-to-los-gatos-after-yearlong-world-tour/
Intense Bay Area heat to crank up even more, and it may last longer than anticipated
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
PG&E began public safety power shutdowns in eight California counties on Tuesday.
‘Strong possibility of violence’: Documents shed some light on Cal Poly Humboldt protests, police response
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
In what could be the largest show of police force in Arcata for a generation, documents shared by the Appeal and published this week shed some light on the plan to break up the occupation of Siemens Hall on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus with hundreds of police.
ACEMAGIC X1 laptop has a second screen that rotates for use in dual-screen or tablet modes
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
The ACEMAGIC X1 is a Windows laptop with a 12th-gen Intel i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an unusual dual-screen design that lets you use the laptop in several different ways. The notebook’s primary display is a 14 inch FHD screen. But there’s also a second 14 inch FHD display connected to the first with a […]
The post ACEMAGIC X1 laptop has a second screen that rotates for use in dual-screen or tablet modes appeared first on Liliputing.
Authorities Identify Juan Lopez as the Victim of the Fatal Hit-and-Run Incident on Mesa in Santa Barbara, Suspect Remains At Large
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Juan Lopez, 39, was killed by an unknown suspect in a hit-and-run on June 29 on the 800 block of Cliff Drive.
The post Authorities Identify Juan Lopez as the Victim of the Fatal Hit-and-Run Incident on Mesa in Santa Barbara, Suspect Remains At Large appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Juveniles reportedly throwing hot dogs, rocks at passing cars in Los Gatos
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Four separate incidents reported.
Labor Department to propose first-ever heat protections for worker
date: 2024-07-02, from: Marketplace Morning Report
More than 60 million Americans are facing a potentially record-breaking heat wave across the South and Western U.S. this week. Still, people will be showing up to work on farms, construction sites and other workplaces where extreme heat exposure is a threat. Now, the Labor Department is proposing new safety standards. Also: a conversation with James LeBrecht, co-director of the film “Crip Camp” about accessibility in the film industry.
Figma Disables AI App Design Tool After It Copied Apple’s Weather App
date: 2024-07-02, from: 404 Media Group
“Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline,” Figma’s CEO said.
https://www.404media.co/figma-disables-ai-app-design-tool-after-it-copied-apples-weather-app/
New immigrants change southern Florida ambience
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
Just south of the Florida mainland lies a string of islands called the Florida Keys. The southernmost tip is Key West. Its location makes it a natural first stop — and eventual home — for migrants, especially those fleeing Haiti and Cuba. VOA’s Senior Washington Correspondent Carolyn Presutti takes a look at who’s settling there and how it’s changing the look and feel of Key West. VOA footage and video editing by Mary Cieslak.
https://www.voanews.com/a/new-immigrants-change-southern-florida-ambience/7682093.html
LogOn: New test will be game changer in tuberculosis diagnostics
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
UCLA molecular bioengineer Mireille Kamariza has developed a new tuberculosis test that tackles shortcomings of existing TB diagnostics. VOA’s Genia Dulot reports for this week’s episode of LogOn.
NASA Shares Use Requirements with Commercial Destination Partners
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
NASA hosted a meeting to share knowledge with companies developing future commercial destinations at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The discussion could aid in developing safe, reliable, innovative, and cost-effective space stations. Industry representatives from more than 20 companies attended. The program focused on NASA’s planned use of commercial destinations, draft utilization requirements, […]
NASA’s Webb Captures Celestial Fireworks Around Forming Star
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
The colors within this mid-infrared image reveal details about the central protostar’s behavior. The cosmos seems to come alive with a crackling explosion of pyrotechnics in this new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Taken with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), this fiery hourglass marks the scene of a very young object in the process […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-captures-celestial-fireworks-around-forming-star/
With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits
date: 2024-07-02, from: Quanta Magazine
After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer programs can get.The post With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Road repairs estimated at $3 million after Santa Cruz Mountains landslide
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Residents near slide area get bleak status report.
Things Have Got to Change
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
There is little doubt Joe Biden can still win, but things have got to change.
The post Things Have Got to Change appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/things-have-got-to-change/
Short-Term Rental, Indeed
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Short-term vacation rentals are a separate animal from owner-occupied vacation rentals.
The post Short-Term Rental, Indeed appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/short-term-rental-indeed/
Repair cafe at Saratoga Library helps divert trash from landfills
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
For Saratoga residents with broken toasters, bicycles, blenders and other household items, a new panacea awaits: the Saratoga Library’s repair cafe.
Affirm fears customer info pilfered during ransomware raid at Evolve Bank
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Number of partners acknowledging data theft continues to rise
The number of financial institutions caught up in the ransomware attack on Evolve Bank & Trust continues to rise as fintech businesses Wise and Affirm both confirm they have been materially affected.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/affirm_evolve_ransomware_breach/
Showers Ahead
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I appreciated the retelling of the story of Lillian Child and how she welcomed people to build little houses on her land 100 years ago.
The post Showers Ahead appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/showers-ahead/
fnec ece commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
Your thinking incorrect; HotKeys module is not for oberon subsystem usage, just for A2.
I think you are using latest UnixAos version Rev. 10272 by Günther. In that distribution, "SystemTools" module name is not changed by "System" in HotKeys.XML file, so,
- Replace all occurences of "SystemTools" module name with "System" module name in HotKeys.XML file, there are 3 of them.
After then, KbdMouse module will forvard the key messages to oberon subsystem as it understands.
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_192892
No fireworks? No problem: Bay Area cities host Fourth of July drone shows
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
These mini unmanned aircrafts are fitted with LED lights and can create a variety of patterns, shapes and animations in the sky.
Fiverr Freelancers Offer to Dox Anyone With Powerful U.S. Data Tool
date: 2024-07-02, from: 404 Media Group
Dozens of Fiverr sellers are advertising access to TLOxp, a potent data surveillance tool sold by credit bureau TransUnion.
https://www.404media.co/fiverr-freelancers-offer-to-dox-anyone-with-powerful-u-s-data-tool-tloxp/
Bente Eegholm: Ensuring Space Telescopes Have Stellar Vision
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Bente Eegholm is an optical engineer working to ensure missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope have stellar vision. When it launches by May 2027, the Roman mission will shed light on many astrophysics topics, like dark energy, which are currently shrouded in mystery. Bente’s past work has included Earth-observing missions and the James […]
Kassidy Beattie | Duty, Respect and Clarity
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
I am writing to express my heartfelt appreciation for the recent article published on May 26, about the Memorial Day veteran flag placement at Eternal Valley. The article beautifully captured […]
The post Kassidy Beattie | Duty, Respect and Clarity appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/kassidy-beattie-duty-respect-and-clarity/
Dan Walters | Homelessness Lingering Under Newsom
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
Homelessness is the political albatross hanging around Gavin Newsom’s neck, something that’s plagued him not only as governor but even earlier during his stint as mayor of San Francisco. He […]
The post Dan Walters | Homelessness Lingering Under Newsom appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/dan-walters-homelessness-lingering-under-newsom/
Christine Flowers | Demonizing Our Blue Collar Values
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
By the time I knew what the term “blue collar” meant, I wasn’t. I come from a long line of blue-collar people, proud Italians and Irish who were carpenters and […]
The post Christine Flowers | Demonizing Our Blue Collar Values appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/christine-flowers-demonizing-our-blue-collar-values/
Cindy Josten | Too Much Made of Pride
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
The following is a summary of comments delivered during the June 25 Santa Clarita City Council meeting: I respect each one of you sitting on this council and I know […]
The post Cindy Josten | Too Much Made of Pride appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/cindy-josten-too-much-made-of-pride/
Nintendo sues alleged Switch pirate pair for serious coin
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And if court finds for gaming giant? It’s-a me! Bankruptcy!
Mario has tossed blue shells at what Nintendo alleges are two figures deeply involved in the piracy and circumvention of the Switch console ecosystem.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/nintendo_piracy_lawsuits/
NASA Stennis Achieves Primary Success for Historic In-Space Mission
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Stennis Space Center and partner Sidus Space Inc. announced primary mission success July 2 for the center’s historic in-space mission – an autonomous systems payload aboard an orbiting satellite. “Our ASTRA (Autonomous Satellite Technology for Resilient Applications) payload is active and operational,” NASA Stennis Center Director John Bailey said. “This is an incredible achievement […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/success-for-historic-in-space-mission/
Mission Success: HERA Crew Successfully Completes 45-Day Simulated Journey to Mars
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Four dedicated explorers—Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro, Shareef Al Romaithi, and Piyumi Wijesekara—just returned from a 45-day simulated journey to Mars, testing the boundaries of human endurance and teamwork within NASA’s HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Their groundbreaking work on HERA’s Campaign 7 Mission 2 contributes to NASA’s efforts to […]
Biden’s LNG Permitting Pause Is No More
date: 2024-07-02, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Raging wildfires are forcing evacuations on several Greek islands • More rain is forecast for China’s sodden rice growing regions • Temperatures in Death Valley could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit early next week.
THE TOP FIVE
- Judge blocks Biden’s LNG permitting pause
A federal court last night blocked President Biden’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export terminals. The administration issued a temporary moratorium on new LNG approvals in January, allowing the Energy Department to study what effect terminals have on the climate, a move seen as a big win for climate activists. But it was quickly followed by a lawsuit from 16 states accusing the administration of violating federal law. A Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana agreed that the pause was hurting states, and said it was “completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy [sic].” The Energy Department disagreed with the ruling and is considering its next steps. Some early reaction and analysis to the news:
- “The ruling represents the latest example of how the judiciary is increasingly constraining President Biden’s climate goals at the behest of conservative and corporate challengers.” –Maxine Joselow at The Washington Post.
- A “major victory for American energy.” –Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.
- “We remain committed to informing our decisions with the best available economic and environmental analysis, underpinned by sound science.” –White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández.
- “Although the court order immediately enjoins the pause, the short-term practical effects are likely to be minimal.” –Jennifer A. Dlouhy at Bloomberg News.
- Hurricane Beryl gains strength and aims for Jamaica
Hurricane Beryl has strengthened into a monster category 5 storm, the earliest storm of that magnitude ever to form in the Atlantic in recorded history. The system slammed into Grenada’s Carriacou Island, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines, leaving catastrophic damage in its wake. “In half an hour, Carriacou was flattened,” Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said. The National Hurricane Center said the storm had maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour and was “still intensifying” this morning as it headed toward Jamaica. “Hurricane Beryl could never have formed where and when it did were it not for the unprecedented heat in the Atlantic Ocean,” wrote Jake Bittle at Grist, noting that surface temperatures are as much as 3 or 4 degrees Fahrenheit above average.
- Analysts expect Q2 drop in Tesla deliveries
Tesla is expected to report Q2 deliveries today. Analysts think the EV maker will show a 6% drop in deliveries compared to the same period last year, marking the second declining quarter in a row. The company has “few excuses for its sales slowdown,” wrote Dana Hull and Kara Carlson at Bloomberg. The problem is straightforward, they added: “Tesla’s older lineup of vehicles is having a harder time keeping up with fresher offerings from rival EV manufacturers.”
Meanwhile, Chinese EV powerhouse BYD just reported its highest ever monthly sales of new energy vehicles, and a 21% rise in EV sales for the second quarter. The total number of vehicles sold (426,039) is about 12,000 short of what is expected from Tesla, but the gap is closing.
- Biden administration proposes federal rules to protect workers from
heat
The Biden administration today put forward a proposal to “establish the nation’s first-ever federal safety standard addressing excessive heat in the workplace.” The rules would require employers to identify heat hazards, have response plans for heat illness and heat emergencies, and provide access to shade, water, and rest breaks. New workers would also need to be acclimatized to higher temperatures. A White House official told The Associated Press that we’d see more penalties for heat-related violations in workplaces. If finalized, the rule would apply to about 36 million workers and reduce heat-related health problems in the workplace significantly. The plan is “likely to face legal challenges from businesses and lobbying groups that have staunchly opposed such a measure,” The Guardian reported.
Also today, the EPA will publish a new report outlining how climate change continues to affect the U.S., so be on the lookout for that.
- ITER fusion project completes its magnet system
An international fusion mega-project long in the making has received a delivery of 19 massive, 56-foot-tall magnets that are essential for controlling and confining the reactions that will take place inside its tokamak. Here is a rendering of the magnets surrounding the tokamak (human for scale!):
ITER
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, which is under construction in southern France, will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility once completed. It is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power, which is the process by which stars produce energy and, if harnessed on Earth, could provide abundant clean energy. While the delivery of the magnets is a big step, the ITER project is struggling with delays and mounting costs. Its first fusion reaction was slated to happen next year but that timeline was recently pushed back by 10 years to 2035. Another large fusion reactor called JT-60SA fired up last October in Japan.
THE KICKER
A new bill set to be signed into law in Michigan will prohibit the state’s homeowners’ associations from banning projects that improve a home’s energy efficiency, like rooftop solar or EV chargers.
https://heatmap.news/politics/lng-pause-biden-judge-block
‘Kitten season’ sounds cute, but it’s one of the toughest times for LA’s cat crusaders
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The LAist
Summer is one of the most difficult times for volunteers working to save cats and kittens on Los Angeles streets. There are ways you can help.
https://laist.com/kitten-season-sounds-cute-but-its-one-of-the-toughest-times-for-las-cat-crusaders
California voters will decide an anti-crime measure in November. Democrats say this one is better
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The LAist
The Democrats’ proposal calls for a new felony for drug dealers who cut fentanyl into other drugs and for increased penalties for repeat thieves.
Podcast: It Shipped that Way (v2!)
date: 2024-07-02, from: Accidentally in Code
Returned to the It Shipped That Way podcast to talk about my book.
https://cate.blog/2024/07/02/podcast-it-shipped-that-way-v2/
Salesforce investors reject plan to add extra $20M to Benioff’s total pay
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Board to take non-binding vote at mega SaaS haus into consideration
Investors have turned down billionaire Marc Benioff’s bid for greater compensation from Salesforce, the SaaS company he helped found 25 years ago, a proxy statement filed on Monday reveals.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/salesforce_benioff_20m/
There’s a new economic indicator in town. And it’s powered by AI.
date: 2024-07-02, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Standard economic indicators like the unemployment and inflation rates are backward-looking. Now, a new tool, the Zeta Economic Indicator, analyzes the economy in real time and utilizes artificial intelligence. We’ll hear more. Plus, regulators in France are set to level antitrust charges against chipmaker Nvidia, and the EU says a Meta subscription service violates Europe’s Digital Markets Act. Then, is paying farmers to conserve Colorado River water worth the cost?
Will Sri Lanka debt deal solve its economic woes?
date: 2024-07-02, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Sri Lanka’s President Ranil Wickremesinghe is presenting lawmakers with a deal made by creditors after the country’s 2022 financial crisis, but the government is facing criticism over the agreement. Also: Samsung workers in South Korea are planning a strike. Then, David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly — the maker of popular weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound — says more needs to be done on global drug counterfeiting.
Biden says US leaders will be ‘free to ignore the law’ after Supreme Court decision
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Hurricane Beryl eyes Jamaica, strengthens into Category 5 storm.
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/30/hurricane-beryl-category-4-barbados-islands
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
“I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ta shoh scansh mie, son ymmyd
Google is adding more languages to Google Translate – lots more. This time around, 110 of them, including Manx.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/google_translate_expansion/
How tech went from free love to pay-per-day
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-03, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
FOSS, AI, blockchain, and the cycle of empty nonsense
Devconf.cz This year, along with all the usual in-depth technical talks about Linux at Red Hat’s Devconf.cz developer conference, there were also several people there to promote AI-linked projects and the tech bros’ previous favorites – blockchain projects.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/foss_ai_blockchain/
Get started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico with our latest book
date: 2024-07-02, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Our book, Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico, has been revised with coverage of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and more.
The post Get started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico with our latest book appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/get-started-micropython-pico-new-book/
MIT’s bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Researchers expect treatment to be available clinically in around 5 years
Researchers have shown a combination of special surgery and a bionic limb can enhance walking speed in some amputees by 40 percent, within the range of able-bodied individuals.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/bionic_leg_interface_mit/
Sols 4232-4233: Going For a Ride, Anyone?
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, July 1, 2024 Have you ever wondered what it might look like to ride along with the rover? Probably not as much as we have here on the planning team, where we are looking at the images on a daily basis. I always wish I could walk around there myself, or […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4232-4233-going-for-a-ride-anyone/
‘Almost every Apple device’ vulnerable to CocoaPods supply chain attack
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Dependency manager used in millions of apps leaves a bitter taste
CocoaPods, an open-source dependency manager used in over three million applications coded in Swift and Objective-C, left thousands of packages exposed and ready for takeover for nearly a decade – thereby creating opportunities for supply chain attacks on iOS and macOS apps, according to security researchers.…
Shared reality
date: 2024-07-02, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>Online interactions are weirdly unique. They happen in shared, digital spaces—forums, chats, comment sections, social media platforms—where it’s easy to forget that more often than not, the people interacting with each other don’t share the same day-to-day reality. And sometimes that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of topics we can chat about that don’t have a connection with our lives. But there are also plenty who do have a connection and a profound one. From food to politics, from everything related to society to cultural norms. We all live in bubbles whether we like it or not. And it’s easy to forget about this fact when interacting online. Every time I stumble on someone making some wild claims about something I have to remind myself that maybe that specific thing appears wild to me because of my circumstances and it might be perfectly normal and reasonable somewhere else. And that’s why when I’m interacting with someone online I try to be both charitable in my interpretations of what others are saying and also generally curious and open-minded. Sometimes asking a question is all it takes to make a bubble pop and help a conversation move to a more interesting place.</p> <hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
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https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/Eny0wqSO82gDriSS
LASD Seeks Public’s Help Locating Man Missing from Canyon Country
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Missing Persons Unit investigators are asking for the public’s help locating At Risk Missing Person Tim Paul Hood
https://scvnews.com/lasd-seeks-publics-help-locating-man-missing-from-canyon-country/
Today in SCV History (July 2)
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1869 – Sanford Lyon (as in Lyons Avenue) appointed postmaster of Petroliopolis (today’s Eternal Valley Cemetery area) [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-2/
Austin hosts Ukraine’s defense chief ahead of NATO summit
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/austin-hosts-ukraine-s-defense-chief-ahead-of-nato-summit/7681786.html
Trouble in space as Boeing’s not going, and China’s back from the Moon
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vultures chew over a busy few days in orbit with a transatlantic chat
Kettle It’s been a busy time for space, with Boeing’s test pilots stuck (at time of writing) on the International Space Station due to a faulty capsule, and then being forced to take shelter from debris.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/kettle_iss_boeing/
Hello Auto Group Launches Annual Back-to-School Backpack Drive
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Hello Auto Group has announced its third annual Back-to-School Backpack Drive. This year, the Hellow Auto Group will partner with three Santa Clarita Valley school districts, Sulphur Springs Union School District, Newhall School District and Castaic Union School District, t support students preparing for the upcoming school year.
https://scvnews.com/hello-auto-group-launches-annual-back-to-school-backpack-drive/
Baddies hijack Korean ERP vendor’s update systems to spew malware
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Notorious ‘Andariel’ crew takes a bite of HotCroissant backdoor for fresh attack
A South Korean ERP vendor’s product update server has been attacked and used to deliver malware instead of product updates, according to local infosec outfit AhnLab.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/korean_erp_backdoor_malware_attack/
Dev Digest 122 – Cracks in the polyfill
date: 2024-07-02, from: Chris Heilmann
Hello and join me to learn about removing malicious code, what the web is up to and why there are some cool new careers in AI. News and articles First things first: if you use Polyfill.io delete it immediately from your server! The – by now pretty unnecessary library – has been acquired and is […]
https://christianheilmann.com/2024/07/02/dev-digest-122-cracks-in-the-polyfill/
China working on standard for brain-computer interfaces
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
This is more than a thought bubble: Beijing aspires to dominate international standards
China’s government wants to develop a standard for brain-computer interfaces.…
US, Panama partnering to address Darien Gap migration
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-panama-partnering-to-address-darien-gap-migration/7681748.html
When Lying, Cheating, Thieves Prevail
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Supreme Court’s political bias reached a crescendo with today’s absurd ruling.
The post When Lying, Cheating, Thieves Prevail appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/when-lying-cheating-thieves-prevail/
Like Uber, but for rainy days: Japan eases its ridesharing restrictions
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Nation turns once again to technology to help with declining population
Japan has loosened its ride-sharing rules to allow more passengers to use the services when it rains.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/japan_lets_more_ridehailing_vehicles/
Trump seeks to set aside New York verdict hours after Supreme Court ruling
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
New York — Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked the New York judge who presided over his hush money trial to set aside his conviction and delay his sentencing scheduled for later this month.
The letter to Judge Juan M. Merchan cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier Monday and asked the judge to delay Trump’s sentencing while he weighs the high court’s decision and how it could influence the New York case, the people said.
The people could not discuss details of the letter before it was made public and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.
Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, arising from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a hush money payment just before the 2016 presidential election.
Merchan instituted a policy in the run-up to the trial requiring both sides to send him a one-page letter summarizing their arguments before making longer court filings. He said he did that to better manage the docket, so he was not inundated with voluminous paperwork.
YouTube confirms it’ll pull AI fakes in 48 hours if a complaint’s upheld
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As ever, terms and conditions apply
YouTube has enacted privacy guidelines that allow people to request the removal of AI-generated videos that mimic them.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/youtube_deepfake_privacy_rules/
Deepening Russia-North Korea ties test US-South Korea deterrence strategy
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
washington — The United States’ commitment to providing extended deterrence to South Korea is being put to the test, with some South Korean politicians publicly questioning the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear umbrella after Russia and North Korea reached a new defense pact.
Debate over the U.S. extended deterrence was sparked by Representative Na Kyung Won, a five-term lawmaker of South Korea’s ruling People Power Party, who is running for the party leadership.
“The deterrence under the solid South Korea-U.S. alliance is currently working, but it does not guarantee the capacity to respond to the future changes in the security environment,” Na said in a social media post last week.
“The international situation, such as cooperation between North Korea and Russia, is adding uncertainty to the security of South Korea,” she added, referring to the stronger military ties between Russia and North Korea, bolstered by the comprehensive strategic partnership treaty signed by Russia’s President Vladmir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang last month.
The new treaty mandates Russia and North Korea to immediately assist each other militarily if either of them is attacked by a third country. The prospect of quasi-automatic Russian involvement in any future war between the two Koreas is now causing alarm in Seoul.
The credibility of extended deterrence is a frequent topic of conversation in today’s South Korea, where citizens must contend with seemingly endless threats and provocations from the North.
Seoul is doing its best to allay citizens’ fears by invoking the April 2023 Washington Declaration, which reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea through its extended nuclear umbrella as well as robust missile defense and conventional forces.
The Washington Declaration outlined a series of measures, including the establishment of the bilateral Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG), to deter North Korea’s use of nuclear weapons.
In the joint declaration, the U.S. additionally vowed to enhance the visibility of its strategic assets, such as a nuclear-armed submarine, around the Korean Peninsula.
The Washington Declaration’s measures are collectively sufficient to deter aggression from Pyongyang, according to some experts in the U.S.
The joint declaration was “unprecedented in its strength and clarity,” Evans Revere, a former State Department official who negotiated with North Korea, told VOA’s Korean Service on Sunday. “And the NCG process is designed to be flexible, creative, and allow for adaptation to a broad range of future contingencies.”
Troop presence
David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel who served on the Combined Forces Command of the U.S and South Korea, told VOA’s Korean Service on Sunday that a large troop presence on the Korean Peninsula demonstrates Washington’s firm commitment to the defense of its key ally.
“How many Russian troops are committed to North Korea? There is no comparison as to the commitment,” said Maxwell, who now serves as vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.
Currently, the U.S. has about 28,500 service members deployed in South Korea.
In contrast, Elbridge Colby, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development in the Trump administration, suggested the U.S. might have to go beyond the Washington Declaration to ensure the security of South Korea.
“I think we need to take very seriously how dire the threat from North Korea is, and that the Washington Declaration is not a solution,” Colby told VOA’s Korean Service on the phone last week.
“It’s been a failure that both North Korea and China are a nuclear breakout. They’re increasing the size and the sophistication of the nuclear forces. So it’s very unsurprising that serious people in South Korea are coming to this conclusion.”
Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, believes some South Koreans may lack confidence in the Washington Declaration because the NCG’s work is not made public.
“Because the NCG that it established has carried out most of its work in secrecy and provided little substance to reassure the South Korean people, many of the South Koreans with whom I have spoken are concerned that it is an inadequate means for rebuilding South Korean trust,” Bennett told VOA’s Korean Service on Sunday.
Responding to an inquiry from VOA’s Korean Service, a State Department spokesperson said Thursday that “the U.S. and the ROK are enhancing and strengthening extended deterrence through the Nuclear Consultative Group, established as part of the Washington Declaration.”
The spokesperson also stressed that the Washington Declaration is “a landmark U.S. extended deterrence commitment to the Republic of Korea.” The Republic of Korea is South Korea’s official name.
Earlier last week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell maintained that the series of mechanisms put in place between the United States and South Korea through the Washington Declaration “has given us what we need to work with” regarding the alliance’s deterrence posture.
North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles Monday, one of which is presumed to have failed and fallen inland near Pyongyang. The latest missile test came just five days after North Korea conducted a ballistic missile test in which it claimed to have successfully tested its multiple-warhead missile technology. South Korean authorities have dismissed such a claim.
Eunjung Cho contributed to this report.
Castaic district’s budget gets OK with full transportation
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
The Castaic Union School District governing board approved a budget for the 2024-25 school year that includes an operating transportation department that should allow for the same routes to be […]
The post Castaic district’s budget gets OK with full transportation appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/castaic-districts-budget-gets-ok-with-full-transportation/
Excessive heat warning for SCV set to run through the weekend
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
Officials are warning of excessive heat coming to the Santa Clarita Valley in the near future, with temperatures near or in excess of 105 degrees expected over the weekend. According […]
The post Excessive heat warning for SCV set to run through the weekend appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/excessive-heat-warning-for-scv-set-to-run-through-the-weekend/
CSUN Students Find Stable Living Situations Through CREA Scholarship
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As a high schooler, Angelina Zuniga Kramer accompanied her stepfather to construction sites where he worked, and it inspired her to dream big
https://scvnews.com/csun-students-find-stable-living-situations-through-crea-scholarship/
Prognosis: Improving
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I saw a perfect example of what Robert Taylor’s refreshing article (pun intended) was talking about at the Summer Solstice parade.
The post Prognosis: Improving appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/prognosis-improving/
Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Matters like antitrust cases against AI players, Adobe’s subscription mess, and net neutrality could be decided by judges – not experts
Analysis The US Supreme Court has ruled that the judges should no longer defer to government agency interpretations of ambiguous laws – a decision with potential ramifications for some of the biggest cases against tech companies.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/supreme_court_chevron/
Crossmark community consultation: What did we learn?
date: 2024-07-02, from: Crossref Blog
In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the resesarch they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo. They also see useful information about the editorial process, and links to things like funding and registered clinical trials. All of this contributes to what we call the integrity of the scholarly record.
Crossmark has been around a long time and the context around it is constantly changing. It last had a major update in 2016 and in 2020 we removed fees for its use.
The past few years have seen a more intense focus on research integrity, leading to more retractions and calling out large-scale manipulation of editorial processes. At the same time, we haven’t seen an increase in the uptake of Crossmark, which is still used by only a minority of our members. We would like to know why the uptake is low and whether there is more we can do in this area. To dig into this, in the first part of 2024 we reached out to members of our community.
What did we do?
We wanted to learn about attitudes towards Crossmark and related aspects of research integrity. This was done in several ways:
- Structured interviews with eight of our members.
- Round tables at Crossref LIVE events in Bogota and Nairobi
- Surveying a selection of our members, which led to 94 responses.
The topics we asked about were related to how post-publication updates are made and communicated, and which metadata demonstrates good practice.
We are extremely grateful to the members who contributed. They provided valuable feedback and have helped to shape the future of Crossmark and our approach to the integrity of the scholarly record.
What did we find?
Across the various groups there were a few common themes, which fell into several areas.
-
Communication of updates is highly valued, and seen as the most important role that Crossmark can play. Some of those we spoke to would like readers to see if there is an update as soon as a page opens, without having to open a popup. This could be done by having a logo that changes colour, shape, or size.
-
Conversely, not as much enthusiasm was shown for the metadata assertions. These are additional fields that can be displayed to readers in the Crossmark popup. There wasn’t a strong consensus on which commonly-made assertions are the most important for research integrity.
-
There is diversity in attitudes towards making updates to published works, what research integrity means, and approaches to workflows for updates. Even within a single organisation, a number of different workflows and multiple staff members might be called on to update published research. This makes things complex and means that it can be difficult to fit Crossmark in.
-
There are technical challenges to getting started with Crossmark. Those responsible for implementing Crossmark are often technical staff who struggle with the documentation we provide in English. There is also no plugin for OJS, a widely-used open source editorial software. It is more difficult to deposit Crossmark metadata for books than journal articles, and many article types don’t permit Crossmark metadata at all. On the other hand, those who successfully installed Crossmark found it easy to use and low-maintenance.
Overall, it seems that Crossmark still has an important role to play but there are changes and improvements we can make.
What’s next?
Here are the main areas we intend to follow up on in the coming months.
Implementation
We need to look at how to make implementation more straight-forward. Can we provide multilingual documentation, plugins, run workshops or webinars, or make changes to Crossmark to lower the barrier to entry?
Understanding workflows
Can we collaborate with our members and other organisations to reach a better understanding of how to update published works? Are there alternative workflows we need to support? Have we made it too difficult to understand and implement the options we currently have?
While updates are always likely to be rare, we want to help members understand the benefits of making them. We talked to some members who were proud of never having published a retraction or correction, which left us wondering whether they are missing legitimate opportunities to correct the scholarly record. We also know that for some members and many work types (preprints, for example), updates are made without a separate published notification. Can we better understand the role that the published updates play and communicate updates even if there isn’t a published notice?
Ongoing feedback
Clearly one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to implementing and communicating updates. We need to find ways of keeping in touch with the community to test new solutions with as broad a range of members as possible. We want to avoid catering to a minority and leaving others struggling to find ways to implement a solution.
Custom metadata?
Is there an ongoing need for metadata assertions? Many of the assertions currently made are possible as standard metadata and others could be included in our deposit schema. We want to consider removing the option to add assertions. This needs more feedback from the community, especially those who currently make use of assertions.
Redesign the UI
Crossmark doesn’t have the recognition with readers we would like. Is there a way we can redesign it to make it more associated with Crossref and accurate metadata? We intend to explore different designs, and test them with members and readers.
https://www.crossref.org/blog/crossmark-community-consultation-what-did-we-learn/