To
Fix CrowdStrike Blue Screen of Death Simply Reboot 15 Straight Times,
Microsoft Says
date: 2024-07-19, from: 404 Media Group
The advice, which is specifically for virtual machines using Azure,
shows that sometimes the solution to a catastrophic failure is turn it
off and on again. And again.
Student
loan payments will be paused for 8 million borrowers after
Republican-led states sue to stop President Biden’s repayment plan
date: 2024-07-19, from: San Jose Mercury News
Reducing student loan debt has been a priority for the Biden
administration and the SAVE plan is one of the most significant policy
changes it has made.
A few days ago I wondered aloud, “What would happen if Google
CEO Sundar Pichai decided to sign up for Google Cloud using a secret
identity, without getting help from any of his staff?” I added, “Every
single CEO should try to use their service as if they were a new
customer that the company is going to try and win over. That alone …
Angry
admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
CrowdStrike? More like Clownstrike! Amirite?
IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from
the faulty CrowdStrike update. One spoke to The Register to share
what it is like at the coalface.…
Bay
Area arts leader on how her parents’ Chinese restaurant became a
community institution
date: 2024-07-19, from: San Jose Mercury News
Debbie Chinn wanted her memoir about her Chinese family and their
beloved Long Island restaurant to show that ‘immigrants really do
wonderful things for this country.’
Icon
bar’s cloak of invisibility improved in Pinboard 2.05
date: 2024-07-19, from: RiscOS Story
A new version of Pinboard 2 has been released by RISC OS
Developments. The software is a replacement for the standard ‘Pinboard’
supplied with the operating system – the component that looks after the
desktop background, allowing backdrops to be displayed, icons to be
pinned to it to save navigating to the relevant files or applications
using the filer, and so on – and provides quite a number of new features
that make it a worthy replacement. For example, as well as pinning icons
to the desktop, Pinboard 2 allows…
KPDFUtil is an application from Kevin Wells that provides a front-end
to the facilities found in PDFUtils, itself a set of command line
utilities for getting information about PDF documents, and performing
actions on them such as extracting individual pages, converting them to
HTML, and so on. Kevin’s application presents a main window with the
various possible actions in a series of buttons, and version 1.06 adds a
menu over the main window as another method of accessing those actions.
If you find any of Kevin’s software, why not consider…
Oakland
distributing free debit cards to low-income residents in need of public
transportation
date: 2024-07-19, from: San Jose Mercury News
The cards are loaded with $160 that can be transferred to a Clipper
card and used on BART, AC Transit, BayWheels bike share, Lime and
VeoRide E-scooters, Amtrak and other forms of public transit.
University
of California regents ban political statements on university online
homepages
date: 2024-07-19, from: San Jose Mercury News
The University of California Board of Regents voted Thursday to ban
employees from posting political statements on the homepages of
university websites, saying such comments could be interpreted as the
university system’s official view.
Current conditions: A raging wildfire disrupted
traffic at Turkey’s Izmir airport • The North Central Plains are on
alert for severe thunderstorms • It’s about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and
sunny in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where President Biden is
self-isolating with COVID.
THE TOP FIVE
Climate groups ‘split’ on Biden’s 2024 decision
With reports swirling that President Biden is likely to announce his
departure from the 2024 presidential race this weekend, Reuters
says that
climate
groups are “split” on the issue. The outlet contacted eight
environmental groups for their take on whether Biden should step aside.
Two (the Sunrise Movement and Climate Defiance) said yes. One (the
Sierra Club) said no. The others were undecided or didn’t want to
comment. “Joe Biden’s inability to campaign coherently and articulate an
alternative to the far right will result in lower turnout among
potential Democratic voters faced with a choice between two old white
men clinging to power,” said Evan Drukker-Schardl, an organizer with
Climate Defiance.
Most of U.S. will likely be hotter than normal next month
“If you like this summer’s heat, I have some good news for you,”
quipped
climatologist Brian Brettschneider after seeing the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s
monthly
temperature and precipitation outlook for August. It’s expected to
be hotter than normal across the vast majority of the contiguous United
States next month. That’s looking especially certain for the
north-central Rockies (Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah) and the Central
Applachians (West Virginia and the Carolinas). As for rain, it’ll likely
be dryer than normal out West, and wetter than normal in the Southeast.
NOAA
The more immediate
forecast
brings some relief from stifling heat in northeastern states, but the
western U.S. will bake this weekend and the Pacific Northwest could see
110 degrees by Sunday.
Another large chunk of the Vineyard Wind farm’s damaged turbine
broke
off and fell into the ocean yesterday. A blade sustained damage over
the weekend and foam and fiberglass debris has been washing up on
Nantucket beaches. Thursday’s incident involved “a significant part” of
what remained of the blade, Vineyard Wind said in
a
statement. The company
said
the blade had settled on the ocean floor. Vineyard’s CEO Klaus Moeller
found out about the new damage during a
particularly
tense meeting with outraged Nantucket community members, during
which he tried (but failed) to reassure them the debris is not toxic.
Cleanup crews are trying to collect the debris but “current weather
conditions create a difficult working environment.” Apparently this
isn’t the first time a turbine manufactured by GE Verona has broken
apart. There have been
reports
of similar incidents in the U.K., Germany, and Sweden in recent years.
Vineyard Wind has halted all operations while an investigation goes
ahead.
4. IEA report: Global electricity demand is soaring
Clean energy expansion needs to speed up to keep pace with the growing
demand for electricity, according to
a
mid-year electricity update from the International Energy Agency.
Key takeaways from the forecast:
Electricity demand will grow by 4% this year, up from
2.5% last year and the highest growth rate since 2007. Intense heat
waves, economic growth, and adoption of electric appliances and vehicles
are key contributors.
Renewables’ share of the global electricity supply mix will
reach 35% next year, up from 30% in 2023.
Solar power is the real workhorse, projected to meet 50% of the demand
growth through 2025.
Renewables will surpass coal next year for the first
time, but coal power won’t decline just yet because of soaring demand in
India (where electricity demand will surge by “a massive” 8% this year)
and China (where demand will be up 6%).
U.S. energy demand will grow by 3%. Power sector emissions in the States
are projected to grow this year, but decline next year.
Global electricity emissions will plateau through 2025.
Data centers need more reliable information regarding their electricity
consumption as artificial intelligence grows.
While we’re “heading fast towards an electric future,” said Dave Jones,
insight director at energy think tank Ember, “we need to be building
renewables at double speed, to make power sector emissions fall as fast
as they need to.”
IEA
U.K. jails 5 Just Stop Oil protesters
Five protesters from the climate activist group Just Stop Oil have been
jailed in the U.K. for blocking a major roadway in 2022. Four of them
were sentenced to four years, and one got five years. The judge in the
case said they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to
fanatic.” The sentences are thought to be the longest ever given in the
U.K. for non-violent protest, The Guardianreported.
The program director of Greenpeace slammed the decision, saying: “We’re
giving a free hand to the polluting elite robbing us of a habitable
planet while jailing those who’re trying to stop them – it makes no
sense.”
THE KICKER
Spending on EV charging infrastructure in the U.S. is
expected
to surpass $6 billion this year, which is double the investment seen
in 2023.
Second
NHS IT system confirmed to be affected by CrowdStrike issues
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Cancer treatments are in jeopardy across multiple healthcare facilities
A UK hospital is battling what it is calling a critical incident as the
ongoing global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike update is impacting its
Varian system.…
Donald Trump promised sweeping changes to tax policy and interest rates,
but would he really have the power to carry those out? Plus, why Silicon
Valley billionaires are suddenly flocking to the GOP, and a widespread
tech outage has disrupted businesses around the globe, including major
airlines.
<p>This is the 47th edition of <em>People and Blogs</em>, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Luke Harris and his blog, <a href="https://www.lkhrs.com">www.lkhrs.com</a></p>
Kev Quirk suggested Luke as a
potential guest way back in September, when this series was in its
infancy. I’m quite sure I stumbled on Luke’s site before that, though.
To follow this series subscribe to
the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every
Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the
interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the
RSS feed.
If you’re enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it
grow, consider supporting on
Ko-Fi.
Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
I’m Luke, I’m 29, and I live in Chicago with my partner and five cats. I
grew up in Austin, Texas. I was homeschooled—which was horrific—and
haven’t gone to college yet.
I’m in-between jobs at the moment; I’ve been looking for IT and web
development work. For the last eleven years I’ve been doing web design
on the side in addition to full-time jobs in electrical, HVAC, apartment
maintenance, logistics brokering, and healthcare IT. Web design and
working in tech was The Dream™ for a long time; with each new non-tech
job I kept telling myself it was just a brief interlude before I was
“discovered” and hired for a wonderful position doing what I love. But
experience and rejection slowly eroded the naivety away. I still love
this stuff but with how turbulent things have been in the industry these
last few years, I’ve been looking at what else I can do for a career
besides drawing rectangles and making logos bigger.
My hobbies include blogging (whoa), playing video games, reading books,
listening to music, and coding. Lately I’ve been playing Helldivers 2,
Diablo IV, and Rimworld. Learning Go has been an obsession for the last
year and I’ve been having fun building a form handler. The code is a
complete mess right now but a couple weeks ago I got it to take a form
submission and send me an email—which made me so excited that I haven’t
touched the project since.
What’s the story behind your blog?
My first blog was on Blogger in 2010. I frequented a number of forums at
the time and I saw other people had their blogs linked in their
signature, and I thought it was cool to have a spot all my own for
topics that didn’t fit the theme of those forums. Early posts centered
around the computer forum I started during that time.
In March 2011 I moved to WordPress and decided the previous posts
weren’t worth moving, and their teenage angst is lost to time.
Frustrated with WordPress, I moved over to Tumblr for a couple months
before pulling a 180 and moving right back to WordPress in June 2011. My
posts continued to revolve around running my forums—now multiple—and
random computer activities I was up to that day.
In 2013 I switched to Anchor CMS (RIP Charlotte). This is when the first
rendition of the cactus logo I use on my site showed up. I
loved the Markdown approach to blogging after fighting the
WordPress editor, but I wasn’t able to delete comments and I missed the
WordPress media gallery. Later that same year I moved to WordPress for
the third time. For the next couple of years I wrote about my solutions
to problems I encountered and my adventures in Elite: Dangerous.
2016 saw a decline in posts and the beginning of a 4-year hiatus from
blogging altogether. I met my partner that same year. Embarrassed by my
teenage self and uncertain how to market my web design services, I took
down the blog and switched my site to a resume-like Gatsby template.
I started things back up again in 2020 with the fourth return to
WordPress, this time embracing the Gutenberg editor and boasting about
how not-Jamstack my site was—out of exasperation with Gatsby’s build
times. But as usual at this point, my time on WordPress wouldn’t last
long and in 2021 I moved to Eleventy, followed by Hugo a few months
later.
For the first year after my return to blogging, I mainly wrote about web
development and tech. In 2022 I grew tired of this; I love those things
but they can be incredibly dry and I wanted to express myself more. I
started writing more about life and posted about
my trip to
purchase wiper blades, which became a reader favorite. I went back
and forth on whether to separate the tech posts or keep posting through
it, and ultimately decided it doesn’t matter. I write about what
interests me and let the people following my blog decide for themselves.
My blog also functioned as my portfolio, and I went back and forth on
this for years until I removed the portfolio and business parts for good
a couple years ago. I felt like trying to attract business on my
personal site limited what I could write about, and it was so freeing to
finally rip that stuff out.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
I consume an unhealthy amount of articles every day and a lot of my
inspiration comes from the excellent people who live in my RSS reader.
I’ll get an idea in my head and start writing to uncover more meaning
behind it—like sculpting but less cool. Sometimes I start with a good
title and then the rest flows out as I think through it in real time.
Other times I might be journaling my thoughts and a sentence will grow
into three paragraphs, a title will appear, and eventually the whole
mess finds its way into my blog. I try to publish posts the same day I
start them; my drafts folder is where posts go to die.
I research almost every post, which is a problem because I can get way
too into the research portion and kill my writing flow. Even the
personal posts will have me going through maps and photos to make sure
I’ve got the story and names straight. I keep reminding myself that I
don’t need to provide proof for absolutely everything.
On days or topics where I feel less confident I ask my partner to
proofread. I re-read what I write about 15-20 times and when the
frustration reaches a breaking point I switch to Sublime Merge, close my
eyes, hit the keys to stage/commit/push, and whisper a prayer to the
gods of blogging.
Once a post is published I have a habit of re-reading what I wrote 5–10
more times because the context switch from my editor to the
wild web tends to inspire additional changes. I consider this part an
unhealthy obsession and I’m working on not doing that and posting
carefree to the wind.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the
physical space influences your creativity?
My ideal creative environment is on an airplane mid-flight after they’ve
passed out the complimentary snacks and drinks that you can’t taste
because you’ve temporarily surfaced above nature’s tender embrace, and
in your newfound godhood your thoughts drift to thinking about how we
never should have left the trees all those years ago. Many posts have
started in the shower, where I’ll strike upon a turn of phrase that I
like and then do my darnedest to remember it when I’m dry enough to type
it out.
I can’t be airborne or in the shower perpetually, so I gladly settle for
my desk in the corner with a nice cup of coffee and one of five cats in
my lap. The physical space I’m in absolutely influences my creativity; I
struggle to think in loud environments with sounds I can’t tune out.
Noise-cancelling headphones help a lot. I find being unable to hear my
keystrokes to be incredibly helpful for staying in the trance-like state
of the zone while writing. I put on music that I’ve either heard a
bazillion times or with few lyrics. Lately my go-to has been Chicago
house inspired.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech
stack?
My blog is generated with Hugo and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The
domain is registered through Namecheap. My CMS is my operating system
and text editor, which can be a frustrating combination at times but it
works. I use Hugo’s archetypes feature to start a new post with the
front matter populated, and then Hugo opens it in iA Writer. Final edits
happen in Sublime Text.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do
anything differently?
There’s a lot I’d do with hindsight. For example, I had to switch my
domain from a .work to a .com TLD a few years ago because the .work TLD
made it onto a few widely-used corporate firewall blocklists years after
I registered mine, to the point where I couldn’t access my own website
in a coffee shop one day. While preventing potential employers and
coworkers from accessing my site could be a useful feature, I’d go with
a boring TLD from the start.
I would have separated my consulting from my personal site earlier. And
I would have kept my site as my main online presence, instead of dumping
words into various social media platforms for five minutes of fame. A
lot of those words and images are lost now.
I’d still switch up my tech stack with the season though. Part of me
enjoys creating problems for my future self.
Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does
it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some
revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?
Domains renewal: $28 USD/year
Cloudflare Pages: $0
Way back near the start I had banner ads, but they produced pennies a
year and looked terrible. I recently
set up a Ko-fi page and added the link to the bottom of my blog
posts, and a couple wonderful readers have funded domain renewals for
the next couple of years. And I’ve been hired by people who found me via
my blog—that counts, right?
I absolutely support monetizing personal blogs. Those recurring costs
add up and it’s another avenue for people to send you warm and fuzzy
feelings. But it should be tasteful. Am I running around town wearing
clothing plastered with ads for the latest VC-funded grift? (No, but
please reach out if that’s an option. People don’t need to know it’s
me). On the blog it’s different; my literal name and persona is wrapped
up in it. When I added banner ads it felt filthy, like I sold my soul to
the company with the largest fraction of a penny on AdSense. It would
take a large—not small—dump truck load of pennies to make me consider
doing that again. The sponsored article people have tried hard, but
every time I ask for the load of zinc measured in cubic yards,
negotiations fall through.
I encourage a cautious, almost hesitant approach. Monetization should be
an afterthought, not the primary goal.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out?
And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
I recommend checking out each of these blogs and interviewing their
wonderful owners. A few of them have been interviewed already.
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
While writing this I came across the album
Ease
the Work by the instrumental group Hour. It feels like a nice
stroll at sunset with a cool breeze behind you and an endless expanse of
tired and dusty landscape in front. It beckons you to explore its gentle
swells and sweeping strings while the beat steadily plods along, kicking
up little swirls of vague nostalgia. Thoughts you’ve thought before but
hadn’t properly put to rest will surface and demand to be explored, to
be wholly perceived; thoughts that may have first surfaced decades
prior. They nibble at your attention, threatening the tranquil state of
your mind, but it is effortless to cast them away. You lose yourself in
the fiery sun, yearning to someday follow its passage behind the hazy
horizon. Not today though. Today is a great day to write a blog post.
This was the 47th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed
this interview with Luke. Make sure to
follow his blog
(RSS) and get in
touch with him if you have any questions.
Awesome supporters
You can support this series on
Ko-Fi and all supporters
will be listed here as well as on the
official site of the
newsletter.
suggest a person to
interview next. I’m especially interested in people and blogs outside
the tech/web bubble.
<hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the dwarf
irregular galaxy NGC 5238, located 14.5 million light-years from Earth
in the constellation Canes Venatici. Its unexciting, blob-like
appearance seems to resemble an oversized star cluster more than a
classic image of a galaxy. Its lackluster appearance belies its
complicated structure, which is the subject of […]
From the BBC World Service: A raft of businesses and organizations
running Microsoft’s Windows apps have been affected by a major global IT
outage. Students in Bangladesh are continuing their blockade of roads
across the country, in protest of a quota system on government jobs. You
may think of Rome or Paris when asked about the café capital of the
world – but China’s financial capital is becoming a new contender. At
least that’s what Shanghai’s local government claims.
CrowdStrike
issue is causing massive computer outages worldwide
date: 2024-07-19, from: OS News
Well, this sure is something to wake up to: a massive worldwide
outage of computer systems due to a problem with CrowdStrike software.
Payment systems, airlines, hospitals, governments, TV stations – pretty
much anything or anyone using computers could be dealing with
bluescreens, bootloops, and similar issues today. Open-heart surgeries
had to be stopped mid-surgery, planes can’t take off, people can’t board
trains, shoppers can’t pay for their groceries, and much, much more, all
over the world. The problem is caused by CrowdStrike, a sort-of
enterprise AV/monitoring software that uses a Windows NT kernel driver
to monitor everything people do on corporate machines and logs it for…
Security purposes, I guess? I’ve never worked in a corporate setting so
I have no experience with software like this. From what I hear, software
like this is deeply loathed by workers the world over, as it gets in the
way and slows systems down. And, as can happen with a kernel driver, a
bug can cause massive worldwide outages which is costing people billions
in damages and may even have killed people. There is a workaround,
posted by CrowdStrike: This is a solution for individually fixing
affected machines, but I’ve seen responses like “great, how do I apply
this to 70k endpoints?”, indicating that this may not be a practical
solution for many affected customers. Then there’s the issue that this
may require a BitLocker password, which not everyone has on hand either.
To add insult to injury, CrowdStrike’s advisory about the issue is
locked behind a login wall. A shitshow all around. Do note that while
the focus is on Windows, Linux machines can run CrowdStrike software
too, and I’ve heard from Linux kernel engineers who happen to also
administer large numbers of Linux servers that they’re seeing a huge
spike in Linux kernel panics… Caused by CrowdStrike, which is installed
on a lot more Linux servers than you might think. So while Windows is
currently the focus of the story, the problems are far more widespread
than just Windows. I’m sure we’re going to see some major consequences
here, and my – misplaced, I’m sure – hope is that this will make people
think twice about one, using these invasive anti-worker monitoring
tools, and two, employing kernel drivers for this nonsense.
Capgemini
wins deal with UK tax collector worth up to £574M
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Love affair between HMRC and French outsourcer set to last 25 years
The UK tax collector is awarding Capgemini a contract worth up to £574
million ($741 million) to run legacy tax management systems until 2029,
one of which was first built under a controversial arrangement that was
supposed to end in 2020.…
New
guide on using generative AI for teachers and schools
date: 2024-07-19, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
The world of education is loud with discussions about the uses and risks
of generative AI — tools for outputting human-seeming media content such
as text, images, audio, and video. In answer, there’s a new practical
guide on using generative AI aimed at Computing teachers (and others),
written by a group of classroom teachers and…
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
AV tech was left alone, locked down, and under severe pressure
On Call Welcome again to On Call, The
Register’s weekly reader-contributed tale of being asked to hold in
your rage while dealing with the effluent of tech support.…
EU’s
renewable hydrogen plan needs a ‘reality check’
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Member nations aren’t on the same page, investors are confused, and
nobody understands the real costs
The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has found the European Union’s
program to develop a renewable hydrogen program needs a reality check
due to use of “overly ambitious” benchmarks and numerous other issues.…
Reading Time: 36minutes Propriety be damned,
we’re allowed to feel a faint twinge of regret, right? Please take it
upon yourselves to determine exactly which of last Sunday’s major news
events I am referring to. Anyway, given the fact that the world’s
digital infrastructure appears to have decided to fall over this morning
and that therefore a lot…
North
Korea likely behind takedown of Indian crypto exchange WazirX
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Firm halts trades after seeing $230 million disappear
Indian crypto exchange WazirX has revealed it lost virtual assets valued
at over $230 million after a cyber attack that has since been linked to
North Korea.…
Beijing’s
attack gang Volt Typhoon was a false flag inside job conspiracy:
China
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Run by the NSA, the FBI, and Five Eyes nations, who fooled infosec
researchers, apparently
China has asserted that the Volt Typhoon gang, which Five Eyes nations
accuse of being a Beijing-backed attacker that targets critical
infrastructure, was in fact made up by the US intelligence community.…
Manufacturers that strong-arm reviewers who don’t say nice things
about products cannot become the norm. Which is why it’s good to see
reviewers pushing back.
Microsoft
365 remains ‘degraded’ as Azure outage resolved
date: 2024-07-19, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Central US region is back in business but Office apps still in trouble
Updated Microsoft’s 365 subscription services are down
for some users, as the software titan also reports the Central US region
of its Azure cloud is experiencing problems.…
An excessive heat warning from the Los Angeles County Public Health
Department was released Thursday afternoon, urging residents to stay
hydrated and to prepare for power outages. The news release […]
Hart High
Winterguard honored for trophy-laden season
date: 2024-07-19, from: The Signal
The Hart High School Winterguard was honored by the William S. Hart
Union High School District at Wednesday’s governing board meeting for
winning the 2024 Winterguard Association of Southern California […]
Valencia
principal set to leave district at end of August
date: 2024-07-19, from: The Signal
Pete Getz is resigning from his position as principal of Valencia High
School, with an effective date of Aug. 30, he confirmed on Thursday.
Part of the William S. Hart […]
Newhall
man charged with child sex crimes released on $500k bail
date: 2024-07-19, from: The Signal
Ventura County officials confirmed this week a Newhall man facing
multiple cases involving allegations he targeted children for sex crimes
was released on bail. Christian Navarro, 25, who was twice […]
Bail
set for driver charged in Castaic triple-fatal crash
date: 2024-07-19, from: The Signal
After arguments from her attorney and pleas from the parents of two
crash victims, a 19-year-old Redlands woman was granted $300,000 bail on
charges she killed three people driving under […]
Trump
tells of attempt on his life, then abandons unity theme in lengthy
convention speech
date: 2024-07-19, from: VOA News USA
MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump, somber and bandaged, accepted the GOP
presidential nomination on Thursday at the Republican National
Convention in a speech that described in detail the assassination
attempt that could have ended his life just five days earlier before
laying out a sweeping populist agenda, particularly on immigration.
The 78-year-old former president, known best for his bombast and
aggressive rhetoric, began his acceptance speech with a softer and
deeply personal message that drew directly from his brush with death.
Moment by moment, the crowd listening in silence, Trump described
standing onstage in Butler, Pennsylvania, with his head turned to look
at a chart on display when he felt something hit his ear. He raised his
hand to his head and saw immediately that it was covered in blood.
“If I had not moved my head at that very last instant, the assassin’s
bullet would have perfectly hit its mark,” Trump said. “And I would not
be here tonight. We would not be together.”
Trump’s address, the longest convention speech in modern history at
just under 93 minutes, marked the climax and conclusion of a massive
four-day Republican pep rally that drew thousands of conservative
activists and elected officials to swing-state Wisconsin as voters weigh
an election that currently features two deeply unpopular candidates.
Sensing political opportunity in the wake of his near-death
experience, the often bombastic Republican leader embraced a new tone he
hopes will help generate even more momentum in an election that appears
to be shifting in his favor.
“The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal
it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a
shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart,” Trump said, wearing
a large white bandage on his right ear, as he has all week, to cover a
wound he sustained in the Saturday shooting. “I am running to be
president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no
victory in winning for half of America.”
While he spoke in a gentler tone than at his usual rallies, Trump
also outlined an agenda led by what he promises would be the largest
deportation operation in U.S. history. He repeatedly accused people
crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally of staging an “invasion.”
Additionally, he teased new tariffs on trade and an “America first”
foreign policy.
Trump also falsely suggested Democrats had cheated during the 2020
election he lost — despite a raft of federal and state investigations
proving there was no systemic fraud — and suggested “we must not
criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement,” even as he has
long called for prosecutions of his opponents.
He did not mention abortion rights, an issue that has bedeviled
Republicans ever since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federally
guaranteed right to abortion two years ago. Trump nominated three of the
six justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump at his rallies often
takes credit for Roe being overturned and argues states should have the
right to institute their own abortion laws.
Nor did he mention the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,
2021, in which Trump supporters tried to stop the certification of his
loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has long referred to the people jailed
in the riot as “hostages.”
Indeed, Trump barely mentioned Biden, often referring only to the
“current administration.”
The RNC ends at an uncertain moment in the race
With less than four months to go in the contest, major changes in the
race are possible, if not likely.
Trump’s appearance came as Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic
incumbent, clings to his party’s presumptive nomination in the face of
unrelenting pressure from key congressional allies, donors and even
former President Barack Obama, who fear he may be unable to win
reelection after his disastrous debate.
Long pressed by allies to campaign more vigorously, Biden is instead
in isolation at his beach home in Delaware after having been diagnosed
with COVID-19.
Hours before the balloons were scheduled to rain down on Trump and
his family inside the convention hall, Biden deputy campaign manager
Quentin Fulks appeared nearby in Milwaukee and insisted over and over
that Biden would not step aside.
“I do not want to be rude, but I don’t know how many more times I can
answer that,” Fulks told reporters. “There are no plans being made to
replace Biden on the ballot.”
Strength on the program
Thursday’s RNC program seemed designed to project strength and
masculinity in an implicit rebuke of Biden.
Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White called Trump “a
real American bad ass.” Kid Rock performed a song with the chorus,
“Fight, fight!,” echoing the word Trump shouted on stage in Pennsylvania
as Secret Service agents helped him off the stage. And wrestling icon
Hulk Hogan described the former president as “an American hero.”
Hogan drew a raucous response when, standing on the main stage, he
ripped off his shirt to reveal a red Trump-Vance “Make America Great
Again” shirt.
“As an entertainer, I try to stay out of politics,” Hogan said as he
briefly broke character. “I can no longer stay silent.”
Like many speakers during the convention, former Fox News host Tucker
Carlson suggested that recent events were divinely inspired and that he
wondered “if something bigger is going on.”
“I think it changed him,” Carlson said of the shooting, praising
Trump for not lashing out in anger afterward.
“He did his best to bring the country together,” Carlson added. “This
is the most responsible, unifying behavior from a leader I’ve ever
seen.”
Former first lady Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump, the president’s
elder daughter and former senior adviser, joined Trump in the convention
hall ahead of his speech, making their first appearances there. Neither
woman spoke.
At nearly 93 minutes, the former president’s speech eclipsed the 74
minutes for which he spoke eight years ago, according to the American
Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Republicans leave their convention united
The convention has showcased a Republican Party reshaped by Trump
since he shocked the GOP establishment and won over the party’s
grassroots on his way to the party’s 2016 nomination. Rivals Trump has
vanquished — including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of
Florida, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron
DeSantis — put aside their past criticisms and gave him their
unqualified support.
Even his vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s choice
to carry his movement into the next generation, was once a fierce critic
who suggested in a private message since made public that Trump could be
“America’s Hitler.”
Security was a major focus in Milwaukee in the wake of Trump’s
near-assassination. But after nearly four full days, there were no
serious incidents inside the convention hall or the large security
perimeter that surrounded it.
The Secret Service, backed by hundreds of law enforcement officers
from across the nation, had a large and visible presence. And during
Trump’s appearances each night, he was surrounded by a wall of
protective agents wherever he went.
Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign have not released information about
his injury or the treatment he received. The former president on
Thursday described his story of surviving the attack — and vowed he
would not talk about it again.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump told the packed
convention hall. The crowd of thousands, which was listening in silence,
shouted back, “Yes, you are.”
Embattled
Biden faces physical and political isolation
date: 2024-07-19, from: VOA News USA
U.S. President Joe Biden faces physical and political isolation as he
deals with COVID and as more Democrats urge him to step aside as the
party’s nominee. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
In celebration of Zonta leadership in the Santa Clarita Valley, ten
past presidents of the Zonta Club of Santa Clarita Valley hosted the
Installation of Officers and Directors for the 2024-2026 biennium on
Monday, May 20 at the beautiful patio of Salt Creek Grille in
Valencia
Marsha
McLean | Santa Clarita Community Centers’ Summer Camps
date: 2024-07-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Summer is here! With the season in full swing and kids starting their
school break, the city of Santa Clarita welcomes youth to one of its
most popular and long-standing programs
DA’s office issues statement on prosecution of drug-related homicides
The woman accused of selling a Santa Clarita Valley teenager with the
fentanyl that led to her fatal overdose has pleaded […]
Tonight, for the third time, Donald Trump will accept the Republican
Party’s nomination for president. But this time, for the first time
ever, Trump is also on track to outright win the presidential election
he is involved in. He has opened
a
two-point lead in polling averages, but some polls show
a
more decisive margin in swing states; no Democrat has been
in
a worse position in the polls, at this point in the election,
since the beginning of the century. Even Trump’s decisions — his
selection of JD Vance as his vice president, for instance — suggests
that Trump is planning to win.
And so it is time to begin thinking in earnest about what a Trump
presidency might mean for decarbonization and the energy transition. For
the next several months, Heatmap’s journalists will cover — with rigor,
fairness, and perspicacity — that question.
(Theyalreadyhave.)
Should Trump win, there are a few predictions we can make with relative
certainty. The Trump administration will roll back the Environmental
Protection Agency’s car and truck pollution rules, which Republicans
describe as a tyrannical EV mandate forced on unwilling American
consumers. Trump will also try to unwind the EPA’s restrictions on
carbon emissions from power plants. And he will once again take the
United States out of the Paris Agreement, just as he did during his
first term. Trump has also pledged
to
reclassify more than 50,000 federal employees as political
appointees. That would make it possible for them to be fired en masse.
Make no mistake, Trump would be a disaster for American climatepolicy — and if your biggest issue is that the United States should
aim to rapidly reduce its emissions of heat-trapping pollution, then you
probably shouldn’t vote for him. But just because he will wreck climate
change policy doesn’t guarantee that he will destroy the clean energy
economy. A second Trump administration would be a bleak time for
decarbonization advocates, but it would not be a hopeless time — even if
we see a powerful and even Caesarist Trump administration, politics
would go on. It is worth thinking about what those politics could look
like ahead of time.
Trump’s first term saw no shortage of contradictions in his climate
program. Trump was a climate change denier who seemed to revel in
unraveling environmental programs. But he also ultimately signed the
Energy Act of 2020, a bipartisan package written by Senator Joe Manchin
and Lisa Murkowski that boosted the advanced nuclear industry, energy
storage, and carbon capture, and which created programs that were later
funded by Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Another key contradiction in Trump’s first term was the interplay of the
executive and legislative branches. Trump’s political appointees —
including Scott Pruitt, his notorious and
scandal-ridden
EPA chief — pursued an aggressively pro-carbon agenda, rolling back
environmental protections and opening up huge new swaths of public land
to oil and gas drilling. The White House kept proposing budgets that cut
tens of billions of dollars from key federal programs, including the EPA
and the Department of Energy.
But Congress never actually passed those budgets. It became one of the
strangest two-steps of the Trump administration: Again and again, the
White House would unveil a radical, lacerating budget proposal that
zeroed out key programs across the federal government and sent it to
Congress. The press would cover Trump’s plans to destroy federal
agencies, and the public would react with alarm. Then, several months
later, Congress would pass a far more conventional budget. In May 2017,
for example — the peak of Trump’s post-election Republican trifecta —
Congress passed a budget that
preserved
nearly all EPA programs and increased funding for some renewable energy
programs, including ARPA-E.
This doesn’t mean that the EPA and other federal agencies survived the
first Trump administration unscathed. Many federal agencies saw brain
drain throughout the four years of Trump; when Biden took office in
2021, his political appointees said that their first act was to rebuild
the agencies’ depleted capacity. And if Trump carried out his aspiration
of firing tens of thousands of federal workers, then the agencies would
be even more beset, even more dysfunctional, at the end of his next
term.
But the Trump White House seemed torn between the impulse to radically
restructure the administrative state and the need to finalize its own
deregulatory rules. The administration’s incompetence at dotting its i’s
and crossing its t’s kept getting in the way of its own agenda: While
the federal government usually beats legal challenges to its own rules,
the Trump administration lost
roughly
80% of its court fights.
Now, unlike during his first term, Trump will have a more favorable
Supreme Court to work with: Conservatives now hold a 6-3 majority on the
high court — and it could easily become 7-2 under a Trump
administration. Last month, the Supreme Court made it harder for the
regulatory state to issue any new rules, essentially subjugating agency
authority to the judiciary. That could allow the Supreme Court to force
a Trump initiative into law — but it could also hamstring Trump’s
agencies by forcing them to do more work, to file more paperwork, to
respond to even more public comments.
A second Trump presidency will differ from its prequel in at least one
respect: its fossil fuel of choice. Throughout the 2016 election, Trump
bound
his campaign to the coal industry, pledging to bring back mining
jobs and end Obama’s “war on coal.” Soon after his election, he
received
a coal “action plan” directly from Bob Murray, the CEO of what
was then the country’s largest coal company.
Trump failed. Murray’s company declared bankruptcy in 2019, and coal
mining jobs
collapsed
to a historic low in November 2020. (Coal mining employment has modestly
recovered under Biden.) Now, as Heatmap columnist Paul Waldman has
observed, Trump
barely
talks about coal at all; he now seems to revere the oil and gas
industry. In April, he
met
with oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago and asked for $1 billion in
campaign donations.
This speaks to another contradiction that’s far bigger than Trump,
between the varying needs of big and small fossil fuel companies.
Climate advocates sometimes talk about “the fossil fuel industry” as a
monolith, but in fact it is riven with its own divisions and
disagreements. Oil and natural gas companies have different demands from
coal companies. There are also disagreements between large oil
companies, such as ExxonMobil, whose size lets them afford higher
regulatory burdens, and smaller oil and gas drillers, who oppose any
regulation whatsoever. This divergence could affect how the Trump
administration handles the EPA’s methane rules, which require oil
companies to cap and monitor greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas
drilling equipment.
Then there’s nuclear power, the country’s most prolific zero-carbon
fuel, which enjoys
nearly
unmatched bipartisan support but which
some
voters are much more wary of. Many nuclear advocates see Trump
as neutral on the technology, even a potential ally, but Project 2025
proposes canceling the tens of billions of dollars in nuclear subsidies
that the Biden administration has proposed. That would render the
industry uneconomic and force many plants to close.
These are, of course, not even the most important contradictions that
will define Trump’s White House. (I remain curious, for instance, about
how
Trump’s
backers in Silicon Valley — whose personal wealth is tied up
with big American tech companies and who detest Biden’s aggressive
approach to antitrust enforcement — feel about Trump’s
devil-may-care
approach to defending Taiwan or about J.D. Vance’s
praise
of Lina Khan.)
Trump has promised to bring back manufacturing to the United States and
wage a trade war on China. He also opposes electric vehicles. But some
of the country’s biggest new manufacturing facilities are going to make
EVs and batteries — and these are in the Republican heartland of South
Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as the battleground state of
Georgia. Trump has pledged to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s
$7,500 tax credit for buying EVs, and Project 2025 proposes neutering
the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, which can lend money to
fund new EV factories. How will those anti-decarbonization policies fit
in with local Republican economies? It is not hard to imagine a world
where Trump repeals the consumer tax credit for EVs and claims victory
over it, but preserves the IRA’s far more lucrative 45x subsidy that
rewards companies that make batteries and EVs. That would leave some of
the most important pro-EV policy in the IRA intact while generating the
necessary anti-climate headlines.
These focuses of ideological slippage shouldn’t make climate advocates
feel more relaxed — on the contrary, some of Trump’s most authoritarian
impulses have been unleashed in response to political weakness or
outright unpopularity. Perhaps that’s most clear around Trump’s outright
denial of climate change, which remains among the most unpopular parts
of his agenda. Is it any wonder that Jeffrey Clark,
a
climate-questioning environment lawyer who Trump installed at
the Justice Department,
ultimately
helped lead the department’s attempt to overturn the 2020
election?
The great irony — you might even say tragedy — of American energy policy
is that voters across the parties see energy as a culture war issue.
Environmentalists dream of creating an all-renewable energy system even
though it would gobble up massive amounts of land. Republicans talk
about supporting nuclear power, even though the nuclear industry has
always and everywhere required state support. Trump, a pile of
contradictions himself, and a distracted culture warrior, will only
accelerate these contradictions. I am by no means optimistic about the
results. But I expect that the reality of Trump’s governance will, even
on these issues, surprise us.
The Los Angeles County Health Officer has issued an excessive heat
warning for the Santa Clarita Valley Friday, July 19 through Wednesday,
July 24 as triple digit temperatures have been forecast
The L.A. County District Attorney’s Office filed two charges against a
man accused of striking a motorcyclist with his truck and dragging the
bike until he dislodged it from the […]
Lilbits:
Volla Tablet, Google Pixel 9 Pro, and MediaTek Dimensity 7350
date: 2024-07-18, from: Liliputing
The Volla Tablet is tablet that’s set to ship this fall with support for
Android or Ubuntu Touch operating systems, optional pen and keyboard
support, and a focus on privacy. When Volla launched a crowdfunding
campaign for the tablet earlier this year, the plan was to build a
device with a 12.3 inch display, 12GB […]
Though America has seen a number of political parties throughout its
history, the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans still
dominates the political process.
OnePlus
Pad 2 is up for pre-order for $500, brings a major spec bump (in some
areas)
date: 2024-07-18, from: Liliputing
The OnePlus Pad 2 is a tablet with a 12.1 inch, 3000 x 2120 pixel, 144
Hz IPS LCD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 12GB of
RAM, and 256GB of storage. Just about all of those features are spec
bumps over the first-gen OnePlus Pad that launched about 15 months ago.
OnePlus […]
NVIDIA
transitions fully towards open-source GPU Linux kernel modules
date: 2024-07-18, from: OS News
It’s a bit of a Linux news day today – it happens – but this one is
good news we can all be happy about. After earning a bad reputation for
mishandling its Linux graphics drivers for years, almost decades, NVIDIA
has been turning the ship around these past two years, and today they
made a major announcement: from here on out, the open source NVIDIA
kernel modules will be the default for all recent NVIDIA cards. We’re
now at a point where transitioning fully to the open-source GPU kernel
modules is the right move, and we’re making that change in the upcoming
R560 driver release. ↫ Rob Armstrong, Kevin Mittman and Fred Oh There
are some caveats regarding which generations, exactly, should be using
the open source modules for optimal performance. For NVIDIA’s most
cutting edge generations, Grace Hopper and Blackwell, you actually must
use the open source modules, since the proprietary ones are not even
supported. For GPUs from the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, or Hopper
architectures, NVIDIA recommends the open source modules, but the
proprietary ones are compatible as well. Anything older than that is
restricted to the proprietary modules, as they’re not supported by the
open source modules. This is a huge milestone, and NVIDIA becoming a
better team player in the Linux world is a big deal for those of us with
NVIDIA GPUs – it’s already paying dividend in vastly improved Wayland
support, which up until very recently was a huge problem. Do note,
though, that this only covers the kernel module; the userspace parts of
the NVIDIA driver are still closed-source, and there’s no indication
that’s going to change.
From
One Crew to Another: Artemis II Astronauts Meet NASA Barge Crew
date: 2024-07-18, from: NASA breaking news
Members of the Artemis II crew met with the crew of NASA’s Pegasus
barge prior to their departure to deliver the core stage of NASA’s SLS
(Space Launch System) rocket to the Space Coast. NASA astronaut and
pilot of the Artemis II mission Victor Glover met the crew July 15. NASA
astronaut Reid Wiseman, commander, […]
Every summer, The Master’s University sends students across the world
to partner with missionaries, pastors, and church planters in sharing
the gospel and serving local bodies of believers
Linux
patch to disable Snapdragon X Elite GPU by default
date: 2024-07-18, from: OS News
Not too long ago it seemed like Linux support for the new ARM laptops
running the Snapdragon X Pro and Elite processors was going to be pretty
good – Qualcomm seemed to really be stepping up its game, and detailed
in a blog post exactly what they were doing to make Linux a first-tier
operating system on their new, fancy laptop chips. Now that the devices
are in people’s hand, though, it seems all is not so rosy in this new
Qualcomm garden. A recent Linux kernel DeviceTree patch outright
disables the GPU on the Snapdragon X Elite, and the issue is, as usual,
vendor nonsense, as it needs something called a ZAP shader to be useful.
The ZAP shader is needed as by default the GPU will power on in a
specialized “secure” mode and needs to be zapped out of it. With OEM key
signing of the GPU ZAP shader it sounds like the Snapdragon X laptop GPU
support will be even messier than typically encountered for laptop
graphics. ↫ Michael Larabel This is exactly the kind of nonsense you
don’t want to be dealing with, whether you’re a user, developer, or OEM,
so I hope this gets sorted out sooner rather than later. Qualcomm’s
commitments and blog posts about ensuring Linux is a first-tier platform
are meaningless if the company can’t even get the GPU to work properly.
These enablement problems should’ve been handled well before the devices
entered circulation, so this is very disheartening to see. So, for now,
hold off on X Elite laptops if you’re a Linux user.
Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 17, 2024 We started our day at
an outcrop called “Fairview Dome,” a light-colored rock so big that it
can easily be seen from orbit! We have had our eye on Fairview Dome
since Curiosity descended into the Gediz Vallis channel. As a geologist
who has spent a lot of […]
Actor Bob
Newhart, famous for deadpan humor, dies at 94
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — Bob Newhart, who fled the tedium of an accounting job
to become a master of stammering, deadpan humor as a standup comedian
and later as a U.S. television sitcom star, died on Thursday at the age
of 94, his publicist said.
Newhart died at his home in Los Angeles after a series of short
illnesses, said his longtime publicist, Jerry Digney.
Newhart had two hit shows — first playing a psychologist on “The Bob
Newhart Show” from 1972 to 1978, and then portraying a Vermont innkeeper
on “Newhart” from 1982 through 1990. In both shows he relied on a bland,
cardigan-clad everyman character who is confounded by the oddball people
around him.
Newhart was nominated for Emmy Awards nine times, beginning in 1962
for writing on his short-lived variety show, but he did not win until
2013 when he was given the award for a guest appearance on “The Big Bang
Theory.”
Newhart’s career began in the late 1950s, with a comedy routine in
which he played straight man to an unheard voice on the other end of a
telephone call. Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers duo called
Newhart “a one-man comedy team” because of his dialogues with invisible
partners.
His 1960 live album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” was a big
hit that was also highly influential. It became the first comedy album
to top the charts and earned him three Grammy awards.
Newhart’s characters had a trademark stammer, which he said was not
an act but the way he really talked. He said a TV producer once asked
him to cut down on the stammer because it was making the shows run too
long.
“‘No,’ I told him. ‘That stammer bought me a house in Beverly
Hills,’” Newhart wrote in his memoir, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing
This!”
He ended his “Newhart” show in 1990 with an episode regarded as one
of the most unique in the annals of U.S. television. In the last scene
of the series, he awakens in bed with his wife from the first series
after “dreaming” his life in the second series.
Newhart sprung from an era of angry, edgy standup comics such as
Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman and Mort Sahl, but his act was subtly
subversive, without the profanity or shock used by his
contemporaries.
He exploited his hesitant, bashful ordinariness to skewer society in
his own fashion — including sketches about how a publicity agent would
“handle” Abraham Lincoln or one featuring an inept official on the phone
with a frantic man trying to defuse a bomb.
In the late 1950s, Newhart had a boring accounting job — in which he
claimed that his credo was “that’s close enough” — and began writing
comedy sketches with a colleague as a diversion.
Those led to radio performances and eventually a record deal with
Warner Bros.
“Probably the best advice I ever got in my life was from the head of
the accounting department, Mr. Hutchinson, I believe, at the Glidden
Company in Chicago, and he told me, ‘You really aren’t cut out for
accounting,’” Newhart told an interviewer.
Before winning an Emmy in 2013, Newhart had been nominated three
times for his acting on “Newhart,” once for writing on his 1961 variety
show and twice for appearances on other shows. He also was a frequent
guest on variety shows and talk shows.
He appeared in several movies, including “On a Clear Day You Can See
Forever,” “Catch-22” and “Elf.”
In 2002, he was awarded the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for
American Humor. Asked by the New York Times in 2019 whether he felt 90
years old, Newhart said, “My mind doesn’t. I can’t turn it off.”
Newhart was introduced by comedian Buddy Hackett to his future wife,
Virginia, whom he married in 1964. The Newharts had four children.
Judge
mostly drags SEC’s lawsuit against SolarWinds into the recycling
bin
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Russia-invaded software biz ‘grateful for the support we have received’
A judge has mostly thrown out a lawsuit brought by America’s financial
watchdog that accused SolarWinds and its chief infosec officer of
misleading investors about its computer security practices and the
backdooring of its Orion product.…
HMD
Skyline is a $499 smartphone with a replaceable battery, repairable
design, and a 144 Hz display
date: 2024-07-18, from: Liliputing
The HMD Skyline is a new smartphone that, as expected, brings back the
classic Nokia “Fabula” design featuring a display by making the colorful
bezels around the display a feature rather than something to be hidden.
But that’s not the only throwback feature in this smartphone. It’s also
designed to be easy to open up, […]
date: 2024-07-18, from: California Native Plants Society
Tribes, community leaders, and organizations collaborate to protect
Sáttítla and other vital California landscapes, ensuring the
preservation of over 1 million acres of biologically and culturally
significant lands.
@Dave Winer’s
linkblog (date: 2024-07-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Today's NYT Daily podcast is really informative, even though the
title sounds like it's going to be a puff piece for Trump. It's not.
It's realistic. And the interviews with Trump supporters sound like
people who could be convinced to vote for Biden.
US
appeals court blocks remainder of Biden’s student debt plan
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court blocked the implementation of
the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan, which would have
lowered monthly payments for millions of borrowers.
In a ruling Thursday, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a
motion for an administrative stay filed by a group of Republican-led
states seeking to invalidate the administration’s entire student loan
forgiveness program. The court’s order prohibits the administration from
implementing the parts of the SAVE plan that were not already blocked by
lower court rulings.
The ruling comes the same day that the Biden administration announced
another round of student loan forgiveness, this time totaling $1.2
billion in forgiveness for roughly 35,000 borrowers who are eligible for
the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
The PSLF program, which provides relief for teachers, nurses,
firefighters and other public servants who make 120 qualifying monthly
payments, was originally passed in 2007. But for years, borrowers ran
into strict rules and servicer errors that prevented them from having
their debt canceled. The Biden administration adjusted some of the
program’s rules and retroactively gave many borrowers credits toward
their required payments.
Two separate legal challenges to Biden’s SAVE plan have worked their
way through the courts.
In June, federal judges in Kansas and Missouri issued separate
rulings that blocked much of the administration’s plan to provide a
faster path toward loan cancellation and reduce monthly income-based
repayment from 10% to 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income. Those
injunctions did not affect debt that had already been forgiven.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that allowed the
department to proceed with the lowered monthly payments. Thursday’s
order from the 8th circuit blocks all aspects of the SAVE plan.
The Education Department said it was reviewing the ruling.
“Our Administration will continue to aggressively defend the SAVE
Plan — which has been helping over 8 million borrowers access lower
monthly payments, including 4.5 million borrowers who have had a
zero-dollar payment each month,” the administration said.
No
official information from Trump about his injuries since assassination
attempt
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
milwaukee, wisconsin — Four days after a gunman’s attempt to
assassinate former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, the
public is still in the dark over the extent of his injuries, what
treatment the Republican presidential nominee received in the hospital,
and whether there may be any long-term effects on his health.
Trump’s campaign has refused to discuss his condition, release a
medical report or records, or make the doctors who treated him
available, leaving information to dribble out from Trump, his friends
and family.
The first word on Trump’s condition came about half an hour after the
shots were fired and Trump dropped to the ground. When he got up, he
pumped his fist defiantly to the crowd with blood streaming down his
face. The campaign issued a statement saying he was “fine” and “being
checked out at a local medical facility.”
“More details will follow,” his spokesperson said.
It wasn’t until 8:42 p.m., however, that Trump told the public he had
been struck by a bullet as opposed to shrapnel or debris. In a post on
his social media network, Trump wrote that he was “shot with a bullet
that pierced the upper part” of his right ear.
“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a
whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through
the skin,” he wrote.
Information falls to friends, family
Presidents and major-party candidates have long had to balance their
right to doctor-patient confidentiality with the public’s expectations
that they demonstrate they are healthy enough to serve, particularly
when questions arise about their readiness. Trump, for example, has long
pressed President Joe Biden to take a cognitive test as the Democrat
faces doubts after his stumbling performance in last month’s
debate.
“It’s an understatement to say that it’s bizarre that a presidential
candidate has sustained an injury from an attempted assassination and no
medical report is issued to describe his evaluation and the extent of
his injury,” Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at The
George Washington University, wrote on the website X, formerly known as
Twitter, on Thursday.
After a would-be assassin shot and gravely wounded President Ronald
Reagan in 1981, the Washington hospital where he was treated gave
regular, detailed public updates about his condition and treatment.
Trump has appeared at the Republican National Convention the past
three days with a bandage over his right ear. But there has been no
further word since Saturday from Trump’s campaign or other officials on
his condition or treatment.
Instead, it has been allies and family members sharing news.
Representative Ronny Jackson, who served as Trump’s White House
doctor and traveled to be with him after the shooting, said in a podcast
interview Monday that Trump was missing part of his ear — “a little bit
at the top” — but that the wound would heal.
“He was lucky,” Jackson said on “The Benny Show,” a conservative
podcast hosted by Benny Johnson. “It was far enough away from his head
that there was no concussive effects from the bullet. And it just took
the top of his ear off, a little bit of the top of his ear off as it
passed through.”
Jackson said the area would need to be treated with care to avoid
further bleeding — “It’s not like a clean laceration like you would have
with a knife or a blade, it’s a bullet track going by,” he said — but
that Trump is “not going to need anything to be done with it. It’s going
to be fine.”
The former president’s son Eric Trump said in an interview with CBS
on Wednesday that his father had had “no stitches but certainly a nice
flesh wound.”
Little medical information during career
The lack of information continues a pattern for Trump, who has
released minimal medical information throughout his political
career.
When he first ran in 2016, Trump declined to release full medical
records, and instead released a note from his doctor that declared Trump
would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the
presidency.”
Dr. Harold Bornstein later revealed that the glowing, four-paragraph
assessment was written in 5 minutes as a car sent by Trump to collect it
waited outside.
When Trump was infected with the coronavirus in the midst of his 2020
re-election campaign, his doctors and aides tried to downplay the
severity of his condition and withheld information about how sick he was
and key details of his treatment.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows later wrote in his
book that Trump’s blood oxygen dropped to a “dangerously low level” and
that there were concerns that Trump would not be able to walk on his own
if he had waited longer to be transported to Walter Reed for
treatment.
Advance
Detection and Reporting Are Key to Preventing Attacks
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: RAND blog
Shootings, bombings, and the like are most commonly prevented when
members of the public report their suspicions. What kinds of warning
signs should we all be on the lookout for in the weeks and months
ahead?
Sam
Altman sues builder over $27M flooded, sewage-hit ‘lemon’ of a
mega-mansion
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Leaking skylights, collapsed roof, garbage-clogged pipes - did ChatGPT
make this?
Serial entrepreneur and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman has made a bunch of
lucrative moves in his time – but his $27 million mega-mansion certainly
hasn’t been one of them. His lawyers even called it a “lemon” in a
recently filed lawsuit accusing the builder of negligence, fraud, and
other failures.…
US
sanctions Sierra Leone man, seeks extradition in migrant smuggling
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
MEXICO CITY — The U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions
Thursday on a man from Sierra Leone who is suspected of smuggling
thousands of migrants from Asia and Africa into the United States.
The ring allegedly run by Abdul Karim Conteh provided false documents
and drove migrants to the border and offered advice on how to cross, the
Treasury said. It also allegedly moved some migrants through Nicaragua,
the Central American country that has been used as a springboard for
migrant smuggling because of its lax visa requirements.
The smuggling ring’s customers came from a dozen countries, including
China, Iran, Russia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.
Karim Conteh was arrested on July 11 in Tijuana, Mexico. The United
States is pursuing Conteh’s extradition on federal migrant smuggling
charges.
Also sanctioned Thursday was his Mexican wife, Veronica Roblero, as
well as two other people from Sierra Leone and Togo.
The department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — the U.S. agency
that combats illicit funds and money laundering — said the ring
allegedly moved the money they charged the migrants for helping them
cross the border illegally through the United States.
The sanctions block the targets’ financial and other assets in the
United States and prohibit U.S. citizens from having any transactions
with them.
Aug. 4:
Sierra Hillbillies Hosting ‘Back to the Beach’ Square Dance
date: 2024-07-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Sierra Hillbillies Square and Round Dance club invites the
community to a “Back to the Beach” themed square dance Sunday, Aug. 4,
from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., at Valencia United Methodist Church
Nintendo’s
Switch Joy-Con charging stand arrives Oct 17 (more than 7 years after
the Switch first launched)
date: 2024-07-18, from: Liliputing
The Nintendo Switch game console first launched in 2017, bridging the
gap between living room console and handheld gaming thanks to a feature
set that includes a tablet with detachable Joy-Con controllers and a
docking station for charging and sending video to a TV. Now the company
is preparing to launch a new accessory that […]
Space ROS is an open-source software framework, derived from ROS 2,
which was created to be compatible with the demands of safety-critical
space robotics applications. NASA is looking to expand the Space ROS
repository with new higher fidelity demonstration environments and
additional capabilities. Award: $10,000 in total prizes Open Date: July
18, 2024 Close Date: […]
Ly is a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and
BSD. ↫ Ly GitHub page That’s it. That’s the description. I’ve been
wanting to take a stab at running a full CLI/TUI environment for a
while, see just how far I can get in my computing life (excluding games)
running nothing but a few tiled terminal emulators running various TUI
apps for email, Mastodon, browsing, and so on. I’m not sure I’d be
particularly happy with it – I’m a GUI user through and through – but
lately I’ve seen quite a few really capable and just pleasantly usable
TUI applications come by, and they’ve made me wonder. It’d make a great
article too.
Look
Into a ‘Mega Den’ of 2,000 Slithering Rattlesnakes With This Live Stream
in Colorado
date: 2024-07-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Run by researchers at Cal Poly, the stream is part of a citizen
science initiative that aims to change the public’s perception of the
much-maligned reptiles
By Councilwoman Marsha McLean “Summer camp is a great opportunity for
children to be independent and self-reliant, but also to have a great
time and create wonderful memories.” – Michael Eisner Summer is here!
With the season in full swing and kids starting their school break, the
City of Santa Clarita welcomes youth to one […]
FiiO
DM13 portable CD player is coming in September for $179
date: 2024-07-18, from: Liliputing
Once upon a time portable cassette players like the Sony Walkman
revolutionized the way people listened to music, by introducing the
concept of carrying your music with you and listening privately on
headphones. These days smartphones fill that need for most users. But
earlier this year a Chinese audio company called FiiO introduced the
FiiO […]
NASA
Sounding Rocket Launches, Studies Heating of Sun’s Active Regions
date: 2024-07-18, from: NASA breaking news
By Wayne Smith Investigators at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, will use observations from a recently-launched
sounding rocket mission to provide a clearer image of how and why the
Sun’s corona grows so much hotter than the visible surface of Earth’s
parent star. The MaGIXS-2 mission – short for the second flight […]
Why
Being Good to Your Workers Is Good for Your Stock Price
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: RAND blog
Companies that invest in their frontline workers—and are clearer
about where/how—could see a meaningful uptick in their stock value,
while also becoming more attractive to job candidates in a tight labor
market. And those investments for employees can have transformative
effects on people’s lives and economic mobility.
Marco Arment (Mastodon): Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast
1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the
iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully
beyond.[…]Much faster, more responsive, more reliable, and more
accessible.Modern design, optimized for easily-reached controls on
today’s phone sizes.Improvements […]
WASHINGTON — The United States issued Yemen-related counterterrorism
sanctions on Thursday targeting individuals and entities linked to
Houthi financial facilitator Sa’id al-Jamal.
The Treasury Department said the actions affected a dozen people and
vessels, including Indonesia-based Malaysian and Singaporean national
Mohammad Roslan Bin Ahmad and China-based Chinese national Zhuang Liang,
“who have facilitated illicit shipments and engaged in money laundering
for the network.”
Safari
Private Click Measurement and Firefox Privacy-Preserving
Attribution
date: 2024-07-18, from: Michael Tsai
John Wilander (2021): A new, on-by-default feature called Private
Click Measurement, or PCM, for privacy-preserving measurement of ad
clicks across websites and from iOS apps to websites in iOS and iPadOS
14.5 betas. This didn’t attract a lot of attention at the time, but now
it’s getting some criticism for being opt-out and somewhat hidden
[…]
“We need a leader,” said JD Vance as he accepted the Republican
nomination for vice president, “who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala
Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American
factories.” The election, he said, is “about the auto worker in
Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their
jobs,” and “the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t
understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators
across the world, when he could buy it from his own citizens right here
in our own country.”
This is the tale Vance tells about energy and climate — one of contempt
and betrayal, elitists sacrificing hard-working blue-collar Americans on
the altar of their alien schemes. On the surface it may sound like it’s
about jobs and economics, but it’s really about the eternal culture war
that divides us from them.
This is nothing new. Maintaining this artificial division between
environmental and economic concerns is central to the effort to protect
the fossil fuel industry, and has been for decades. Voters must be
convinced that any attempt to do something about climate change is not
just unserious but an assault on virtuous working people waged from
Washington and other places controlled by the snobbish liberal elite.
The argument plays on beliefs about environmentalism that go back
decades. Beginning in the 1970s, a group of political scientists led by
Ronald
Inglehart drew attention to a change in public opinion in
advanced societies around the world, as
“post-materialist
values” based on autonomy and self-expression grew in political
prominence. The generations that grew up after World War II, they
argued, were less focused on material scarcity and more concerned with
issues like abortion, equal rights for women and minority groups, and
the environment.
The idea that environmental concerns were separate from economics — that
they are fundamentally cultural and not material — has always been used
by the right to discredit environmentalism and those who advocate for
it. As George H.W. Bush
said
about Al Gore in 1992 when Gore’s warnings about climate change were
considered a little wacky, “This guy is so far off in the environmental
extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every
American.”
Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. But the solutions have
also gotten more real.
In Vance’s home state, for instance, an “energy worker” is much more
likely to be working in green energy than fossil fuels; as Semafor
recently
noted, “Clean energy-related companies now employ about 114,000
people in Ohio, compared to 71,000 working in oil and gas.” The state is
enjoying something of a
solar
boom, as well as a significant increase in production of
batteries that will power the electric vehicles Vance and his running
mate
despise.
The “great American factories” Vance celebrates apparently don’t include
projects like the joint LG-Honda
battery
plant in Jeffersonville, an hour’s drive from his home town of
Middletown, which will complete construction later this year and is
slated to employ 2,200 of his constituents.
But in the picture painted by Trump, Vance, and others running on the
anti-anti-climate
change agenda, there is essentially no such thing as a green
job; efforts to lower emissions have only costs and no benefits. And the
cost is not just to our economy but to our spirit, making us impotent
and weak. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who may well become Secretary
of Energy if Trump wins, began
his
convention speech with a call-and-response to the audience. “Who
will make America energy dominant?” he asked three times, to which the
audience responded, “Donald Trump!” “Energy dominant” has replaced
“energy independent” as the goal for the Trump-era GOP, not surprising
given that dominance and submission is one of the central themes of
Trump’s life.
“Energy dominance” isn’t so much a practical state of affairs as a
feeling, the sense that our heads are held high and
others grovel before us, whether that has any relation to reality or
not. After all, under Joe Biden the country is about as energy dominant
as it could be, and not always for the best. America is not only
producing
more oil than any country in the world, it’s producing more than
any country in human history. We’re also the
world’s
largest exporter of liquified natural gas.
Yet according to Burgum, the next four years will bring either an
apocalypse of enfeeblement as we huddle together in darkness or an
explosion of manly strength, depending on which president we elect.
“Imagine: no electricity for your fridge, your lights or air
conditioning,” he warned. “President Trump will ensure there’s power for
you, and importantly, that we have the power as the United States to
beat China in the AI arms race.” You can almost feel the power
Trump will give you, like a steroid shot to the national soul
— or a dose of something even more potent. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged
America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum went on. “Energy
dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.” To
paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a stick is just a stick — but not
this time, I think.
All that was no doubt music to the ears of the American Petroleum
Institute, one of the convention’s sponsors, as well as both Trump and
Vance, who has
introduced
a bill to repeal the EV subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and
replace them with subsidies for internal combustion vehicles. “The whole
EV thing is a scam,” Vance has
said.
In other words: Don’t be fooled when Democrats tell you that climate
change is an economic threat and that transitioning to a green economy
will actually increase prosperity. All you need to
know is that the “Green New Scam” is being imposed by the people you
hate.
Those resisting climate action would prefer that voters continue to see
it as solely a cultural issue, as though the environmental conversation
were still confined to
beautifying
highways and picking up litter, something we can set aside with
no material cost. But the truth is that culture and economics are
entwined, and always have been. The Republicans who took the stage in
Milwaukee to rail against green energy and present themselves as the
protectors of the working class understand that only too well.
John Wilander et al. (Mastodon): These are the protections and
defenses added to Private Browsing in Safari 17.0: Link Tracking
Protection Blocking network loads of known trackers, including
CNAME-cloaked known trackers Advanced Fingerprinting Protection
Extensions with website or history access are off by default In
addition, we added these protections and defenses in all browsing
[…]
New
Evidence Adds to Findings Hinting at Network of Caves on Moon
date: 2024-07-18, from: NASA breaking news
An international team of scientists using data from NASA’s LRO (Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter) has discovered evidence of caves beneath the
Moon’s surface.
You’re
Always on That Phone: How Being Online Sustained Sudan’s Youth
Revolution
date: 2024-07-18, from: Care
<p>“The sit-in became a physical embodiment of the safe spaces we had only imagined could exist online. We congregated freely and spoke without bounds. We cared for each other in immediate ways.”</p>
California
Faces a Brutal Wildfire Season, With More Land Burned to Date Than in
Recent Years
date: 2024-07-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The state’s fires have burned more than 11 times as much land so far
in 2024 than they had at this point last year, according to the most
recent numbers from Cal Fire
On
Sudan and the Interminable Catastrophe: A Conversation with Bedour
Alagraa
date: 2024-07-18, from: Care
<p>“In terms of genres of the human, I think that Sudan has a lot to tell the world about our assumptions about Man, because it’s a country that doesn’t have very many white people at all.”</p>
View From
the Nuba Mountains: An Interview with Kuna
date: 2024-07-18, from: Care
<p>“Previously, when I was outside of Sudan, I was very much like, “I’m just Sudanese.” But now, I find myself more and more—I don’t want to say less willing—but I will say I feel safer identifying as a Nuba.”</p>
Apple: Safari, the world’s fastest browser, now offers Highlights, an
even easier way to discover information on the web, such as directions,
summaries, or quick links to learn more about people, music, movies, and
TV shows. A redesigned Reader includes even more ways to enjoy articles
without distractions, featuring a streamlined view of the article a
[…]
Genocidal
Technologies: The Deprivation of Medicine in Tigray
date: 2024-07-18, from: Care
<p>“The decimation of medicine and healthcare was a genocidal technology used to actualize as many deaths as possible—and one whose future deployment can by no means be ruled out.”</p>
Wall
Street Journal firing shocks chair of Hong Kong journalists group
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
BANGKOK — The newly elected chair of the Hong Kong Journalists
Association says she was “shocked and appalled” to be fired by the Wall
Street Journal this week, immediately after taking her position.
Selina Cheng says the media outlet terminated her contract Wednesday
after she accepted the role leading the association, known as the
HKJA.
Speaking with VOA, Cheng said, “I think I would not be terminated if
I had complied with their request to not be chair.”
The reporter says Wall Street Journal editors had warned her that her
HKJA role could be a conflict of interests because the Journal covers
press freedom issues in Hong Kong.
Cheng said in a news conference that the Journal’s actions called
into question its commitment to press freedom, saying management is
blocking employees “from advocating for freedoms the Journal reporters
rely on to work, in a place where journalists and their rights are under
threat.”
She said the Journal is applying a double standard, noting its
advocacy efforts to free American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who is on
trial in Russia.
Cheng, who joined the Journal as a full-time employee in 2022, covers
the electric vehicle and auto industry.
A spokesperson at Dow Jones, parent company of the
Journal, confirmed to VOA that personnel changes were made in Hong Kong
on Wednesday.
When pressed over the reason to terminate Cheng’s role, the
spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on specific individuals. This is a
newsroom decision.”
The spokesperson added, “The Wall Street Journal has been and
continues to be a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom in Hong
Kong and around the world.”
Conflict brewing for weeks
In a statement shared on the social media platform X on Wednesday,
Cheng said that about three weeks ago, Wall Street Journal editors
learned that she was running for election to be chair of HKJA.
Cheng says that her supervisor, who is based in Britain, then asked
her to withdraw.
“She also asked me to quit the board — which I have served on since
2021 —even though the Wall Street Journal approved this when I was
hired. This day was the day before our election,” Cheng said in a
statement.
When she refused, Cheng says, her supervisor told her the role
as chair “would be incompatible” with her job and that “employees of the
Journal should not be seen as advocating for press freedom in a place
like Hong Kong.”
Cheng told VOA she had been expecting something to happen when she
refused to stop her association with the HKJA.
“There didn’t seem to be any room for discussion, and they went
straight to threatening to dismiss weeks ago. I’m deeply shocked and
appalled by this,” she said.
The journalist said that on Wednesday, Gordon Fairclough, the world
coverage chief at the Journal, flew from Britain to Hong Kong to inform
Cheng her role had been terminated as part of a restructure.
Cheng said the Journal made layoffs in Hong Kong earlier this year,
but that she was kept on.
“Prior to knowing that I was going to run for chair, there wasn’t any
indication [of being dismissed],” she told VOA. “In fact, I was a small
number of people kept on in the newsroom and my reporting area was
highlighted from our editor in chief as being one of the key areas to
continue reporting on in Asia.”
Cheng told VOA she had not been asked to relocate to any other of the
Journal bureaus.
Cheng has worked in Hong Kong since 2017, reporting on the umbrella
protest movement, the removal of books about Tiananmen Square from
libraries and a lobbying campaign that sought to revoke the Hong Kong
Human Rights and Democracy Act.
She previously worked at English news website the Hong Kong Free
Press and Hong Kong media outlet HK01.
Association is ‘outraged’
The HKJA in a statement said that it was “outraged” by the Journal’s
actions. The statement says Cheng is consulting her lawyers about a
potential breach of Hong Kong labor law.
“By pressuring employees not to take part in the HKJA, a key advocate
for both local and international journalists working in Hong Kong, the
WSJ risks hastening the decline of what space for independent journalism
remains,” the statement said.
The HKJA said that other elected board members had come under similar
pressure.
The HKJA has come under pressure from authorities and criticism from
Chinese-state media since Beijing enacted the national security
law in Hong Kong four years ago to quell dissent. The association has
been criticized for alleged links to activist organizations.
Former HKJA chair Ronson Chan was sentenced to five days in jail in
September for allegedly obstructing a police officer.
Chan was an editor at the now-defunct Stand News website, one
of several media outlets to close for allegedly conspiring to publish
seditious publications. Media executives and journalists from the outlet
are on trial, with a verdict expected in August.
Press freedom in Hong Kong and East Asia have seen a decline in the
past year, according to media watchdog Reporters without Borders, known
as RSF.
Hong Kong ranks 135 out of 180, where 1 shows the best
environment. In 2019, the year before the national security law came in,
Hong Kong ranked 73.
Since the national security law was enacted, at least 28 journalists
and press freedom defenders have been arrested, with 10 still in jail,
and over a dozen media outlets have closed.
Aleksandra Bielakowska, an advocacy officer at RSF, says press
freedom has “plummeted.”
“While Reporters Without Borders does not comment on individual
employment disputes, we want to express our support for Selina Cheng’s
courageous work with the Hong Kong Journalists Association,” she told
VOA.
“As press freedom has sharply plummeted in Hong Kong in recent years,
and as pressure has grown against foreign and domestic media operating
in the territory, independent journalism is more crucial than ever,” she
said.
RSF’s World Press Freedom Index lists these countries in East Asia as
the most dangerous for media: China, North Korea and Vietnam.
Backblaze
Raises Its Fully Refundable Price for Restoration Drives
date: 2024-07-18, from: TidBITS blog
Online backup service Backblaze will soon increase the fee it charges to
restore data by shipping you a USB hard drive from $189 to $279.
However, the change is largely moot since the company refunds the full
amount when you return the drive.
Hart
District Appoints Susan Kim New West Ranch Assistant Principal
date: 2024-07-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The William S. Hart Union High School District Governing Board
unanimously approved the appointment of Susan Kim as the newest
assistant principal at West Ranch High School
Sleep
Alliance: Rebranding Sleep Divorce for Better Rest and
Relationships
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: RAND blog
When both partners are well rested, they are likely to be less
irritable and more supportive, leading to a stronger, more positive
relationship. By viewing separate slumber as a sleep alliance, rather
than a sleep divorce, more couples may consider an option that has led
to better sleep and healthier relations for many.
Welcome to a new era for The Earth Observer newsletter! Our 35th
anniversary also marks the official public release of our new website.
Over the past year and a half, The Earth Observer has migrated from a
print publication (the last printed issue was November–December 2022) to
publishing PDFs online only (final PDF issue published in May 2024) to
publishing individual articles […]
Pi goes to
spaaaaace… for a bit longer than planned
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Ariane 6 might have had some APU problems, but the well-Armed hardware
on YPSat worked well
A Raspberry Pi camera is orbiting the Earth, attached to ESA’s YPSat, a
week after both were supposed to have burned up upon re-entering the
atmosphere with the upper stage of the Ariane 6.…
On July 16, 2024, the first core stage of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch
System) rocket for the agency’s Artemis II mission began a journey from
NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The core stage was
moved onto the agency’s Pegasus barge, where it will be ferried 900
miles to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in […]
Registration
Opens for the 2024 NASA International Space Apps Challenge
date: 2024-07-18, from: NASA breaking news
NASA invites innovators, technologists, storytellers, and problem
solvers to register for the 2024 NASA Space Apps Challenge, the largest
annual global hackathon.
Curating
Colonization: On Sharing Visuals of the Dead
date: 2024-07-18, from: Care
<p>“Using images to highlight the gruesome and merciless power of an oppressor does not necessarily generate sympathy for the oppressed; it can be a tool to reinforce the ruling order.”</p>
Kaiser
Panorama City Among Best Hospitals for 2024-2025
date: 2024-07-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Several Kaiser Permanente hospitals across Southern California,
including Panorama City Medical Center which serves the Santa Clarita
Valley, are among the best in the nation and state for delivering safe,
high-quality care based on U.S. News & World Report’s 2024-2025 Best
Hospitals analysis.
Kaspersky
challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Stick an independent probe in our software, you won’t find any Putin.DLL
backdoor
Kaspersky has hit back after the US government banned its products – by
proposing an independent verification that its software is above board
and not backdoored by the Kremlin.…
UDock
X 15.6 Pro is a laptop dock with a 120 Hz touchscreen display and
wireless phone charging
date: 2024-07-18, from: Liliputing
UPERFECT has been making laptop docks for years, allowing you to connect
a phone, tablet or mini PC to a keyboard and display so that you can use
them like a laptop. The latest is the new UPERFECT UDOCK X 15.6 Pro,
which features a 15.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD touchscreen
display with […]
“So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising
set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren
Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most
explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the
family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At
Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion,
saying “I don’t really care if the entity that is most threatening to
that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be
worried about it.”“
An interesting analysis of JD Vance’s economic ideas - at least as
described here, I’m actually not in disagreement. The free market
is cover for private rule. Lina Khan is doing a great
job.
I’m less impressed with his backers Andreessen and Horowitz’s ideas,
which are tied up with military might and a self-interested
misunderstanding of what happened in relation to the downfall of the
USSR. The idea that Elizabeth Warren “hates capitalism” is nonsense.
It’s a very thin defense drawn from their particular mode of capitalism
coming under threat of regulation.
The trouble is,
as I’ve
described, all the social policies that go along with it. Sure, try
and influence both political parties to be beneficial to your businesses
all you want. But if you throw mass deportations, military policing of
our cities, and fascist reconstructions of government in the mix, you’d
better be ready for the repercussions.
“Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and
off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s
long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its
commitment to privacy.”
This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more than that, it likely
says a lot about the performance of Apple News.
For many news publishers Apple News pageviews are a multiple of the
reads on their own websites: it’s a serious source of traffic and
impact. The fact that Apple is finding itself having to make changes to
how it makes revenue on the platform means that the mechanism itself may
be under threat.
It’s never a good idea to put your trust in a third party: every
publisher needs to own their relationships with their communities. The
pull of Apple News has been irresistible, and Apple has seemed more
trustworthy than most. This may have been a false promise, and
publishers should take note.
US
Army honors Nisei combat unit that helped liberate Tuscany in WWII
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
ROME — The U.S. military is celebrating a little-known part of World
War II history, honoring the Japanese-American U.S. Army unit that was
key to liberating parts of Italy and France even while the troops’
relatives were interned at home as enemies of the state following
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
Descendants of the second-generation “Nisei” soldiers traveled to
Italy from around the United States – California, Hawaii and Colorado –
to tour the sites where their relatives fought and attend a
commemoration at the U.S. military base in Camp Darby ahead of the 80th
anniversary Friday of the liberation of nearby Livorno, in Tuscany.
Among those taking part were cousins Yoko and Leslie Sakato, whose
fathers each served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which went onto
become the most decorated unit in the history of the U.S. military for
its size and length of service.
“We wanted to kind of follow his footsteps, find out where he fought,
where he was, maybe see the territories that he never ever talked
about,” said Yoko Sakato, whose father Staff Sgt. Henry Sakato was in
the 100th Battalion, Company B that helped liberate Tuscany from
Nazi-Fascist rule.
The 442nd Infantry Regiment, including the 100th Infantry Battalion,
was composed almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of
Japanese ancestry, who fought in Italy and southern France. Known for
its motto “Go For Broke,” 21 of its members were awarded the Medal of
Honor.
The regiment was organized in 1943, in response to the War
Department’s call for volunteers to form a segregated Japanese American
army combat unit. Thousands of Nisei — second-generation Japanese
Americans — answered the call.
Some of them fought as their relatives were interned at home in camps
that were established in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, to house Japanese
Americans who were considered to pose a “public danger” to the United
States. In all, some 112,000 people, 70,000 of them American citizens,
were held in these “relocation centers” through the end of the war.
The Nisei commemoration at Camp Darby was held one week before the
80th anniversary of the liberation of Livorno, or Leghorn, on July 19,
1944. Local residents were also commemorating the anniversary this
week.
In front of family members, military officials and civilians, Yoko
Sakato placed flowers at the monument in memory of Pvt. Masato Nakae,
one of the 21 Nisei members awarded the Medal of Honor.
“I was feeling close to my father, I was feeling close to the other
men that I knew growing up, the other veterans, because they had served,
and I felt really like a kinship with the military who are here,” she
said.
Sakato recalled her father naming some of the areas and towns in
Tuscany where he had fought as a soldier, but always in a very “naive”
way, as he was talking to kids.
“They were young, it must have been scary, but they never talked
about it, neither him nor his friends,” Sakato said of her father, who
died in 1999.
Her cousin Leslie Sakato’s father fought in France and won a Medal of
Honor for his service. “It was like coming home,” she said of the
commemoration.
“I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves
forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be
enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to
run a news organization to recognize the importance of the role of the
press in democratic governance—although that ought to be essential.”
“[…] More subtly, a CEO without news experience may not grasp how large
of an asset is newsroom morale, or how much sapping it may cost an
enterprise. Such issues can become particularly tricky in a unionized
environment— especially one in which there are no profits over which to
haggle, either because the organization is a nonprofit, or because it is
no longer profitable.”
Dick Tofel was the founding general manager of
ProPublica, and generally knows a
thing or two about the news business.
There’s a line to walk here: there’s certainly risk, as Tofel describes,
of picking a news CEO who is not familiar with the news business. At the
same time, as I’ve previously lamented,
the
industry needs an injection of new, outside ideas. It’s certainly
true that the CEO must deeply understand how news works, but they also
can’t be to afraid to change some of those dynamics - as long as they’re
cognizant of the position and responsibility that journalism holds in a
democracy.
Any CEO needs to be very aware of organizational culture and morale.
Many news CEOs are hyper-focused on their journalism (which is good!) at
the expense of thinking too deeply about culture (which is bad).
Hopefully any good incoming CEO would be an expert at building culture,
although most of us know that this often isn’t the case.
It’s complicated, in other words. But journalism is at least as
important as it’s ever been, and getting news leadership right is
crucial.
It
May Soon Be Legal to Jailbreak AI to Expose How it Works
date: 2024-07-18, from: 404 Media Group
A proposed exemption to the DMCA would give researchers permission to
break terms of service on AI tools to expose bias, training data, and
potentially harmful outputs.
Generative
AI Hype Cycle Is Hitting ‘Trough of Disillusionment’
date: 2024-07-18, from: 404 Media Group
“Investment in AI has reached a new high with a focus on generative
AI, which, in most cases, has yet to deliver its anticipated business
value,” Gartner has said.
Space
firms pitch SpaceX workers hurt by Elon Musk’s plane to move company out
of California
date: 2024-07-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Offering perks and inclusive office cultures, space startups are
making a drive to recruit SpaceX workers disillusioned by Elon Musk’s
plans to move his rocket launcher’s headquarters from California to
Texas.
First, semiconductor manufacturer TSMC has seen a surge in sales, yet
its stock took a hit yesterday. That followed news the U.S. might
further curb exports to China and comments by former President Donald
Trump that TSMC’s home base of Taiwan would need to start paying for its
own defense. Then, as the U.S.-China economic relationship becomes more
contentious, where does that leave Europe? We dig in. And later: why
women’s health is so far behind the curve.
Pittsburg
Theatre Company to host benefit concert after devastating fire
date: 2024-07-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
The fire on June 9 destroyed over 40 years’ worth of costumes, props,
set pieces, furniture, and equipment, leaving the theatre company
members devastated.
UKIs can run on UEFI systems and simplify the distribution of small
kernel images. For example, they simplify network booting with iPXE.
UKIs make rootfs and kernels composable, making it possible to derive a
rootfs for multiple kernel versions with one file for each pair. A
Unified Kernel Image (UKI) is a combination of a UEFI boot stub program,
a Linux kernel image, an initramfs, and further resources in a single
UEFI PE file (device tree, cpu µcode, splash screen, secure boot
sig/key, …). This file can either be directly invoked by the UEFI
firmware or through a boot loader. ↫ Hugues If you’re still a bit
unfamiliar with unified kernel images, this post contains a ton of
detailed practical information. Unified kernel images might become a
staple for forward-looking Linux distributions, and I know for a fact
that my distribution of choice, Fedora, has been working on it for a
while now. The goal is to eventually simplify the boot process as a
whole, and make better, more optimal use of the advanced capabilities
UEFI gives us over the old, limited, 1980s BIOS model. Like I said a few
posts ago, I really don’t want to be using traditional bootloaders
anymore. UEFI is explicitly designed to just boot operating systems on
its own, and modern PCs just don’t need bootloaders anymore. They’re
points of failure users shouldn’t be dealing with anymore in 2024, and
I’m glad to see the Linux world is seriously moving towards negating the
need for their existence.
Seeking
Authors & Books to Feature in Our Book Talk Series with Internet
Archive
date: 2024-07-18, from: Authors Union blogs
Authors and Publishers: We are looking for books (both new &
classic titles) to feature in our popular book talk series. Starting in
2023, Authors Alliance and Internet Archive have partnered on a series
of virtual book talks highlighting issues of importance to the library
and information communities. Last year, more than 2,000 people attended
[…]
Russia’s
FIN7 is peddling its EDR-nerfing malware to ransomware gangs
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Major vendors’ products scuppered by novel techniques
Prolific Russian cybercrime syndicate FIN7 is using various pseudonyms
to sell its custom security solution-disabling malware to different
ransomware gangs.…
JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that
Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably
understand each other quite well.
Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is what Andreessen
called “the final straw” that forced him to switch from supporting the
current president to voting for Trump. If the unrealized capital gains
tax goes into effect, startups may have to pay taxes on valuation
increases. (Private companies’ appreciation is not liquid. However, the
U.S. government collects tax in dollars.)
One could argue, of course, that the future of America is at
stake.
As
The 19th reported about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s
suggested plan for a next Trump administration whose authors include
over 140 people who were a part of the last one:
Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to
end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and
even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public
and private sectors.
The
other
sweeping changes it proposes include firing civil servants and
replacing them with Trump loyalists, removing the Department of
Education, gutting our already-insufficient climate change protections,
reinstating the military draft, conducting sweeping immigration raids
and mass deportations, and condemning more people to death sentences
while making them swift enough to avoid retrial.
All this despite being on shaky legal ground:
Some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are
divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire
them at will, for example. And the plan calls for using the military to
carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be
constitutionally iffy.
“This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and
detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your
movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to
save America.”
We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will
remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
JD Vance is walking this line too. My employer, ProPublica,
recently
reported that he, among other things, believes that the Devil is
real, and that he had some unpleasant things to say about trans people:
He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out
the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural,
religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I
think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like
fundamentally denying basic reality.”
So, yes, all things considered, it feels a bit like America is in the
balance.
What’s particularly bald about involvement from the Silicon Valley crowd
is that they are, according to them, overlooking all of this and
concentrating solely on their business interests. If policies like a tax
on unrealized capital gains or tighter anti-trust actions are enacted,
those investors may have to re-think some of their investment
strategies.
For what it’s worth,
those
taxes are only applicable for individuals with a net worth of over
$100M, with payments at an automatic minimum tax rate treated as
prepayments against future realized gains. The effect could actually be
to encourage startups to go public and realize their value sooner, which
wouldn’t be a terrible thing for the ecosystem (but might limit the
heights private valuations can reach). Given that people with that level
of worth don’t usually make taxable income, this new levied tax
on investment gains makes sense as a way to encourage the very wealthy
to pay the same sorts of tax rates as the rest of us — but, clearly,
Musk, Thiel, et al feel differently. (Invasive thought: where’s Sacks
and Palihapitiya’s podcast co-host Jason Calacanis on this? Is he a
sympathizer or just an enabler?)
Do tighter regulations and a new minimum tax for the wealthy risk the
future of America, though? Maybe they have a different definition of
America than I do. If, to them, it’s a place where you can make a bunch
of money without oversight or accountability, then I can see how they
might be upset. If, on the other hand, America is a place where
immigrants are welcome and everyone can succeed, and where everyone has
the freedom to be themselves, all built on a bedrock of infrastructure
and support, then one might choose to take a different view. The tax
proposal at hand is hardly socialism; it’s more like a correction. Even
if you accept their premise, single-issue voting when the other issues
include mass deportations and gutting public education is myopically
self-serving, leave alone the barren inhumanity of leaving vulnerable
communities out to dry.
Responses by prominent Republican supporters to the inclusion of a Sikh
prayer in Punjabi in the Republican National Convention — one line
reading, “in your grace and through your benevolence, we experience
peace and happiness” —
lay
bare what the unhinged Christian nationalist contingent believes in:
Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, ranted to
his 400,000 followers on X, “Last night you saw why Christian
Nationalism must be exclusively and explicitly Christian. No tolerance
for pagan false gods and the synagogue of Satan.” Republican Oklahoma
state Sen. Dusty Deevers seemed to agree. “Christians in the Republican
party nodding silently along to a prayer to a demon god is shameful,” he
posted.
From my perspective, there are no upsides to a Trump win. Even if you
accept the idea that Project 2025 has nothing to do with him (which, as
I’ve discussed, is laughable), his own self-published
Agenda 47 for his
next administration is similarly horrible, and includes provisions like
sending the National Guard into cities, destroying climate crisis
mitigations, mass deportations, and removing federal funding for any
educational institution that dares to teach the history of race in
America. It also includes a version of Project 2025’s call to fire civil
servants who are seen as disloyal. JD Vance
wants
to end no-fault divorce(ironically, given his running mate),
trapping people in abusive relationships. The effects on the judicial
system from his first administration will be felt for generations; a
second administration will be similarly seismic. He will gut support for
vulnerable communities. I have friends who will directly suffer as a
result of his Presidency; he will create an America that I do not want
to bring my son up in.
Silicon Valley is supposed to invent the future. That’s what’s so
inspiring about it: for generations, it’s created new ways of sharing
and working that have allowed people to communicate and work together
wherever they are. These new moves make it clearer than ever that a
portion of it has never believed in that manifesto; that it is there
solely to establish itself as a new set of power-brokers, trying to
remake the world in their own image. The rest of us need to oppose them
with our full voices and everything we can muster.
Inside an
IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981
date: 2024-07-18, from: OS News
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit.1
But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on
mainframes. ↫ Ken Shirriff Whenever we talk about mainframes, I am
obligated to link to the story of an 18 year old buying a mainframe,
while still living at his parents. One of the greatest presentations of
all time.
“She gets things done.” This is how colleagues describe Brooke
Weborg, machine learning data scientist and engineer at NASA. Weborg was
nominated as Digital Transformer of the Month for her work on the AI/ML
(artificial intelligence/machine learning) consultation portal, the type
of ambitious project that computer scientist Herb Schilling had seen
fail in the past. […]
TSMC
boss predicts AI chip shortage through 2025, says Trump comments don’t
change his strategy
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Overseas expansion to continue, insists C.C. Wei
The CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is
predicting that supply won’t balance out demand for advanced chips until
2025 or 2026.…
Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI.
That said, ChatGPT4 has acquired what some believe is an impressive
sense of humanity. How is this possible? Listen to this week’s “The Joy
of Why” with co-host Steven Strogatz.
The
Grateful Dead and Francis Ford Coppola are among the newest Kennedy
Center Honors recipients
date: 2024-07-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Coppola and The Dead will be honored for lifetime achievement in the
arts, along with jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, blues legend Bonnie
Raitt and the legendary Harlem theater The Apollo.
Those who know me well know that, since the 2020 election, I have feared
political violence in connection with the 2024 election and its
aftermath. Most of my friends think […]
The Democrats will eventually win the argument that Joe Biden just had a
bad night. That is the wrong debate. Biden has had a bad three and a
half years. […]
It’s interesting that you can have an approval rating, as reported in
The Signal, of 80-plus percent and still lose your job. Usually that
would get you a bonus. The […]
The letter from Christopher Lucero (June 12) was pretty decent up until
the second-to-last paragraph. How will he vote, according to Democratic
dogma/programming or according to his own best interest? […]
Europe’s
largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project
disaster
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-19, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Thank goodness for pen and paper. Re-implemented system might not arrive
until March 2026, four years after initial roll-out
Europe’s largest local authority faces a $15.58 million (£12 million)
bill for manually auditing accounts which should have been supported by
an Oracle ERP systems installed in April 2022.…
An
Ancient Partnership: Co-Evolution of Earth Environments and Microbial
Life
date: 2024-07-18, from: NASA breaking news
NASA-supported scientists have examined the long and intricately
linked history of microbial life and the Earth’s environment. By
reviewing the current state of knowledge across fields like
microbiology, molecular biology, and geology, the study looks at how
microorganisms have both shaped and been shaped by chemical properties
of our planet’s oceans, land, and atmosphere.
Milwaukee Former President Donald Trump once privately told associates
that the problem he faced selecting a running mate was that the field of
potential partners did not include a no-brainer […]
At the start of this week’s Republican National Convention, Republicans
adopted a new platform that promises to preserve Social Security and
Medicare with no cuts, while also pledging to cut taxes for working
Americans. Can those two objectives be squared? We’ll also hear more
about the economics of J.D. Vance and learn how Gaza’s farmers are
faring amid war. Plus,
from
today’s “Marketplace Tech,” how can we limit the fallout from
misinformation after political violence?
US
says China’s halt of arms-control talks undermines strategic
stability
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
State Department — The United States called China’s decision to
suspend nascent arms-control talks with Washington “unfortunate,” noting
that China has opted not to engage in efforts to manage strategic risks
and prevent costly arms races.
“We think this approach undermines strategic stability. It increases
the risk of arms race dynamics. We have made efforts to bolster the
defense of our allies and partners in the Indo Pacific, and we will
continue to make those efforts in the face of Chinese threats to their
security,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters
during a briefing on Wednesday.
The Chinese foreign ministry announced on Wednesday that Beijing has
decided to hold off on discussions with the U.S. regarding a new round
of consultations on arms control and non-proliferation.
This decision is a protest against Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan,
a self-ruled democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.
“China has chosen to follow Russia’s lead in asserting that
engagement on arms control can’t proceed when there are other challenges
in the bilateral relationship,” Miller added.
On November 6, 2023, officials from the U.S. and China convened for a
new strategic risk reduction discussion at the State Department.
Leading the U.S. delegation was Mallory Stewart, assistant secretary
for the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and
Stability (ADS). The Chinese delegation was headed by Sun Xiaobo,
director general for arms control at China’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, with other civilian officials also in attendance.
The U.S. has proposed three measures to China aimed at reducing
strategic risks related to missile launches or potential missile
launches. These include establishing a strategic crisis hotline between
their respective Strategic Commands, implementing space deconfliction
measures, and adopting missile launch notifications, a practice observed
by China with Russia.
China’s decision to halt the new round of strategic risk reduction
talks was described as not a significant loss to the U.S., as Chinese
officials did not propose any initiatives during the November
discussions, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The source also noted that similar talks between the U.S. and China
under previous administrations had yielded no tangible results.
“China stands ready to maintain communication with the U.S. on
international arms control issues in line with the principles of mutual
respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation,” said Chinese
foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian on Wednesday.
“But the U.S. must respect China’s core interests and create
necessary conditions for dialogue and exchange,” he said.
Some former U.S. intelligence officials doubt the effectiveness of
ongoing government-to-government engagements and exchanges. They argue
that Beijing’s recent suspension of risk reduction talks in response to
U.S. arms sales to Taiwan serves as a convenient pretext for China to
persist with its internal nuclear arms buildup and external
proliferation.
James Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former director of
intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet,
commented that “talks can and will be held when the Chinese Communist
Party changes its nefarious actions and destabilizing behavior.”
In a report mandated by Congress last October, the Pentagon revealed
that China was developing its nuclear arsenal more quickly than the U.S.
had previously estimated.
As of May 2023, China had more than 500 operational nuclear warheads,
with projections indicating they could exceed 1,000 by 2030.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute,
the United States currently has about 3,700 nuclear warheads, fewer than
Russia’s estimated 4,500.
The U.S. switched its diplomatic recognition from the government in
Taipei to the government in Beijing in 1979.
Since then, the U.S. policy has maintained that differences between
the two sides should be settled peacefully and in accordance with the
will of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The United States
acknowledges but has never endorsed Beijing’s sovereignty claim over
Taiwan.
Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse.
What
Republicans Have Been Saying About Energy at the RNC
date: 2024-07-18, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: The Acropolis in Greece was
closed yesterday due to excessive heat • The Persian Gulf International
Airport
recorded
a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit • Recent flooding in Brazil
exposed a 233-million-year-old dinosaur fossil.
THE TOP FIVE
Republicans slam Biden energy policy at RNC
Energy hasn’t dominated the conversation at the Republican National
Convention this week, but it’s certainly been a talking point. Last
night North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum gave a
speech
focusing on the topic. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak
softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum said. “Energy dominance will be
the big stick that President Trump will carry.” He accused President
Biden of making Russia and Iran “filthy rich” with his energy policies,
blamed him for higher electric bills and grid problems, and said “four
more years of Joe will usher in an era of Biden brownouts and
blackouts.” Oh, and he promised that Trump would “let all of you keep
driving your gas-powered cars.” CNN
called
the speech “Burgum’s audition to be energy secretary.”
Republicans at the event have been blaming Biden for high gas prices
(which are
heavily
influenced by global market forces) and saying that Trump will give
America “energy independence” (even though the U.S.
continued
to rely on foreign oil imports during Trump’s presidency). And
there’s been a lot of complaining about Biden’s pause on new LNG export
terminals.
But it hasn’t been all Biden bashing or fossil fuel fawning. During a
Punchbowl
News fireside chat, execs from American Clean Power, American Gas
Association, Edison Electric Institute, and the Nuclear Energy Institute
touted U.S. energy policy as “one of the greatest strengths in this
country.” They called for building out new energy infrastructure more
quickly, more inclusive tax codes (“rather than say we only like this
type of molecule for hydrogen, it should be let’s create a hydrogen
market and let the best man win”), and looked ahead to an exciting
future for nuclear power.
Today is the final day of the RNC, and it will culminate with a speech
from Donald Trump.
2. Report finds greener steelmaking is taking off
A new
report
from Global Energy Monitor found that the iron and steel industries
worldwide “made major strides towards net zero goals” last year.
Steelmaking alone accounts for about 10% of global carbon dioxide
emissions, so greener production is essential. The GEM report found that
93% of new planned steel capacity will use low-emission electric arc
furnaces instead of the much dirtier blast furnace. It projects that the
global steelmaking fleet could be very close to meeting the
International Energy Agency’s net zero emissions targets by 2030. “The
transition to greener steel is afoot,” the report said, but it
acknowledged that the blast furnace isn’t going away just yet and
remains a climate risk.
GEM
Insured losses from Hurricane Beryl could top $6 billion
The cost of insured property damages from Hurricane Beryl could top $6
billion,
according
to Moody’s. In Texas alone, insurers might be on the hook for $4.5
billion. Most U.S. losses are projected to be from destructive wind.
Katrina in 2005 was the
most
expensive hurricane on record, with insured property losses topping
$65 billion. Last year, natural disasters cost
$95
billion in insured losses globally.
U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell this week made an impassioned
plea
for the world to urgently cut fossil fuel use after his grandmother’s
home on the Caribbean island of Carriacou was destroyed by Beryl. “What
the climate crisis did to my grandmother’s house must not become
humanity’s new normal,” Stiell said. “We can still prevent that, but
only if people everywhere speak up, and demand bolder climate actions
now, before it’s too late.” Beryl struck Carriacou as a category 5
storm, the earliest storm of that magnitude ever recorded in the
Atlantic.
4. Attorneys general push FEMA on extreme heat and wildfire
smoke disasters
A group of 14 state attorneys general are ramping up the pressure on
FEMA to declare extreme heat and wildfire smoke major disasters. They
sent a
letter
to the agency this week, urging it to “update its regulations to prepare
for this hotter, smokier future.” Last month a coalition of about 30
groups
filed
a petition pushing for the change. Such a declaration could allow
communities access to federal funds to prepare for heat and fire
emergencies and could help pressure employers to provide better heat
protections for workers. Heat waves
kill
more Americans each year than all other weather events combined. In
case you’ve forgotten, last year was the hottest year on record, and
climate change is making heat waves
more
likely and
more
intense.
Saudi Arabia to buy 50 Lilium electric jets
Saudi Arabia is
buying
50 electric jets for its state-owned national carrier, the Saudia Group.
The “electric vertical take-off and landing” (or eVTOL) jets are made by
a German manufacturer called
Lilium
and have electric engines that use less power while cruising. One jet
can carry
up
to six passengers, and Saudi Arabia will deploy the aircraft for
regional trips, most likely to and from tourist attractions. The planes
cost $9 million each, bringing the deal to a total of about $450
million, and the kingdom has the option of purchasing another 50.
As climate change threatens to reduce access to fresh water, and rising
seas encroach on farm land, researchers are
studying
ways to breed crops that could grow and thrive in saltwater.
Four key
learnings from teaching Experience AI lessons
date: 2024-07-18, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
Developed by us and Google DeepMind, Experience AI provides teachers
with free resources to help them confidently deliver lessons that
inspire and educate young people about artificial intelligence (AI) and
the role it could play in their lives. Tracy Mayhead is a computer
science teacher at Arthur Mellows Village College in Cambridgeshire. She
recently taught…
From the BBC World Service: Despite big profits for chipmakers,
the prospect of further curbs on exports of semiconductor technology to
China has prompted a major sell-off by investors. Plus, a court in South
Korea has ruled same-sex couples should be eligible for the same health
insurance benefits as their heterosexual counterparts. And we hear how
conflict in Gaza is affecting those who earn a living from the land.
European
leaders discuss Ukraine, migration, direction of US
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
WOODSTOCK, England — Leaders from across Europe expressed support for
Ukraine and concern about the direction of the United States on Thursday
at a security-focused summit clouded by worries about whether the U.S.
will remain a reliable ally if Donald Trump wins a second
presidency.
Newly elected U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed some 45 heads
of government to an English country mansion to discuss migration, energy
security and the threat from Russia as he seeks to restore relations
between the U.K. and its European Union neighbors four years after their
acrimonious divorce.
The venue for the European Political Community, or EPC, meeting,
Blenheim Palace, was the birthplace of Britain’s World War II Prime
Minister Winston Churchill, and Starmer said the leaders were convening
“as a new storm gathers over our continent.”
“Our first task here today is to confirm our steadfast support for
Ukraine, to unite once again behind those values that we cherish and to
say we will face down aggression on this continent together,” Starmer
said, adding that the threat from Russia “reaches right across
Europe.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a key guest at the
meeting, aimed at shoring up Europe’s support for his country’s defense
and discussing ways to defend democracy. The U.K. accuses Moscow of
seeking to undermine European democracies with cyberattacks,
disinformation and sabotage.
Others making the trip to Blenheim Palace, a Baroque country mansion
100 kilometers (60 miles) northwest of London, included German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime
Minister Giorgia Meloni, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and NATO
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. European Commission President Ursula
von der Leyen stayed away as she fought to secure a second term from
lawmakers in the European Parliament, which she received as the summit
was underway.
A brainchild of Macron, the EPC was established in 2022 as a forum
for countries inside and outside the 27-nation EU after Russia’s
full-scale invasion of Ukraine shattered Europe’s sense of security. The
next three summits are due to be held in Hungary, Albania and
Denmark.
Starmer’s center-left government aims to rebuild ties with the EU
strained by years of ill-tempered wrangling over Brexit terms. A key
priority is a new U.K.-EU security pact that Starmer hopes to strike
soon.
“We are confident that a new chapter will be opened with the U.K.,”
European Council President Charles Michel said as he arrived.
Starmer said that the U.K. plans to take a more active role on the
world stage, especially when it comes to Ukraine’s fight against
Russia’s invasion and to people-smuggling gangs organizing irregular
migration.
He promised “we will never withdraw from the European Convention on
Human Rights” — something the previous Conservative U.K. government had
flirted with, to the alarm of the U.K.’s European allies.
The U.K. plans to work more closely with the European police agency
Europol against people smuggling, part of measures to beef up border
security following Starmer’s decision to scrap the Conservatives’
contentious and unrealized plan to send migrants arriving in the U.K. by
boat on a one-way trip to Rwanda.
Starmer called the Rwanda plan a “gimmick” and urged European nations
to cooperate against “the vile trade of people smuggling.”
“Let’s be frank — ‘challenge’ is the wrong word,” he said. “It is
now, I think, a crisis. We must combine our resources, share
intelligence, share tactics, shut down the smuggling routes and smash
the gangs.”
At the end of the daylong summit, Starmer said there had been broad
agreement on “gripping the migration crisis” but acknowledged it would
take time.
“Two weeks ago today we were still knocking on doors asking people to
vote for us. We can’t turn it around that quickly,” he told a news
conference.
Many thoughts strayed to the U.S., where the weekend assassination
attempt on Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, underscored how
febrile and polarized politics has become before the November 5
election.
Trump’s skepticism about NATO has long worried U.S. allies. Trump’s
choice of Senator J.D. Vance, an opponent of U.S. military aid to
Ukraine, as his vice presidential running mate has heightened
concerns.
Politicians and officials at the summit stressed the need for Europe
to show it was taking steps to protect its own security.
“European countries must stand on their own legs more than ever,”
Netherlands Prime Minister Dick Schoof said.
That sentiment was echoed by several other leaders, but not by
Hungary’s pro-Russia Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has riled other EU
nations with a series of meetings with foreign leaders, including
Russian President Vladimir Putin, about Ukraine.
Don’t
blame AI for rise in carbon emissions, says Google exec
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Datacenter pollution is rising… but LLM workload not as big as you think
Google’s chief scientist claims that AI is being unfairly blamed for the
rise in his company’s carbon dioxide emissions, and says the tech
giant’s efforts to switch to entirely clean energy by 2030 remains on
track.…
I’m going to be out of commission for a while, as the date for planned
surgery has rolled around. Hopefully, I’ll be back in reasonable working
order next month. Meanwhile, let’s have a musical intermission, from two
of my very favourite pianists from different generations. First, the
transcendentally great Maria Joāo Pires playing Beethoven’s Sonata […]
Marsha
McLean | Summer Camps at Your Local Community Centers
date: 2024-07-18, from: The Signal
“Summer camp is a great opportunity for children to be independent and
self-reliant, but also to have a great time and create wonderful
memories.” – Michael Eisner Summer is here! […]
<p>In a <a href="https://kevquirk.com/blog/could-you-give-up-social-media">recent post</a>, Kev used the magic words to summon me and make me write something on this site: he talked about social media, mentioned me, and posed a question. Rather than focusing on the could/should/would why don’t we focus on the actual product and figure out what is that we’re getting out of social media? And I’m saying “we” even though I’m not really on any traditional social media platform. But more on that later.</p>
The quality and usefulness of a social platform are a by-product of
three factors: my inputs, other people’s inputs, and the platform
creator’s intentions. The first two are quite obvious since social media
is the product of what people decide to put into it. The third is what
really shapes a platform. Not all platforms are created equal and as a
result of that the mixture of inputs and outputs can differ widely from
one digital place to another. Fame and money are terrible incentives
when it comes to digital spaces because people are willing to do pretty
much everything to get a following if that can help them earn money. So
every time a platform gets big enough you just know things are doomed to
turn to shit. That’s an inescapable reality of social platforms. So if
you’re looking for a decent social media space you probably want to stay
on one that’s designed to either stay small in size or one that’s
designed to stay small in scope.
You might be tempted to think that a Mastodon server is a good example
of the first type but you’d be wrong. The decentralised social media
experiments—Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky—are not designed to stay small.
Quite the contrary. They can stay small but you have to fight against
the main concept behind those platforms. In the past, I argued that
small
communities are the best type of communities and so one potential
solution to this social media conundrum is to find—or create!—a
closed-door, small community that wants to stay small on purpose in
order to keep it sane.
Another potential solution is to not join a kitchen-sink social platform
where (almost) everything goes and instead join one that is specifically
designed to cater for a specific audience.
Literal is a good example. It’s a
social platform but the focus is books so everything that’s happening
there is related to books and book reading. You won’t find people
sharing memes or random links or anything like that but if you care
about books you’ll find plenty of those.
Another good example is read.cv and its
sibling, posts.cv. The first one gives
out very early Dribbble vibes but with a different overall aesthetic and
the second, since it’s tied to the first one, is a Twitter clone where
everyone’s a designer posting stuff about design or photography. I have
a profile on both so technically I am on social media but my activity on
there is non-existent. I update the
read.cv profile periodically
since it’s my online CV and I never posted anything on post.cv even
though every three or four weeks I scroll through it for 5 minutes to
see what people are creating. And it’s an incredibly positive
experience. No flame wars, no memes, and nobody is trying to crypto scam
anyone. Just a chill place that’s mainly focused on design (and cats).
The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything.
We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for
news, for serious discourse. And that’s a mistake. Because the moment
you put a stupid amount of people in one room and you let them do
whatever they want the only reasonable outcome you can expect is chaos.
Sure, you might get some positive results out of it but you’ll also
likely get someone shitting in a corner and someone trying to fuck the
power outlet. Because that’s the world we live in. Now sprinkle some
nonsense AI on top of it all and Bob’s your uncle.
So, to circle back to the original question you asked Kev, I don’t think
it’s a matter of wanting to give up social media entirely. You should be
asking if you’re willing to give up this specific flavour of social
media, you should be asking what parts of this type of social media
you’re treasuring and then figure out if there are saner ways to get
those same things elsewhere.
<hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
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Semiconductor
shares slump – possibly thanks to Biden and Trump
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
More sanctions and weaker support for Taiwan are bad news … except for
Intel?
The share price of several major semiconductor producers has taken a
sharp dive, seemingly in response to a pair of political developments in
the United States.…
Trump
vice presidential nominee takes center stage at Republican Party
convention
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance took center stage
at the third night of the Republican National Convention Wednesday.
Donald Trump’s running mate embraced an “America First” approach to
foreign policy and security. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine
Gypson has more from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Samsung
buys UK AI startup to give its products the personal touch
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Oxford Semantic could help your fridge and smartphone pick up on your
proclivities
Samsung announced the acquisition of UK knowledge graph startup Oxford
Semantic Technologies on Thursday, to boost its AI smarts and offer more
personalized experiences and content on its devices.…
Tech
upgrade broke the casino – took slots offline for days
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
A fresh mess for the Australian outfit that previously managed to pay
winnings more than once
Australia’s Star Entertainment Group, operator of three casinos down
under, has seen its slot machines and other electronic games go offline
for at least three days after an upgrade went awry.…
JD
Vance will introduce himself to the nation at the RNC as Trump’s running
mate
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
MILWAUKEE — Introducing himself to the nation after being tapped as
Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance is planning to use his Wednesday
night address to the Republican National Convention to share the story
of his hardscrabble upbringing and make the case that his party best
understands the challenges facing struggling Americans.
The 39-year-old Ohio senator is a relative political unknown. In his
first primetime speech since becoming the nominee for vice president,
Vance is expected to talk about growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio,
his mother addicted to drugs and his father absent, and how he later
went on to the highest levels of U.S. politics.
Vance, who rapidly morphed in recent years from a bitter critic of
the former president to an aggressive defender, is positioned to become
the future leader of the party and the torch-bearer of Trump’s “Make
America Great Again” political movement, which has reshaped the
Republican Party and broken longtime political norms. The first
millennial to join the top of a major party ticket, he enters the race
as questions about the age of the men at the top — 78-year-old Trump and
81-year-old Biden — have been high on the list of voters’ concerns.
Speaking earlier Wednesday, at his first fundraiser as Trump’s
running mate, Vance said he will use the speech to highlight the
contrast between Trump and Biden.
“The guy who actually connects with working people in this country is
not Fake Scranton Joe, it’s Real President Donald Trump,” he said.
Vance was introduced at the fundraiser by Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who
said Trump’s decision to choose Vance wasn’t about picking a running
mate or the next vice president.
“Donald Trump’s decision this week in picking JD Vance was about the
future,” he said. “Donald Trump picked a man in JD Vance that is the
future of the country, the future of the Republican Party, the future of
the America First movement.”
Along with his relative youth, Vance is new to some of the hallmarks
of Republican presidential politics: This year’s gathering is the first
RNC that Vance has attended, according to a Trump campaign official who
was not authorized to speak publicly.
Trump, who entered the arena to a version of the song “It’s a Man’s
World” by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, will be watching from his
family box.
Convention organizers had stressed a theme of unity, even before
Trump survived an attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania
Saturday. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and
the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol, officials said, would be
absent from the stage.
But that changed with former White House official Peter Navarro, who
was greeted with enthusiastic cheers and a standing ovation hours after
he was released from a Miami prison where he served four months for
defying a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the
Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of the former
president’s supporter.
“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be
careful. They will come for you,” he said in a fiery speech. He compared
his legal troubles to those faced by Trump, who earlier this year was
convicted on 34 felony charges in his criminal hush money trial. Trump
is also facing two indictments for his efforts to overturn the 2020
election.
“They did not break me,” Navarro said, “and they will never break
Donald Trump.”
Also spotted on the floor of the convention: Paul Manafort, Trump’s
2016 campaign chair, who was convicted as part of the investigation into
Russia’s meddling in that election.
Vance is an Ivy League graduate and former businessman, but gained
prominence following the publication of his bestselling 2016 memoir
“Hillbilly Elegy,” which tells the story of his blue-collar roots. The
book became a must-read for those seeking to understand the cultural
forces that propelled Trump to the White House that year.
Still, most Americans — and Republicans — don’t know much about
Vance. According to a new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public
Affairs Research, which was conducted before Trump selected the freshman
senator as his choice, 6 in 10 Americans don’t know enough about him to
have formed an opinion.
About 2 in 10 U.S. adults have a favorable view of him, and 22% view
him negatively. Among Republicans, 61% don’t know enough to have an
opinion of Vance. About one-quarter have a positive view of him, and
roughly 1 in 10 have a negative one.
Vance will be introduced Wednesday night by his wife, Usha Chilukuri
Vance. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a close friend of
Vance, will also speak.
Beyond Vance’s prime-time speech, the Republican Party focused
Wednesday on a theme of American global strength. Speakers were to
include family members of service members killed during the withdrawal
of troops from Afghanistan and someone taken hostage during the Oct. 7
attack in Israel, according to a person familiar with the program.
Republicans contend that the country has become a “global
laughingstock” under Biden’s watch. The party that was once home to
defense hawks and neoconservatives has fully embraced Trump’s “America
First” foreign policy that redefined relationships with allies and
adversaries.
Democrats have sharply criticized Trump — and Vance — for their
positions, including their questioning of U.S. support for Ukraine in
its defense against Russia’s invasion.
In a video released Wednesday by Biden’s reelection campaign, Vice
President Kamala Harris dismissed Vance as someone Trump “knew would be
a rubber stamp for his extreme agenda.”
“Make no mistake: JD Vance will be loyal only to Trump, not to our
country,” Harris says in a video.
The Friends of Santa Clarita Public Library is hosting a “Summer Bag
Sale” event at the Valencia, Canyon Country and Newhall branches of the
Santa Clarita Public Library, during normal operating hours from
Saturday, Aug. 3 to Sunday, Aug.
New
Valencia baseball coach aiming to put Vikings back on top
date: 2024-07-18, from: The Signal
After eight years as an assistant coach with the Valencia Vikings
baseball program, Tim Pennell has his shot to lead the Vikings back to
the pinnacle of the Santa Clarita […]
Ryan Mathiesen, the power-hitting, power-throwing pitcher/third
baseman for The Master’s University baseball team, has been chosen by
the Houston Astros in the 14th round of the MLB Draft
US
arrests Syrian who oversaw prison where alleged abuse took place
date: 2024-07-18, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — A former Syrian military official who oversaw a prison
where human rights officials say torture and abuse routinely took place
has been arrested, authorities said Wednesday.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents took Samir Ousman
al-Sheikh into custody last week at Los Angeles International Airport,
said agency spokesperson Greg Hoegner.
The 72-year-old has been charged with immigration fraud, specifically
that he denied on his U.S. visa and citizenship applications that he had
ever persecuted anyone in Syria, according to a criminal complaint filed
on July 9 and reviewed by The Associated Press. Investigators are
considering additional charges against al-Sheikh, the complaint
shows.
He was in charge of Syria’s infamous Adra Prison from 2005 to 2008
under President Bashar Assad. Human rights groups and United Nations
officials have accused the Syrian government of widespread abuses in its
detention facilities, including torture and arbitrary detention of
thousands of people, in many cases without informing their families
about their fate. Many remain missing and are presumed to have died or
been executed.
“This is the highest-level Assad regime official arrested anywhere in
the world. … This is a really big deal,” said Mouaz Moustafa, executive
director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based opposition
organization.
Moustafa said Wednesday that one of his staff members, a former
Syrian detainee, was first tipped off in 2022 by a refugee that there
was “potentially a war criminal” in the United States. His organization
alerted several federal agencies and began working with them to build a
case against al-Sheikh.
Al-Sheikh’s attorney, Peter Hardin, called it a “simple
misunderstanding of immigration forms” that has been politicized and
said al-Sheikh “finds himself being made a pawn caught up in a larger
international struggle.”
“He vigorously denies these abhorrent accusations,” Hardin said.
Investigators interviewed five former inmates at the Syrian prison,
who described being hanged by their arms from the ceiling, severely
beaten with electrical cables, and witnessing other prisoners being
branded by hot rods, according to court documents. One inmate described
how guards broke his back.
According to the complaint, al-Sheikh, a resident of Los Angeles
since 2020, stated in his citizenship application that he had “never
persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race,
religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or
political opinion” and “never been involved in killing or trying to kill
someone.” This was false, as al-Sheikh persecuted political dissidents
and ordered the execution of prisoners while he was head of Adra, the
complaint states.
He began his career working police command posts before transferring
to Syria’s domestic intelligence agency, which focused on countering
political dissent, the complaint says. He later became head of Adra
Prison and brigadier general in 2005. He also served for one year as the
governor of Deir Ez-Zour, a region northeast of the Syrian capital of
Damascus, where there were violent crackdowns against protesters.
He had purchased a one-way plane ticket to depart LAX on July 10, en
route to Beirut, Lebanon, which shares a border with Syria, according to
the complaint. After his arrest, al-Sheikh made his first appearance in
Los Angeles federal court last Friday. He has family in the United
States, including a daughter living in the Los Angeles area, according
to the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
Syria’s civil war, which has left nearly half a million people dead
and displaced half the country’s prewar population of 23 million, began
as peaceful protests against Assad’s government in March 2011.
Other players in the war, now in its 14th year, have also been
accused of abuse of detainees, including insurgent groups and the
U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which guard suspected
and convicted Islamic State members imprisoned in northeastern
Syria.
In May, a French court sentenced three high-ranking Syrian officials
in absentia to life in prison for complicity in war crimes in a landmark
case against Assad’s regime and the first such case in Europe.
The court proceedings came as Assad had begun to shed his longtime
status as a pariah because of the violence unleashed on his opponents.
Human rights groups involved in the case hoped it would refocus
attention on alleged atrocities.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS)
announced the nominees for the 76th Annual Emmy Awards on Wednesday,
July 17 at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. Several California
Institute of the Arts alums were recognized for excellence in television
across 118 categories
Sept. 6:
Cocktails on the Roof Benefits Hart District Student Programs
date: 2024-07-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The WiSH Education Foundation Cocktails on the Roof fundraiser will
be held Friday, Sept. 6, 7-10 p.m. to benefit student programs in the
William S. Hart Union School District.
Release
the hounds! Securing datacenters may soon need sniffer dogs
date: 2024-07-18, updated: 2024-07-18, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Nothing else can detect attackers with implants designed to foil
physical security
Sniffer dogs may soon become a useful means of improving physical
security in datacenters, as increasing numbers of people are adopting
implants like NFC chips that have the potential to enable novel attacks
on access control tools.…
SCV
business owner attends first RNC, details ‘crazy’ energy
date: 2024-07-18, from: The Signal
Harleen Grewal moved to the United States from India in 2008. Five years
later, she got her U.S. citizenship, and 11 years after that, she’s at
her first Republican National […]
July 22:
CalCompetes Tax Credit Applications Begin
date: 2024-07-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The California Competes Tax Credit application periods, amounts
available, and committee meeting dates for fiscal year 2024-2025 have
been posted here.
We’re looking for your feedback on a draft proposal for criteria to
include additional external identifiers in ROR records, and comments are
open through August 16th.
NOAA
IEA
GEM
