News gathered 2024-08-04

four victims, believed to be spectators, found their own transportation to a hospital, where they were treated and listed in stable condition

Trio of home runs power SF Giants to rare road series win over Reds

The Giants got homers from Matt Chapman, LaMonte Wade Jr. and Tyler Fitzgerald to earn their first road series win since July 2-4.

Everyday Ways to Nurture Your Skin This Summer: 4 simple habits to support healthy skin

Good skin care doesn’t have to mean intensive routines or expensive moisturizers – it can be as easy as adopting everyday habits that nurture your skin from the inside out. […]

Summer Wine Tasting

So much wine, and so little time. When summer is in full swing and the temperatures reach double digits, wine might not be your first choice for a summer adult […]

Lights, camera, AI! Real-time deepfakes coming to DEF CON

Red teamer finds they’re easy to make, which is welcome to produce fodder for detection bots

DEF CON Visitors to the AI Village at this year’s DEF CON hacker conference will have the chance to star in their own deepfake video simply by standing in front of Brandon Kovacs’ camera, and watching as he turns them into a digital likeness of a fellow attendee – for a good cause.…

Unraveling Credit Reports and Credit Scores

Your credit score plays a significant role in your ability to reach your financial goals. When you apply for a loan, a cellphone, a rental unit or any number of […]

Visit Beautiful California Lakes and Rivers

What says summer more than diving into a cool mountain lake or rafting along a scenic river? A day by the water in California usually means a day by the […]

Finke, women’s relay team set world records as U.S. wins medal race over Australia

Bobby Finke set a new standard in the 1,500 freestyle and the American women closed a thrilling nine days at La Defense Arena with another record in their 4×100 medley relay.

Dueling Harris and Trump rallies in the same Atlanta arena showcase America’s deep divides

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stood in the same arena four days apart, each looking over capacity crowds like concert stars or prizefighters.

U.S. bench comes up big against Germany to extend streak to 58 games with quarterfinals next

Antioch man charged with burglaries of Walnut Creek homes

The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office has filed charges against the suspect in court with two counts of burglary, and he remains in custody at the Martinez Detention Facility

Kamala Harris Can Be the Pro-Innovation President Silicon Valley Needs

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explains why Silicon Valley should get behind Harris, counter to the example set by Musk, Andreessen, and a few others. Hoffman is a co-signatory of VCs for Kamala, which makes clear that most Silicon Valley funders are in favor of the Democratic candidate and current Vice President.

I’m more pro-regulation than Hoffman is. Harris should maintain a strong antitrust stance, too, I believe, as well as providing new protections against the worst excesses of AI and other technologies that might harm vulnerable groups. But it’s certainly true that her administration will be better for innovation than her opponent, even if the latter might be better for lining the pockets of a few select billionaires.

It is a false choice. Regulation, principles, and a duty of care to the public are not anti-innovation: in fact, they promote it. And that’s the direction we should all be heading in.

Review: Three music legends walk into Shoreline Amphitheatre and this is what happens

Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp performed at the Outlaw Music Festival Tour concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View.

IBM Canada can’t duck channel exec’s systematic age discrimination claim

‘They actually replaced me with a younger employee’

Three years ago, Bruce Maule, worldwide president of channel marketing at IBM, was informed by bosses that his position was being eliminated.…

A’s shut down by Flaherty in Dodgers debut as Ohtani joins 30-30 club

A’s manager Mark Kotsay pointed to a borderline call in the sixth inning that went the Dodgers’ way, saying it changed the game.

The 2024 Lexus RX 450h AWD Luxury PHEV Plug in Hybrid SUV

What is a RX 450h? The RX is a midsize luxury SUV built in the Miyawaka, Japan, assembly plant and sold worldwide by Lexus. The 450h designation means that the SUV has a combined total system of 304 hp horsepower from a 2.5 liter 4 cylinder gas engine with a plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) drive.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Monterey Auto Week: auctions fast, furious

The front page of the Monterey section of the Mecum Auctions website features a bright yellow 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB/6C Alloy Berlinetta. It sold at last year’s annual three-day gathering at the Hyatt Regency Monterey for $3.41 million.

Logitech ponders a ‘forever mouse’ that requires a subscription

In a recent interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber talked about the desire to create a ‘forever mouse.’ Buy one, and you wouldn’t just have the mouse forever. You may also have pay for yet another subscription forever, too. Faber likened the idea to owning a higher-end watch. ” I’m not […]

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

I used to do one guard for each condition, until I discovered I could compound those all in one go with the comma operator.

In this particular case, I am dealing with converting weakly typed data into strongly typed data:

The Curious About Everything Newsletter #41

Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled

As uBlock Origin lead developer and maintainer Raymond Hill explained on Friday, this is the result of Google deprecating support for the Manifest v2 (MV2) extensions platform in favor of Manifest v3 (MV3). “uBO is a Manifest v2 extension, hence the warning in your Google Chrome browser. There is no Manifest v3 version of uBO, hence the browser will suggest alternative extensions as a replacement for uBO,” Hill explained. ↫ Sergiu Gatlan at Bleeping Computer If you’re still using Chrome, or any possible Chrome skins who have not committed to keeping Manifest v2 extensions enabled, it’s really high time to start thinking about jumping ship if ad blocking matters to you. Of course, we don’t know for how long Firefox will remain able to properly block ads either, but for now, it’s obviously the better choice for those of us who care about a better browsing experience. And just to reiterate: I fully support anyone’s right to block ads, even on OSNews. Your computer, your rules. There are a variety of other, better means to support OSNews – our Patreon, individual donations through Ko-Fi, or buying our merch – that are far better for us than ads will ever be.

Rebasing to reality

Somehow, I need to deal with my sadness.

Do we all?

It’s like it sits just under the surface, ready to spring up. Is every adult like this? I think it must be more common than anyone talks about. It’s not even that the world is getting harder, between climate change and nationalism and war; it’s the narrowing vice of what it takes to just be alive. There’s no time, there’s no money, we’re all expected to be a part of a template that someone else has established for their own benefit. It’s maybe easier if you’re rich, because more money roughly translates to more time and more freedom, at least in America, but even the rich get trapped into their own cycles of spending and acquiescence in order to maintain their lifestyles. Even rich kids compare their lives to people who have it better. They’ve got to keep earning, somehow.

I had a conversation with a good friend recently. I told her that I felt like I was living in a branch in the timestream, and I was waiting for the world to snap back to the main timeline.

“Ben,” she patiently told me, “this is the main timeline.”

I mean, fuck.

I’m older than I think I am. That’s a common problem too, I think: finding yourself stuck in that late twenties / early thirties mindset where you’re still exploring and nothing is really set in stone yet. I’m forty-five. My next major milestone birthday is fifty. I’m fifteen years away from being sixty years old. Is it always going to feel like this? When, exactly, will I have my shit together?

I’m still dealing with the loss of my mother and everything that led up to it. It’s been thirteen years since I moved to America to be closer to her, because she needed supplementary oxygen and it wasn’t clear how long she would live for. For so much of that time, I was worried about her. The two fridge-sized oxygen concentrators running in parallel so she would have enough to breathe, the clear tubes snaking around the house as she moved; the day she had her double lung transplant, when the ICU nurses eventually had to kick me out of her room; her first steps, set perfectly to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show; the joy of being free; the slow sadness of the drugs taking it all away from her. The nightmare trauma of palliative care and my guilt for not having done more. Wishing I’d said more to her in those final hours. Wishing I’d talked more with her overall. Feeling, despite everything I know, that I must have disappointed her, she must be mad at me, because she’s never shown up in a dream for me since.

My life hasn’t been real. It’s all a hyper-surreal collection of scenes that I’ve been disassociated from to varying degrees. After her loss, I fell into a trough of feeling like nothing at all mattered, like I was disconnected from the cause and effect of reality. It was all a dream.

It was not a dream. This is the main timeline.

One of the things about being a third culture kid — or maybe this isn’t about being a third culture kid at all, maybe it’s just about me, or maybe everyone feels this — is that however you may superficially appear to be a part of an archetype, you’re not a part of it. For all those years with a British accent, going to an English school, I was missing the cultural touchpoints and feeling of belonging. Some people are anchored in place, nationhood, nationality, their hometowns. The only feeling of belonging that really made sense to me was family: the only people who had that same background, that mix of cultural touchpoints and recognition. Losing family is about the profound hole that’s left when someone you love is suddenly gone, a real hurt, but it’s also about losing a tether: losing belonging itself.

I have always felt like I don’t really matter to anyone, except to my family. I could disappear tomorrow and, shrug. When I was younger, I convinced myself that there was some kind of magic incantation that other people knew and I didn’t; if I could just learn the password, I’d be a part of what everyone else was a part of. Until then, I wasn’t good enough. I needed to prove myself.

When I didn’t date in high school, it was because I wasn’t good enough. (All those beautiful people who did — I admired them so much. To my teenage eyes, to hook up with someone meant that they acceptedyou. What an unattainable thing for someone who didn’t feel like he belonged.) (And: Christ, why was my body so big. I hated my physicality. I wanted so badly for someone to tell me I was okay. This is still true.) Every job I didn’t get, I wasn’t good enough. When my startups didn’t hit the highs I was hoping for, I wasn’t good enough. Every mistake, I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t measure up.

I don’t measure up. I’m not good enough. Even in my chosen profession, I’ve never been in the cool developer circle, I’ve never quite made it into the in crowd. I am still scared of my body, of catching myself in the mirror. I’m still looking for the password.

This backchannel in my head is exhausting. It’s another reason to think: eh, I don’t matter, nothing I do is really that important.

The thing about being convinced that you’re in some kind of dream-world fork of reality is that you don’t face these things. The temptation is to slide and slide — nothing really matters, remember? — and pretend that one day you’ll go back to how it was before any of it started. But you have to; there is no going back; if this is a fork, it’s been worked on so long that there’s no way you could possibly rebase to the main branch. This is life.

Which brings me to: I have a son.

He’s beautiful and smart; his smile cuts through everything else. He sings the alphabet song in the back seat of the car and randomly walks up to me and says “hug” before wrapping me in an embrace. I wish my mother could have met him, is the toxic thought, but he is infused with everything that was good about her. To him, I want to be the belonging she represented to me. The belonging that my dad still represents for me. (Largely unacknowledged: I am terrified of losing him, too.)

That means I have to deal with this sadness, this untethered unreality. This has to be the main branch, because no other branch has him in it. What I do matters to him, a lot, and it will for the rest of his life.

Therapy? Yes, of course. Parts Work and reflection and perspective. I have a trauma therapist and Erin and I have a couples therapist and these things work.

But they don’t cut to the sadness. The sadness is there, always. And I have to deal with it, don’t I, because eventually it will infuse itself into my son. I don’t want him to carry it. I want him to be free of its tendrils. I want him to not feel how I feel.

I’ve been focused on the loss of belonging, and the idea of returning to a less complicated timeline. I think, though, the way to deal with the sadness is simpler, although also harder.

Ultimately, finally, I’ve got to make peace with myself.

That’s the job.

I’ll be honest: I don’t have the first clue how to do it.

And I don’t know how universal this is. Is this something that’s unique to me? Something that a lot of people quietly deal with? Is this sadness sitting just underneath everybody’s skin, or is it just an infection under mine? If it is lurking everywhere, shallowly digging its way into everyone, what can we do about it? How can we tell each other that we belong, that we’re okay, that it’s alright?

And if it’s not: please, finally, what’s the password? Not for my sake. For his.

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Wall Street week ahead - Flaring economic worries threaten US stocks rally

New York — Economic fears are roiling Wall Street, as worries grow that the Federal Reserve may have left interest rates elevated for too long, allowing them to hurt U.S. growth.

Alarming economic data in recent days have deepened those concerns. U.S. job growth slowed more than expected in July, a Friday report showed, while the unemployment rate increased to 4.3%, heightening fears that a deteriorating labor market could make the economy vulnerable to a recession.

The jobs report exacerbated a selloff in stocks that began on Thursday, when data showing weakness in the labor market and manufacturing sector pushed investors to dump everything from chip stocks to industrials while piling into defensive plays.

Richly valued tech stocks tumbled further on Friday, extending losses in the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC to more than 10% from a record closing high reached in July. The benchmark S&P 500 index .SPX has slid 5.7% from its July peak.

“This is what a growth scare looks like,” said Wasif Latif, president and chief investment officer at Sarmaya Partners. “The market is now realizing that the economy is indeed slowing.”

For months, investors had been heartened by cooling inflation and gradually slowing employment, believing they bolstered the case for the Fed to begin cutting interest rates. That optimism drove big gains in stocks: the S&P 500 remains up 12% this year, despite recent losses; the Nasdaq has gained nearly 12%.

Now that a September rate cut has come into view following a Fed meeting this week, investors are fretting that elevated borrowing costs may already be hurting economic growth. Corporate earnings results, which saw disappointments from companies such as Amazon, Alphabet and Intel, are adding to their concerns.

“We’re witnessing the fallout from the curse of high expectations,” said James St. Aubin, chief investment officer at Ocean Park Asset Management. “So much had been invested around the scenario of a soft landing, that anything that even suggests something different is difficult.”

Next week brings earnings from industrial bellwether Caterpillar CAT.N and media and entertainment giant Walt Disney DIS.N, which will give more insight into the health of the consumer and manufacturing, as well as reports from healthcare heavyweights such as weight-loss drugmaker Eli Lilly LLY.N.

Bets in the futures markets on Friday suggested growing unease about the economy. Fed fund futures reflected traders pricing an over-70% chance of a 50-basis point cut at the central bank’s September meeting, compared to 22% the day before, according to CME FedWatch. Futures priced a total of 116 basis points in rate cuts in 2024, compared to just over 60 basis points priced in on Wednesday.

Broader markets also showed signs of unease. The Cboe Volatility index .VIX - known as Wall Street’s fear gauge - hit its highest since March 2023 on Friday as demand for options protection against a stock market selloff rose.

Meanwhile, investors have rushed into safe haven bonds and other defensive areas of the market. U.S. 10-year yields - which move inversely to bond prices - on Friday dropped as low as 3.79%, the lowest since December.

Sectors that are often popular during times of economic uncertainty are also drawing investors.

Options data for the Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund XLV.P showed the average daily balance between put and call contracts over the last month at its most bullish in about three years, according to a Reuters analysis of Trade Alert data. Trading in the options on Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund XLU.P also shows a pullback in defensive positioning, highlighting traders’ expectations for strength for the sector.

The healthcare sector .SPXHC is up 4% in the past month, while utilities .SPLRCU are up over 9%. By contrast, the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index .SOX is down nearly 17% in that period amid sharp losses in investor favorites such as Nvidia NVDA.O and Broadcom AVGO.O.

To be sure, some investors said the data could just be a reason to lock in profits after the market’s overall strong run in 2024.

“This is a good excuse for investors to sell after a huge year to date rally,” said Michael Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors. “Investors should be prepared for some major volatility, particularly in the big tech stocks. But it will probably be short-lived.”

StarBook 7 Linux laptop comes with a choice of Intel N200 or Core Ultra 7 165H chips

It’s not unusual for PC makers to offer the same laptop with several different processor options. But usually we’re talking about chips in the same family, like Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 or AMD Ryzen 3, 5, or 7. But the new StarBook 7 laptop from Linux PC vendor Star Labs is something different. […]

Support Wildlife Corridors Bill

Studies show that wildlife corridors can reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by up to 90 percent.

LEVER WEEKLY: When Big Oil Kills Your Family

Advocates are charging Big Oil for climate-related deaths, and more from The Lever this week.

Limine: a modern, advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader and boot manager

Limine is an advanced, portable, multiprotocol bootloader that supports Linux, multiboot1 and 2, the native Limine boot protocol, and more. Limine is lightweight, elegant, fast, and the reference implementation of the Limine boot protocol. The Limine boot protocol’s main target audience is operating system and kernel developers that want to use a boot protocol which supports modern features in an elegant manner, that GRUB’s aging multiboot protocols do not (or do not properly). ↫ Limine website I wish trying out different bootloaders was an easier thing to do. Personally, since my systems only run Fedora Linux, I’d love to just move them all over to systemd-boot and not deal with GRUB at all anymore, but since it’s not supported by Fedora I’m worried updates might break the boot process at some point. On systems where only one operating system is installed, as a user I should really be given the choice to opt for the simplest, most basic boot sequence, even if it can’t boot any other operating systems or if it’s more limited than GRUB.

Exploring O3 optimization for Ubuntu

Following our recent work 5 with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS where we enabled frame pointers by default to improve debugging and profiling, we’re continuing our performance engineering efforts by evaluating the impact of O3 optimization in Ubuntu. O3 is a GCC optimization 14 level that applies more aggressive code transformations compared to the default O2 level. These include advanced function and the use of sophisticated algorithms aimed at enhancing execution speed. While O3 can increase binary size and compilation time, it has the potential to improve runtime performance. ↫ Ubuntu Discourse If these optimisations deliver performance improvements, and the only downside is larger binaries and longer compilation times, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer to enable these, assuming those mentioned downsides are within reason. Are there any downsides they’re not mentioning? Browsing around and doing some minor research it seems that -O3 optimisations may break some packages, and can even lead to performance degradation, defeating the purpose altogether. Looking at a set of benchmarks from Phoronix from a few years ago, in which the Linux kernel was compiled with either O2 and O3 and their performance compared, the results were effectively tied, making it seem not worth it at all. However, during these benchmarks, only the kernel was tested; everything else was compiled normally in both cases. Perhaps compiling the entire system with O3 will yield improvements in other parts of the system that do add up. For now, you can download unsupported Ubuntu ISOs compiled with O3 optimisations enabled to test them out.

A course correction

Over time — and really, over the last few years — this personal space really has evolved to become more about tech and society and less about me. I’m going to add more “me” back. This is my space.

Children of freed sleeper agents learned they were Russians on the flight, Kremlin says

What a bonkers story. It’s crazy to me that these kinds of sleeper agents are still real - or that they ever were at all. Imagine what it takes to fit in with a culture completely, from language to mannerisms to cultural understanding.

I wonder how many sleeper agents are still out there, acting on behalf of Russia and every other nation.

In win for Mexico, US will expand areas for migrants to apply online for entry at southern border

Mexico City — The Biden administration will expand areas where migrants can apply online for appointments to enter the United States to a large swath of southern Mexico, officials said Saturday, potentially easing strains on the Mexican government and lessening dangers for people trying to reach the U.S. border to claim asylum.

Migrants will be able to schedule appointments on the CBP One app from the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, extending the zone from northern and central Mexico, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said. The move satisfies a request of Mexico, an increasingly close partner of the U.S. in efforts to control extraordinary migration flows.

The change will spare migrants from traveling north through Mexico to get one of 1,450 appointments made available daily, CBP said. The agency said it will happen soon but did not give a date.

“We consistently engage with our partners in the Government of Mexico and work together to adjust policies and practices in response to the latest migration trends and security needs,” CBP said in a statement.

The statement confirmed remarks a day earlier by Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary Alicia Bárcena, who said closer relations with the United States cut migration sharply from late last year.

U.S. officials have said increased Mexican enforcement is largely responsible for a sharp drop in U.S. arrests for illegal border crossings during the first half of this year. Mexican officials have stepped up their presence at highway checkpoints and on railroads leading to the U.S. border, returning most to southern Mexico.

In June, the U.S. temporarily suspended asylum processing for those who enter the country illegally, making CBP One of the only avenues for migrants to enter the U.S. to seek asylum and further driving down illegal entries. U.S. officials said arrests for illegal crossings plunged 30% in July from the previous month to the lowest level of Joe Biden’s presidency and the lowest since September 2020.

“We have managed to decompress our [northern] border in a very meaningful way and that has helped … our relationship with the United States be very, very dynamic and very positive,” Bárcena said Friday.

More than 680,000 people scheduled CBP One appointments at eight Mexican land crossings with the U.S. from its introduction in January 2023 through June. The top nationalities are Venezuelan, Cuban and Haitian. U.S. authorities recently limited slots for Mexicans due to the high number of applicants from the country.

The perils of traveling through Mexico to be kidnapped or robbed has prompted many migrants to fly to northern border cities like Tijuana for their CBP One appointments once they reach the southernmost point from which they can apply — until now, Mexico City.

Migrants generally enter Mexico in Chiapas or Tabasco from Guatemala. Mexico City may offer more job opportunities and relative safety but the cost of living is higher, prompting some to live in informal camps in the nation’s capital.

AI boom is reshaping the face of cloud infrastructure

Capex skyrockets as providers prioritize new shiny over traditional server upgrades

Analysis Cloud infrastructure is undergoing an upheaval with service providers rushing to deploy servers configured for AI model training, often at the cost of postponing the usual refresh cycle for their standard server hardware.…

‘We’re going to survive and it’s going to come back’: A year after Maui wildfire, survivors press on

LAHAINA, Hawaii — They have combed the ashes for mementos, worried about where they would sleep, questioned their faith and tried to find a way to grieve amid the great, unsettling devastation. Residents have faced a year of challenges, practical and emotional, since the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century decimated the historic town of Lahaina, on Maui, on Aug. 8, 2023.

To mark the anniversary, The Associated Press interviewed seven survivors its journalists first encountered in the days, weeks or months after the fire, as well as a first responder who helped fight the flames. Among their difficulties, they also have found hope, resilience and determination: the Vietnam veteran who has helped others deal with post-traumatic stress; the Buddhist minister with a new appreciation for the sunsets from Lahaina; the college-bound teen aspiring to become a Maui firefighter himself.

Here is a series of vignettes examining some of their experiences over the past year.

Even as he hid behind a seawall from the flames, Thomas Leonard knew Lahaina’s wildfire was going to give him flashbacks to his service as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam 55 years ago. The exploding cars and propane tanks sounded just like mortars.

The nightmares started a few months later. His Veterans Administration doctor prescribed new sleeping medication.

The 75-year-old retired mailman learned to identify signs of post-traumatic stress disorder at a VA clinic in 2001, helping him spot and cope with new triggers. He’s also helped fellow fire survivors.

“I’ve learned to be a really good listener on that with other people, what they’re going through,” he said.

His condo building is still a pile of ash and rubble. Leonard suspects it might take years to rebuild, but he’s determined to see it through. He’s been living in hotels and a rented condo.

“We all got to stay together here on Maui,” Leonard said. “We’re going to survive and it’s going to come back.”

After Elsie Rosales arrived on Maui from the Philippines in 1999, she scrimped on a hotel housekeeper’s salary. As she saved up enough to buy a five-bedroom house in Lahaina in 2014, she did allow herself a few luxuries: gold bracelets, delicate hoop earrings, things she could never have afforded if she remained in the Philippines.

Like the home — her pride, her American dream — the jewelry was a reminder of what’s possible in the U.S.

It all was wiped out in the wildfire that destroyed Lahaina. When she finally was allowed back on the property, she dug through the debris for anything that survived. All she found was a broken bangle.

She used insurance money to pay off the mortgage on the house. She’s now renting a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, their son and their son’s girlfriend in Kahului, an hourlong bus ride from Lahaina.

On those long commutes, she reflects on how she amassed her jewelry collection, only for it to vanish.

“When I’m not working, I keep thinking about everything that burned,” she said. “Especially my jewelry. Everything that I worked hard for.”

Surfing off his Lahaina home always gave Ekolu Lindsey “mana,” spiritual energy. The house was in his family for five generations.

He’s so familiar with the area he notices when more crabs are around or fish are undersized. He has brought school groups there to teach them about the coral, seaweed and the ocean.

That has been impossible since the wildfire turned his house to rubble. His property is now clear of debris but has no electricity or other utilities. Reconstruction is well off.

He’s living at a friend’s place on Oahu, another island, a plane ride away. He couldn’t find anything in Lahaina for less than $4,000 a month.

He returns regularly to Maui to help restore native forests, a focus of the nonprofit his father founded, Maui Cultural Lands. Sadness weighs on him as he drives the winding coastal highway to Lahaina.

State conservation officials won’t allow people to enter the ocean from the burn zone. He surfs on Oahu, but it’s not the same.

“You get the physical exercise,” he said, but not the “rejuvenation of that mana.”

As he was dying of colon cancer, Mike Vierra spent sleepless nights fretting about where his wife, Leola, and their daughter would live when he was gone. The wildfire had reduced their home of more than half a century to hardened pools of melted metal, burned wood and broken glass.

Leola Vierra and her daughter moved multiple times after the fire, switching hotel rooms and vacation rentals whenever the unit’s owners would return.

The Vierras, married 57 years, also couldn’t find their beloved cat, Kitty Kai. But in February, they learned Kitty Kai had found her way to Kahului, 30 miles (48 kilometers) across the West Maui Mountains.

The reunion, while joyful, complicated their housing search. Landlords are less likely to rent to families with pets.

Not until last month did Vierra find some stability, securing a six-month lease while they wait to someday rebuild on their own property. Their new place has a yard, a sundeck and an ocean view.

“I have been so depressed ever since my husband passed, and I can feel my mind and my memory all going downhill,” she said. “With this new home, I think I will be able to accept more things now, because it seems like I’m on the right track.”

As the flames approached, Ai Hironaka and his family — wife, four children, French bulldog — crammed into his Honda Civic and drove off, leaving behind their home and the Japanese Buddhist temple where he was resident minister and caretaker.

Losing those buildings and being uprooted amid the greater devastation has tested him as a Buddhist. How should he behave as a disaster victim? What is the appropriate response when someone gives him donated clothing he doesn’t want? If he feels ungrateful, he turns to the teachings of his religion.

After moving three times in the months after the fire, he now lives across the island, nearly an hour away, at another temple, Kahului Hongwanji Mission, where he also serves as resident minister. He performs much of the same work he did at the Hongwanji Mission in Lahaina: leading ceremonies and counseling members, including fire survivors.

He returns to the site of the Lahaina temple occasionally to check the columbarium, an area for storing funeral urns, which survived. He misses the town, the beach parks, the parents on his son’s high school football team.

And he misses the sunsets from Lahainaluna High School, overlooking the ocean. When he goes back now, he does not take that view for granted.

“I have to capture that,” he said, “because I cannot see this tomorrow.”

Before the fire, Morgan “Bula” Montgomery was a kid who loved playing football and paddling in the ocean. College wasn’t on his radar.

But the University of Hawaii offered full-ride scholarships for Lahainaluna High School graduates at any school in its system following the disaster. Montgomery thought, “Why not?”

He plans to leave Maui this fall to study fire science at Hawaii Community College on the Big Island, inspired by the devastation and the firefighters who tried to save the community.

“I want to come back to Lahaina and come back to Maui and try to be a firefighter,” he said.

Montgomery’s family lost their two-bedroom apartment to the fire, but also found opportunity. Montgomery and fellow Lahainaluna football captains were invited to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this year. It was one of just a handful of times he has left Maui.

After spending time in a hotel, the family secured a rental house about an hour drive across the island. It’s not convenient for his canoe paddling practices in Lahaina. But it’s the biggest house they’ve lived in, with five bedrooms, enough for his mom and her five children.

“An opportunity for school or free tuition is something you’ve got to take advantage of,” Montgomery said.

Ikaika Blackburn, an 18-year veteran of the Maui Fire Department, talks often with his crewmates about the blaze that consumed Lahaina: at the fire house kitchen table, over cups of coffee while waiting for calls or during family gatherings on days off.

His five-person crew was one of the first on the scene. There was no time to think, “no time to have these sentimental feelings,” as he fought through the night. He spent a lot of time growing up with his grandparents in Lahaina. His wife is from the town. His mother-in-law lost her home.

Blackburn and his crew spent days talking about it, “just releasing it and not holding it all in,” he said. Recalling how they rushed from one part of town to the next, trying to find a way to stop it.

“For the most part, we’re able to always win,” he said. “We’re always able to get ahead of it.”

But this fire was different, uncontrollable. Firefighters and investigators from outside Maui helped him understand that his crew did all they could.

Blackburn followed his father’s footsteps as a Maui fire captain. Firefighting feels like something he was born to do.

And he has kept doing it. This year’s busy brushfire season hasn’t triggered memories of last August, he said, because nothing compares to that fire.

When wildfire struck, Jordan Ruidas couldn’t sleep. Eager to help families in the 21 homes that burned, she started a Facebook fundraiser titled, “Lahaina Strong,” which raised more than $150,000.

Five years later, Ruidas and Lahaina Strong again emerged as leaders, pushing officials to control tourism and try to find enough housing for local residents after the 2023 fire destroyed thousands of buildings.

Ruidas was seven months pregnant when last year’s fire destroyed Lahaina. She sometimes missed prenatal checkups. Traveling nurses at community hubs for fire survivors would check her blood pressure.

The fire spared her neighborhood and two months later she gave birth at home to a daughter, Aulia.

“I don’t think I’ve dealt with all the emotions that came with losing Lahaina and being postpartum,” she said. “I feel like I cope by staying busy with work, with Lahaina Strong.”

Ruidas brought the baby along, strapped to her chest, when she helped organize a “fish-in” protest at a popular beach resort demanding more short-term rental housing be made available for survivors.

“My kids will never grow up seeing or knowing the Lahaina that I grew up seeing and knowing,” she said. “The Lahaina that we lost was a very special and beautiful place.”

Tropical Storm Debby moving through Gulf toward Florida with hurricane warnings

MIAMI, FLORIDA — A tropical depression strengthened into Tropical Storm Debby north of Cuba on Saturday and was predicted to become a hurricane as it moves through the Gulf of Mexico on a collision course with the Florida coast.

The National Hurricane Center said in an update posted at 5 a.m. Sunday that Debby was located about 195 miles (315 kilometers) south-southwest of Tampa, Florida, and about 255 miles (410 kilometers) south-southwest of Cedar Key, Florida. The storm was moving north-northwest at 13 mph (20 kph) with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (85 kph).

The storm was strengthening over the southeastern Gulf and expected to be a hurricane before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida, the hurricane center said.

Wind and thunderstorms have spread over a broad area including southern Florida, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. A hurricane warning and tropical storm warnings were in effect for sections of Florida’s coast and a tropical storm watch was added for coastal Georgia in the latest advisory.

Debby is likely to bring drenching rain and coastal flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast by Sunday night and predictions show the system could come ashore as a hurricane Monday and cross over northern Florida into the Atlantic Ocean.

Forecasters warn it also could drop heavy rains over north Florida and the Atlantic coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina early next week.

Debby is the fourth named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season after Tropical Storm Alberto, Hurricane Beryl and Tropical Storm Chris, all of which formed in June.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted the system will strengthen as it curves off the southwest Florida coast, where the water has been extremely warm. Intensification was expected to proceed more quickly later on Sunday.

A hurricane warning was issued for parts of the Big Bend and the Florida Panhandle, while tropical storm warnings were posted for Florida’s West Coast, the southern Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas. A tropical storm watch extended farther west into the Panhandle. A warning means storm conditions are expected within 36 hours, while a watch means they are possible within 48 hours.

Tropical storms and hurricanes can trigger river flooding and overwhelm drainage systems and canals. Forecasters warned of 6 to 12 inches (150mm to 300 mm) of rain and up to 18 inches (450 mm) in isolated areas, which could create “locally considerable” flash and urban flooding. Forecasters also warned of moderate flooding for some rivers along Florida’s West Coast.

Some of the heaviest rains could actually come next week along the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville, Florida, through coastal regions of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. The storm is expected to slow down after making landfall.

“We could see a stall or a meandering motion around coastal portions of the southeastern United States,” National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan said in a Saturday briefing. “So that’s going to exacerbate not just the rainfall risk, but also the potential for storm surge and some strong winds.”

Flat Florida is prone to flooding even on sunny days, and the storm was predicted to bring a surge of 2 to 4 feet (0.6 to 1.2 meters) along most of the Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay, with a storm tide of up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) north of there in the sparsely populated Big Bend region.

Forecasters warned of “a danger of life-threatening storm surge inundation” in a region that includes Hernando Beach, Crystal River, Steinhatchee and Cedar Key. Officials in Citrus and Levy counties ordered a mandatory evacuation of coastal areas, while those in Hernando, Manatee, Pasco and Taylor counties called for voluntary evacuations. Shelters opened in those and some other counties.

Citrus County Sheriff Mike Prendergast estimated 21,000 people live in his county’s evacuation zone. Officials rescued 73 people from storm surge flooding during last year’s Hurricane Idalia. Prendergast said by phone that he hopes not to have a repeat with Debbie.

“After the storm surge does come in, we simply don’t have enough first responders in our agency and among the other first responders in the county to go in and rescue everybody that might need to be rescued,” he said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for 61 of Florida’s 67 counties, with the National Guard activating 3,000 guard members. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made his own emergency proclamation on Saturday.

The White House said federal and Florida officials were in touch and FEMA “pre-positioned” resources including water and food.

In Tampa alone, officials gave out more than 30,000 sandbags to barricade against flooding.

“We’ve got our stormwater drains cleared out. We’ve got our generators all checked and full. We’re doing everything that we need to be prepared to face a tropical storm,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said.

Christina Lothrop is the general manager at Blue Pelican Marina in Hernando Beach, a barrier island about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of St. Petersburg. She said the public ramp was jammed Saturday with people launching boats.

“Today it’s kind of normal, which is kind of weird,” Lothrop told The Associated Press by telephone.

Workers at her marina have been preparing since Tuesday, however, securing boats stored on racks, stowing tool boxes and tying everything down.

Before closing Saturday, Lothrop planned to raise computers off the floor and sandbag and tape doors. Idalia pushed about a foot of water (30 centimeters) into the store.

Betti Silverman, whose home in Crystal River was under an evacuation order, said on Saturday afternoon that she doubted her family would leave. Silverman’s waterfront home flooded during Idalia just as her family was moving in, ruining boxes and furniture in the garage. But she said the forecast for Debby didn’t seem as severe.

“We’ve been in Florida our whole lives, in South Florida, so hurricanes are not really a big, big thing,” Silverman said.

On Friday, crews pulled floating cranes away from a bridge construction project across Tampa Bay, lashing together 74 barges and 24 floating cranes and anchoring them, project engineer Marianne Brinson told the Tampa Bay Times. Crews also laid down cranes on land on their sides.

Pinellas County paused a $5 million beach renourishment project necessitated in part by erosion from past storms.

For some, the name Debby summons bad memories of a 2012 tropical storm of the same name that caused $250 million in losses and eight deaths, including seven in the Sunshine State. That storm dumped torrential rains, including an astronomical 29 inches (730 mm) south of Tallahassee.

More than 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) off Mexico in the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Carlotta continued moving westward with top sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph). Carlotta began losing strength Saturday and is likely to dissipate into a remnant of thunderstorms.

Farther west, Tropical Storm Daniel formed in the Pacific. It was more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) from the southern tip of Baja California and was also expected to dissipate without striking land.

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Today in SCV History (Aug. 4)

Tribes wait to get items back, 6 months after museums shut Native exhibits

NEW YORK — Tucked within the expansive Native American halls of the American Museum of Natural History is a diminutive wooden doll that holds a sacred place among the tribes whose territories once included Manhattan.

For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or Doll Being, has been hidden from view after the museum and others nationally took dramatic steps to board up or paper over exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant items to tribes — or at least to obtain consent to display or study them.

Museum officials are reviewing more than 1,800 items as they work to comply with the requirements while also eyeing a broader overhaul of the more than half-century-old exhibits.

But some tribal leaders remain skeptical, saying museums have not acted swiftly enough. The new rules, after all, were prompted by years of complaints from tribes that hundreds of thousands of items that should have been returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 still remain in museum custody.

“If things move slowly, then address that,” said Joe Baker, a Manhattan resident and member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, descendants of the Lenape peoples European traders encountered more than 400 years ago. “The collections, they’re part of our story, part of our family. We need them home. We need them close.”

Sean Decatur, the New York museum’s president, promised tribes will hear from officials soon. He said staff these past few months have been reexamining the displayed objects in order to begin contacting tribal communities.

Museum officials envision a total overhaul of the closed Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains halls — akin to the five-year, $19 million renovation of its Northwest Coast Hall, completed in 2022 in close collaboration with tribes, Decatur added.

“The ultimate aim is to make sure we’re getting the stories right,” he said.

Discussions with tribal representatives over the Ohtas began in 2021 and will continue, museum officials said, even though the doll does actually not fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act because it is associated with a tribe outside the U.S., the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario, Canada.

The museum also plans to open a small exhibit in the fall incorporating Native American voices and explaining the history of the closed halls, why changes are being made and what the future holds, he said.

Lance Gumbs, vice chairman of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, a federally recognized tribe in New York’s Hamptons, said he worries about the loss of representation of local tribes in public institutions, with exhibit closures likely stretching into years.

The American Museum of Natural History, he noted, is one of New York’s major tourism draws and also a mainstay for generations of area students learning about the region’s tribes.

He suggests museums use replicas made by Native peoples so that sensitive cultural items aren’t physically on display.

“I don’t think tribes want to have our history written out of museums,” Gumbs said. “There’s got to be a better way than using artifacts that literally were stolen out of gravesites.”

Gordon Yellowman, who heads the department of language and culture for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, said museums should look to create more digital and virtual exhibits.

He said the tribes, in Oklahoma, will be seeking from the New York museum a sketchbook by the Cheyenne warrior Little Finger Nail that contains his drawings and illustrations from battle.

The book, which is in storage and not on display, was plucked from his body after he and other tribe members were killed by U.S. soldiers in Nebraska in 1879.

“These drawings weren’t just made because they were beautiful,” Yellowman said. “They were made to show the actual history of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people.”

In Chicago, the Field Museum has established a Center for Repatriation after covering up several cases in its halls dedicated to ancient America and the peoples of the coastal Northwest and Arctic.

The museum has completed four repatriations to tribes involving around 40 items over the past six months, with at least three more repatriations pending involving additional items. Those repatriations were through efforts that were underway before the new regulations, according to Field Museum spokesperson Bridgette Russell.

At the Cleveland Museum in Ohio, a case displaying artifacts from the Tlingit people in Alaska has been reopened after their leadership gave consent, according to Todd Mesek, the museum’s spokesperson. But two other displays remain covered up, with one containing funerary objects from the ancient Southwest to be redone with a different topic and materials.

And at Harvard, the Peabody Museum’s North American Indian hall reopened in February after about 15% of its roughly 350 items were removed from displays, university spokesperson Nicole Rura said.

Chuck Hoskin, chief of the Cherokee Nation, said he believes many institutions now understand they can no longer treat Indigenous items as “museum curiosities” from “peoples that no longer exist.”

The leader of the tribe in Oklahoma said he visited the Peabody this year after the university reached out about returning hair clippings collected in the early 1930s from hundreds of Indigenous children, including Cherokees, forced to assimilate in the notorious Indian boarding schools.

“The fact that we’re in a position to sit down with Harvard and have a really meaningful conversation, that’s progress for the country,” he said.

As for Baker, he wants the Ohtas returned to its tribe. He said the ceremonial doll should never have been on display, especially arranged as it was among wooden bowls, spoons and other everyday items.

“It has a spirit. It’s a living being,” Baker said. “So if you think about it being hung on a wall all these years in a static case, suffocating for lack of air, it’s just horrific, really.”

Inspired by older Olympians, adults get back into gymnastics

As wildfires rage in US, volunteers save animals with warm hearts and cool heads

COHASSET, California — While firefighters continued to battle California’s biggest wildfire of the year, Norm Rosene was spending 18-hour days behind fire lines with a different task –- saving the animals.

Tucked in an old wooden barn in the decimated forest town of Cohasset in northern California, his team stumbled upon a calf that appeared to be just a few days old. Its mother protectively hovered over her baby while it nursed.

“It’s critical for us to get feed and water … especially because the temperature is supposed to go up to the hundreds (above 37 degrees Celsius) over the next few days,” said the 66-year-old volunteer. “They drink a lot of water, especially the mom’s going to need water and food to be able to nurse the calf.”

He made sure any smoldering hay or small fires still burning near the barn were extinguished, alerted nearby firefighters and moved on to the next home.

With more than 26,000 residents evacuated due to the Park Fire and over 1,554 square kilometers scorched as of Wednesday, there were cats, dogs, chickens, horses, and goats left behind.

Worried owners depend on volunteers like Rosene to rescue their beloved pets and keep their livestock alive until they can return to their homes.

“If people can’t take their animals, they sometimes want to stay,” Rosene said. “So if we can come and help them take their animals, then they will come out of that disaster area and they are safer and they feel better because they didn’t leave their animals behind.”

When the Park Fire started last Wednesday, Rosene at first thought it wouldn’t come his direction. But by evening, the winds had changed. He and his wife Janice evacuated his home in Chico around 1 a.m.

“It’s almost terrifying because the wind was blowing and the fire was roaring and it’s coming right at you and the embers are like fireflies just darting all over the sky,” Rosene said, showing images of a blood red sky blanketed with billowing columns of black smoke.

But the fire burned through his area quickly and thankfully left his house intact. Within hours, he and his wife were already at work evacuating animals.

The couple began volunteering 12 years ago with the North Valley Animal Disaster Group, a team of now about 300 volunteers. They’re trained for all types of disasters, from floods to fires, and nearly every type of rescue you could think of – helicopter rescue, high angle rope rescue, search and rescue – as well as animal behavior and handling.

“That’s why our team is allowed to go behind fire lines and work within the fire disaster system because we integrate with them and we don’t get in the way of the firefighters,” Rosene said. “They like having us back there because when they find an animal they don’t know what to do with it.”

They’ve dealt with all types of animals, and Rosene is team’s designated snake-and-lizard handler. He’s even evacuated two giant emus and their chicks. Every pet is worth saving.

For large animals, the goal is to keep them where they are, as long as they’re safe.

“When they get stressed by fire and smoke … now you try to load them into a trailer or truck it can be a real challenge,” he said.

If they have to be evacuated, Rosene and others will coax them into the back of their trailer and take them to the Camelot Equestrian Park. Smaller animals like cats and dogs are taken to an emergency shelter in Oroville.

Sometimes owners will bring in their animals if they are unable to care for them, Rosene said. There are about 100 in the small animal shelter and 70 in the large animal shelter from the Park Fire, and they are taking care of 850 more within the evacuation area.

Even if the fire is out in an area, it can take days for an evacuation order to lift. Crews have to clear the numerous hazards that appear in the aftermath of a fire, such as falling trees and power lines, exposed nails and broken glass, and tree holes filled with embers.

During the devastating Camp Fire in 2018, which destroyed several towns including nearly the entire community of Paradise, Rosene and others helped more than 4,000 displaced animals. He and group founder John Maretti have traveled to more than a dozen countries to teach and respond to disasters.

“If there’s one lesson here, it’s for people to be prepared to take their pets with them during a fire,” Rosene said. “So if they have a go bag for themselves, they should have a go bag for their pets.”

Review | Mid-Summer Symphonic High on John Adams Turf

Orchestra delivers Music Academy season pinnacle with help from Leila Josefowicz and John Adams.

Rumors of Threads dot net federation have been greatly exaggerated. (Indeed, threads users have to opt in.)

Harris campaign staffs up in battleground states, ‘Sun Belt’

WILMINGTON, Delaware — Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is staffing up in battleground states over the next two weeks including in the ‘Sun Belt’ that increasingly looked out of reach for President Joe Biden, citing momentum for her White House bid as grassroots engagement and fundraising soar.

“Our grassroots engagement is proving that Kamala Harris is strong in both the Sun Belt and the Blue Wall — with multiple pathways to 270 (electoral votes),” wrote Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director in a memo on Saturday.

The Sun Belt refers to states including Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, and the Blue Wall includes Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. U.S. President Joe Biden won all six of those states in 2020 by thin margins, but just weeks ago, his campaign said the Sun Belt and North Carolina looked increasingly out of reach.

Harris’ takeover of the Democratic presidential campaign has injected new energy, money and enthusiasm into the race, which is translating into a shift in polls that show her pulling even with Republican former President Donald Trump or ahead in some battleground states.

Since Biden endorsed Harris on July 21, 200,000 volunteers have joined the Harris campaign, while over 350,000 supporters attended their first phone bank, rally or other campaign event - an over 350% increase in event attendees, Kanninen said.

Harris’ campaign announced on Friday it raised $310 million in July, fueled by small-dollar donations.

In the next two weeks, the campaign will add 150 more staff in the “Blue Wall,” and will more than double its staff in Arizona and North Carolina, Kanninen said.

Harris campaign operations on the ground are more extensive than Trump’s, he said.

“In Nevada, Team Harris has 13 offices, while Trump has just one,” Kanninen wrote. “In Pennsylvania, we have 36 coordinated offices while Trump has just three. In Georgia, we have 24 offices while the Trump team didn’t open their first until June.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately confirm the accuracy of those numbers, and it did not respond to a request for comment.

This week Trump’s campaign was set to launch a $10 million advertising blitz in six battleground states. A super PAC supporting Trump, MAGA Inc., kicked off a parallel ad blitz after it said it will spend $32 million in three states with new ads criticizing Harris.

Some political experts have questioned Trump’s lack of campaign infrastructure in recent days.

“Those of us who are interested in voting are like, ‘Why don’t you need a ground game?’” political historian Heather Cox Richardson said in a Facebook livestream. “It really takes feet on the ground, knuckles on doors, meetings with people, everything to get money circulating. He is not trying to get enough votes.”

Harris was expected to meet in person this weekend with the top contenders vying to join the ticket as the candidate for vice president, Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources.

She will meet with leading contenders Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro for interviews on Sunday, according to sources familiar with her plans.

Other top names include U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Harris held a marginal one-percentage-point lead over Trump in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, closing the gap that opened in the final weeks of Biden’s reelection bid.

The three-day poll showed Harris supported by 43% of registered voters, with Trump supported by 42%, within the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error.

Katie Ledecky swims into Olympics history, winning 800 freestyle in Paris

NANTERRE, France — Every year on August 3, Katie Ledecky is reminded of her first Olympic gold medal.

She was just 15 years old, a reserved high schooler who had surprisingly made the U.S. swim team for the London Games. Then she went out and shocked the world, beating everyone in the 800-meter freestyle.

Ledecky capped another stellar Olympics by becoming only the second swimmer to win an event at four straight Summer Games, holding off Ariarne Titmus, the “Terminator,” to win the 800 free Saturday night.

It was Ledecky’s second gold medal in Paris and the ninth of her remarkable career, which marked another milestone.

She became only the sixth Olympian to reach that figure, joining swimmer Mark Spitz, track star Carl Lewis, Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, and Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi in a tie for second place.

“Every August 3rd, the video [of her first Olympic gold] gets posted somewhere and you kind of reminisce,” she said. “So, when I saw it was August 3rd, I was like, ‘Oh boy, I’ve got to get the job done.’”

That she did, going faster than her winning time in Tokyo to finish in 8 minutes, 11.04 seconds. Titmus was right on her shoulder nearly the entire race, but Ledecky pulled away in the final 100.

Titmus, who beat Ledecky in the 400 freestyle, settled for silver at 8:12.29. The bronze went to another American, Paige Madden at 8:13.00.

Phelps had been the only swimmer to win the same event at four straight Olympics, taking gold in the 200 individual medley at Athens, Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro.

Titmus added some perspective to Ledecky’s consistency over the last dozen years, noting where she was when the American won that first gold in London.

“I was in grade six in primary school,” Titmus said. “That’s how remarkable she is.”

Their friendly rivalry has driven both to greater heights. They each won two golds and four medals at these games, which pushed Ledecky to 14 overall and left the 23-year-old Aussie with four golds and eight medals in her career.

“To think that eight years later, I challenged her into her fourth consecutive in the 800 is pretty cool,” Titmus said. “So I’m really proud of myself and I feel very honored and privileged to be her rival, and I hope I’ve made her a better athlete. She has certainly made me become the athlete I am. I felt so privileged to race alongside her.”

Ledecky has dominated the distance freestyle events over the last dozen years — and isn’t done yet. She’s made it clear she plans to keep swimming at least through the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

“It’s not easy,” Ledecky said. “I’ll take it year by year, and we’ll see if I can keep giving everything I’ve got for as long as I have left in me.”

Summer McIntosh stamped herself as one of the swimming stars of the Paris Olympics with her third individual gold medal, winning the 200 individual medley.

The 17-year-old Canadian chased down American Alex Walsh and held off another U.S. swimmer, Kate Douglass, to finish in an Olympic record of 2:06.56.

Douglass grabbed the silver in the star-studded final at 2:06.92, but the Americans lost the bronze when Walsh, the silver medalist in this event at Tokyo who recorded a time of 2:07.06, was disqualified because she did not finish the backstroke segment on her back.

It was a bitter blow for Walsh, whose younger sister, Gretchen, has won a gold medal and two silvers in Paris.

McIntosh set several world records ahead of the Paris Olympics, and she backed up the enormous expectations by claiming a starring role at La Defense Arena along with Léon Marchand and Ledecky.

McIntosh also won gold medals in the 200 butterfly and 400 IM, plus a silver in the 400 freestyle. She fell just 0.88 seconds — the margin of her loss to Titmus — shy of matching Marchand’s four individual golds.

“It’s pretty surreal,” said McIntosh, who became the first Canadian athlete to win three golds in a single Olympics. “I’m just so proud of myself and how I’ve been able to recover and manage events.

The United States made up for a disappointing showing in Tokyo by setting a world record in the 4x100 mixed medley relay.

Ryan Murphy, Nic Fink, Gretchen Walsh and Torri Huske held off China for a winning time of 3:37.43, breaking the mark of 3:37.58 set by Britain when it won gold in the wild and woolly event’s Olympic debut three years ago.

With each team picking two men and two women, the U.S. and China both went with their male swimmers in the first two legs.

Murphy put the U.S. in front on the backstroke, China’s Qin Haiyang slipped past Nic Fink on the breaststroke, but Walsh put the Americans back in front on the butterfly before Huske held off Yang Junxuan to secure the gold.

The Chinese team, which also included Xu Jiayu and Zhang Yufei, took silver in 3:37.55. The bronze went to Australia in 3:38.76.

Marchand swam the breaststroke leg for France but couldn’t add to his already impressive haul of four individual golds. The French finished fourth, more than two seconds behind the Aussies.

When the British won gold in 2021, the Americans finished fifth. Britain was seventh this time.

Kristóf Milák of Hungary won the men’s 100 butterfly, chasing down three swimmers on the return lap.

Milák was only fourth at the turn, but he rallied to touch in 49.90. Canada grabbed the silver and bronze, with Josh Liendo finishing in 49.99 and Ilya Kharun next at 50.45.

Milák had failed to defend his Olympic title in the 200 butterfly, settling for a silver behind French star Marchand.

Milák claimed silver in the 100 fly three years ago, but he didn’t have to worry about the guy who beat him in that race. American Caeleb Dressel stunningly failed to qualify for the final, posting only the 13th-fastest time in the semifinals Friday.

Harris rejects Trump’s idea to debate her on FOX with live audience

reuters — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proposed to debate Democratic U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News on September 4, and the Harris campaign said Trump is trying to back out of a debate that had been set to run on ABC.

The rules would be similar to the first debate with President Joe Biden, who has since dropped his reelection bid, Trump said in a post on Truth Social late Friday. But this time it would have a “full arena audience” and take place in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump said.

Trump and Biden had agreed to a second debate on September 10 on ABC News which the former president had suggested should be moved to Fox, the most popular network with his followers.

Harris, who on Friday secured the delegate votes needed to clinch the Democratic nomination for the November 5 election, said Saturday that she plans to participate in the originally planned debate.

“It’s interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space,’” she wrote on social media platform X. “I’ll be there on Sept. 10, like he agreed to. I hope to see him there.”

Harris spokesperson Michael Tyler said Trump is “running scared” and that her campaign is happy to discuss further debates after the September 10 one that “both campaigns have already agreed to.”

On Saturday, Trump said on Truth Social that Harris is “afraid to do it” and that he will see her on September 4, “or I won’t see her at all.”

On Friday he said that the ABC debate had been “terminated” in that Biden would no longer be in it and because he himself was in litigation with ABC.

ABC on July 26 outlined qualification requirements for the debate but did not mention any candidates by name.

Requirements include proving polling support and state ballot access by September 3.

Recent polls show a tight contest between Harris and Trump, who had enjoyed a bigger lead over Biden after the first debate.

ABC News had no comment about whether Trump had dropped out of the debate, a spokesperson said.

Trump’s proposal for the debate on Fox came right after the Democratic National Committee launched an advertising campaign Friday taunting him by saying “the convicted felon is afraid to debate” and questioning whether that is due to his stance on abortion.

David Plouffe, an adviser to former President Barack Obama who recently joined the Harris campaign, posted on social media: “Now, he seems only comfortable in a cocoon, asking his happy place Fox to host a Trump rally and call it a debate. Maybe he can only handle debating someone his own age.”

Former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, said, “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Saturday.

Full Circle Weekly News 377

Firefighters battle California wildfire ahead of storms, lightning

chico, california — Firefighters made progress Saturday against California’s largest wildfire of the year ahead of expected thunderstorms that could unleash fire-starting lightning and erratic winds and erode progress made over the past week. Dry, hot conditions posed similar threats across the fire-stricken West.

“We’re not completely out of the woods yet, but we’re looking very, very good,” CalFire official Mark Brunton said in a video update Saturday. “This is moving at a very fast pace.”

Containment of the Park Fire, now California’s fourth-largest wildfire on record, is at 27% as of early Saturday. Brunton said the relatively milder weather the last few days allowed firefighters to build containment lines.

But hotter weather, fuels and terrain will continue posing challenges for the estimated 6,500 firefighters battling the fire, which has spread over 1,621 square kilometers since allegedly being started by arson in a park in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of the Sacramento Valley city of Chico. For comparison, the city of Los Angeles covers about 1,302 square kilometers.

Suppression crews will also start removing damaged infrastructure in some areas Saturday to allow residents to return home.

The fire originated at low elevations, where it quickly burned through thick grass and oaks, destroying at least 567 structures and damaging 51 so far. As it has climbed higher, the vegetation has changed to a greater concentration of trees and brush, Cal Fire said.

The fire’s push northward has brought it toward the rugged lava rock landscape surrounding Lassen Volcanic National Park, which has been closed because of the threat.

“There’s a lot of really steep drainages in that area,” CalFire spokesperson Devin Terrill said. “It takes a lot more time to access those areas.”

After a brief respite, firefighters are now bracing for treacherous conditions of hot and dry weather, along with expected thunderstorms with potential thunder strikes and gusty winds.

The collapse of thunderstorm clouds can blow wind in any and all directions, said Jonathan Pangburn, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire. “Even if there’s not lightning per se, it is very much a safety-watch-out environment for our firefighters out there,” Pangburn said.

The Park Fire is among almost 100 large fires burning across the western U.S. Evacuation orders were in effect for 28 of the fires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Three wildfires burned in Colorado on Friday near heavily populated areas north and south of Denver, with about 50 structures damaged or destroyed, thousands of people under evacuation orders, and human remains found in a destroyed house earlier this week.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a blaze threatening hundreds of homes near the Colorado city of Littleton as arson.

Karlyn Tilley, a spokesperson for Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, said the investigation is ongoing and they are using a dog specially trained to sniff out sources and causes of fires. Tilley said just because they suspect the fire was human-caused doesn’t mean it was intentional.

Firefighters were making good progress on the fire despite the steep, rocky terrain and blistering heat, and no houses had been burned, officials said.

The cause and origin of a fatal blaze west of the town of Lyons was being probed by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, with specially trained fire investigators from the agency helping local authorities, agency spokesperson Crystal McCoy said. The area blackened by that fire remained relatively unchanged after it burned five houses.

The largest of the Colorado fires, west of Loveland, grew to 38.5 square kilometers after previously burning 49 homes and other structures. Its cause is under investigation.

Scientists say extreme wildfires are becoming more common and destructive in the U.S. West and other parts of the world as climate change warms the planet and droughts become more severe.

Foresters Fall to Hutchinson Monarchs 3-2 in NBC World Series Quarterfinals

Kathryn Barger | Keeping Up With Kathryn

My office works closely with the Department of Animal Care and Control to ensure that we are doing everything we can to find safe, loving homes for animals. Our County Care Centers face challenges with shelter capacity and overcrowding like many shelters nationwide.

Real Estate Evolution

On August 17, some new rules went into effect regarding how real estate agents advertise and sell property.

City hosts third annual Graffiti Removal Day

Volunteers carried down buckets of paint and rollers underneath the Soledad Canyon Road overpass, near the intersection of Camp Plenty Road and Soledad Canyon Road on Saturday morning for Santa […]

Conditional GET Issues

NetNewsWire and Conditional GET Issues

I had thought that NetNewsWire’s conditional GET support was rock-solid — and so my first reaction was to be very surprised to learn that it’s not!

My second reaction was to be appreciative — Rachel’s work here on setting up a test server and reporting on the results is really great. My goal has always been to make NetNewsWire a model net citizen, and learning where it’s not is super valuable. So: much respect and thanks to Rachel for this.

The Data

Things to know: these are all requests for a NetNewsWire-specific feed, and the copy of NetNewsWire making these requests is on my personal laptop. That laptop is occasionally used for development, which can throw things off, but not often. You can even see in the data a gap lasting just over two weeks where there were no requests (I was on vacation).

(You can also see some anomalies from when I had it on my dev machine also — ignore every row where ip is v6, since that’s my dev machine.)

Another thing to know: this is testing direct feed-reading, as with the On My Mac (or iPhone/iPad) and iCloud accounts. With systems such as Feedly, Feedbin, and so on, we get the data from the sync system and not directly from the site.

Ignoring Timing Issues

Let’s set aside, at least for today, the timing issues. That situation could be improved, but it very much reflects that this is a desktop app with a command that allows you to refresh feeds manually, without having to wait for the next poll.

Conditional GET Issues

When a server returns a Last-Modified header, the client should return that exact same string in follow-up requests in an If-Modified-Since header. The server then looks at the If-Modified-Since header and decides to either return a 200 plus the feed — if it has been modified since — or return a 304 Not Modified response and an empty body.

It’s the same story with the Etag header. The client should save it and return it in follow-up requests in an If-None-Match header.

This is great because it can save a ton of bandwidth, which is great for server and app alike. And NetNewsWire’s been doing this since the early 2000s.

But clearly there’s a bug! In some cases, NetNewsWire is not picking up and saving the changed Last-Modified and Etag headers. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it keeps using whatever it already had and ignores the new ones.

Feed processing logic

Here’s what happens when a feed download completes without errors and the content is non-empty:

First we check the hash of the raw feed data against the hash of the raw feed data the last time it actually changed. If those hashes match, then the app stops processing, because the feed hasn’t changed: it’s exactly the same as last time.

This is an optimization that deals with the fact that many servers unfortunately don’t support conditional GET. It allows the app to skip feed parsing and updating the database. Saves a bunch of work. Good for battery life.

If the hashes don’t match, then processing continues: it parses the feed and then sends the parsed articles to the code that updates the database.

After that it updates and saves the hash of the raw feed data, and finally it stores the conditional GET info — it saves any Last-Modified and Etag header values to send with the next request.

My theory

There’s a great chance you’ve already spotted what I think is the issue: it’s that optimization where we check the hash of the raw feed data and return if it matches the previous hash.

Here’s what I think has happened in some of the tests: the raw feed data was unchanged, but one or both of the Last-Modified and Etag header values did change.

NetNewsWire never picked up the changes to those headers, because that code didn’t run — it had already bailed when it saw that the raw feed data was unchanged.

The assumption I made when I wrote this code was that if the raw feed data was unchanged then of course the Last-Modified and Etag header values would be unchanged too, so there was no need to check to see if they were new.

And I think that in real-world situations this is probably true pretty much all the time, and it’s only in tests like this where my assumption wouldn’t be true.

But I can’t say that for sure! This is a real bug, and we’ll fix it and add a test or tests to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

PS There could be other bugs

My theory does point to a bug that should get fixed. But is it the only bug? Is it even the bug that causes the issues in these tests?

Though I’m pretty confident that this is the bug — seems pretty obvious, right? — more investigation and testing is warranted.

Welcome to the Intensive Care Unit

This is not a place you plan to visit. You may be surprised to find yourself here. But if you are really sick, this is the place to be.

VOA immigration weekly recap, July 28- Aug 3

Supes Vote Tuesday to Transfer Hart Park to City

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will vote Tuesday, Aug. 6 on a motion to finalize the transfer of William S. Hart Regional Park to the city of Santa Clarita. The vote will be held at the regular weekly public board meeting held in downtown Los Angeles

Bugging out: 53 years since humans first drove a battery-powered car on the Moon

And you thought you had range anxiety

Feature Electric vehicles have generated plenty of discussion over the last decade or so. However, it was 53 years ago this week that one of the battery-powered machines first carried humans around the Moon.…

Excessive Heat Warning Issued for SCV

The Los Angeles County Health Officer has issued an excessive heat warning as high temperatures have been forecast for the Santa Clarita Valley

Off-duty LASD Homicide Bureau Sergeant Dies in Solo Vehicle Accident

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has announced the death of Homicide Bureau Sergeant Jason Viger who was killed in an off-duty solo vehicle traffic collision on Thursday, Aug. 1, at approximately 11 p.m. at the intersection of McBean Parkway and Valencia Boulevard

Santa Clarita Making Strides in Addressing Homelessness

By City Manager Ken Striplin It has been a landmark year for putting the crucial infrastructure in place to address homelessness in our community. It was not easy, or quick to get to this point, but thanks to decades of hard work from our community leaders, non-profits and generous donors, we now have permanent shelter […]

Spectrum Presents $10,000 Grant to Single Mothers Outreach

Spectrum presented a donation of $10,000 to Single Mothers Outreach on Thursday, Aug. 1. The donation was made through the company’s employee-driven grants program that recognizes the value of community service, Spectrum Employee Community Grants

Aug. 5-9: SB I-5 Lane Closures Continue in Castaic Area

The California Department of Transportation announced the southbound Interstate 5 will be reduced to one or two lanes from two miles north of Templin Highway (near the Whitaker Sand Shed) north of Castaic to Lake Hughes Road overnights Monday, Aug. 5 through Friday, Aug. 9 for paving work.

Waveshare UPS HAT easily adds battery backup to a Raspberry Pi

The Waveshare UPS HAT (E) offers an inexpensive, easy way to add battery backup to a Raspberry Pi project. It’s compatible with Raspberry Pi 5, 4B and 3B+ boards and accepts four 21700 lithium-ion batteries (not included). Just like a traditional UPS from a company like APC or CyberPower, the UPS HAT (E) springs into […]

Trump, Vance head to Georgia after Harris event in same arena

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — Former President Donald Trump returns Saturday to Georgia, which he lost four years ago, to campaign in a state that Democrats and Republicans see as up for grabs yet again.

Trump’s 5 p.m. event alongside his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, comes just days after Vice President Kamala Harris rallied thousands in the same basketball arena at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Both parties are focusing on Georgia, a Sun Belt battleground that Democrats had signaled just two weeks ago they would sideline in favor of a heavier focus on the Midwestern “blue wall” states. President Joe Biden’s decision to end his campaign and endorse Harris fueled Democratic hopes of an expanded electoral map.

“The momentum in this race is shifting,” Harris told a cheering, boisterous crowd on Tuesday. “And there are signs Donald Trump is feeling it.”

Biden beat Trump in the state by 11,779 votes in 2020. Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to change the outcome. Trump was later indicted in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the election, but the case remains on hold while courts decide whether the Fulton County district attorney can continue to prosecute it.

In announcing Saturday’s rally, the Trump campaign accused Harris of costing Georgians money due to inflation and higher gas prices, which have risen from pandemic-era lows at the end of the Trump administration. The campaign also noted the case of Laken Riley, a nursing student from the state who was killed while jogging in a park on February 22. A Venezuelan citizen has been indicted on murder charges in her death.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly labeled Harris the current administration’s “border czar,” a reference to her assignment leading White House efforts on root causes of migration.

But in recent days, Trump has lobbed false attacks about Harris’ race and suggested she misled voters about her identity. Harris has stated for years in public life that she is Black and Indian American.

At her rally in Atlanta, Harris called Trump and Vance “plain weird” — a lane of messaging seized on by many other Democrats of late — and taunted Trump for wavering on whether he’d show up for their upcoming debate, currently on the books for September 10 on ABC.

Saying earlier that he would debate Harris, Trump has more recently questioned the value of a meetup, calling host network ABC News “fake news,” saying he “probably” will debate Harris, but he “can also make a case for not doing it.”

The fact that Harris and Trump have been focusing resources on Georgia underscores the state’s renewed significance to both parties come November. Going to Atlanta puts Trump in the state’s largest media market, including suburbs and exurbs that were traditional Republican strongholds but have become more competitive as they’ve diversified and grown in population.

In a strategy memo released after Biden left the race, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon — who held the same role for Biden — reaffirmed the importance of winning the traditional Democratic blue wall trio of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania but also argued that Harris’ place atop the ticket “opens up additional persuadable voters” and described them as “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” in places like Georgia.

Next week, along with her eventual running mate, Harris plans to visit that Midwestern trifecta, along with North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. On Friday, she will make another stop in Georgia.

Call for startups

I don’t invest any more, but here are some areas I’d be interested to see startups explore:

The hallway track for remote and hybrid teams. One reason many companies are enacting return to office policies is to re-establish cross-pollination across teams. Yes, a strong, intentional remote culture would render that moot, but not every company has that. So what does it look like to build scaffolding that goes beyond the water cooler and intentionally surfaces ideas and reactions across teams, including across timezones? Slack is a set of chatrooms at heart — what if you optimize for asynchronous reflection and building on ideas, not just real-time discussion?

Composable, local AI made easy. There are lots of use cases for AI in the enterprise, but for many high-value use cases sharing data with centralized services owned by OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google isn’t tenable. Sensitive data needs to be treated carefully, and protective contract terms often aren’t enough (consider what happens when a provider is subpoenaed, for example). Let’s make building AI tools that don’t share data beyond your local computer incredibly easy, even for people who can’t code.

Pro tools for the fediverse. The fediverse is going to continue to grow, in part because of the maturity of its underlying technology, and in part because countries across the world are tightening anti-monopoly rules, creating strong business reasons to adopt open standards and interoperability. Many fediverse platforms and services don’t meet the needs of larger organizations or professional use cases, due to the wrong mix or features or a more technical user experience. How can startups remove friction from taking advantage of the fediverse, and add ecosystem tools that grow in value as more users onboard? (By the way, I still think an API service that helps people build tools on the fediverse has legs.)

Substack (or Ghost) for indie and open source developers. Substack and Ghost have paved the way for a kind of journalist entrepreneur who can launch a subscription and make a living by themselves. What if we could do the same thing for indie developers who wanted to support their work? Imagine built-in subscriptions connected to a social discovery mechanism where developers recommend other developers’ work: a network that makes it far easier for developers to make a living from doing what they love independently. This is particularly important in a world where many developers have left big cities and are resisting return to office mandates: going it alone could be a viable alternative. Kickstarter et al let people support a project; this would allow you to support the creator, with more network effects and built-in software integrations than something like a Patreon.

Metrics in a box. A tool that connects to your analytics, payment processor, newsletter tool, etc, and automatically gives you insights, generates actionable reports on your preferred cadence, and answers questions without you needing to deal with schemas, configure specific views, or make queries yourself. You could refine its outputs by giving it feedback in natural language, and ask questions using the same. Another way of putting this: what if your in-house data analyst was software that you didn’t need to configure?

Redefine the US rail experience. Private rail cars (or — more ambitiously — whole trains?) that operate a bit like a WeWork: luxury accommodations, high-bandwidth satellite wifi, phone call booths, desks, private rooms with comfortable beds. Make it easy to choose to take a long-distance train instead of a flight without sacrificing comfort or connectivity. High-speed rail is great and important, and such a business would expand to get there, but in the meantime this experience would make the longer travel time matter a great deal less, while helping business travelers to lower their carbon footprint. One can imagine this initially working best between destinations like Miami and New York, or San Francisco and LA, but the real goal would be nationwide. (Hey, dream big.)

Magic for the elderly. A lot of people swear by services like Magic’s executive assistant offering: a way for executives and entrepreneurs to get remote help with doing important work. But we all need help as we get older. What does it look like for older people to get their own executive assistants to help them with administration and life’s daily chores?

Open bookkeeping and administration for distributed groups. There’s plenty of bookkeeping and administration software out there. Most of it is understandably privacy-focused, allowing very few people to access your sensitive information. But what happens if you’re part of a group — an extended family managing a house, say, or a loose co-operative — that needs to have a shared view of their finances and administration? There’s very little for them beyond, say, Open Collective, which is for a very specific kind of organizational unit. What does it look like for a group to share and stream their finances and decisions?

—

It’s been six years (gulp) since I last invested in a startup as part of any kind of fund, but I’m still excited by the idea and the ethos of startups. While there are plenty of bad businesses out there (for any definition of “bad”), the idea of a group of people getting together and trying to build a new, useful product as part of a sustainable business engine really appeals to me. There’s definitely a part of me that wishes I still could make financial bets into ventures. (Let’s be clear: I could never have invested in an idea like reinventing rail travel. That wasn’t my area. But wouldn’t it be cool?)

I really like Homebrew’s investment process statement, which is very close to how I’d want to do it too (commit the time and energy to help build an ethical, enduring, high-quality business). And this piece in particular stands out to me:

We invest in mission-driven founders who embrace big – big ideas, big impact, big risk.

The combination of real mission, impact, and risk is important. That’s where the exciting stuff is.

Greylock, the veteran Silicon Valley venture capital firm, recently put out a call for startups that was all AI, all the time. Long-time readers will know that I have a contrarian take on that — and that I worry AI is sucking oxygen away from other, genuinely useful products that could form the basis of great businesses. I also don’t shy away from AI completely: there are real applications for the technology that will linger long after the hype cycle has died down. Still, their post was the inspiration for this one: I think there are more interesting, broader, longer-term trends that are worth paying attention to.

What are you excited by? If you were an investor — or if you are — what would you be keeping your eye out for?

Impressive

Aerosmith ends touring, citing permanent damage to singer’s voice

LOS ANGELES — Aerosmith says Steven Tyler’s voice has been permanently damaged by a vocal cord injury last year and the band will no longer tour.

The iconic band behind hits such as “Love in an Elevator” and “Livin’ on the Edge” posted a statement Friday announcing the cancellation of remaining dates on its tour and provided an update on Tyler’s voice.

“He has spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before his injury. We’ve seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible,” the statement said. “We have made a heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision — as a band of brothers — to retire from the touring stage.”

Tyler announced he injured his vocal cords in September during a show on the band’s Peace Out: The Farewell Tour. Tyler said in an Instagram statement at the time that the injury caused bleeding but that he hoped the band would be back after postponing a few shows.

Tyler’s soaring vocals have powered Aerosmith’s massive catalog of hits since its formation in 1970, including “Dream On,” “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion.” They were near the start of a 40-date farewell tour when Tyler was injured.

“We’ve always wanted to blow your mind when performing. As you know, Steven’s voice is an instrument like no other,” the band said in Friday’s statement to fans.

“It has been the honor of our lives to have our music become part of yours,” the band said. “In every club, on every massive tour and at moments grand and private you have given us a place in the soundtrack of your lives.”

Aerosmith is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and a four-time Grammy-winning band. In addition to Tyler, its members are Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer.

As recruiting rebounds, US Army expands basic training for modern warfare

WASHINGTON — Buoyed by an increase in recruiting, the U.S. Army will expand its basic combat training in what its leaders hope reflects a turning point as it prepares to meet the challenges of future wars.

The added training will begin in October and comes as the Army tries to reverse years of dismal recruiting when it failed to meet its enlistment goals. New units in the U.S. states of Oklahoma and Missouri will train as many as 4,000 recruits every year.

Army leaders are optimistic they will hit their target of 55,000 recruits this year and say the influx of new soldiers forced them to increase the number of training sites.

“I am happy to say last year’s recruiting transformation efforts have us on track to make this year’s recruiting mission, with thousands awaiting basic training” in the next year, U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said. Adding the two new locations, she said, is a way to get the soldiers trained and into units quickly, “with further expansion likely next spring if our recruiting numbers keep improving.”

The expanded training is part of a broader effort to restructure the Army so that it is better able to fight against a sophisticated adversary such as Russia or China. The U.S. military spent much of the past two decades battling insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than fighting a broader war with another high-tech, more capable nation.

Brigadier General Jenn Walkawicz, head of operations for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, said there will be two new training companies at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and two at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

Driving the growth is the successful Future Soldier Prep Course, which was created at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in August 2022 as a new way to bolster enlistments. That program gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards and move on to basic training.

Created two years ago, the program has been cited as a key reason Army leaders expect that this fall they will reverse several years of recruiting shortfalls. In the budget year that ended September 30, the Army brought in a bit more than 50,000 recruits, falling far short of the publicly stated “stretch goal” of 65,000.

The Army has 151 training companies overall that work with recruits at Fort Jackson and Fort Moore, Georgia, in addition to the 15 training companies assigned to the prep course. Army leaders have expanded the prep course, which is expected to bring in nearly 20,000 recruits this budget year, and that total is expected to spike in 2025.

Due to the Army’s recruiting struggles, the number of recruits going through basic training dropped in recent years. As a result, the 15 training units, which total 27 soldiers each, including 16 drill sergeants, were available for the prep course. But as the prep course grows, those units are not available to do basic training.

“We don’t want to mess with that because right now that formula’s working and it’s provided a lot of value for the Army,” Walkawicz said. So, the Army is creating the four new companies and has developed plans for more if needed.

She added that Fort Sill and Fort Leonard Wood have the infrastructure, barracks and room to accommodate the new units and could take more if needed. The costs of the program are limited because the Army already had the equipment and rooms, but there will be maintenance, food, staffing and other costs. Army officials did not provide a total price.

The move to add units is the latest change in what has been a tumultuous time for the Army. Coming out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when the service grew dramatically to fill the nation’s combat needs, the U.S. military began to see recruiting dip.

Unemployment has been low, corporate jobs pay well and offer good benefits, and, according to estimates, just 23% of people ages 17 to 24 are physically, mentally and morally qualified to serve without receiving some type of waiver. Moral behavior issues include drug use, gang ties or a criminal record.

Those problems were only amplified as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, preventing recruiters from meeting with students in person at schools, fairs and other public events.

In 2022, the Army fell 15,000 short of its enlistment goal of 60,000, and the other services had to dig deep into their pools of delayed entry candidates to meet their recruiting numbers. Then in 2023, the Army, Navy and Air Force all missed their recruitment targets. The Marine Corps and the tiny Space Force have consistently hit their goals.

Partly in response to the recruiting shortfalls, Army leaders slashed the size of the force by about 24,000, or almost 5%. They said many of the cuts were in already vacant jobs.

Paris Olympics: Simone Biles wins women’s vault final for a second time

Simone Biles captures her 10th career Olympic medal, her seventh gold, by winning the women’s vault.

Berkeley cellphone store owner sentenced to 6 years for killing friend in DUI crash

The defendant failed a sobriety test and police gave him a ride to his store, but later that evening he got behind the wheel and crashed, killing a friend.

Bay FC beats Club América in its final Summer Cup match

Maddie Moreau, Dorian Bailey score to lead Bay FC past Club América at PayPal Park.

Paris Olympics: U.S. women’s soccer team edges Japan in extra time to reach semifinals

Trinity Rodman scores in extra time to lead U.S. over Japan in a quarterfinal at Paris Olympics.

Why the collapse of the Generative AI bubble may be imminent

Existential thoughts about Apple’s reliance on Services revenue

This is an interesting piece about how Apple’s services revenue is set to overtake its hardware business.

I’d go further. The beauty of Apple’s product line is that they’re comparatively well-made products that push the boundaries of user experience, bringing technology breakthroughs to a creative audience: as Jobs put it, “bicycles for the mind”. Customers (including me) accept higher prices because the products are exceptional, but that depends on a product line that is complete.

If the product offering is a higher-priced hardware device and premium monthly services on top of it, the investment starts to have diminishing returns. It’s a loss of focus on what made Apple great, and why people keep coming back to it. It’s greed, essentially: continuing to push the Apple user base further and further, assuming the breaking point is very far out.

That puts them at risk from being disrupted by someone else. Windows ain’t it, but at some point someone is going to come in with a really great set of hardware on an alternative stack. The question won’t be whether it beats Apple as-is, but simply whether it’s good enough at a lower price point. And then that company will grow their offerings, until before you know it, Apple has serious competition. It’s disruption 101, and the further Apple pushes out its expense and friction, the more susceptible it becomes.

Harris foreign policy would bring continuity with some distinct emphases

With Democratic nominee Kamala Harris set to face off with Republican Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency, Harris’ positions on military support to Israel and Ukraine; a rising China; and the migrant crisis at the southern border are under increased scrutiny. As VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports, expect a continuation of Biden administration policies with a few shifts in emphasis.

Vallejo teen fatally shot in Oakland

A motive has not been released in the fatal shooting of a Vallejo teen Friday evening in Oakland

Hunger at Home helping more restaurants with food recovery efforts

Santana Row eateries among those contributing unused food to the San Jose nonprofit to help ease food insecurity in Silicon Valley.

Pin-demonium hits Paris: Inside the pin-trading market at the Olympics

The quest for pins has become an integral part of the Olympics, adding another layer of excitement to the Games.

East Palo Alto tenants demand property owners improve living conditions

Tenants, who unionized last month, say maintenance requests have gone unresolved for years.

Meet the artist whose job is to paint beach volleyball at the 2024 Olympics

While the photograph is about a specific moment, “the painting brings back the spirits of the event.”

Tahiti’s youth surf culture gets a boost as island hosts the Paris Olympics

While Teahupo’o has been a coveted destination for surfers from around the world for decades, it’s only in more recent years that local surf culture and talent among younger generations began to develop across Tahiti.

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Game On For Workers

Plus, cancer-causing chemicals might get banned, landlords can’t use tech to jack up rent, and climate-minded investors win a legal battle.

Using Illustration To Help Investigations Stay Grounded and Approachable

Taking inspiration from The Simpsons and Chevron commercials, we created an illustrated explainer to ground our storytelling

The Time Ranger | When President Ford Ditched the SCV

¿Como esta, yuppies? Come on, you bunk huggers. Best you climb down from those condos, ranchettes and townhouses. We’ve a most interesting ride through the unspoiled vistas of the Santa […]

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Who wants to make a TRACTOR pull request?

To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle.…

Suzette Martinez Valladares | Wanted: School Supply Tax Holiday

Parents are getting ready for back to school. In my household, we are already getting some back-to-school clothes shopping in, updating our school supplies and preparing for the year ahead. […]

Rick Barker | Put an End to This

In re: Man arrested on suspicion of trespassing, battery on a peace officer, July 2. Call me old fashioned or a far-right-winger, but to me when you assault or commit […]

Ron Perry | Medical Insurance for All

Kamala Harris, our illustrious Democratic nominee for president, is pushing for medical insurance for all. Everybody. Including Illegal aliens. Rich. Poor. Everyone! Ah but wait! How about members of Congress? […]

Larry Moore | Harris a Frightening Thought

God save us. Kamala Harris is now the frontrunner of the Democrat Party? That is a frightening thought. I would wager that the average voter in either party would be […]

Byron York | Harris and the DEI Question

A handful of Republicans have referred to Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, as a “DEI hire.” They were essentially saying that President Joe Biden […]

Servo enables parallel table layout

Another month, another chunk of progress for the Servo rendering engine. The biggest addition is enabling table rendering to be spread across CPU cores. Parallel table layout is now enabled, spreading the work for laying out rows and their columns over all available CPU cores. This change is a great example of the strengths of Rayon and the opportunistic parallelism in Servo’s layout engine. ↫ Servo blog On top of this, there’s tons of improvements to the flexbox layout engine, support generic font families like ‘sans-serif’ and ‘monospace’ has been added, and Servo now supports OpenHarmony, the operating system developed by Huawei. This month also saw a lot of work on the development tools.

Robert Lamoureux | Can I replace the garburator myself?

Question: Mr. Lamoureux, thank you for sharing your knowledge. I have one question for you, which I haven’t seen an answer to previously. Perhaps you’ve covered it and I missed […]

Today in SCV History (Aug. 3)

Minority farmers set for $2 billion from USDA after years of discrimination

COLUMBIA, Missouri — The Biden administration has doled out more than $2 billion in direct payments for Black and other minority farmers discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the president announced Wednesday.

More than 23,000 farmers were approved for payments ranging from $10,000 to $500,000, according to the USDA. Another 20,000 who planned to start a farm but did not receive a USDA loan received between $3,500 and $6,000.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters that the aid “is not compensation for anyone’s loss or the pain endured, but it is an acknowledgment by the department.”

The USDA has a long history of refusing to process loans from Black farmers, approving smaller loans compared to white farmers, and in some cases foreclosing quicker than usual when Black farmers who obtained loans ran into problems.

National Black Farmers Association Founder and President John Boyd Jr. said the aid is helpful. But, he said, it’s not enough.

“It’s like putting a bandage on somebody that needs open-heart surgery,” Boyd said. “We want our land, and I want to be very, very clear about that.”

Boyd is still fighting a federal lawsuit for 120% debt relief for Black farmers that was approved by Congress in 2021. Five billion dollars for the program was included in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package.

But the money never came. White farmers in several states filed lawsuits arguing their exclusion was a violation of their constitutional rights, which prompted judges to halt the program shortly after its passage.

Faced with the likelihood of a lengthy court battle that would delay payments to farmers, Congress amended the law and offered financial help to a broader group of farmers. A new law allocated $3.1 billion to help farmers struggling with USDA-backed loans and $2.2 billion to pay farmers who the agency discriminated against.

Wardell Carter, who is Black, said no one in his farming family got so much as access to a loan application since Carter’s father bought 34.4 hectares of Mississippi land in 1939. He said USDA loan officers would slam the door in his face. If Black farmers persisted, Carter said officers would have police come to their homes.

Without a loan, Carter’s family could not afford a tractor and instead used a horse and mule for years. And without proper equipment, the family could farm at most 16.2 hectares of their property — cutting profits.

When they finally received a bank loan to buy a tractor, Carter said the interest rate was 100%.

Boyd said he’s watched as his loan applications were torn up and thrown in the trash, been called racial epithets, and was told to leave in the middle of loan meetings so the officer could speak to white farmers.

“We face blatant, in-your-face, real discrimination,” Boyd said. “And I did personally. The county person who was making farm loans spat tobacco juice on me during a loan session.”

At 65, Carter said he’s too old to farm his land. But he said if he receives money through the USDA program, he will use it to get his property in shape so his nephew can begin farming on it again. Carter said he and his family want to pitch in to buy his nephew a tractor, too.

Simone Biles raises gymnastics bar so high that 5 skills bear her name

paris — It is not enough — it has never been enough — for Simone Biles to do gymnastics.

The 27-year-old American star has been intent almost from the start on pushing the sport in new directions by doing things that have never been done before. That could continue this week when she tries for her eighth Olympic medal in Paris.

Five elements currently bear her name in the Code of Points after she successfully completed them in an international competition: two on vault, two on floor exercise and one on balance beam.

She was just a teenager and recently minted national champion when Biles performed a tumbling pass at the 2013 world championships that she completes by doing a double layout with a half-twist at the end.

The move looks dangerous — Biles is essentially flying blind — but she and former coach Aimee Boorman came up with it because it was less taxing on her legs.

“It was almost kind of necessity is the mother of invention,” Boorman told The Associated Press in 2015. “Her calf was hurting. She had bone spurs in her ankles and she’s really good at floor with landings.”

Biles returned to the sport in 2018 following a two-year layoff after winning the all-around at the 2016 Olympics.

Not content to merely repeat herself, Biles began working on a triple-twisting, double flip that is now known simply as ” the triple-double.” She unveiled it while winning the 2019 U.S. Championships then did it again at the world championships a few months later when she won the fifth of her record six world all-around titles.

As with a lot of gymnastics elements, Biles took a Cheng vault and added another layer of difficulty — this one an extra half twist on a vault originally done by China’s Cheng Fei.

The vault requires Biles to do a round-off onto the vault, then a half-twist onto the table before doing two full twists. It entered the Code after she made it part of her routine at the 2018 world championships.

“I’m embarrassed to do floor and vault after something like that,” U.S. men’s gymnast Yul Moldauer said in 2018. “You see Simone do that and she’s smiling the whole time. How does she do that?”

The Yurchenko double pike had never been completed by a woman in competition, and few men have even tried. She began tinkering with it in 2021, but it’s in the last year that it has morphed into perhaps the most show-stopping thing done in the sport.

The vault asks Biles to do a round-off back handspring onto the table, then two backward flips in pike position with her hands essentially clasped to her knees. She does it with so much power, she can sometimes overcook it. At the U.S. Olympic trials last month, it drew a standing ovation.

“No, it’s not normal,” longtime coach Laurent Landi said after she drilled it at the 2023 U.S. Championships. “She’s not normal.”

For all of her explosive tumbling, Biles is a wonder on balance beam, too, where she can make doing intricate moves on a four-inch-wide piece of wood seem almost casual.

The same year she debuted the triple-double on floor, she added a double-twisting, double-tucked dismount off the beam. She stuck it at the 2019 world championships, though she has since taken it out of her repetoire.

The skill Biles submitted requires her to do a forward circle around the lower bar before turning a handstand into a 540-degree pirouette. USA Gymnastics teased the move on X ahead of the Games. She didn’t attempt it during the team or all-around competitions but still won gold in both.

Scholarships help graduates attend college outside Hawaii a year after wildfire

HONOLULU — College wasn’t on Keith Nove Baniqued’s mind after her family’s home burned down in a deadly wildfire that decimated her Hawaii town. The 17-year-old, who was 7 when she moved to Maui from the Philippines, was about to start her senior year of high school but shifted her focus to her family’s struggles to find a place to live amid the tragedy.

Nearly a year after the fire that destroyed thousands of other homes and killed 102 people in historic Lahaina, Baniqued is headed to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And her family doesn’t have to worry about how to pay for it, thanks to $325,000 in college scholarships awarded Wednesday to 13 Lahainaluna High School graduates attending schools on the U.S. mainland.

“Even being a senior, I really didn’t know if I was going to pursue higher education anymore, only because I didn’t want to leave my family in the situation that we were in,” she recalled of her feelings after the fire.

Her school survived the blaze, but was closed for two months. The reopening restored a small sense of normalcy and reignited her dream to attend college beyond Hawaii’s shores. She also realized a college degree would put her in a better position to help her family’s long-term recovery.

She applied to colleges with nursing programs, channeled her feelings about surviving the fire into scholarship essays and decided she would attend UNLV — partly because its popularity among Hawaii students would make it feel a bit like home.

Using a grant from the Maui Strong Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Downtown Athletic Club of Hawaii is providing Baniqued and her 12 classmates with about $25,000 each — meant to cover out-of-state college costs after other scholarships and financial aid for the first year.

“A lifechanging opportunity like this can be beneficial to any Hawaii high school graduate, and even more so for Lahainaluna graduates and all they’ve gone through,” said Keith Amemiya, president of athletic club, which has been spearheading a fundraising campaign to support the Lahainaluna student-athletes and coaches whose homes were destroyed by the fire.

In a separate effort after the fire, the University of Hawaii announced scholarships for 2024 Lahainaluna graduates to attend any campus in the statewide system. Nearly 80% of a graduating class of 215 applied to UH campuses, according to school data. As of last week, 105 students had registered at a UH school, leading to a record-number of college-bound Lahainaluna graduates, school officials said, who expect that number to increase by mid-August.

Ginny Yasutake, a Lahainaluna counselor, reached out to Amemiya to see if there was a way to do something similar to the UH scholarship for student athletes who opted to leave Hawaii for college.

With help from the Hawaii Community Foundation, they found funding to help even students who weren’t athletes. Both organizations are committed to finding a way to provide the scholarships beyond freshman year of out-of-state college and also to underclassmen affected by the fire, Amemiya said.

“These scholarships kind of came in as a last-minute dream,” said Principal Richard Carosso.

And the Hawaii scholarships provided an opportunity to many who never thought college was even possible, he said.

Pursuing college highlights the resilience of a graduating class whose freshman year of high school was disrupted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Carosso said.

Emily Hegrenes, headed to the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in her scholarship essay about how she had to find a way to train as a swimmer because the Lahaina Aquatic Center was closed in a restricted burn zone.

“But for my final high school season, I worked harder than ever to recruit enough swimmers to hold team practice at a pool forty-five-minutes away from my hometown,” she wrote. “With my Lahaina cap on, I proudly dove straight into my fears.”

Talan Toshikiyo, who plans to attend Oxnard College in California, said he aspires to become an engineer and attain financial stability because it was already difficult for Native Hawaiians like him, and other locals, to afford living in Hawaii before the fire.

“I hope Lahaina is not changed when I come back from the Mainland,” he wrote in his essay. “I dream one day all the rent in Maui will be lower so locals will be able to afford it and not have to move far far away.”

Heat deaths of people without air conditioning underscore inequity

PHOENIX, ARIZONA — Mexican farm worker Avelino Vazquez Navarro didn’t have air conditioning in the motor home where he died last month in Washington state as temperatures surged into the triple digits.

For the last dozen years, the 61-year-old spent much of the year working near Pasco, Washington, sending money to his wife and daughters in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, and traveling back every Christmas.

“If this motor home would have had AC and it was running, then it most likely would have helped,” said Franklin County Coroner Curtis McGary, who determined Vazquez Navarro’s death was heat-related, with alcohol intoxication as a contributing cause.

Most heat-related deaths involve homeless people living outdoors. But those who die inside without sufficient cooling also are vulnerable. They are typically older than 60, living alone and with a limited income.

Underscoring the inequities around energy and access to air conditioning as summers grow hotter, many victims are Black, Indigenous or Latino, such as Vazquez Navarro.

“Air conditioning is not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, which represents state energy assistance programs. “It’s a public health issue, and it’s an affordability issue.”

People living in mobile homes or in aging trailers and RVs are especially likely to lack proper cooling. Nearly a quarter of the indoor heat deaths in Arizona’s Maricopa County last year were in those kinds of dwellings, which are transformed into a broiling tin can by the blazing desert sun.

“Mobile homes can really heat up because they don’t always have the best insulation and are often made of metal,” said Dana Kennedy, AARP director in Arizona, where many heat-related deaths occur.

Research shows mobile home dwellers are particularly at risk in blistering hot Phoenix, where 45-degree Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) weather is forecast for this weekend.

“People are exposed to the elements more than in other housing,” said Patricia Solís, executive director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, who worked on mapping hot weather impacts on mobile home parks for a state preparedness plan.

Worse, some parks bar residents from making modifications that could cool their homes, citing esthetic concerns. A new Arizona law required parks for the first time this summer to let residents install cooling methods such as window units, shade awnings and shutters.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, 156 of 645 heat-related deaths last year occurred indoors in uncooled environments. In most cases, a unit was present but was not working, was without electricity or turned off, public health officials said.

One victim was Shirley Marie Kouplen, who died after being overcome by high temperatures inside her Phoenix mobile home amid a heat wave when the extension cord providing her electricity was unplugged.

Emergency responders recorded the 70-year-old widow’s body temperature at 41.7 C (107.1 F). Kouplen, who was diabetic and had high blood pressure, was rushed to a hospital, where she died.

Kouplen apparently was struggling financially, if the shabby condition of her mobile home was any indication. It still sits on Lot 60, surrounded by a chain-link fence with a locked gate and a dirt driveway overgrown with weeds.

It’s unclear how the cord got unplugged, if Kouplen had an electricity account or how she got her power.

“Losing your air conditioning is now a life-threatening event,” said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who grew up in hot, humid Houston in the 1970s. “You didn’t want to lose your air conditioning, but it wasn’t going to kill you. And now it is.”

Arizona’s regulated utilities have been banned since 2022 from cutting off power during the summer, following the 2018 death of a 72-year-old woman after Arizona Public Service disconnected her electricity over a $51 debt.

Ann Porter, spokesperson for Arizona Public Service, which provides electricity to homes in the park where Kouplen lived, said “due to privacy concerns” the company could not say if she had an account at the time of her death or in the past. Porter said the utility does not cut power from June 1 to Oct. 15.

Arizona is among 19 states with shut-off protections, leaving about half of the U.S. population without safeguards against losing electricity during the summer, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association said in a new study.

Almost 20% of very-low-income families have no air conditioning at all, especially in places such as Washington state, where they weren’t commonly installed before climate-fueled heat waves grew increasingly stronger, more frequent and longer lasting.

In the Pacific Northwest, several hundred people died during a 2021 heat wave, prompting Portland, Oregon, to launch a program to provide portable cooling units to vulnerable, low-income people.

Chicago, better known for its cold winters, saw a heat wave kill 739 mostly older people over five days in 1995. Amid high humidity and temperatures over 37.7 C (100 F), most victims had no air conditioning or couldn’t afford to turn on their units.

In 2022, Chicago adopted a cooling ordinance after three women died in their apartments in a building for older adults on an unusually warm spring day. Certain residential buildings must now have at least one air-conditioned common area for cooling when the heat index exceeds 26.6 C (80 F) and cooling is unavailable in individual units.

Nonprofits in historically hotter areas such as Arizona also are trying to better address the inequities low-income people face during the sweltering summers. The Phoenix-based community agency Wildfire recently raised money to buy over $2 million worth of air conditioning equipment to help 150 households statewide over three years, Executive Director Kelly McGowan said.

Laws protect renters in some places. Phoenix landlords must ensure that air conditioning units cool to 28 C (82 F) or below and that evaporative coolers lower the temperature to 30C (86 F).

Palm Springs, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, both desert cities, have ordinances requiring landlords to offer air conditioning in rental dwellings. Dallas, where temperatures can pass 43.3 C (110 F) in the summer, has a similar law.

But most renters pay their own electricity costs, leaving them to agonize whether they can afford to even turn on the cooling or how high to set the thermostat.

A new report estimates the average cost for U.S. families to keep cool from June to September will grow nationwide by 7.9% this year, from $661 in 2023 to $719 this summer.

Wolf noted the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which grants money to states to help families pay for heating and cooling, is underfunded, with 80% going to heat homes in winter.

The “blowing smoke up your ass” theory of AI

I love technology. I’m not obsessed with it but I do enjoy staying up to date with what’s happening in the tech world. This is both on the hardware and on the software side of things. Sadly, the current state of tech news is quite boring because it’s dominated by AI. AI this, AI that. New AI companies cropping up, old companies pivoting to AI, and companies that have no business being in the AI race announcing their AI strategies. It’s everywhere. And yet, there are PLENTY of examples of how bad this tech can be.

And yet, “people” keep being super optimistic. And when I say people, I mean mostly developers. Because that’s my current theory: the vast majority of the AI hype is driven by tech people who are struggling to realise that AI is most useful in their line of work. Every time people discuss AI the best example they can come up with for how useful these tools are is coding. AI tools are—allegedly—great if you need help coding something and you don’t know how to do it. Which is great, if you’re a developer.

The current state of AI is filled with mostly nonsense. Just look at what the big players are announcing. Google has tried to shove its stupid AI thing inside search results and has failed spectacularly and they’re now slowly retreating. Apple had an entire event dedicated to AI to announce a smarter Siri and some smart—allegedly—writing aid. Cool, I guess? OpenAi is announcing all sorts of tools that are cool tech demos but I can’t see why the population at large should be excited about any of that stuff.

I’m starting to believe that tech companies—and their VC companions—are drinking way too much of their own Kool-Aid because they fail to realise that the vast majority of the usefulness of AI tools can be found in the industries that work on said tools. At least that’s my current theory. But hey, I said it many times before, I’m a complete idiot and I’m happy to be proven wrong. If you have a different theory I want to hear it so get in touch or maybe ask your AI bot to get in touch with me.

What makes a good human interface?

When I discuss interfaces on this blog, I’m most often referring to software interfaces: intermediating mechanisms from our human intentions to computers and the knowledge within them. But the concept of a human interface extends far before it and beyond it. I’ve been trying to build myself a coherent mental framework for how to think about human interfaces to knowledge and tools in general, even beyond computers.

What are the qualities we want in something that mediates our relationship to our knowledge and tools?

When I visited Berlin earlier this year for a small conference on AI and interfaces, I spent my last free night in the city wandering and pondering whether there could be a general answer to this expansive question. My focus — both then and now — is on engaged interfaces, interfaces people use to deeply understand or explore some creative medium or knowledge domain, rather than to complete a specific well-defined task. (In this post, when I write interface, I specific mean this type.) The question of what makes an interface compelling is particularly interesting for this type because, as I noted in the other post in this series, inventing good primitives for engaged interfaces demands broad, open-ended exploration. I was hopeful that foundational principles could guide our exploration process and make our search more efficient.

I returned home from that trip with a hazy sense of those principles, which have since become more crisp through many conversations, research, and experiments.

To see and to express. This is what all great engaged interfaces — creative and exploratory tools — are about.

To see

A good engaged interface makes visible what is latent. In that way, they are like great maps. Good interfaces and maps enable us to more effectively explore some domain of information by visualizing and letting us see the right slices of a more complex, underlying reality.

Data visualizations and notations, the backbone of many kinds of graphical interfaces, are maps for seeing better. Primitives like charts, canvases, (reverse-)chronological timelines, calendars, are all based on taking some meaningful dimension of information, like time or importance, and mapping it onto some space.

If we take some liberties with the definition of a data visualization, we can consider interface patterns like the “timeline” in an audio or video editing app. In fact, the more capable a video editing tool, the greater variety of maps that tool offers users, enabling them to see different dimensions of the underlying project. An experienced video editor doesn’t just work with video clips on a timeline, but also has a “scope” for visualizing the distribution of color in a frame, color histograms and curves for higher-level tuning, audio waveforms, and even complex filtered and categorized views for navigating their vast library of source footage. These are all maps for seeing information clearly from diverse perspectives.

Straying even further, a table of contents is also a kind of data visualization, a map of a longer document that helps the reader see its structure at a glance. A zoomed-out thumbnail grid of a long paged document is yet another map in disguise, where the reader can see a different more scannable perspective on the underlying information.

Even when there isn’t an explicit construction of space in the interface, there is often a hidden metaphor gesturing at one. When we open a folder in a file browser, for example, we imagine hierarchies of folders above and below to which we can navigate. In a web browser, we imagine pages of history coming before and after the current page. When editing a document, the undo/redo “stack” gestures at a hidden chronological list of edits. Sometimes, these hidden metaphors are worth reifying into concrete visuals, like a list of changes in a file history view or a file tree in the sidebar of a code editor. But over time these inherently cartographic metaphors get collapsed into our imagination as we become more adept at seeing them in our minds.

To express

Once we’ve seen what is in front of us, we need to act on that understanding. Often that comes in the form of manipulating the thing being visualized — the thing we see in the interface. A good engaged interface also helps us here by transparently translating natural human interactions into precise intents in the domain of the tool.

Simple applications accomplish this by letting the user directly manipulate the element of interest. Consider the way map applications allow the user to explore places by dragging and zooming with natural gestures, or how the modern WIMP desktop interface lets users directly arrange windows that logically correspond to applications. When possible, directly manipulating the underlying information or objects of concern, the domain objects, minimizes cognitive load and learning curve.

Sometimes, tools can give users much more capability by inventing a new abstraction. Such an abstraction represents latent aspects of a domain object that couldn’t be individually manipulated before. In one type of implementation, a new abstraction shows individual attributes of some underlying object that can now be manipulated independently. We often see this in creative applications like Photoshop, Figma, or drag-and-drop website builders, where a sidebar or attribute panel shows independent attributes of a selected object. By interacting directly a color picker, font selector, or layout menus in the panel — the surrogate objects — the user indirectly manipulates the actual object of concern. To make this kind of interaction more powerful many of these tools also have a sophisticated notion of selection. “Layers” in image editing apps are a new abstraction that makes both selection and indirect attribute manipulation more useful.

A second type of surrogate object is focused not on showing individual attributes, but on revealing intermediate states that otherwise wouldn’t have been amenable to direct manipulation, because they weren’t concrete. Spreadsheet applications are full of UI abstractions that make intermediate states of calculation concrete. A typical spreadsheet will contain many cells that store some intermediate result, not to mention the concept of a formula itself, which is all about making the computation itself directly editable. Version control systems take the previously inaccessible object of past versions of a document or the concept of a single change — a “diff” — and allow the user to directly manipulate them to undo or reorder edits.

Direct manipulation

All of the interfaces I mention above are examples of direct manipulation, a term dating back at least to 1983 for interfaces that:

This kind of an interface lets us re-use our intuition for physical objects, movement, and space to see and express ideas in more abstract domains. An underrated benefit of direct manipulation is that it enables low-friction iteration and exploration of an idea space. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that direct manipulation is itself merely a means to achieve this more fundamental goal: let the user easily iterate and explore possibilities, which leads to better decisions.

In the forty years since, direct manipulation has eaten away at nearly every corner of the landscape of knowledge tools. But despite its ubiquity, the most interesting and important part of creative knowledge work — the understanding, coming up with ideas, and exploring options part — still mostly takes place in our minds, with paper and screens serving as scratchpads and memory more than true thinking aids. There are very few direct manipulation interfaces to ideas and thoughts themselves, except in specific constrained domains like programming, finance, and statistics where mathematical statements can be neatly reified into UI elements.

Of course, we have information tools that use direct manipulation principles, like graphical word processors and mind mapping software. But even when using these tools, a user has to read and interpret information on screen, transform and manipulate them in the mind, and then relay their conclusions back into the computer. The intermediate states of thinking are completely latent. In the best thinking tools today, we still can’t play with thoughts, only words.

We are in the pre-direct manipulation, program-by-command-line age of thinking tools, where we cannot touch and shape our thoughts like clay, where our tools let us see and manipulate words on a page, but not the concepts and ideas behind them.

This realization underlies all of my technical research and interface explorations, though I’m certainly not early nor unique in pursuing this vision. To me, solving this problem means freeing our most nuanced and ineffable ideas from our individual heads. It would give us a way to translate those thoughts into something we can hold in our hands and manipulate in the same way we break down an algebra problem with pencil and paper or graphs on a grid.

What could we accomplish if, instead of learning to hold the ever more complex problems in our world within our minds, we could break down and collaborate on them with tools that let us see them in front of us in full fidelity and bring our full senses and dexterity to bear on understanding and exploring the possibilities?

Music to Lift the Spirit

Youth choruses from Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara and Young People’s Chorus of New York City unite for an upbeat show at the Marjorie Luke Theatre.

Maui fire lawsuit parties reach $4B global settlement, court filings say

HONOLULU — The parties in lawsuits seeking damages for last year’s Maui wildfires have reached a $4 billion global settlement, a court filing said Friday, nearly one year after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

The term sheet with details of the settlement is not publicly available, but the liaison attorneys filed a motion Friday saying the global settlement seeks to resolve all Maui fire claims for $4.037 billion. The motion asks the judge to order that insurers can’t separately go after the defendants to recoup money paid to policyholders.

“We’re under no illusions that this is going to make Maui whole,” Jake Lowenthal, a Maui attorney selected as one of four liaisons for the coordination of the cases, told The Associated Press. “We know for a fact that it’s not going to make up for what they lost.”

Thomas Leonard, who lost his Front Street condo in the fire and spent hours in the ocean behind a seawall hiding from the flames, welcomed the news.

“It gives us something to work with,” he said. “I’m going to need that money to rebuild.”

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said in a statement that seven defendants will pay the $4.037 billion to compensate those who have already brought claims for the August 8, 2023, fires that killed 102 people and destroyed the historic downtown area of Lahaina on Maui.

Green said the proposed settlement is an agreement in principle and would “help our people heal.”

“My priority as governor was to expedite the agreement and to avoid protracted and painful lawsuits so as many resources as possible would go to those affected by the wildfires as quickly as possible,” he said in a statement.

“It will be good that our people don’t have to wait to rebuild their lives as long as others have in many places that have suffered similar tragedies,” Green said.

Hawaiian Electric CEO Sheelee Kimura said the settlement will allow the parties to move forward without the added challenges and divisiveness of litigation.

“For the many affected parties to work with such commitment and focus to reach resolution in a uniquely complex case is a powerful demonstration of how Hawaiʻi comes together in times of crisis,” Kimura said in a statement.

Hawaiian Electric said the settlement will help reestablish the company’s financial stability. It said payments would begin after final approval and were expected no earlier than the middle of next year.

Gilbert Keith-Agaran, a Maui attorney who represents victims, including families who lost relatives, said the amount was “woefully short.” But he said it was a deal plaintiffs needed to consider given Hawaiian Electric’s limited assets and potential bankruptcy.

Lowenthal noted there were “extenuating circumstances” that made lawyers worry the litigation would drag on for years.

Now that a settlement has been reached, more work needs to be done on next steps, like how to divvy up the amount.

“This is the first step to allowing the Maui fire victims to get compensation sooner than later,” Lowenthal said.

More than 600 lawsuits have been filed over the deaths and destruction caused by the fires, which burned thousands of homes and displaced 12,000 people. In the spring, a judge appointed mediators and ordered all parties to participate in settlement talks.

Four other defendants did not immediately respond to email messages or phone calls seeking comment. They are Maui County, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools — formerly known as Bishop Estate — and West Maui Land Co.

US colleges reembracing SAT as admissions requirement

The COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to administer the SAT exam to high school students worldwide. In response, US colleges and universities that required the exam for admissions made the test optional. Now, with the pandemic in the rearview mirror, a trend is growing in higher education to again require the SAT. VOA’s Robin Guess has the story.

Pentagon chief revokes plea deals with 3 Sept. 11 suspects

Washington — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday scrapped a plea agreement with September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, just two days after the announcement of a deal that reportedly would have taken the death penalty off the table.

Deals with Mohammed and two alleged accomplices announced Wednesday had appeared to have moved their long-running cases toward resolution – but sparked anger among some relatives of those killed on September 11, 2001, as well as criticism from leading Republican politicians.

“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused … responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Austin said in a memorandum addressed to Susan Escallier, who oversaw the case.

“I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-referenced case,” the memo said.

The cases against the 9/11 defendants have been bogged down in pre-trial maneuverings for years, while the accused remained held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

The New York Times reported this week that Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy in exchange for a life sentence, instead of facing a trial that could lead to their executions.

Much of the legal jousting surrounding the men’s cases has focused on whether they could be tried fairly after having undergone methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years after 9/11.

The plea agreements would have avoided that thorny issue, but they also sparked sharp criticism from political opponents of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Republican lawmaker Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Austin that said the deals were “unconscionable,” while House Speaker Mike Johnson said they were a “slap in the face” to the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11 attacks.

And Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, described the agreements as a “sweetheart deal with 9/11 terrorists,” saying during a campaign rally: “We need a president who kills terrorists, not negotiates with them.”

Mohammed was regarded as one of Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted and intelligent lieutenants before his March 2003 capture in Pakistan. He then spent three years in secret CIA prisons before arriving at Guantanamo in 2006.

The trained engineer – who has said he masterminded the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z” – was involved in a string of major plots against the United States, where he had attended university.

Bin Attash, a Saudi of Yemeni origin, allegedly trained two of the hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks, and his U.S. interrogators also said he confessed to buying the explosives and recruiting members of the team that killed 17 sailors in an attack on the USS Cole.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he took refuge in neighboring Pakistan and was captured there in 2003. He was then held in a network of secret CIA prisons.

Hawsawi is suspected of managing the financing for the 9/11 attacks. He was arrested in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and was also held in secret prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

The United States used Guantanamo, an isolated naval base, to hold militants captured during the “War on Terror” that followed the September 11 attacks in a bid to keep the defendants from claiming rights under U.S. law.

The facility held roughly 800 prisoners at its peak, but they have since slowly been repatriated to other countries. Biden pledged before his election to try to shut down Guantanamo, but it remains open.

High heat expected in SCV starting Sunday

The Santa Clarita Valley is set to experience another period of high heat starting from Sunday to Wednesday, according to Kristan Lund, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Lund […]

US military sending reinforcement to the Middle East

Washington — U.S. warships and fighter jets are headed to the Middle East and nearby areas to bolster American defenses in support of Israel, as both countries brace for a possible military strike by Iran.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin late Friday signed orders to move the additional assets and capabilities to the Middle East and parts of Europe, following pledges by Tehran and its proxies to take revenge for the killings this past week of a top Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and the Hamas terror group’s political leader on Iranian soil.

The U.S. moves include sending the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East, along with naval cruisers and destroyers capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.

In addition, the U.S. is sending an additional fighter squadron to the region and is taking steps to allow for the deployment of land-based missile defense capabilities.

The Pentagon did not say when the various ships and planes will be in place, but in a statement Friday it described the moves as necessary to “mitigate the possibility of regional escalation by Iran or Iran’s partners and proxies.”

The statement also said the movement of more military capabilities to the region aims “to improve U.S. force protection, to increase support for the defense of Israel, and to ensure the United States is prepared to respond to various contingencies.”

The new orders came just hours after Austin pledged additional support to Israel during a call with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

“The secretary reiterated ironclad support for Israel’s security and informed the minister of additional measures to include ongoing and future defensive force posture changes that the department will take to support the defense of Israel,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said during a briefing.

The Pentagon’s support for Israel since the October 7 Hamas terror attack “should leave Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups with no doubt about U.S. resolve,” she said.

Tensions in the region have escalated significantly in the past week, following an Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed Fouad Shukur, Hezbollah’s top military commander, and the subsequent assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was in Tehran to celebrate the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Israel has not publicly claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put the onus on Israel and called for retribution.

“The criminal, terrorist Zionist regime martyred our dear guest in our territory and has caused our grief, but it has also prepared the ground for a severe punishment,” Khamenei posted on the X social media platform.

Iranian officials said Thursday they planned to meet with representatives from Iran’s key proxies — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and militias in Iraq and Syria — to plan their next steps.

“How Iran and the resistance front will respond is currently being reviewed,” said Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s armed forces chief, speaking on Iranian state TV.

“This will certainly happen, and the Zionist regime [Israel] will undoubtedly regret it,” he added.

But U.S. officials, seeking to prevent the tensions from exploding into a regional war, have repeatedly signaled that Washington would not leave Israel undefended.

During a call Thursday between U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden “discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive U.S. military deployments,” according to the U.S. readout.

U.S. defense officials Friday likewise emphasized Israel would not stand alone in the face of Iranian aggression.

“These are defensive capabilities,” Singh added. “All of our capabilities that we have there in the region are defensive and to send a message of deterrence.”

Besides the additional ships and warplanes headed to the Middle East, the Pentagon has a U.S. Marine Corps amphibious ready group with some 4,000 troops in the region.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is also in the Middle East but is expected to leave once the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group arrives.

This would not be the first time the U.S. has enhanced its defensive capabilities to help shield Israel from an Iranian attack.

This past April, the U.S. moved naval destroyers and other military assets into the region while coordinating with Britain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other allies in the Middle East to thwart a massive drone and missile barrage by Iran.

At the time, one U.S. official called the effort an “incredible military achievement.”

Whether the U.S. will be able to rely on a similar coalition to deter a second Iranian attack on Israel, however, is unclear.

Whether Iran and its proxies would attempt another aerial attack on Israel, after an estimated 99% of the missiles and drones that they launched in April failed to hit a target, is also unclear.

“Iran is currently in the process of making a difficult decision on how to respond to the targeting killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran,” said Robert Murrett, a retired U.S. vice admiral and deputy director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University.

“Iran will likely carefully calibrate its response to the Israelis,” Murrett told VOA via email. “They [the Iranians] are fully aware of the regional implications of any direct or indirect attack on Israel with or without surrogates.”

In the meantime, the Pentagon insisted Friday that a further escalation between Iran and Israel “is not inevitable.”

“We do believe there is an off-ramp here, and that is that [Gaza] cease-fire deal,” between Israel and Hamas, Singh said.

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