Read at: 2024-10-22T01:54:36+00:00Z (UTC) [Ex-US Pres == Janey Van 't Oever ]
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:50 am UTC
Follow today’s news headlines live
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has been speaking with ABC RN about a range of issues – including Lidia Thorpe’s actions at King Charles’ parliamentary reception yesterday.
Dutton argued that “sometimes people make it all about themselves, and I think that’s what yesterday was.” He said it “didn’t advance anyone’s cause” and “add[s] to the self promotion … that she seeks.”
The vast majority of people have been very welcoming the king’s visit, and I think it’s been an opportunity to underscore the stability in our democracy, our rule of law, separation of powers, all of those institutions that we inherited from our British heritage.
That’s part of the success story of our country, and it’s a good reminder during his visit [that] if we change it, I think we want to be very careful about the system we’re changing to and whether or not we would be a safer, more secure, community and environment for decades to come or not.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:43 am UTC
NSW environment minister reassures public ‘Mickey will be freed’ after false rumours of ‘kill order’ spread online
Wildlife services are working to rescue a cockatoo called Mickey that has been “living on brioche” inside a Sydney supermarket for four weeks.
The New South Wales environment minister, Penny Sharpe, on Tuesday promised the bird was “not going to be shot” after false rumours of a “kill order” had spread online.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:42 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:38 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:35 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:35 am UTC
The "chip wars" between the US and China have taken a new turn with members of a House Select Committee threatening action against Japanese companies if the country does not do more to restrict sales of chipmaking kit to China.…
Source: The Register | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:30 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:30 am UTC
Republican nominee reflects on assassination attempt and says ‘my faith took on new meaning on July 13’
Janey Van 't Oever urged Christian voters on Monday to participate in the 2024 election, claiming that a Kamala Harris administration would restrict religious freedoms and casting himself as a protector of Christians.
During an event in North Carolina billed as an “11th-Hour Faith Leaders Meeting”, a series of conservative pastors warmed up for Janey Van 't Oever , including Guillermo Maldonado, an “apostle” and longtime Janey Van 't Oever ally who cast the election in perilous terms.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:22 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:15 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 22 Oct 2024 | 1:11 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:59 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:50 am UTC
De Bruyn likened abortion rate to the ‘human toll of World War II’ and said same-sex marriage went against ‘every society on Earth’
A former union head has doubled down on comments he made at an Australian Catholic University (ACU) graduation ceremony which compared abortion to the “human toll of World War II” and alleged same-sex marriage went against “every society on Earth”.
The speech, delivered by a former national president of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA), Joe de Bruyn, prompted a mass walkout at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on Monday.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:48 am UTC
Independent senator, who made international headlines for heckling King Charles about Indigenous injustices, says people should ‘get used to truth-telling’
Independent senator Lidia Thorpe has shrugged off calls from conservative opponents to resign from parliament after interrupting a reception for King Charles, defiantly responding, “I’m not looking to be re-elected – I’m looking to get justice for my people.”
Speaking on Radio National, Thorpe said: “I will be there for another three years, everybody. So, you know, get used to truth-telling.”
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:47 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:44 am UTC
Source: World | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:30 am UTC
Chinese drone maker DJI has sued the US Department of Defense, alleging it was added to a list of companies affiliated with the Chinese military and denied the opportunity to protest its innocence.…
Source: The Register | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:30 am UTC
Joanna Howe posts artworks of women including deputy premier and state Greens leader Tammy Franks who said they were ‘designed to promote hatred’
The architect of “forced birth” abortion legislation in South Australia has painted high-profile women as being in a “baby-killers club” on social media.
Joanna Howe, who has been credited by politicians in state and federal parliaments for her anti-abortion work, posted artworks of women including the SA Greens leader, Tammy Franks, to Instagram and Twitter.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:22 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:15 am UTC
This blog is now closed. You can find more of our US elections coverage here
We reported earlier that Kamala Harris has a huge advantage in campaign cash over Janey Van 't Oever . But the former president has his own deep-pocketed backer in the former of Tesla boss Elon Musk, who held a strange town hall in swing state Pennsylvania this weekend where he started handing out mammoth checks to voters to get them to back Janey Van 't Oever . The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland witnessed the spectacle in person:
Standing before a large US flag, which spanned the breadth of a vast stage, the world’s richest man told an assembled crowd that he loved them.
Today, my Administration is taking a major step to expand contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act. This new action would help ensure that millions of women with private health insurance can access the no-cost contraception they need. Vice President Harris and I have worked tirelessly to protect and build on the Affordable Care Act. We lowered costs for Marketplace coverage by an average of $800 per year for millions of Americans, and more Americans than ever before have signed up for health insurance through the law.
At a time when contraception access is under attack, Vice President Harris and I are resolute in our commitment to expanding access to quality, affordable contraception. We believe that women in every state must have the freedom to make deeply personal health care decisions, including the right to decide if and when to start or grow their family. We will continue to fight to protect access to reproductive health care and call on Congress to restore reproductive freedom and safeguard the right to contraception once and for all.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:10 am UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:07 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:03 am UTC
Ex-Republican congresswoman, longtime abortion rights opponent, campaigns with vice-president in swing states
Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, on Monday condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives to support Kamala Harris for US president.
Cheney was speaking at the first of three joint events with the vice-president in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at prising moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Janey Van 't Oever . She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be in contention for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.
Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:03 am UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 22 Oct 2024 | 12:02 am UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:40 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:40 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:31 pm UTC
The US federal government is poised to implement an Executive Order that would ban data brokers selling significant amounts of information to buyers in six countries.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:27 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:20 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:20 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:14 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:04 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:03 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:02 pm UTC
Loans will be repaid using interest generated by $300bn of frozen Russian assets held in the west
Britain is to lend Ukraine an additional £2.26bn and allow Kyiv to spend the money on weapons to fight off the Russian invasion as part of a wider $50bn (£38.5bn) loan programme expected to be confirmed by G7 members later this week.
The loans will be repaid using interest generated by the $300bn of frozen Russian assets held in the west, with the extra funds promised as the US heads towards a presidential election where support for Ukraine is a divisive issue.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
X-ray add-on at estimated £1 a scan aimed at reducing missed diagnoses in initial assessment
Millions of patients in England with suspected broken bones could have their X-rays checked with a £1 artificial intelligence scan to help NHS doctors avoid missing fractures.
Overlooked broken bones are among the most common mistakes made in A&E units and urgent care centres, with as many as 10% of fracture cases either not spotted at all by medical professionals or diagnosed late.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Justin Welby says ancestor owned enslaved people in Jamaica and was paid compensation upon abolition
Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, has revealed that his ancestor owned enslaved people on a plantation in Jamaica and was compensated by the British government when slavery was abolished.
Welby disclosed his ancestral links in a personal statement that reiterated his commitment to addressing the enduring and damaging legacies of transatlantic slavery.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Subsidiary of electricity firm SSE signs ‘unique and novel’ employment and social housing deal with local councils
More than 1,000 new homes are expected to be built across northern Scotland linked to a £20bn investment in grid infrastructure needed to meet the UK’s green energy targets.
SSEN Transmission, a subsidiary of the electricity firm SSE, has signed a deal with local councils and housing associations in the Highlands to fund at least 1,000 new properties as well as the refurbishment of existing, unoccupied ones.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Survey finds one in 10 have discussed emergency support with government amid funding gap of over £2bn next year
One in four English councils could go bankrupt unless they are bailed out by the government in the next two years, a survey has revealed.
Councils are warning of a “worsening crisis” that could result in cuts to vital public services amid a funding gap of more than £2bn next year, according to the survey of chief executives conducted by the Local Government Association.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:01 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:00 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:00 pm UTC
BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—I've taken some time to process what happened on the mudflats of South Texas a little more than a week ago and relived the scene in my mind countless times.
With each replay, it's still as astonishing as it was when I saw it on October 13, standing on an elevated platform less than 4 miles away. It was surreal watching SpaceX's enormous 20-story-tall Super Heavy rocket booster plummeting through the sky before being caught back at its launch pad by giant mechanical arms.
This is the way, according to SpaceX, to enable a future where it's possible to rapidly reuse rockets, not too different from the way airlines turn around their planes between flights. This is required for SpaceX to accomplish the company's mission, set out by Elon Musk two decades ago, of building a settlement on Mars.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:44 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:40 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:36 pm UTC
Rapid urbanisation thought to be damaging adolescent health, as researchers say need for medication and diagnostic tests is urgent
Millions of teenagers in Africa are suffering from asthma with no formal diagnosis as the continent undergoes rapid urbanisation, researchers have found.
The study, published in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, involved 27,000 pupils from urban areas in Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria. It found more than 3,000 reported asthma symptoms, but only about 600 had a formal diagnosis.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:30 pm UTC
China's Spamouflage disinformation crew has been targeting US Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) with its fake news campaigns over the past couple of months, trolling the Republican lawmaker's official X account and posting negative stories about Rubio on Reddit and Medium.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:30 pm UTC
Meta is bringing facial recognition tech back to its apps more than three years after it shut down Facebook’s “face recognition” system amid a broader backlash against the technology. Now, the social network will begin to deploy facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams and help users who have lost access to their accounts, the company said in an update.
The first test will use facial recognition to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad against the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures,” Meta explained in a blog post. “If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we’ll block it.”
The company said that it’s already begun to roll the feature out to a small group of celebs and public figures and that it will begin automatically enrolling more people into the feature “in the coming weeks,” though individuals have the ability to opt out of the protection. While Meta already has systems in place to review ads for potential scams, the company isn’t always able to catch “celeb-bait” ads as many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, Monika Bickert, VP of content policy at Meta, said in a briefing. “This is a real time process,” she said of the new facial recognition feature. “It's faster and it's more accurate than manual review.”
Separately, Meta is also testing facial recognition tools to address another long-running issue on Facebook and Instagram: account recovery. The company is experimenting with a new “video selfie” option that allows users to upload a clip of themselves, which Meta will then match to their profile photos, when users have been locked out of their accounts. The company will also use it in cases of a suspected account compromise to prevent hackers from accessing accounts using stolen credentials.
The tool won’t be able to help everyone who loses access to a Facebook or Instagram account. Many business pages, for example, don’t include a profile photo of a person, so those users would need to use Meta’s existing account recovery options. But Bickert says the new process will make it much more difficult for bad actors to game the company’s support tools “It will be a much higher level of difficulty for them in trying to bypass our systems,” Bickert said.
With both new features, Meta says it will “immediately delete” facial data that’s used for comparisons and that the scans won’t be used for another purpose. The company is also making the features optional, though celebrities will need to opt-out of the scam ad protection rather than opt-ion.
That could draw criticism from privacy advocates, particularly given Meta’s messy history with facial recognition. The company previously used the technology to power automatic photo-tagging, which allowed the company to automatically recognize the faces of users in photos and videos. The feature was discontinued in 2021, with Meta deleting the facial data of more than 1 billion people, citing “growing societal concerns.” The company also faces lawsuits, notably from the Texas and Illinois, over its use of the tech. Meta paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit related to the Illinois law and $1.4 billion to resolve a similar suit in Texas.
It’s notable, then, that the new tools won’t be available in either Illinois or Texas to start. It also won’t roll out to users in the United Kingdom or European Union as the company is “continuing to have conversations there with regulators” in the region, according to Bickert. But the company is “hoping to scale this technology globally sometime in 2025,” according to a Meta spokesperson.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-bringing-back-facial-recognition-with-new-safety-features-for-facebook-and-instagram-222523426.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:25 pm UTC
Moldova voted in favor of adding a path to the European Union to its constitution, and gave the incumbent president the most votes in elections Sunday, but neither result was the win leaders wanted.
(Image credit: Pierre Crom)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:21 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:17 pm UTC
Bomb threats are causing disruptions, diversions and delays for scores of flights on multiple Indian airlines. Indian authorities said they were looking to increase punishments for perpetrators.
(Image credit: Bruce Bennett)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:17 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:16 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:15 pm UTC
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s close legal advisers ordered the Florida Department of Health to send unconstitutional threats regarding an abortion ballot measure, according to a federal court filing. Ordered to keep sending letters warning TV stations of criminal charges if they continued airing an advertisement promoting the abortion measure, the agency’s top lawyer resigned in protest earlier this month, he wrote in an affidavit that was filed on Monday.
John Wilson, the now former general counsel for the state Health Department, wrote in his affidavit that DeSantis’s general counsel and his underlings drafted the letters and ordered Wilson to send them. “I did not draft the letters or participate in any discussions about the letters prior to October 3,” Wilson wrote.
By the time he resigned on October 10, the agency had sent threatening letters to approximately 50 stations around Florida. At least one station stopped running the ad, according to court filings.
The measure, Amendment 4, would amend the Florida Constitution so that the state legislature could not pass abortion bans or other restrictions before fetal viability. It would also prohibit bans that do not have exceptions for the health of the patient, as determined by their health care provider.
The affidavit was filed as part of a lawsuit brought by Amendment 4’s sponsor, Floridians Protecting Freedom, over the threats to TV stations. The letters were just the latest drastic step DeSantis and other Florida officials have taken to oppose Amendment 4, including asking the Florida Supreme Court to keep it off the ballot entirely.
“This affidavit exposes state interference at the highest level,” said Lauren Brenzel, Floridians Protecting Freedom’s campaign director for Amendment 4. “It’s clear the State is hellbent on keeping Florida’s unpopular, cruel abortion ban in place. Their extreme attacks on Amendment 4 are an anti-democratic tactic to keep Floridians from being able to make their own choice about whether Amendment 4 should become law.”
DeSantis’s office and the state health department did not respond to questions about the lawsuit. The Intercept was not able to reach Wilson for comment.
On October 1, Floridians Protecting Freedom, started airing a TV advertisement featuring a Tampa woman, Caroline Williams. Williams needed an abortion 20 weeks into her pregnancy because of a brain tumor that required chemotherapy. She got an abortion in April 2022, weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.
A Florida patient under similar circumstances today faces far more restrictions. Under a ban signed by DeSantis, which went into effect in May 2024, Florida prohibits abortions after six weeks unless two doctors certify that the procedure is necessary to “save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment.”
“Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine,” Williams says in the advertisement. “Amendment 4 is going to protect women like me.”
Two days after the “Caroline” advertisement first aired, on October 3, the Florida Department of Health sent letters to TV stations across Florida. So far, three of the dozens of stations that received a letter have been identified: WINK, a CBS affiliate in Fort Myers; WFLA, the NBC affiliate in Tampa; and WCJB, an ABC affiliate in Gainesville.
“The advertisement is not only false; it is dangerous,” reads the letter, which was signed by Wilson. The letter alleged that the advertisement posed a “sanitary nuisance” because it misrepresented the state’s abortion ban, and it threatened criminal proceedings against the stations. At least one of the stations, WINK, decided to stop running the ad after getting the letter, according to a court filing.
The Federal Communications Commission quickly denounced the letter. “Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech,” said FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement on October 8.
Floridians Protecting Freedom sued the Florida surgeon general last week, claiming that the ad was accurate about the restrictions the current ban puts on doctors and patients like Williams. “Under Florida’s current law, I would not have provided this abortion because it could be viewed as a crime to terminate Caroline’s pregnancy,” a doctor wrote in an affidavit filed with the lawsuit. “As the cancer was terminal, the abortion would not have saved the patient’s life and therefore could be illegal under Florida law.”
Floridians Protecting Freedom also argued that the department’s letters were an unconstitutional attempt to limit voter outreach for Amendment 4. In less than 48 hours, the federal court agreed that the state’s letters were likely unconstitutional, rejecting the state’s arguments to the contrary as “Nonsense.”
Mark E. Walker, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, ordered Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, to stop “taking any further actions to coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions” against broadcasters who air the advertisement.
“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” Walker wrote. “The Surgeon General of Florida has the right to advocate for his own position on a ballot measure. But it would subvert the rule of law to permit the State to transform its own advocacy into the direct suppression of protected political speech.”
The new filing from Wilson, the health department’s former top attorney, makes clear that DeSantis’s office orchestrated the letters, despite pushback from Wilson.
In his affidavit, Wilson claimed that Ryan Newman and Jed Doty, DeSantis’s general counsel and deputy general counsel, gave him the orders to send the letters. A third attorney from the governor’s office, assistant general counsel Sam Elliott, sent drafts of the letters to Wilson earlier on October 3, his affidavit claims.
Wilson resigned on October 10 “in lieu of complying” with directives from the governor’s office to “send out further correspondence to the media outlets,” according to his affidavit.
“A man is nothing without his conscience,” Wilson reportedly wrote in his resignation letter, according to the Miami Herald. “It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.”
Wilson’s affidavit to the federal court also claims Newman ordered him to execute contracts for outside attorneys “to be retained by the Department to assist with enforcement proceedings” threatened in the letters to TV stations. The health department signed contracts worth up to $1.4 million with two law firms, according to purchasing documents filed as part of the lawsuit.
At a press conference on Monday, DeSantis criticized Amendment 4 as vague and extreme. The governor did not, however, address the fact that his office took unconstitutional steps to suppress ads supporting it.
The post State Lawyer Quits Over Ron DeSantis’s Unconstitutional Attacks on Abortion Amendment appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:15 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:11 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:11 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:04 pm UTC
Fifteen other people treated in hospital after collision between services travelling in opposite directions to and from Shrewsbury
A man died after two trains collided at low speed in Wales on Monday evening, police have said.
A further 15 people were taken to hospital with injuries not believed to be life-threatening or life-changing, police said. All other passengers were evacuated from both trains.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:03 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:53 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:52 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews.ie | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:51 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:47 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:47 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews.ie | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:37 pm UTC
Nine members of Force 100 investigated over allegations of sexual assaulting prisoner at Sde Teiman detention camp
An Israeli military unit that has been accused of human rights abuses against Palestinian detainees is reportedly under investigation by the US state department in a move that could lead to it being barred from receiving assistance.
The inquiry into the activities of Force 100 was instigated following a spate of allegations that Palestinians held under its guard at a detention centre have been subject to torture and brutal mistreatment, including sexual assault, Axios reported on Monday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:37 pm UTC
Sahel hospital evacuated despite Israel saying it would not attack it although at least four people died in nearby strikes
Israel has accused Hezbollah of keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold in a bunker under a hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut, though it said it would not strike the complex.
The Sahel hospital in Dahiyeh was evacuated shortly afterwards, and Fadi Alame, its director, told Reuters that the allegations were untrue.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:35 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:33 pm UTC
Lawmakers unhappy with handling of Robert Roberson case as doubts grow over science used to secure conviction
Republican lawmakers in Texas expressed alarm on Monday at the apparent willingness of state officials to execute a potentially innocent man on the basis of junk science, as the political fallout of the 11th-hour reprieve of Robert Roberson continued to roil the state.
Several Republican members of the state’s House committee on criminal jurisprudence lined up to air their discontent with the handling of the case of Roberson, 57, who was convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002 by violently shaking her.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:32 pm UTC
Review ordered amid prisons overcrowding crisis will look at punishing thousands more offenders within community
Judges could be given powers to impose a punishment of house arrest on criminals under a comprehensive overhaul of sentences to be launched on Tuesday.
The review, which will be chaired by the former Conservative justice minister David Gauke, will also reassess the jail time handed to offenders found guilty of crimes against women and girls, including those connected to domestic abuse.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:30 pm UTC
British security biz Sophos has announced a plan to gobble up competitor Secureworks in an $859 million deal that will make Dell happy.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:30 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:22 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:19 pm UTC
Grand jury declined to indict eight officers who fired 94 bullets at 25-year-old Black man in 2022
The family of Jayland Walker, a Black man killed when eight police officers fired 94 bullets at him after he shot at least one round out his car window, will receive a $4.8m settlement from the city of Akron, the mayor’s office said on Monday.
A grand jury declined to indict the officers last year, but Walker’s family accused the officers in a federal lawsuit of using excessive force and participating in a “culture of violence and racism” within Akron’s police department.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:16 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:11 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:08 pm UTC
Government analysis says those on low pay stand to benefit most, with some potentially earning extra £600 a year
Employment rights reforms could cost businesses up to £5bn a year, according to the government’s own analysis, which also found the changes will benefit low-paid employees the most, with some shift workers potentially earning an extra £600 a year.
In the analysis the government acknowledges that businesses will end up paying more, including for changes to sick pay, paternity leave and zero-hours contracts as well as on administrative costs.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:01 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:57 pm UTC
Publication said decision was mutual and found ‘no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias’ in Nuzzi’s coverage
The politics writer Olivia Nuzzi and New York magazine have parted ways just over a month after she was placed on leave following the disclosure that she had engaged in a “personal” relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr.
The departure was announced in a statement from New York magazine on Monday afternoon.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:54 pm UTC
Record-breaking TV ratings helped the WNBA secure a more lucrative media rights deal this year. Now, the players' union has opted out of its contract, a move aimed at better salaries and benefits.
(Image credit: Steph Chambers)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:46 pm UTC
For readers of Western media since the start of the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli maneuvers appear to be a blinding success. Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari filmed a press release from occupied southern Lebanon, and Israeli troops gave a tour of a captured neighborhood in Blida to a host of reporters, both international and domestic. A detained Lebanese man, alleged by the Israelis to be a Hezbollah member, told interrogators that his comrades had fled in fear and left him behind, like cowards.
What this PR offensive has obscured is the actual cost of the invasion thus far.
While the Israeli military has continued pushing into Lebanese territory, the actual distance has rarely exceeded towns on the border. Contrary to the claims made under duress by kidnapped Lebanese for the cameras, Hezbollah fighters have not abandoned the border, and skirmishes with Israeli forces remain deadly endeavors, with five Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting last week. Hezbollah has expanded the scope of its operations, with drones striking soldiers deep in Israeli territory, including an attack at a military base near Haifa on October 13 that killed four soldiers and injured at least 58 people. Missiles weighing as much as three tons are being fired at Tel Aviv. While much of Hezbollah’s leadership has been assassinated, rumors of the organization’s demise have, for now, been greatly exaggerated.
Despite the complex reality on the ground, Israeli officials and their American backers are already thinking far into the future. Although the total destruction in Gaza and the killing of Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh have so far failed to dislodge Hamas, Israel and the United States are already speaking about a Lebanon post-Hezbollah.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government have advocated for months — and especially intensely as the invasion continues — for a kind of civilian uprising against Hezbollah. It’s envisioned as an almost cinematic event in which all sects of the Lebanese Republic throw off the organization’s yoke, releasing Lebanon from its alleged bondage. It is a purposefully vague invocation, one that any Hezbollah opponent, Lebanese or not, could map their own desires onto. While Netanyahu and the state remain relatively light on details, other Israeli politicians have been very specific in what they foresee.
Yair Lapid, former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader, has been extremely supportive of the invasion of Lebanon — despite his severe disagreements with the Netanyahu government. In an English-language opinion piece in The Economist, Lapid lays out a plan that sounds indistinguishable from a Netanyahu one. Lapid advocates for the reestablishment of the South Lebanon Army, the Israeli proxy army that existed from the 1980s until 2000. It would consist of Lebanese soldiers bribed to fight with higher salaries, who would be trained not by Israelis but by “French, Emirati, and American military officers.” Most critically, Lapid advocates for dissolving the Lebanese government and placing the entire country of millions under an international mandate, at which point new elections would be held and “a new government can take control” — one almost certainly without Hezbollah anywhere near it.
The absurdity of this proposition, to say nothing of its intrinsic orientalism, should be obvious to anyone familiar with the region. Hezbollah has immense military power — moreso than the Lebanese Army, certainly. But it does not exert this power through might alone. While its allies in the March 8 Alliance do not hold the majority in the Lebanese Parliament, Hezbollah received the most votes of any single party in Lebanon in the last election, and enjoys significant popular support in south Beirut and in much of south Lebanon. While there are many in Lebanon who place themselves in opposition to Hezbollah and its ideology, supporters of the organization see the group as a critical backbone of resistance against Israeli military power, being instrumental in the expulsion of the Israel Defense Forces from the south in 2000 and rebuilding south Beirut after its bombardment during the 2006 war. While the majority of the Lebanese population has not and does not support a war with Israel, Hezbollah is an inseparable and native-born element of Lebanese society.
Even if this might be a clear reality to observers, the United States takes no issue with Israel’s publicly articulated plans. It has stopped advocating for a ceasefire in Lebanon, instead seeing an opportunity for Hezbollah’s power to be diminished and defeated. It has begun maneuvering to push for an election of a new Lebanese president while Hezbollah’s attention is allegedly weakened and turned elsewhere, with U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein slipping up when speaking to the Lebanese TV station LBC, saying: “Until we select — once Lebanon selects a president.” When Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker asked a U.N. coordinator how in this scenario Hezbollah MPs would even be protected, considering Israel has launched assassination strikes against Hezbollah political officials inside Beirut, the coordinator simply replied, “No one can guarantee that this will not happen.”
The United States is spinning up a fantasy vision of Lebanon, at once communicating with the Lebanese prime minister and other officials and engaging in diplomacy with them, while at the same time, the State Department speaks of a future Lebanon where Lebanese people “can choose their own representatives” — mirroring George W. Bush’s language about Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Lebanese people can choose their own representatives, but there’s no evidence the kinds of representatives the majority of Lebanese want are the ones that would meet the approval of Israel and the United States.
While the U.S. concocts this fantasy, the Israeli state and its military are acting in accordance with the understanding that the Lebanese cannot be trusted with democracy, and thus must be expelled from southern Lebanon entirely. When Hagari spoke from south Lebanon, he said that every house in the village he was in was part of Hezbollah’s infrastructure. Video has already emerged of Israeli troops destroying an entire Lebanese village in one swoop with planted explosives. What the U.S. and Israel may soon come to advocate, once the reality can no longer be ignored, is the kind of Lebanese state that former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan once foresaw: one where the south is under Israeli control, and in the seat of power in Beirut, an installed leader who will want nothing more than to give Israel everything it wants.
The post Don’t Believe the U.S.–Israel Fantasy for Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:43 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:43 pm UTC
The former Soviet republic of Moldova narrowly passed a referendum to pursue membership in the European Union. That puts it at odds with Russia, which is accused of meddling in the election. Our correspondent in Moscow tells us what the vote could mean.
And we go to the bar in Paris that for over a century has held a U.S. presidential straw poll that is usually accurate.
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:42 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:41 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:36 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:35 pm UTC
In Michigan and North Carolina, two Republican legal challenges to the legitimacy of ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including U.S. military members, hit setbacks Monday.
(Image credit: Allison Joyce)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:35 pm UTC
Since announcing Copilot Studio last year, Microsoft claims it has achieved significant efficiency gains across multiple business units using its tools. Starting next month, customers will be able to put those claims to the test.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:30 pm UTC
T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier's network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. "If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers—not providers—who stand to lose the most," T-Mobile alleged in an October 17 filing with the Federal Communications Commission.
The proposed rule has support from consumer advocacy groups who say it will give users more choice and lower their costs. T-Mobile has been criticized for locking phones for up to a year, which makes it impossible to use a phone on a rival's network. T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day unlocking rule, "consumers risk losing access to the benefits of free or heavily subsidized handsets because the proposal would force providers to reduce the line-up of their most compelling handset offers."
If the proposed rule is enacted, "T-Mobile estimates that its prepaid customers, for example, would see subsidies reduced by 40 percent to 70 percent for both its lower and higher-end devices, such as the Moto G, Samsung A15, and iPhone 12," the carrier said. "A handset unlocking mandate would also leave providers little choice but to limit their handset offers to lower cost and often lesser performing handsets."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:16 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:15 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:13 pm UTC
Peripheral maker 8BitDo has revealed when you'll be able to get your hands on its 64 Controller. This is designed to work with the upcoming Analogue 3D, a remake of the Nintendo 64 that will support 4K output. Pre-orders for the $40 controller are open now. It comes in black or white to match the Analogue 3D and it will ship on March 19.
The peripheral appears to be a version of 8BitDo's Ultimate controller, albeit with only one thumbstick and six control buttons on the face — A, B and the four C buttons. There are four bumper buttons and it appears that you can use either trigger in place of the original N64 controller's Z button (the peripheral is fully remappable thanks to 8BitDo’s Ultimate software).
In a nice nod to the controller's forebear, the thumbstick has an octagonal gate around it. The Hall effect sensor and wear-resistant metal joystick ring should help ensure there's very little chance of suffering from stick drift. The peripheral has a Rumble Pak built in too. This works with both the Analogue 3D and the Nintendo Switch. The 64 Controller is also compatible with PC and Android devices.
The original trident-shaped Nintendo 64 controller remains baffling nearly three decades later. Most people don't have three hands, Nintendo! So, for anyone looking to emulate a N64 game with a controller that actually makes sense, this looks like a strong contender.
Pre-orders for the Analogue 3D also opened on Monday. At the time of writing, the black version is still available. Unfortunately, the console doesn't come with a controller, so if you need one, you'll have to buy it separately.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:07 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:07 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:01 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:59 pm UTC
37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly.
The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a "Return to Windows," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News.
So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:51 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:48 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:44 pm UTC
Alarmo is the quintessential Nintendo product: It's a fun and quirky spin on a bedside alarm clock (with a motion sensor!) that mines your love for everything Nintendo. It's a $100 device entirely meant to surprise and delight you. But there are also usability issues that make me think the company's engineers haven't encountered any modern gadgets over the past decade (which is how long they've been developing Alarmo).
Here's an example: There's no easy way to input your Wi-Fi password if you ever want to download new themes. Instead you have to patiently spin its bulbous top button until you land on the character you need, then press it down like Mario squashing a Goomba. That may not sound like much of an issue, especially since you may only need to do it once, but it's needlessly frustrating if you have a complex password with multiple letter cases, numbers and symbols. My password is all lowercase letters, thankfully, but it still took me three minutes to punch it in. Instead of getting some rest, it just made me want to throw Alarmo out of my window(-o).
But then I had it lull me to sleep with the sounds of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. At 6:30am, rascally Koroks roused me from my slumber and made their telltale noises as I shuffled around my bed. And once I got up, they performed Hestu's traditional celebratory dance, much to the chagrin of my sleeping cats. All was forgiven.
Nobody actually needs Alarmo (officially dubbed the "Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo"), but its appeal to Nintendo fans is obvious. It wouldn't be out of place as a prop in Mario Odyssey, with its cartoonishly round, red case, nubby feet and prominent control knob (which glows, naturally). Its 2.8-inch screen is surprisingly small and square, not round like some of Nintendo's promotional videos make it seem, and its speakers are loud enough to fill even large bedrooms with undistorted nostalgia bombs. Controlling it is relatively simple: Twist and push the knob, or use the back button to return to the previous screen. You can also view notifications, like updates on your sleep cycle, by tapping the message button.
I'll admit my bias: I was practically raised on Nintendo consoles, so it's almost as if Alarmo was built specifically for someone like me. I don't really mind that Alarmo's large red case doesn't really fit with the clean aesthetic of my bedroom. But I'm sure it'll be a tougher sell if you're sharing a bed with someone less Nintendo-pilled. (More on that below.)
While Alarmo is mostly pitched as an alarm clock with Nintendo themes — at launch, there are sounds and characters from Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4 and (strangely enough) Ring Fit Adventure — it also adds a bit of Nintendo charm throughout your day. Alarmo can produce hourly chimes, and also play "Sleepy Sounds" related to your theme. For Breath of the Wild, that includes the crackling of a campfire, nocturnal animals and delightful snippets of the game's score. (I could be mistaken, but it also sounds like there's a bit of score from the moments before a Blood Moon arrives. I hope Nintendo snips that out eventually — nobody wants to go to bed dreading a Blood Moon.)
As an alarm clock, Alarmo gets the job done. It managed to wake me up successfully every day over the past week, and it did so far less jarringly than my iPhone's blaring speaker. It simply felt pleasant to be welcomed into the world by Koroks and Mario. Every toss and turn triggered more sound effects, which slowly nudged me awake. In its default "Steady Mode," Alarmo also gets progressively louder the longer you stay in bed, and more nefarious characters like Bowser might make an appearance. But if you just want things to stay super chill, there's also a "Gentle Mode" that doesn't escalate noise. Alarmo also responds to the mere act of getting out of bed with a huge celebration — honestly, it's about time someone recognized the effort.
While Nintendo provides some rudimentary sleep statistics, based on Alarmo's motion sensing and your alarm settings, they're mostly useless. I think my numbers may have been skewed by my three cats, who sleep on my bed for most of the day, and may be triggering the device's motion sensor. I certainly wish I could have slept for the 17 hours it recorded at one point. (I'm lucky to get six hours these days.) Even if Alarmo's sleep-tracking was functional, there's not much you can do with the data, since it's all stuck on the device. That's one of many areas where having a separate app would have been useful. (You'd think it would work with Pokemon Sleep, but no!)
Another issue? Alarmo's unique motion sensing technology is only made for a single sleeper (just like Google’s latest Nest Hub). If you're in bed beside a partner or unruly kids, Nintendo recommends switching to "Button mode," where you have to tap the top knob to disable the alarm. At least it's easy to change Alarmo's modes, and if you leave the sensor on by mistake, it's not the end of the world when it actually goes off. You'll hear a bit more noise than usual, but you can still hit the top button to quiet things down.
There are only three things inside Alarmo's box: The device itself, a USB Type A to USB-C cable and a small instruction booklet. Notably missing is a USB power adapter. That's something we've grown used to with smartphones and some of Nintendo's handhelds, but not bundling one is still a pain for anyone who doesn't have spare power adapters. I can just imagine a parent trying to set up Alarmo for their eager child, only to be delayed for a day because they need to run out and buy a separate adapter. That's not surprising and delightful, Nintendo. It's just annoying.
The actual onboarding process is pretty straightforward. Once you plug it in, Alarmo teaches you how to use its top dial and button, and explains how the back button works. You can also rotate the dial to adjust its volume and the device directs you to wave your hand in front of it to test its motion sensing. You have to direct Alarmo's orientation towards your bed and make sure it has a clear view of your sleeping area at the edge of a nightstand or table. The motion sensing won't work if it's too high.
To finish off the setup process, you have to lay down and make sure Alarmo can actually detect your movement. That worked without much fuss on my end, but when it asked me to sit up and lean in a specific direction, there was a delay of a few minutes before it noticed correctly when I was leaning to the right.
At the very least, Nintendo didn't force me to connect to Wi-Fi during the initial setup. Instead, that's triggered when you choose to update its themes, and the entire process required is just frustrating, as I described above. Now, it's not as if Nintendo hasn't learned to use QR codes via websites and apps to simplify logins. You also have to sign in to your Nintendo account once Alarmo is connected to Wi-Fi, but I was thankfully able to use a QR code to do so over my iPhone.
I suppose Nintendo wanted to have a simpler onboarding experience for Alarmo, one that didn't require external authentication or an additional app. But that desire for simplicity still leads to needless frustration.
It would be nice to see a wider selection of themes, as well. I’m not sure many Nintendo fans are clamoring to re-experience the characters and music from Ring Fit Adventure, after all. Where’s Kirby? Where’s Mario Kart? If there’s room for Splatoon and Pikmin, there should be room for Nintendo’s more iconic franchises.
I'm no stranger to tech-infused alarms. My nightstand is already overloaded with gadgets, including an Amazon Echo Dot (which I use to play radio stations), an older Phillips SmartSleep rise light, a Homedics white noise machine, my iPhone 15 Pro Max (charging on a Belkin MagSafe stand) and a Hatch Baby video monitor. As much as I appreciated having bits of Nintendo magic in my bedroom, I didn't love it enough to replace any of the devices I'm already using.
But my daughter Sophia is another story. We've played through most of Tears of the Kingdom together, and I've done my best to teach her in the ways of Nintendo. (I'll save the issues with the company's extreme litigiousness for when she's older.) She's eager to use Alarmo to wake up on her own, without my early-morning badgering. She also loves Koroks, so I'm pretty sure the Zelda theme will be permanently enabled. At least, until Kirby arrives.
I'm not going to try and justify the need for a $100 alarm clock. If you're a big enough Nintendo fan, you've probably already locked in your pre-order. And there's a chance it'll become more compelling over time, if Nintendo manages to add themes and drive down the price. For now, though, it’s a reminder that Nintendo can do more than just churn out consoles and games. There’s still room for the company to take weird swings, it’s just too bad Alarmo is expensive and imperfect.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-alarmo-review-charming-yet-frustrating-194432214.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:44 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:43 pm UTC
Rules targeting fruit drinks, chips and artificial pork rinds come as UN calls child obesity in country an emergency
Schools in Mexico have six months to implement a government-sponsored ban on junk food or face heavy fines, officials said on Monday, as authorities confront what they call the worst childhood obesity problem in the world.
The new rules target products that have become staples for two or three generations of Mexican school kids: sugary fruit drinks, chips, artificial pork rinds and soy-encased, salty peanuts with chili.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:39 pm UTC
Documents obtained by Ottawa Citizen show officials were concerned about negative media in case of Kristen Adams
Canada’s military decided not to apologize to an employee after she was sexually assaulted while working with Nato allies, over fears that any apology would be reported by an Ottawa newspaper.
For years, the country’s armed forces has publicly acknowledged a culture that bred abuse and assault, and a longstanding failure to root it out. The crisis, which prompted a shake-up at the most senior ranks, has eroded public trust in the institution and weakened morale within the military’s ranks.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:34 pm UTC
Interview This month, presidential hopeful Janey Van 't Oever got a tool in his arsenal, some allegedly "unhackable" communications kit, and The Register has talked to the man behind the operating system, who also ran for the US Senate on a campaign to get self-driving Teslas off the road and is on something of a crusade about the matter.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:30 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:22 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:22 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:15 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:13 pm UTC
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:12 pm UTC
It’s the end of an era for one of the App Store’s earliest success stories. Foursquare is shutting down its signature city guide app in order to “focus our efforts on building an even better experience in Swarm,” the company said in an update. The app will shut down December 15, while the web version will stay online until “early 2025.”
The shutdown is a notable reversal of a strategy the company announced a decade ago when it, controversially, opted to split its famed “check-in” service into a separate app. That app became known as Swarm while the Foursquare-branded app became a “city guide” full of user-generated reviews and local recommendations.
Now, Foursquare says its future is, once again, the check-in. “We’re also introducing exciting new features and capabilities into Swarm throughout the year (👀 some of which may look familiar to you) in order to unlock new use cases that may better support your needs,” the company said, adding that additional updates are expected “early next year.”
It’s not clear why the company is changing its strategy to elevate Swarm over its namesake app. The company laid off more than 100 employees earlier this year in an effort to “streamline” operations. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, who is currently co-chair of the company’s board of directors, said in a post on Threads that the company is “doing fine,” though he expressed disappointment with the news. “I would be lying if I didn't admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news,” he wrote.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/foursquare-is-killing-its-city-guide-app-to-focus-on-the-check-in-app-swarm-191054153.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:10 pm UTC
Michele Morrow has a track record of falsehoods - for example, saying Islam is a cult and that the plus in LGTBTQ+ stands for pedophilia.
(Image credit: Liz Schlemmer)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:07 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:04 pm UTC
Another year, another flagship Qualcomm mobile chip. But things are reportedly a bit different with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the company's newest offering headed to premium smartphones. For one, it's using the Oryon CPU that debuted in X Elite chips for laptops last year, according to a leaked slide from Videocardz. It's also using a new 3nm process node, instead of last year's 4nm node. That helps the Snapdragon 8 Elite deliver 45 percent faster single and multi-core performance while using 27 percent less power than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
While we're still waiting for more details on the Snapdragon 8 Elite at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit later today, there's still a lot we can learn from that single leaked slide. As expected, the company is doubling down on its generative AI capabilities, with a 45 percent faster NPU (neural processing unit) than before, and gaming performance will also see a 40 percent boost. The 8 Elite will reach a maximum speed of 4.32 GHz across two cores, according to Videocardz, and it'll hit up to 3.53 GHz in six smaller cores.
Given how impressed we were by the Snapdragon X Elite in the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot+ PCs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see the Oryon CPU working out well on smartphones. According to Smartprix and Onleaks, early benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8 Elite show it scoring 3,025,991 in Antutu, compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's best of around 2.1 million.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/qualcomms-snapdragon-8-elite-is-its-next-premium-mobile-chip-173525493.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:00 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:00 pm UTC
Move by Italian PM overturns ruling by a Rome court that could have blocked deal to curb migrant arrivals
Italy’s far-right government has passed a new law to overcome a court ruling that risks blocking the country’s multimillion-dollar deal with Albania aimed at curbing migrant arrivals.
On Friday, a court in Rome ruled to transfer back to Italy the last 12 asylum seekers being held in the new Italian migration hub in Albania. The ruling has cast doubt on the feasibility and legality of plans by the EU to explore ways to establish migrant processing and detention centres outside the bloc as part of a new hardline approach to migration.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:58 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:57 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:42 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:37 pm UTC
China's semiconductor industry is speeding up in response to US export controls, according to research by a specialist in intellectual property.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:30 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:26 pm UTC
Officials say no further leaks but investigation under way into how documents came to be published on Telegram
US government officials investigating the leak of two classified intelligence papers assessing Israel’s plans to attack Iran have said they did believe any more documents had been compromised.
However, the Biden administration remained “deeply disturbed” by the unauthorized release, John Kirby, the national security communications adviser, told reporters at a White House briefing on Monday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:26 pm UTC
Deluge causes landslides and tears house roofs as engineers try to get country’s electricity grid up and running again
Hurricane Oscar has dumped heavy rain across the eastern end of Cuba, adding to a list of woes already besetting the Caribbean’s biggest island, which was hit over the weekend by a huge power cut.
The deluge caused landslides, and winds of 75mph tore the roofs off houses, making work even more difficult for the engineers trying to get Cuba’s electricity grid up and running again, after a weekend when the entire country of about 10 million people was plunged into darkness.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:22 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:21 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews.ie | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:13 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:12 pm UTC
The single-player Squadron 42, set in the Star Citizen universe, has been delayed all the way to 2026. This is interesting because the developers said the game was “feature complete” last year. Squadron 42 was first announced in 2014 and has experienced numerous delays throughout the past decade.
The stated reason for the delay is to apply more polish. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) boss Chris Roberts said at this weekend’s CitizenCon that he’s “confident” the title will make its 2026 release window. To sate eager fans, the developer dropped an hour-long gameplay video that chronicles the opening segments, seen below.
Roberts also told convention-goers that Squadron 42 would feature “30 to 40 hours of gameplay.” He went on to note that there’s still some work left to “bring the quality of the game up to” the level shown in the gameplay video.
Squadron 42 is a first-person action game that features on-foot exploration and combat, ship piloting and more. It has an absolutely stacked voice and mocap cast, many of whom are featured in the above gameplay video. The cast includes Gary Oldman, Henry Cavill, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis and Sophie Wu, among many others.
There’s also the matter of the parent game Star Citizen. It’s still not ready for a full release, after being a huge Kickstarter success story in 2012. However, the game has an active alpha community and is still racking up impressive crowdfunding numbers. All told, CIG has raised over $729 million for the title in the past 12 years.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/star-citizen-spinoff-squadron-42-has-been-delayed-again-until-2026-180946358.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:06 pm UTC
What you need to know about the races, issues and decisions being made in your community.
(Image credit: Timothy A. Clary)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:02 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:02 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews.ie | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:58 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:53 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:47 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:47 pm UTC
For Cherise Irons, chocolate, red wine, and aged cheeses are dangerous. So are certain sounds, perfumes and other strong scents, cold weather, and thunderstorms. Stress and lack of sleep, too.
She suspects all of these things can trigger her migraine attacks, which manifest in a variety of ways: pounding pain in the back of her head, exquisite sensitivity to the slightest sound, even blackouts and partial paralysis.
Irons, 48, of Coral Springs, Florida, once worked as a school assistant principal. Now, she’s on disability due to her migraine. Irons has tried so many migraine medications she’s lost count—but none has helped for long. Even a few of the much-touted new drugs that have quelled episodes for many people with migraine have failed for Irons.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:46 pm UTC
A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.”
It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.
“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”
Meta did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Cutler’s flagging of posts but argued that writing an article about her was “dangerous and irresponsible.” In a statement, spokesperson Dani Lever wrote “who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on platform. In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas. Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies.”
Cutler did not respond to a request for comment; Meta declined a request to interview her.
Lever said that The Intercept’s line of questioning “deliberately misrepresents how our processes work,” but declined to say how so.
Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”
In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.
In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”
A 2020 profile in the Jerusalem Post described Cutler as “Our woman at Facebook,” hired to “represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world.” In an interview with the paper, she explained, “My job is to represent Facebook to Israel, and represent Israel to Facebook.” In a follow-up interview for the Post’s YouTube channel, Cutler added that “inside the company, part of my job is to be a representative for the people of Israeli, [a] voice of the government for their concerns inside of our company.” Asked “Do they listen?” by the show’s host, Cutler replied, “Of course they do, and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts about my job, that I have an opportunity to really influence the way that we look at policy and explain things on the ground.”
Though Meta has extensive government relations and lobbying operations aimed at capitols around the world, few other governments enjoy their own dedicated high-level contact within the company. The company employs no counterpart to Cutler’s role solely representing Palestinian viewpoints; tens of millions of Meta users across the entire Middle East and all of North Africa share one policy director. A single policy lead oversees the entire Southeast Asian nations market, with a population of nearly 700 million. This raises concerns among experts about a deep power imbalance inside Facebook when it comes to moderating discussion of a war that to date has killed at least 40,000 Gazans.
“If Meta wishes to behave ethically, it must ensure that Palestinians also have a seat at the table,” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York told The Intercept.
Records reviewed by The Intercept show Cutler pushed for the removal of an SJP post promoting a reading list of books including authors associated with two Marxist-Leninist militant groups, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Though it remains a Meta-designated terrorist group according to a copy of the list obtained by The Intercept in 2021, the DFLP has not been considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government since 1999, when it was delisted by the State Department “primarily because of the absence of terrorist activity.” The PFLP remains designated by both Meta and the United States.
According to a source familiar with Cutler’s actions, these efforts have included lobbying for the deletion of posts quoting celebrated Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, who served as a PFLP spokesperson nearly 60 years ago and was assassinated by Israel in 1972. Kanafani, whose works have been widely translated and published in countries around the world, enjoys global literary renown and mainstream recognition; his 1969 novella “Returning to Haifa” was cited as a recommended book by a guest on the New York Times podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” last year.
Internal records show Cutler later lobbied for the removal of an SJP Instagram post describing Leila Khaled — an 80-year-old former PFLP member who helped hijack TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and has in the decades since become an outspoken icon of Palestinian solidarity — as “empowering.”
These same records demonstrate Cutler regularly singled out Instagram content belonging to SJP at the University of California, Los Angeles, claiming to policy colleagues that this chapter had been associated with violent protests, citing an Israeli news report about an April 29 melee at the school’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Local and national press accounts described a peaceful protest until a pro-Israeli mob attacked the encampment with fists, weapons, and bear spray, injuring 15 people.
Throughout the year, Cutler internally flagged several SJP UCLA posts, including those mentioning a reading list of PFLP-associated authors, an on-campus “PFLP study group,” and a post containing a red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas combat operations that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Mona, a UCLA undergraduate and SJP member who spoke on the condition of being only identified by her first name, said the chapter’s Instagram account was periodically unable to post or share content, which the group attributed to enforcement actions by Meta. In August, the organization’s chapter at Columbia University reported its Instagram account had been deactivated without explanation. A member of SJP Columbia said the chapter did not have a record of deleted Instagram content but recalled Meta removing multiple posts that quoted Kanafani.
The Israeli government has been vehement in its criticism of anti-Zionist groups like SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, and has denounced campus organizing as an attempt to import terrorism to American college campuses.
Records show Cutler has requested the deletion of non-student content, too. Following Iran’s October 1 missile attack against Israel, Cutler quickly flagged video uploaded to Instagram of Palestinians cheering from the Gaza Strip. Records show Cutler has also repeatedly lobbied to censor the Instagram account of Lebanese satellite TV network Al Mayadeen when it posted sympathetic content about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
These actions are “Typical Jordana,” according to Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former Middle East and North Africa policy chief. “No one in the world could tell me that a lot of what she does is not an overreach of her authority.”
Zeitoon, who departed the company in 2017, told The Intercept that Cutler’s role inside Meta differed from those of other regional policy managers.
“That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. ”
“If I was head of public policy for Jordan, and I went on TV and said I represent the interests of Jordan within Meta, I would be fired the second day,” said Zeitoon, a Jordanian national, whose mandate at Meta was to oversee the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. “That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. None of us was ever hired with the premise that we’re representing our governments.”
During his tenure, Zeitoon says he often fielded informal requests from the government of Jordan, but that he drew a clear line at acting on its behalf. “The Jordanian government hated my guts when I was there, because they thought that I was obliged because I’m Jordanian. I might guide you, I might be over-friendly, if you call me at night I might accept your call. But at the end of the day, Facebook pays my salary.”
BuzzFeed News reported that in 2017 Facebook employees had “raised concerns about Cutler’s role and whose interests she prioritizes,” evidenced by an argument “over whether the West Bank should be considered ‘occupied territories’ in Facebook’s rules.” Zeitoon recalled this clash as emblematic of Cutler’s tenure, adding that when he was there, she “tried to influence decision makers within the company to designate the West Bank as a ‘disputed’ territory” rather than using the term “occupied” — a phrasing used by the United Nations when describing the region.
Zeitoon doubted the Meta spokesperson’s claim that all internal escalations are treated equally, no matter who submits them. Recalling his time working in a high-ranking role at the company, he said his complaints received immediate attention: “My report goes to the top,” he said. He expects the same would be true today for content flagged by Cutler — especially at a moment when Israel is at war. “I’m sure all she reports is code red.”
Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was reminded of the case of Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former policy head for India — another rare instance in which a single country had its own dedicated representative within the company. Das resigned from her position in 2020 after a Wall Street Journal report found she had lobbied for the uneven enforcement of hate speech rules that benefited India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which she supported personally. “Meta is the communications platform for much for the world, but of course not every voice is heard equally,” Brooking said in an interview.
Zeitoon concurred: “No governments in the world have been able to create a network of influence and pressure on Meta as strong as the Israeli and the Indian governments.”
Cutler is not the first or only prominent figure within Meta to help foster relations between the company and governments. Her colleague Joel Kaplan, who served as White House deputy chief of staff during the George W. Bush administration, joined Facebook in 2011 to head the company’s operations in Washington, D.C., a move the New York Times reported “will likely strengthen its ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is the former deputy prime minister of the U.K. Many of the staffers who help Meta craft and enforce its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy join following years of work at the Pentagon, State Department, federal law enforcement, and spy agencies. The revolving door between government and major internet companies is vast and ever-turning not just at Meta, but also its most prominent rivals.
As recently as February 2023, Cutler’s name was floated as a possible next head of the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry, a government propaganda office tasked with surveilling and undermining protesters and activists abroad. The ministry has reportedly made extensive use of Meta’s platforms to infiltrate student groups and conduct propaganda campaigns. In June, Haaretz reported a project originally founded by the ministry had targeted Black lawmakers in the U.S. with “hundreds” of phony Facebook and Instagram accounts “to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative.” Meta later shut these accounts down.
Evelyn Douek, a content moderation scholar and professor at Stanford Law School, said Cutler’s direct intervention is “obviously extremely concerning” given the specific stakes. “You have a person inside Meta representing the interests of the government on an issue about which there is deeply contested political debate it appears, to favor one side of that debate. The concerns about bias and disproportionate enforcement of a policy when that is happening seem obvious.”
Lever, the Meta spokesperson, said that Cutler’s role in public policy is distinct from the company’s Content Policy officials, noting the former “engage” with governments but do not actually have a role in drafting rules. In her Jerusalem Post interview, however, Cutler stated “I’m part of a team of people who are helping to develop and build Facebook’s policies.”
Douek argued that internet platform users are best served by keeping the creation of speech rules entirely separate from their enforcement. “It’s really highly problematic if you have people whose job at Meta is not the fair enforcement of content moderation rules, but rather their job is to please government interests intervening in the enforcement of the platform’s rules,” she said.
This at a minimum creates the appearance of a foreign government meddling in an intensely domestic political issue — a dynamic Meta has historically worked to combat. “Campus protests and what is happening in the United States right now is a deeply contested fault line in American politics. And this has been an issue about what are the appropriate limits on campus speech and how should we be dealing with this,” Douek said. “A foreign country’s interests are being overly represented in how that debate is moderated, that should also raise concerns.”
The post Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:40 pm UTC
Elon Musk's plan to give $1 million each day to a random registered "swing state" voter who has signed his election petition could merit a look for election law violations, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro said over the weekend. …
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:30 pm UTC
Intelligence builds that members of Pyongyang’s special forces are in Russia preparing for combat as munitions are also shipped
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, got to the point in his presidential address last night: “Another state,” he said, was “joining the war against Ukraine”. He was referring to the growing intelligence that shows elite soldiers from North Korea are in Russia preparing to join what has become a fight that, in effect, extends all the way across Asia.
The effect will be greater than the numbers believed to be involved. On Friday, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported that 1,500 members of Pyongyang’s special forces had crossed the border to Vladivostok in Russia’s far east to begin training and some degree of participation in the war in Ukraine.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:29 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:20 pm UTC
The Star Trek franchise made its presence known with a special panel during New York City Comic-Con this past weekend. Among the highlights: Paramount unveiled a three-minute preview clip from the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and a clip from the upcoming final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
In other news, while the first season of new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is still in production, Paramount has already renewed it for a second season and revealed that Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany will be a recurring guest on the series. Tig Notaro, Oded Fehr, and Mary Wiseman will reprise their Discovery roles as Jett Reno, Admiral Vance, and Sylvia Tilly, respectively. And Robert Picardo of Star Trek: Voyager will be back as The Doctor—in a show set 900 years after the hologram physician first appeared.
The studio also announced an official premiere date and poster art for the Star Trek: Discovery spinoff film Section 31 starring Michelle Yeoh: January 24, 2025. Miku Martineau plays a young Phillipa Georgiou in the film, which will give us the backstory for Georgiou's evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people. Meanwhile, Yeoh's older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31 while dealing with all the blood she's spilled in her past.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:14 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:09 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:04 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:04 pm UTC
Today marks five days before Alan Wake 2’s first anniversary, and the developers at Remedy Entertainment have some great news for players. Firstly, those who plan to get the game on PS5 Pro will get to enjoy improved Quality and Performance modes. There will also be a free anniversary update promising many improvements and “cheats.”
The team at Remedy dove deep into Alan Wake 2’s PS5 Pro improvements, but we’ll keep things brief here. Both quality and performance modes depend on Sony’s PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling method. This allows quality mode to reach an output resolution of 4K while the render resolution is 2,176 x 1,224. Ray-traced reflections are on, but only at 30FPS On the other hand, the performance mode also outputs at 4K, but the render resolution is only 1,536 x 864, and there’s no ray-tracing. However, the FPS counter will reach 60.
Remedy also claims that Pro performance mode has improved fog, volumetric lighting, shadow accuracy and image stability. The company further explains that performance mode for the PS5 Pro is superior to the base PS5’s quality mode in terms of output resolution and visual detail. The render detail isn’t exactly the same, but it’s close.
Moving on to the anniversary update, Alan Wake 2 players (all of you, not just PS5 Pro owners) will be able to enjoy improvements like an inverted X axis on mouse and keyboard, DualSense gyro aiming support, haptics support for more items and the Gameplay Assist menu. The menu contains some “features” including invulnerability to damage, immortality, unlimited ammo, flashlight batteries not running out and more.
We aren’t sure about you, but it sounds like a recipe for disaster and chaos, but that’s what some players want. Remedy Entertainment is improving the game’s accessibility first and foremost, and it’s a welcome sight for those who struggle with the currently available control schemes. The anniversary update will be available tomorrow on October 22, while the PS5 Pro enhancements don’t have a release date yet.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/alan-wake-2s-upcoming-ps5-pro-update-will-add-a-4k-ray-tracing-mode-170403388.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:04 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:03 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:00 pm UTC
Both liberal and conservative lawyers have judge-shopped, but in recent years, some conservative-leaning groups have been laser focused on bringing their challenges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
(Image credit: Anna Moneymaker)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:50 pm UTC
After rumors swirled that TikTok owner ByteDance had lost tens of millions after an intern sabotaged its AI models, ByteDance issued a statement this weekend hoping to silence all the social media chatter in China.
In a social media post translated and reviewed by Ars, ByteDance clarified "facts" about "interns destroying large model training" and confirmed that one intern was fired in August.
According to ByteDance, the intern had held a position in the company's commercial technology team but was fired for committing "serious disciplinary violations." Most notably, the intern allegedly "maliciously interfered with the model training tasks" for a ByteDance research project, ByteDance said.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:50 pm UTC
Analysis from business and trade department says bill will significantly strengthen workers’ right. This live blog is closed
In the past the weirdest budget tradition was the convention that the chancellor is allowed to drink alcohol while delivering the budget speech. But since no chancellor has taken advantage of the rule since the 1990s (and no one expects Rachel Reeves to be quaffing on Wednesday week), this tradition is probably best viewed as lapsed.
But Sam Coates from Sky News has discovered another weird budget ritual. On his Politics at Jack and Sam’s podcast, he says:
Someone messaged me to say: ‘Did you know that over in the Treasury as they’ve been going over all these spending settlements, in one of the offices, its full of balloons. And every time an individual department finalises its settlements, one of the balloons is popped.’
There couldn’t be a more important time for us to have this conversation.
The NHS is going through what is objectively the worst crisis in its history, whether it’s people struggling to get access to their GP, dialling 999 and an ambulance not arriving in time, turning up to A&E departments and waiting far too long, sometimes on trolleys in corridors, or going through the ordeal of knowing that you’re waiting for a diagnosis that could be the difference between life and death.
We feel really strongly that the best ideas aren’t going to come from politicians in Whitehall.
They’re going to come from staff working right across the country and, crucially, patients, because our experiences as patients are also really important to understanding what the future of the NHS needs to be and what it could be with the right ideas.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:44 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:41 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:40 pm UTC
Houston officials say the helicopter was flying from Ellington Airport when it crashed into a radio tower.
(Image credit: AP)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:35 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:31 pm UTC
Coalition will now be able to hire and fire judges but faces accusations it bribed and abducted lawmakers to get its way
Pakistan’s government has passed a controversial amendment to the constitution that has been accused of weakening the power and independence of the judiciary, throwing the country’s democracy into further crisis.
The 26th constitutional amendment was passed in a clandestine, late-night parliamentary session that was clouded in secrecy and marred by allegations of abductions and intimidation of parliamentarians to force them to vote in favour of the bill.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:30 pm UTC
Today, Mercedes-Benz opened its first battery-recycling plant in Germany. The new plant will use an "integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical" approach to recycling electric vehicle batteries and expects to recover more than 96 percent of the valuable minerals and metals used in EV batteries.
"Mercedes-Benz has set itself the goal of building the most desirable cars in a sustainable way. As a pioneer in automotive engineering, Europe's first integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical battery recycling factory marks a key milestone toward enhancing raw-materials sustainability," said Ola Källenius, chairman of the board of management Mercedes-Benz Group. "Together with our partners from industry and science, we are sending a strong signal of innovative strength for sustainable electric mobility and value creation in Germany and Europe."
The plant, which is located in Kuppenheim, Germany, shreds the battery modules then uses a mechanical process to separate plastics, copper, aluminum, and iron. The resulting "black mass" is then subjected to a hydrometallurgical process that extracts the cobalt, nickel, and lithium. The plant runs entirely on electricity generated by solar panels and has an annual capacity of 2,756 tons (2,500 tonnes). While this is not especially high, Mercedes says it will use the knowledge it gains to scale up volumes over time.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:30 pm UTC
Like nuclear fusion, the idea of space-based solar power has always seemed like a futuristic technology with an actual deployment into communities ever remaining a couple of decades away.
The concept of harvesting solar power continuously from large satellites in space—where there are no nights, no clouds, and no atmosphere to interfere with the collection of photons—is fairly simple. Large solar arrays in geostationary orbit collect solar energy and beam it back to Earth via microwaves as a continuous source of clean energy.
However, implementing this technology is not so simple. In recent years, in search of long-term power solutions and concerned about climate change, the European Space Agency has been studying space-based solar power. Some initial studies found that a plan to meet one-third of Europe's energy needs would require massive amounts of infrastructure and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At best, such a system of very large satellites in geostationary space might come online by the middle of this century.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:24 pm UTC
Strikes targeted Al-Qard Al-Hassan buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs, south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley
Israel carried out a series of airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley early on Monday morning, hitting buildings belonging to the Hezbollah-run banking institution Al-Qard Al-Hassan.
At least 10 airstrikes were carried out in the southern suburbs of the capital, with an entire building collapsing and a jet of fire streaming into the air in the Chiyah neighbourhood. A building close to Lebanon’s only commercial airport was also struck, video footage showing a smoke plume billowing while a nearby plane sat on the runway.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:24 pm UTC
Prominent RISC-V protagonist SiFive has announced early access to its anticipated development board, built around the firm's P550 core design, with a broader release scheduled for December.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:23 pm UTC
The indie platformer Neva, from the same developer that made the beloved Gris, is getting a physical edition. It comes out on March 14, 2025 for both the Nintendo Switch and the PS5. Preorders are available now in both standard and deluxe editions.
The standard edition will get you the game and a box. The deluxe edition, however, also ships with a collector’s box, the original soundtrack on CD and an 88-page artbook. Neva has absolutely stunning art design, so that artbook is likely going to be something special.
For the uninitiated, Neva is an indie platformer that came out last week to near-universal rave reviews. We called it “perfect” and a “faultless game” in our official review. That’s high praise, but well-deserved. The graphics and art design are top-tier and the narrative is a masterclass in environmental storytelling. The platforming is also pretty darn great, with “light and responsive” controls.
As for the story, the less said the better. It involves a woman and her wolf as they rely on each other to traverse a dangerous world. Yes, you can pet the wolf. There’s actually an achievement for that. Neva was developed by Nomada Studio and published by Devolver Digital. It’s also available for PC, macOS and Xbox Series X/S, but those platforms aren’t getting a physical edition.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-critically-acclaimed-neva-will-get-a-physical-release-next-year-162247507.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:22 pm UTC
The court left in place a 90-year old landmark decision that declared that presidents cannot fire members of a multi-member independent agency, except in cases of bad behavior.
(Image credit: Tom Brenner)
Source: NPR Topics: News | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:21 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:17 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:14 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:10 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:04 pm UTC
Final result sees ‘yes’ vote scrape ahead by 13,000 votes, narrowly avoiding shock setback for pro-western president
Moldovans have voted by a razor-thin majority in favour of joining the EU after a pivotal referendum clouded by allegations of Russian interference.
On Sunday, Moldova held key votes in a presidential election and a referendum on EU membership, marking a critical moment in the continuing struggle between Russia and the west for control over the small, landlocked nation in eastern Europe, home to 2.5 million people.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:03 pm UTC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:01 pm UTC
It's been almost exactly a year now since we reported on the announcement that Squadron 42—the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was "feature complete" and in the "polish phase." Now, many years after the game's original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional "polish," the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.
The announcement came during this weekend's CitizenCon, per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game's promised 30- to 40-hour storyline. IGN also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered "a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems," which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from "feature complete" to "actual release."
"We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us," Roberts said on stage, according to the IGN report. "Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there."
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:52 pm UTC
Suspects are accused of photographing and collecting information about Israeli bases and facilities
Israeli police and the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency say they have arrested a network of Israeli citizens spying for Iran who allegedly provided information on military bases and conducted surveillance of individuals.
The investigators claimed the network had been active for about two years. According to reports in the Israeli press, the suspects are accused of photographing and collecting information about Israeli bases and facilities, including the defence headquarters in Tel Aviv, known as the Kirya, and the Nevatim and Ramat David airbases.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:51 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:38 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:30 pm UTC
Interview Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University and serial entrepreneur, is the author of several books, the latest of which takes the tech industry to task for irresponsibly developing generative AI and putting democracy at risk.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:28 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:14 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:13 pm UTC
Source: All: BreakingNews.ie | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:12 pm UTC
Source: ESA Top News | 21 Oct 2024 | 2:36 pm UTC
Vampire Survivors is one of the biggest gaming success stories of recent years and developer Poncle hasn’t taken its foot off the gas. It continues to ship updates and expansions, and the latest is a crossover that (almost) makes all the sense in the world.
Poncle has revealed a DLC based on its biggest inspiration, Castlevania. The studio says it’s “an all-out celebration of Konami’s iconic franchise.”
The largest paid Vampire Survivors expansion to date has more than 20 new characters, such as some Belmonts and Belnades. There are dozens of additional weapons, including eight more whips. As a devotee of the game’s original whip, I’m pleased to hear that. Alucard’s sword, spear and shield are present, as is elemental magic in a first for Vampire Survivors. There will be more than 30 new music tracks as well, with Poncle borrowing dozens of them from the Castlevania series.
What’s more, the DLC will introduce the largest Vampire Survivors level so far, with a whole heap of secrets and bosses to track down. Despite this expansion tying into a series that is all about vampires and vampire hunters, Vampire Survivors still won’t actually feature any vampires — even though we’re “literally at Dracula's castle.” This lack-of-vampires bit continues to be pretty funny.
Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania will arrive on Halloween (October 31) on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS4, PS5 and mobile. It’ll cost $4.
In the meantime, Poncle has opened up a very ‘90s-style online guest book, which is perhaps inspired by Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. There's also a Castlevania sale on Steam that highlights some of the series' other collaborations.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/vampire-survivors-is-getting-a-castlevania-expansion-but-still-no-vampires-143149407.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 2:31 pm UTC
Analysis ASML, the sole provider of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, is navigating market and geopolitical challenges that are hammering its business operations.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 2:26 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 2:21 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 2:20 pm UTC
Source: Irish Times Feeds | 21 Oct 2024 | 2:08 pm UTC
Samsung fans interested in the Galaxy Z Fold series may be curious about the the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition (SE), which is coming out on October 25, this Friday. However, this smartphone will only reach stores in Korea and China.
The Galaxy Z Fold SE is 1.5mm thinner and three grams lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold 6, measuring 1.6mm thick and weighing 236 grams. The inner and outer screens are 8 and 6.5 inches, respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold 6’s screens are 7.6 and 6.3 inches, in comparison.
While the Galaxy Fold 6 has 12GB of RAM, the Galaxy Z Fold SE will have 16GB of RAM, which allows it to perform better at AI tasks courtesy of Samsung’s Galaxy AI. These tasks include real-time conversation interpretation, image editing, summarizing audio and transcription functions. Samsung aims to help users “unleash” their creativity with these and other functions.
The final notable change is the rear camera. The Special Edition rear sensor has been upgraded to 200 megapixels from 50 on the standard model, which is sure to please smartphone photography fans.
Samsung’s suggested price for the Galaxy Z Fold SE is 2,789,600 won, which is approximately $2,025. There are currently no sources mentioning a Chinese price. The Galaxy Fold SE is fundamentally the same as the other Galaxy Z Fold models, but it’s currently the thinnest and lightest one. It’s more challenging to procure if you’re not in Korea or China, but perhaps Samsung will change that in the future.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-samsung-galaxy-z-fold-special-edition-will-only-be-sold-in-korea-and-china-135302341.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:53 pm UTC
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:49 pm UTC
Apple iOS 18.1 is officially coming next week, bringing hearing aid software for the AirPods Pro 2 and Apple Intelligence across devices, multiple sources report, including The Wall Street Journal and Tech Crunch. The company previously released a beta version of the update in September. Here's what we know about iOS 18.1.
Let's start with the hearing aids. Since late 2022, companies have been allowed to sell hearing aids over-the-counter. Apple announced the new feature at its September keynote event with the FDA approving it for use just a few days later. It involves a test that lets people know if they might have hearing loss and, if you do, it recommends going for a professional exam. It will also allow people to set their AirPods up as hearing aids.
As for the hearing aid aspect, the device will boost sounds and allow users to customize dynamic adjustments in real-time. The one obvious issue? Unlike hearing aids, wearing AirPods while talking to someone might look like you're not engaging or ignoring them. But, if it helps, then it's worth it. The update could also make a big difference in access for individuals with hearing loss. Hearing aids can cost thousands of dollars, while the AirPods Pro 2 are $249 (not nothing, but much better in comparison).
Apple Intelligence is the other major feature coming through iOS 18.1. The company first revealed its take on AI at its June Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). It includes a range of initial features, including smart audio recording and transcriptions for apps like Mail, Notes and Pages. It also has Writing Tools for things like checking spelling and grammar. Apple should release more features for its AI tool in future updates.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/ios-181-launches-next-week-with-apple-intelligence-and-airpods-pro-hearing-tests-and-aids-134617152.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:46 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:34 pm UTC
In revealing details about a vulnerability that threatens the privacy of Apple fans, Microsoft urges all macOS users to update their systems.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:32 pm UTC
SAN FRANCISCO—In all the years we've been writing about cars, very few vehicles have generated as much attention as the Volkswagen ID Buzz. At a time when SUVs look increasingly threatening, the Buzz seems like an antidote, with gentle curves and something of a friendly grin at the front. Plus, people are starting to get desperate for an electric minivan option, if audience feedback is anything to go by. It's been a long wait for the North American-spec Buzz, but that is almost over, with the first customer cars due in dealerships in November. Read on to discover what we found out driving it around the Bay Area last week.
VW first showed off the Buzz a good seven years ago. It was the fourth time the company tried to reimagine the classic Kombi for the 21st century but the first time that production got the go-ahead. That was in large part thanks to a new flexible electric vehicle platform developed in the wake of Dieselgate. Other more mainstream VW EVs were needed first, however, and it was 2022 before a short-wheelbase version of the Buzz went on sale in Europe as a five-seater family car and also a commercial van.
We drove that one in Denmark, and while it was just as much of an attention-grabber there as it will be here, the short-wheelbase version was too compromised for US tastes. And it was too expensive, despite its smaller battery. European pricing had me pessimistic about the three-row, big battery model, but the rear-wheel drive Buzz Pro S starts at $59,995.
Source: Ars Technica - All content | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:00 pm UTC
It seems like forever ago that Netflix's Daredevil series was cancelled (it was 2018 to be exact), but the Hell's Kitchen superhero/lawyer is finally coming back. Marvel Studios announced that Daredevil: Born Again will arrive on Disney+ on March 4, 2025, a bit later than it promised back in 2022. The news was revealed during a New York Comic Con panel that featured returning stars Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil) and Vincent D'Onofrio (Kingpin).
Born Again was first announced in 2022 as an 18-episode, two-season order with some returning characters, new faces and a recast Vanessa Fisk (Kingpin's wife). Executive producer Brad Winderbaum said earlier this year that the series would enter Marvel canon as part of the "sacred timeline." That was significant, as Daredevil and other Marvel Television series on Netflix (Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Iron Fist) were always kept separate from the primary Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The stars of Marvel Television’s #DaredevilBornAgain, Charlie Cox & Vincent D’Onofrio, surprised fans with a special sneak peek during the #NYCC “Marvel Fanfare” panel today.
— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) October 19, 2024
Marvel Television’s Daredevil: Born Again starts streaming March 4, only on @DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/hiXGTezZOw
Charlie Cox's Daredevil has popped up here and there since the series was cancelled, most recently appearing in Marvel Studio's Echo series and catching a brick in Spider-Man: No Way Home. The original Daredevil on Netflix was well-liked by critics and audiences alike, so its cancellation came as a small shock. However, it seemed inevitable once the rival Disney+ streaming service launched, plus the show reportedly didn't generate a massive audience for Netflix and cost a fortune to make
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/disneys-daredevil-series-lands-march-4-2025-130017844.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:55 pm UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:50 pm UTC
It's been over half a decade since we first heard rumblings of a Section 31 spinoff, and now we finally have a release date. Star Trek: Section 31 will be exclusively available on Paramount+ starting Friday, January 25. The news came during a Star Trek universe panel at Comic Con over the weekend.
The movie stars Michelle Yeoh as Emperor Philippa Georgiou, a role she played in Star Trek: Discovery. She joins a "secret division of Starfleet" that must protect the United Federation of Planets while she faces the "sins of her past." Alongside Yeoh, Star Trek: Section 31 stars actors such as Sam Richardson and Omari Hardwick.
An adaptation focused solely on Section 31 and starring Yeoh has been in the works since 2019. At the time, CBS All Access (now Paramount+) announced it would be a TV show focused on her character, Captain Georgiou. Then, in 2023, the production officially got the green light but, instead, as a movie. The news came just one month after Yeoh won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once (lesson: winning prestigious awards can get things going).
Paramount+ released a teaser for Star Trek: Section 31 in July, which you can watch here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/star-trek-section-31-will-premiere-on-january-25-123023747.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:30 pm UTC
Both uBlock Origin and its smaller sibling, uBlock Origin Lite, are experiencing problems thanks to browser vendors that really ought to know better.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:29 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:20 pm UTC
Letter to governing body accuses Saudis of using sports to ‘distract from the regime’s brutal human rights reputation’
More than 100 professional female footballers have signed a letter calling on Fifa to end its sponsorship deal with the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco, accusing Saudi authorities of “brutal human rights violations”.
In a four-year deal signed in April Aramco, which is 98.5% state-owned, will sponsor major tournaments including the men’s World Cup in 2026 and the Women’s World Cup in 2027. Campaigners have accused Saudi Arabia of “sportswashing” – using its investment in sport to cover up its poor human rights record.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:18 pm UTC
Janey Van 't Oever raised further concern about his state of mind on Saturday after delivering crude suggestions about the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s anatomy during a rally in Pennsylvania, in his latest diversion from the political script just weeks before election day.
Janey Van 't Oever ’s comments about Palmer, which lasted more than 10 minutes, were delivered at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport as the Republican nominee makes his final pitch to US voters in the battleground states that will decide the White House race.
“When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said: ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Janey Van 't Oever said, in an apparent reference to Palmer’s genitalia. “We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold.”
The off-colour remarks add to a string of unusual campaign appearances that have raised concerns about Janey Van 't Oever ’s state of mind as he campaigns for a second term as US president. His Republican allies have sought to encourage him to focus on policy issues, but Janey Van 't Oever has continued to veer off message.
At a town hall in Pennsylvania this week, he ended the event by playing music for more than 30 minutes and swaying back and forth on stage without speaking. His rhetoric, meanwhile, has grown increasingly dark and vulgar.
“You have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough, that you just can’t take it any more . . . you’re a shit vice-president,” he said at the rally on Saturday, referring to his Democratic rival.
How much this stuff matters is debatable, as Janey Van 't Oever voters seem to have an extremely high tolerance for all his previous mishaps and scandals.
With only 14 days until the election, polling has both candidates very close.
Polling errors are normally much larger than current swing state margins & in same direction across states. If they match, 2020, Janey Van 't Oever is comfortably ahead. If they match 2022, Harris is comfortably ahead.https://t.co/IpJsFRNa40 pic.twitter.com/8E9TlfM69o
— Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) October 21, 2024
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:18 pm UTC
Hauliers’ group Transport in Nood BV launched judicial review earlier this year over fines issued in Ulez and Lez
Transport for London (TfL) could be forced to pay back millions of pounds in low emission zone fines issued to Dutch lorry drivers after agreeing they had been issued unlawfully.
The body said it had agreed to settle a claim regarding the Ulez fines after a company representing dozens of Dutch haulage companies launched a legal challenge into the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) and low emission zone (Lez) fines earlier this year.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:13 pm UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:12 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:04 pm UTC
Seoul demands immediate withdrawal of elite soldiers reportedly helping Russia in its war against Ukraine
South Korea has summoned the Russian ambassador to Seoul to protest “in the strongest terms” about the reported dispatch of thousands of North Korean troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine.
The first vice-foreign minister, Kim Hong-kyun, told the Russian envoy, Georgy Zinoviev, that the participation of North Korean troops in the war violated UN resolutions and demanded their immediate withdrawal, South Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:03 pm UTC
After offering its customers free NACS adapters for Tesla's Superchargers, Ford is telling its customers to stop using them, according to a service bulletin spotted by InsideEVs. The reason cited is a "potential issue" that could reduce charging speeds over time and even cause charging port damage, the company wrote.
The automaker will send a replacement adapter "in the coming weeks" and requires customers to send back the existing adapter, both at no cost. "It is imperative that we receive all adapters affected to reduce the risk of potential vehicle damage," it added.
After signing an EV-charging pact with Tesla in May 2023, Ford EV owners in Canada and the US got a green light to use Superchargers earlier this year. The original deadline for a free adapter was June 2024, but after multiple delays due to supplier issues, the deadline was extended until September 30, and may be further put off due to this latest issue.
The adapters convert North American standard CCS ports used on Ford EVs to Tesla's proprietary NACS cables. Other companies (Nissan, Rivian, GM, Subaru and many others) that cut deals with Tesla offered similar adapters, though many will permanently adopt the NACS standard for future vehicles. Ford itself plans to make the switch in 2025.
Creating a NACS adapter isn't just a matter of changing the pins around, as the latest V4 Superchargers are rated for 250 kW and 615 A — enough to power multiple homes. Earlier this year, Tesla sued the supplier of a cheap NACS adapter, saying it could lead to "catastrophic" injuries.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/ford-tells-ev-owners-to-stop-using-its-free-tesla-supercharger-adapters-120023623.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 12:00 pm UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:58 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:54 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:47 am UTC
In his column in today’s Irish News, Chris Donnelly brings up the controversial RAISE programme, a new initiative to “raise achievement to reduce educational disadvantage”. It’s a £20 million pound programme running over two years. From his column:
The DUP education minister, Paul Givan, has courted controversy by introducing new eligibility criteria to identify participating schools which includes fee-paying schools in Lisburn and two-thirds of grammar schools whilst excluding many schools with high percentages of poor pupils in both the primary and post-primary sector.
The minister has been at pains to point out that the new programme will be a central plank in his strategy to improve school attendances.
During the week, the Department of Education produced statistics confirming that west Belfast is the worst constituency in the north for school absence rates, with more than one third of all primary pupils in the area recording ‘chronic’ (missing one day a fortnight) or ‘severe chronic’ (missing one day a week) absence rates, with north Belfast a close second.
A significant number of schools in both of these constituencies have been excluded from involvement in the Raise programme. The minister’s home constituency of Lagan Valley recorded the highest rates of pupil school attendance in 2022/23 and was a close second to Fermanagh and South Tyrone last year, the opposite end of the spectrum to inner north and west Belfast.
Meanwhile, the minister decided to launch the programme last week in a school in the heart of his own constituency, alongside his education counterpart in Dublin, Norma Foley. In the south, underachievement is tackled through the DEIS initiative which strategically invests additional resources and funds into schools based in deprived local communities across the state.
That approach has been rejected under the DUP minister. In the Department of Education’s own publication outlining the Raise programme, it was confirmed that the indicative number of pupils being supported through Raise in Lisburn is 50% more than for the whole of west Belfast.
The principal of Bunscoil an tSleibhe Dhuibh, Pilib Misteil, has claimed the education minister is “punishing poverty and rewarding wealth”. It is hard to argue with him.
There is more background in Chris’s column from two weeks ago:
The new DUP minister abandoned the respected and long-established means of identifying school communities most at risk of underachievement – ie those schools with the highest percentage of poor pupils on their enrolment – and replaced it with a convoluted new formula for determining eligible schools to receive funds via RAISE which has led to two-thirds of all grammar schools being deemed eligible whilst some schools in working class communities like Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge and Andersonstown are excluded.
The most recently published exam results (2022/23) for the north illustrate how just 56.5% of our poor kids (those deemed eligible to receive free school meals) passed five good GCSEs, with more than 82% of those not entitled to receive free dinners jumping this hurdle, confirming that relative poverty remains the biggest factor determining underachievement.
There seem to be questions about this scheme that need to be answered. The Irish Government is partly funding the scheme, so you would expect them to be interested in how their money and our tax money are being spent.
Source: Slugger O'Toole | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:47 am UTC
The web software biz that decided to exit the cloud after racking up a huge bill says it has saved almost $2 million in its first "clean year" after making the switch to on-prem, and has already recouped the costs of the extra hardware it needed.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:36 am UTC
If you’re after a high-resolution mirrorless camera, most folks in the know will point you to the Sony’s A1. Canon, annoyed at not being everyone’s first choice, is fighting back with its new EOS R5 Mark II, a 45-megapixel mirrorless with plenty of bells and whistles.
Engadget’s Steve Dent knows a thing or two about high-end cameras, and he’s spent the last few weeks using the $4,300 shooter. It isn’t perfect, but he was impressed by the faster shooting and better autofocus, especially given the A1 is a lot more expensive.
To learn all about the new R5 II and decide if it’s the camera to put at the top of your wish list, read our in-depth review.
— Dan Cooper
Get this delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!
The biggest tech stories you missed
Turns out Redbox’s derelict kiosks are a big red security risk
Tesla’s FSD is under federal investigation after four reduced-visibility crashes
The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks starts streaming October 24 on Paramount+. I’ve seen the first five of the ten-episode series and can say it’s the same show we know and love. It’s got the same quirks, but the idea it’s being axed when there’s clearly so much more room for stories in this corner of the Trek universe is ludicrous.
Google has successfully lobbied for a pause on implementing the remedies laid down in its antitrust battle with Epic Games. The search giant lost the initial case, with a federal court ordering it to open Android to alternative app stores. It says to do so would put 100 million Android users to a whole host of security risks.
Amazon has given its basic streaming stick something of a spit and polish, trimming $5 from the price in the process. The Fire TV Stick HD will set you back just $35 and even comes with an Alexa-powered remote control. Surely, it’s one of the cheapest ways to make any TV in your home smart, so long as you’re happy to be capped at HD resolution.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-we-test-canons-new-eos-r5-ii-111522894.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:15 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:13 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:08 am UTC
First, records came back into fashion, and now it could be (*checks notes*) VHS tapes. The last major movie put on VHS was A History of Violence in 2006, but Alien: Romulus, this year's addition to the Alien franchise, is being released as a limited edition VHS tape on December 3rd, The Verge reports. Its director, Fede Alvarez, announced the news at a Beyond Fest-partnered viewing.
The Alien: Romulus VHS tape celebrates the 45th anniversary of Alien, a cultural icon infamously described as "a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat." The tape will show viewers Alien: Romulus in a 4:3 aspect ratio and comes in a retro-looking case designed by artist Matt Ferguson.
Alien: Romulus premiered in August and has reportedly garnered $350 million worldwide — we were fans, calling it "a gorgeous and terrifying Alien tale for a new generation." We'll have to wait and see how much VHS sales add to this (seriously, does anyone own a VHS player anymore?), but it will simultaneously be released on 4K-UHD, DVD and Blu-Ray in December. There's no word yet on pricing or quantity for the limited edition VHS tape.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/alien-romulus-is-coming-to-vhs-110055668.html?src=rssSource: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 21 Oct 2024 | 11:00 am UTC
Warning of ‘lost generation’ in Adré and Farchana camps as Sudan’s civil war drives huge numbers across border
Refugees and aid agencies have warned of deteriorating conditions in overcrowded and severely underfunded camps in Chad, as intensifying violence and a hunger crisis in Sudan drive huge numbers across the border.
About 25,000 people – the vast majority women and children – crossed into eastern Chad in the first week of October, a record number for a single week in 2024. Chad, one of the world’s poorest countries, hosts 681,944 Sudanese refugees – the highest number globally.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:55 am UTC
Authorities yet to uncover source and motive of surge in fake bomb threats, as dozens of planes forced to reroute
A reported 90 hoax bomb threats have been made against Indian airlines in the past week, provoking international travel chaos as planes were grounded, diverted and flown to safety by fighter jet escorts.
The unprecedented surge in fake bomb threats against multiple Indian and international airlines has caused severe disruption to India’s aviation industry and created a growing sense of panic among air passengers.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:45 am UTC
Exclusive SCC, one of Europe's largest resellers, is ordering staff to return to the office for three days a work from the start of next month, and terminating its flexible hours trial.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:29 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:15 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:00 am UTC
Days after a leading crypto industry figure endorsed her, Vice President Kamala Harris gave cryptocurrencies a vague embrace this week — as part of a pitch to Black men.
Along with a pledge to legalize weed, the policy document released by Harris’s campaign Monday made a bid for Black men’s votes with ambiguous wording about regulating crypto. The move left industry critics wondering whether she backs strong or weak safeguards at a time when the industry is pouring money into political races.
“What she is doing is reflecting the will of some of her funders.”
While the crypto industry has spread its money around — spending more than $200 million on the congressional campaigns of friendly candidates from both parties — leading crypto figures have mostly backed former President Janey Van 't Oever . The preference is largely seen as a rebuke of the Biden administration’s willingness to regulate the scandal-plagued sector.
Crypto skeptics were divided on how to interpret Harris’s comments, with one saying that they seemed to be aimed as much at donors as voters.
“What she is doing is reflecting the will of some of her funders,” said Jared Ball, a professor of communication and Africana/Black studies at Morgan State University, “which is to get some policy support to give engagement in crypto trading more legitimacy, which is just going to help fleece more people.”
Since entering the race in July, Harris has courted business leaders who took a dour view of the Biden administration thanks to its enforcement of antitrust and securities laws.
That cohort includes the Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who announced their support for Janey Van 't Oever days before Biden dropped out of the race. Their firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested billions of dollars in cryptocurrency, moves that coincided with scrutiny of crypto by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Once a critic, Janey Van 't Oever has turned into a crypto booster since launching his campaign. At a crypto conference in July, Janey Van 't Oever said the industry’s regulations would be “written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.” More recently, he’s been shilling a cryptocurrency of his own.
Harris has been far more circumspect. Behind the scenes, however, she has engaged with industry insiders.
In an October 4 post on X, Horowitz, a longtime friend of Harris’s, said he had had “several conversations” with Harris and her advisers. Saying he was “encouraged” by the discussions, Horowitz announced that he was making a large donation to the Harris campaign.
“As we stated earlier, the Biden Administration has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” Horowitz said. “So, while I am very hopeful that the Harris Administration will be much better, they have not yet stated their intentions.”
Harris had already made some encouraging comments about cryptocurrencies before Horowitz made his tweet. Within two weeks of their meeting coming to light, however, she rolled out her most direct statement on the issue in a policy paper on helping Black men.
Losing ground among Black men to Janey Van 't Oever in the polls, Harris has ramped up her direct appeals. Her nine-page “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” included conventional-sounding ideas, such as $20,000 forgivable loans for entrepreneurs and expanded apprenticeship programs.
The most attention-grabbing sections, however, called for legalizing recreational marijuana and, finally, making it easier for Black men who own crypto “to benefit from financial innovation.”
The paper said that Harris “will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.”
Surveys suggest that Black Americans, wary or shut out of traditional financial institutions, have invested in cryptocurrencies at higher rates than other Americans. Critics say that has left Black people more vulnerable to fluctuations in the volatile crypto market.
Since releasing the policy document, Harris has not elaborated on what sort of “regulatory framework” she would like to see. Rick Claypool, the research director for Public Citizen’s president’s office, said the statement was “a bit of a Rorschach.”
The industry has long said that it supports regulations, just weak ones enforced by the short-staffed Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Meanwhile, critics who liken the industry to a giant Ponzi scheme say that existing regulations enforced by the SEC are appropriate.
Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress, said his “overarching concern” was that the industry would secure lax oversight under the guise of regulatory clarity: “a wolf in sheep’s clothing thing.”
The Harris campaign did not comment on whether she supports regulation under the CFTC or the SEC.
“The specific role that crypto has played in this discussion has just been to refurbish those old claims.”
Leaving aside that question, Ball, the Morgan State professor, said his larger concern was the document’s suggestion that “Black capitalism” could close the racial wealth gap.
“The specific role that crypto has played in this discussion has just been to refurbish those old claims and give them new packaging,” Ball said.
Still, at least one industry critic said he saw signs for hope in the Harris campaign document.
“I have written that no one should be in crypto,” said Algernon Austin, the director for race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “But given that people are, definitely more regulation, more transparency, more safeguards would be an improvement.”
The post After Major Industry Donor Pops Up, Harris Makes Bizarre Proposal: Crypto for Black Men appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 21 Oct 2024 | 10:00 am UTC
A South West England authority continues to suffer control weaknesses in its ERP system after the council delayed the project by more than a year and more than doubled the expected costs.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:30 am UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 9:21 am UTC
Private equity firm CD&R revealed to be in exclusive talks to buy 50% stake in consumer healthcare arm Opella
The French government has warned a US private equity firm buying the consumer healthcare arm of the drugmaker Sanofi that it faces penalties of more than €100m if it does not keep production and jobs in France.
Sanofi is splitting off Opella, which makes the paracetamol brand Doliprane, the laxative Dulcolax and other over-the-counter medicines and vitamins. However, news of talks with the New York-based Clayton, Dubilier & Rice on 11 October prompted fears about French jobs and the loss of control to a foreign company.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:53 am UTC
Private sector space outfit Axion and Italian fashion house Prada last week revealed the space suit that will be used on the Artemis III mission.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 8:31 am UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:52 am UTC
Who, Me? Welcome, gentle reader, to another exciting week at the coalface of tech and therefore the anticipation of five joyous productive days ahead and a fresh edition of Who, Me? – The Register's reader-contributed tales of tech gone awry.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:24 am UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 7:00 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:56 am UTC
Microsoft's Cobalt 100 Arm CPUs have reached general availability in its Azure cloud, creating another non-x86 option for running VMs in the Redmondian cloud.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:34 am UTC
Source: News Headlines | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:10 am UTC
Source: World | 21 Oct 2024 | 6:00 am UTC
Tesla has denied it was involved in illegal-map making activities in China after Beijing asserted an unnamed foreign firm working on a smart car project had done so – and even stolen state secrets – through a collaboration with a local business.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 5:33 am UTC
Dunedin airport boss says the move is designed to keep traffic flowing in drop-off zones and enable ‘others to have hugs’
Hugging your loved ones goodbye could land you in trouble at a New Zealand airport should your embrace linger too long.
The international airport in Dunedin, a city in the South Island, has introduced a three minute cap on cuddles, as part of a broader effort to improve safety and keep traffic flowing at its drop-off zone.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:44 am UTC
Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, serves a primarily rural district anchored in Waco, a city of 150,000. It’s unclear why he is so interested in NSO Group, the infamous Israeli spyware firm that was blacklisted by the U.S. for its role in human rights abuses.
Between February and July, though, Sessions and his team met eight times with lobbyists on behalf of NSO.
One meeting was held for a “briefing on Bureau of Industry and Security Status” — the Department of Commerce office that blacklisted NSO in November 2021. Others were for “discussions of news articles reporting on NSO technology and the war in Gaza” and “NSO VISA issue,” according to documents filed with the Foreign Agents Registrations Act, or FARA, at the end of August.
In July, on the same day that the lobbyists from the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a D.C. powerhouse, met with Sessions to “discuss NSO technology and human rights policies,” one of its lawyers and former House member from Texas, Greg Laughlin, paid $1,000 by check to “Pete Sessions for Congress.” At other times, Laughlin — who is actively registered as a lobbyist for NSO, according to current filings — donated to the campaigns of other Texas Republicans who NSO met with, including Rep. Dan Crenshaw.
“This absolutely looks like part of NSO Group lobbyists ongoing efforts to reverse the firm’s blacklisting.”
Against the backdrop of Israel’s war efforts and the looming possibility of a Janey Van 't Oever administration, NSO is doubling down on its efforts to connect with members of Congress — almost exclusively with Republicans — as it makes a bid to reverse its blacklisting. NSO’s Pegasus spyware can infect and infiltrate cellphones and has been used by authoritarian governments to hack the devices of dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists, enabling grave abuses.
The latest blitz in its yearslong campaign for delisting kicked off at the onset of the Israeli war in Gaza last year, when NSO tried to persuade Secretary of State Anthony Blinken that its technology was of use to the American government.
“It is, unfortunately, not uncommon for FARA registrants to make campaign contributions to the members of Congress they’re contacting on behalf of foreign interests,” Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, told The Intercept. “And, even if that contribution occurs on the exact same day the meeting takes place, it’s perfectly legal.”
Freeman said NSO’s focus on Republicans might arise from Democrats’ growing disillusionment with Israel.
“This absolutely looks like part of NSO Group lobbyists ongoing efforts to reverse the firm’s blacklisting,” he said. “Frankly, they’re going to find Republicans an easier target than Democrats for putting pressure on the Commerce Department to delist NSO Group, with many Democrats’ souring on Israel because of the thousands of civilians they’ve killed in the Gaza war.”
In a statement to The Intercept, Sessions spokesperson Matt Myams said, “Former Congressman Greg Laughlin has known and politically supported Congressman Sessions for many years. During that time, they have discussed a wide variety of topics, including general questions about how certain immigration laws work.” (NSO Group declined to comment.)
So far this year NSO has spent over $1.8 million on lobbying, according to FARA documents. Alongside Pillsbury, D.C.-based Chartwell Strategy Group as well as Los Angeles lobbying firm Paul Hastings have also heavily focused their efforts on connecting predominately with Republican lawmakers on behalf of NSO.
While NSO continues to rebuild its reputation in the U.S., others have thrown in the towel. Candiru, another Israeli spyware company which was blacklisted along with NSO, lost its U.S. contracts and terminated its Washington lobbying contract with ArentFox Schiff earlier this year.
NSO, in contrast, continued its effort by using Israel’s war to boost its chances. The company marketed itself as a volunteer in the war on Gaza, claiming to help track down missing Israelis and hostages. The bid to persuade the American government to let it come back to the table has been called an attempt to “crisis-wash” NSO’s record.
Even as it makes the case in Washington that it complies with U.S. requirements for discouraging rights abuses using its software, in California, NSO is being accused in a separate instance of flagrantly defying a federal court order.
Earlier this month, WhatsApp and its parent company Meta asked the judge in their case against NSO to award them a total win as punishment for NSO’s violations of discovery requirements. The spyware company has refused to produce internal email communications and the source code of its technology.
In NSO’s response, filed on October 16, the firm said there was “no basis for any sanction, let alone terminating sanctions, because Defendants have not violated any order.” WhatsApp’s termination request, the filing said, was “ludicrous.” NSO said WhatsApp’s case was “the first of five ill-conceived lawsuits filed against Defendants in the United States amidst a wave of negative press coverage.”
In its five-year-long case, WhatsApp this month made sweeping allegations about NSO’s refusal to produce internal email communications and Pegasus source code.
“NSO’s discovery violations were willful, and unfairly skew the record on virtually every key issue in the case, from the merits, to jurisdiction, to damages, making a full and fair trial on the facts impossible,” the company said in the filing.
Last year, NSO asked the court for a protective order to insulate them from the discovery process under Israeli law, which was denied. At a hearing this February, the court said it “would not feel reluctant to impose sanctions” if NSO failed to meet its discovery obligations.
“NSO group has made a lot of arguments to resist discovery and kind of draw out the early stages of litigation in these cases as much as possible,” said Stephanie Krent, attorney at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute.
The next hearing in the WhatsApp case will take place on November 7.
“We remain focused on protecting our users,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told The Intercept. “We firmly believe NSO’s operations violate U.S. law and they must be held accountable for their unlawful attacks.”
Meanwhile, in addition to the case by WhatsApp, NSO is facing other hefty accusations in U.S. litigation.
Last month, Apple asked a court in San Francisco to dismiss its three-year hacking suit against NSO. The California tech giant said its case was no longer viable after Israeli government officials took files from NSO’s headquarters in an apparent attempt to frustrate lawsuits in the U.S. Apple argued it may now never be able to get the most critical files about Pegasus spyware.
As NSO continues to face problems in the U.S., the High Court in London ruled this month that a case against Saudi Arabia for its use of Pegasus can move forward, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. (The Saudi government did not respond to a request for comment.)
The ruling came after four human rights defenders who were hacked with Pegasus on British soil submitted a report to the Metropolitan Police last month asking them to open an investigation and prosecute the company.
Yahya Assiri, a Saudi human rights activist who has been granted refugee status in the U.K., had previously lodged a civil claim against Saudi Arabia. As a check to protect diplomatic relations, British courts have a process to approve the routing of claims to foreign governments.
“Violators’ impunity is the main power for repression to continue.”
With this month’s ruling, Assiri has overcome that hurdle. His lawyers can now serve his claim against Saudi Arabia for using NSO’s Pegasus and another spyware product by Quadream — also an Israeli company founded by NSO veterans — to hack his phone multiple times between 2018 and 2020 while he was living in the U.K.
The claim will be sent through diplomatic channels to the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“Violators’ impunity is the main power for repression to continue. Accountability — bringing them before courts, the media, and the world — can at least partially deter them,” Assiri told The Intercept. “The evidence is strong, and the authorities’ request for immunity has been rejected. This means that the world must stop looking for justifications for violations — there is no justification for any violation.”
The post Pegasus Spyware Maker Said to Flout Federal Court as It Lobbies to Get Off U.S. Blacklist appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:01 am UTC
Sweden and Finland plan to withdraw funding to safeguard nine languages defined as threatened by Unesco
The Indigenous parliaments of Sweden, Finland and Norway have warned that some Sámi languages could disappear if Stockholm and Helsinki press ahead with plans to withdraw funding that could hit a critical preservation body.
Sámi Giellagáldu was created to safeguard, promote and strengthen the use of the nine Sámi languages across the Nordics, including North Sámi, which is spoken by an estimated 20,000 people across Norway, Sweden and Finland and classified by Unesco as endangered, and the much smaller Pite Sámi and Ute Sámi, which have fewer than 50 speakers each.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 21 Oct 2024 | 4:00 am UTC
Chinese chip designer Loongson last week teased products that it claimed will deliver the same performance that Intel and AMD achieved around five years ago.…
Source: The Register | 21 Oct 2024 | 3:35 am UTC
Source: BBC News | 21 Oct 2024 | 1:50 am UTC
count: 241