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There are simple rules for telling whether a number is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. A number is divisible by 2 if its last digit is divisible by 2. A number is divisible by 3 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3. A number is divisible by 4 if the number formed by its last two digits is divisible by 4. A number is divisible by 5 if its last digit is divisible by 5. A number is divisible by 6 if it is divisible by 2 and by 3. There is a rule for divisibility by 7, but it’s a little wonky. Let’s keep going. A number is divisible by 8 if the number formed by its last three digits is divisible by 8. A number is divisible by 9 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 9. A number is divisible by 10 if its last digit is 0. There’s a rule for divisibility by 11. It’s a little complicated, though not as complicated as the rule for 7. I describe the rule for 11 in the penultimate paragraph here. A number is divisible by 12 if it’s divisible by 3 and 4. (It matters here that 3 and 4 are relatively prime. It’s not true, for example, that a number is divisible by 12 if it’s divisible by 2 and 6.) But what do you do when you get to 13? Testing divisibility by 7, 11, and 13 We’re going to kill three birds with one stone by presenting a rule for testing divisibility by 13 that also gives new rules for testing divisibility by 7 and 11. So if you’re trying to factor a number by hand, this will give a way to test three primes at once. To test divisibility by 7, 11, and 13, write your number with digits grouped into threes as usual. For example, 11,037,989 Then think of each group as a separate number — e.g. 11, 37, and 989 — and take the alternating sum, starting with a + sign on the last term. 989 – 37 + 11 The original number is divisible by 7 (or 11 or 13) if this alternating sum is divisible by 7 (or 11 or 13 respectively). The alternating sum in our example is 963, which is clearly 9*107, and not divisible by 7, 11, or 13. Therefore 11,037,989 is not divisible by 7, 11, or 13. Here’s another example. Let’s start with 4,894,498,518 The alternating sum is 518 – 498 + 894 – 4 = 910 The sum takes a bit of work, but less work than div
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The lopsided margin reflected growing bipartisan anger at China’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs in the northwestern region.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated PressDec. 8, 2021, 7:16 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would ban a wide array of imported products made in China’s Xinjiang region, moving over the strong objections of large corporations to crack down on companies sourcing goods produced through forced labor by persecuted Muslim minorities.The lopsided 428-to-1 vote reflected increasing bipartisan ire at China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, where officials have waged a campaign of repression against Uyghurs, the Muslim ethnic minority group, detaining as many as one million in internment camps and prisons. But the legislation’s fate is uncertain in the Senate, where similar efforts have stalled amid a fierce lobbying effort by businesses that have argued that the bill’s requirements are too onerous and would d
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The company’s finding is based on only a small study of blood samples in a laboratory, but others are sure to follow.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021, 7:17 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Pfizer and BioNTech said Wednesday that laboratory tests suggest a booster shot of their coronavirus vaccine offers significant protection against the fast-spreading Omicron variant of the virus.The companies said that tests of blood from people who had received only two doses found much lower levels of antibodies protecting against Omicron than against an earlier version of the virus. That suggests that two doses “may not be sufficient to protect against infection” by the new variant, the companies said.While limited in scope — to get fast results, the companies examined only about 39 samples — the findings provided a bit of hopeful news at a time of renewed uncertainty. Health departments are identifying close to 100,000 cases a day, hospitalizations are ticking up and deaths are again on the rise in the United States, almost all due to the Delta variant.The companies summarized their findings in a news release and did not release any data. Their study came on the heels of a preliminary report on laboratory experiments in South Africa that also found Omicron seemed to dull the power of two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.The Omicron variant has been detected in about 20 American states so far, with cases rising much faster in parts of South Africa and Europe. Early modeling and analysis suggest that it may move twice as fast as Delta.In South Africa, where Omicron already appears to be dominant, two large hospitals are reporting more children testing positive for the coronavirus after being admitted for other reasons, suggesting increased community transmission there. Around the world, cities are canceling Christmas and New Year’s Eve events amid unresolved questions about the transmissibility and virulence of the new variant.President Biden went out of his way to draw attention to Pfizer-BioNTech’s findings on Wednesday, calling them “very, very encouraging” and saying they showed that the vaccines remain a bulwark against the virus.“If you get the booster, you’re really in good shape,” Mr. Biden said. According to federal data, the United States has more than 200 million fully vaccinated people, but only about 50 million have gotten a booster dose.But Pfizer-BioNTech’s study of blood samples in a laboratory is not proof of how the vaccines will perform in the real world. While antibodies are the first line of defense against infection, they are only part of a wider-ranging and powerful response by the immune system. Because antibodies are the fastest and easiest part to measure, those results typically come first.“You have to start somewhere,” said Kathrin U. Jansen, a senior vice president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, while awaiting the results of more complex studies and “real-world evidence that tells you what we need to know.”Scientists say it could take a month or more to really understand the new variant’s threat. By then, they say, Israel, Britain or other countries with sophisticated health surveillance systems will have gathered more data on whether Omicron will overtake Delta and how the vaccines will hold up against it.The Pfizer-BioNTech results seemed to underscore the importance of boosters in combating infection. The blood samples obtained from people who had received a booster shot contained antibodies neutralizing Omicron at levels comparable to those combating the original variant after two doses, Pfizer’s statement said.While calling the results “really good news,” Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert with the Baylor College of Medicine, noted that researchers only measured the levels of neutralizing antibodies one month after a booster injection. He is concerned, he said, that the surge of virus-blocking antibodies provided by a booster may be short-lived.The World Health Organization, which has long resisted broad rollouts of booster shots amid severe vaccine shortages in poorer nations, said on Wednesday that it was too early to conclude whether the vaccines were significantly less effective against Omicron or whether the emergence of the variant necessitated a booster shot for most people.Both Dr. Albert Bourla, the chief executive officer of Pfizer, and Dr. Ugur Sahin, the chief executive of BioNTech, said that while two doses may still prevent severe disease from Omicron, the study demonstrates that a third strengthens protection. Dr. Sahin said three doses “could still offer a sufficient level of protection from disease of any severity” caused by the variant. Like other vaccine manufacturers, both companies have profited hugely from the global demand for their shots.The companies suggested that Omicron would not significantly diminish the power of T-cells, which kill off infected cells. Researchers identified parts of Omicron that could be recognized by the T-cells produced after vaccination. Most did not contain any mutations.Dr. Jansen said it was “very important” that the parts of the Omicron variant targeted by virus-killing cells were mostly unchanged from previous variants. “It gives comfort that you will have sufficient T-cell responses to prevent the worst outcomes,” she said.Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, said he, too, wanted “to sound a note of reassurance.”“The virus has mutated to the point that it has become less neutralizable by antibodies,” he said. “But in all likelihood, two doses of an mRNA vaccine will protect you against serious illness.”The separate laboratory experiments in South Africa did not try to evaluate how well three doses worked. But they found that antibodies produced by people with two doses of vaccine were much less successful at fending off infection from Omicron than infection from previous variants. That study looked at six people who had received the Pfizer vaccine without ever having had Covid-19, and six people who had been infected before getting the vaccine.Omicron has now spread to dozens of countries, and while the Delta variant is still overwhelmingly dominant in the United States, the Biden administration is bracing for a new flood of winter cases from Omicron.While lab results are one indicator of what comes next, administration officials say it will take a month or two to get more definitive real-world data from countries like Israel that carefully track every patient.“We shouldn’t be making any definitive conclusions, certainly not before the next couple of weeks,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert, said at a White House briefing Tuesday.He said early reports from South African medical officials presented a somewhat hopeful picture of Omicron’s impact. Researchers at a major hospital complex in Pretoria reported this week that patients with the coronavirus are significantly less ill than those they have treated before, and that other hospitals are seeing the same trends.“We are not seeing a very severe profile of disease,” Dr. Fauci said, adding that hospital stays were shorter and patients required less oxygen. “It might be — and I underscore might — be less severe, as shown by the ratio of hospitalizations per number of new cases.”But he noted that South Africa’s population differed from that of the United States, with a high proportion of infected young people, a low percentage of vaccinated people, and a high rate of H.I.V., which can damage the immune system. Others cautioned against drawing conclusions from scattered early reports.In an interview last week, Dr. Bourla said the company had begun developing a version of its vaccine targeting Omicron right after Thanksgiving and could produce it in mass quantities within 95 days. Moderna is on much the same path.Dr. Bourla said that if necessary, Pfizer would be able to switch production “overnight,” adding: “There’s not going to be
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A former executive leading Qualcomm's Snapdragon computing platforms has darted the company to become CEO at an AI chip startup. Keith Kressin will lead product commercialization for MemryX, which was founded in 2019 and makes memory-intensive AI chiplets. The company is now out of stealth mode and will soon commercially ship its AI chips to non-tech customers. The company was testing early generations of its chips with industries including auto and robotics. The previous CEO and company co-founder, Wei Lu, will slip into the role of CTO. Qualcomm last week introduced new Snapdragon chips for Android smartphones and Windows PCs at the company's tech summit in Hawaii. Kressin bolted Qualcomm on Friday, once the announcements and festivities were complete, and joined MemryX this week. The MemryX AI chip is more like a programmable mesh, with memory and logic coupled tightly that could be mapped to an AI model. The company's initial focus is on computer vision and on smaller networks with localized memory, with no need to access external DRAM, which could slow down AI applications. The chip includes embedded floating point execution units, which are typically found on larger AI chips like GPUs. That will aid in faster low-level processing to analyze and identify patterns in data. "Part of my job is to figure out which customers we're gonna prioritize and how to scale -- that's what we look forward to doing in 2022," Kressin told The Register. The company's target is mainly edge devices and commercial customers in markets like auto, many of which are taking chip development in their own hands to take control of the supply chains. The chiplet model allows MemryX to resize the chips for larger deployments. "We'll take their model, run it and show them their performance of their model in their office. That'll be something that others can't do," Kressin said. AI chips are a hot market, with Cerebras Systems last month raising $250 million in its latest round of funding. Cerebras has the world's largest chip, and while MemryX's chip comes nowhere close in size, they share a common theme -- a big focus on memory. MemryX'
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Guardian and Observer journalists have won four awards at the British Journalism Awards (BJA), including the coveted news provider of the year.The columnist Marina Hyde took home the prize for comment journalism, while Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne won in the arts and entertainment journalism category.Meanwhile, Stephanie Kirchgaessner won in technology journalism for her stories on the Pegasus project, while there were commendations for the Queen’s consent investigation and the Observer’s James Tapper in the health and life sciences journalism category.Commenting on the Guardian winning the
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New York|Drug Company Settles with N.Y. for $200 Million in Sprawling Opioid Casehttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/nyregion/allergan-settlement-opioid.htmlThe agreement with Allergan, a company whose best-known product is Botox, is the latest settlement in the case jointly argued by New York State and two counties.Credit...Richard Drew/Associated PressDec. 8, 2021, 7:22 p.m. ETA large pharmaceutical manufacturer has agreed to pay $200 million in a settlement reached just before closing arguments began in a monthslong opioid trial in New York, the state’s attorney general announced on Wednes
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After administrators sent an email saying that students who remained on strike after Friday were not guaranteed jobs next term, union members turned up the heat.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021, 7:09 p.m. ETStudent workers on strike at Columbia formed picket lines that blocked off entrances to campus and prevented other students from getting to class. A giant inflatable fat cat waved in the breeze as dozens of drivers heading down Broadway honked their car horns in support. A 10-foot-banner reading “Fair Contract Now” was unfurled along an overpass on Amsterdam Avenue.The scenes of protest dotting the campus on Wednesday came six weeks into a strike by the Student Workers of Columbia, a United Auto Workers Local 2110 union with about 3,000 graduate and undergraduate students. The strike, which is being waged over higher pay, expanded health care and greater protections against harassment and discrimination, has embroiled the campus administration in a lengthy struggle with its own student body.Wednesday’s action brought one of the largest turnouts since the strike began, as union members were joined by members of student worker unions and faculty from New York University, Fordham University and the City University of New York, and labor unions such as Teamsters Local 104.“Today, I think, there’s a real show that we are the backbone of this university, and without us, the university doesn’t really function,” said Mandi Spishak-Thomas, a doctoral student at the School of Social Work and a member of the union’s bargaining committee.The picket line came days after Dan Driscoll, the vice president of the university’s human resources department, sent an email to student workers saying that those who did not return to work by Friday were not guaranteed jobs next semester.“Please note that striking student officers who return to work after December 10, 2021, will be appointed/assigned to suitable positions if available,” Mr. Driscoll said in the email.The widely circulated email sparked outrage and accusations that the university was attempting to retaliate against strikers.Scott Schell, a university spokesman, argued that its actions did not qualify as unfair labor practice. He cited the National Labor Relations Act, which says that while firing workers for going on strike is illegal and workers are entitled to get th
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Politics|Judge Appoints Special Master to Review Material Seized From Project Veritashttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/politics/project-veritas-special-master.htmlThe group had sought the action to protect material covered by attorney-client privilege and what it said were its First Amendment rights.Credit...Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2021, 7:08 p.m. ETA federal judge on Wednesday appointed a so-called special master to determine whether materials the F.B.I. seized from current and former Project Veritas employees can be used by prosecutors as evidence in their investigation into the apparent theft last year of a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter.The ruling by Judge Analisa Torres of U.S. District Court came as a victory for Project Veritas, the conservative group that has found its conduct under scrutiny in recent weeks by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan as it investigates how the diary kept by Ashley Biden made its way to Project Veritas in the weeks before Election Day last year.The group asked the judge to appoint the special master to ensure that the authorities did not gain access to materials covered by attorney-client privilege and that the group’s First Amendment rights as a media organization were protected.Despite ruling in Project Veritas’s favor, Judge Torres declined a request by the group to order the Justice Department to conduct a leak investigation into who provided information about the searches to The New York Times, which reported on them shortly after they occurred in early November. In appointing the special master, Judge Torres acknowledged that federal prosecutors could conduct the review themselves “with utmost integrity.”But she said the appointment of a special master was warranted because it was important both that the process be fair and that it appear to be fair.“In light of the potential First Amendment concerns that may be implicated by the review of the materials seized from petitioners, the court finds that the appointment of a special master will ‘help to protect the public’s confidence in the administration of justice,’” the judge said.Barbara S. Jones, a retired former U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan who now works as a private lawyer, will serve as the special master, Judge Torres said.It is common for special masters to be appointed in high-profile investigations, where the authorities may have obtained materials that the government is often barred from having because they are protected by attorney-client privilege. A special master was appointed earlier this year to determine what evidence prosecutors can use that they obtained in a search of the home and office of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer.Federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been investigating the role Project Veritas might have played in any theft of the diary. Project Veritas has acknowledged that it paid to obtain the diary but said that it had been assured by the individuals who sold it to the group that they had legally procured it.Project Veritas has sought to portray itself as a journalistic organization whose First Amendment right
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The £3tn windfall from soaring house prices in the past 20 years should be subject to a capital gains levy so that poorer households can be spared paying more in tax, a thinktank has urged.A report from the Resolution Foundation said the government should consider applying capital gains tax (CGT) to increases in the value of main residences in the UK as well as to sales of second homes, instead of increasing tax on income and profits.The thinktank admitted it would be a hard sell but said house prices had risen by 86% more than inflation in the past two decades and the gains had been “unearned, unequal and untaxed”.The increase in national insurance contributions and the 2023 rise in corporation tax will mean taxes as a share of the economy returning to levels last seen in the 1950s, yet property windfalls have been entirely absent from the debate, the Resolution Foundation said.Other capital gains attract tax rates of between 10% and 28%, and the benefits of the property boom had been disproportionately enjoyed by the better off, older people and those living in London, it added.Households over the age of 60 gained £80,000 in property on average, against less than £20,000 for the under-40s. For the wealthiest 10% of households it was £174,000, while the poorest third it was £1,000. Average gains in London (£76,000) were almost four times those in the north-east (£21,000).Adam Corlett, the principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said the £3tn capital gains on main residences represented one-fifth of all wealth in the UK.“Choosing not to tax this huge housing wealth windfall because of the political and administrative challenges involved has real consequences, including higher taxes for workers and businesses,” he said.“With the government on course to raise taxes by an equivalent of £3,000 for every household in Britain by the middle of the decade, it’s time to reconsider a range of practical options for taxing these unearned windfall gains if we are to protect workers’ living standards in the years ahead.”Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDeskNone of the main political parties has indicated it would be willing to take the risk of angering homeowners, but Labour has been exploring the possibility of wealth taxes on shareholders.The Resolution Foundation report, which was conducted in partnership with abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, said levying CGT on main residences at 28% would raise £11bn a year – slightly less than the £12bn the Treasury will get from increasing national insurance contributions next April. Under the plan, property owners would be required to pay nothing until they exited home ownership or died.The thinktank said more modest proposals would still raise significant amounts. Setting a £75,000 allowance would mean more than half of estates would not have to pay any tax, while still raising £4bn a year. If unearned capital gains on a primary residence could no longer be covered by the inheritance tax residence nil rate band, up to £3bn would be raised.
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Mark Meadows, one-time chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, has filed a lawsuit against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, claiming he cannot provide information due to executive privilege. In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. district court for the District of Columbia, Meadows alleges that subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee asking him for information related to the insurrection were “overly broad and unduly burdensome” and “threaten[ed] to violate longstanding principles of executive privilege.” On Tuesday, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol threaten
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Mr. Banks, who founded the Eagle Academy, a network of public schools for boys, is the first commissioner named to Mayor-elect Eric Adams’s administration.Credit...D Dipasupil/FilmMagic, via Getty I
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Wattpad has long been a pipeline bringing content adaptations of stories by emerging writers to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Now, ViacomCBS and Wattpad’s studio arm are teaming up to spin out a slate of original series from successful titles on Wattpad and Webtoon. Wattpad has been a story springboard for streaming services for years — The Kissing Booth and the After franchises are two notable examples — in part because Wattpad is able to mine a trove of internal data about how readers are interacting with stories and what specific kind of storytelling they return to. That can easily translate to hit franchises for services hungry for new original content, particularly
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This tutorial is intended for C beginners who want to do some coding practice, and in the process gain valuable insights regarding low level programming and how (some) Virtual Machin
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The energy regulator is responsible for a series of mistakes and missed opportunities that allowed the collapse of dozens of energy suppliers and led to spiralling household bills, according to a report by a leading consumer rights charity.Citizens Advice has blamed the industry regulator, Ofgem, for failing to take action against rule-breaking suppliers for almost 10 years despite mounting concerns over the energy market.In a damning report, the consumer watchdog warned that there was evidence of financial weakness in the energy market “long before this year’s crisis”, but said Ofgem had failed to heed warnings, meaning households would bear the brunt of its “catalogue of errors”.The market has lost 26 suppliers amid record high gas prices, which could mean household bills rising by an extra £94 to cover the cost to companies of taking on the extra customers.Clare Moriarty, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said households would face a multi-billion-pound bill “in large part because Ofgem missed multiple opportunities to regulate the market and tackle rule-breaking by suppliers”.The report found that Ofgem failed to act following repeated warnings from Citizens Advice over the precarious finances of a raft of small suppliers that entered the energy market between 2010 to 2019.It had also been slow to take action in recent years even as the industry’s customer service levels declined and financial instability increased, according to the report.“Recent wholesale price rises would have been hard to handle in any circumstances, but they need not have led to the collapse of a third of companies in the market,” Moriarty said.The regulator brought in plans to toughen financial checks on small suppliers at the beginning of 2020, but has taken action against only one despite evidence that many in the market relied on their customers’ credit balances to stay afloat.It has also opened only one formal customer service investigation in the last three years, after the number of people working on enforcement at Ofgem fell by a quarter.Citizens Advice has called for an independent review of the causes of the market collapse, including Ofgem’s regulat
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After closing arguments on Wednesday, the panel began considering whether the actor had staged a hate crime against himself, as the two men who attacked him have testified.Credit...Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2021, 6:52 p.m. ETThe jury tasked with deciding whether Jussie Smollett falsely told the police that he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic assault began deliberations on Wednesday and started to grapple with the two differing narratives of what happened on a freezing Chicago night in 2019.Prosecutors have accused Mr. Smollett of orchestrating the attack himself by instructing two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, to punch him just hard enough to create bruises, pour bleach on his clothing and place a rope around his neck like a noose while yelling racist and homophobic slurs.But the defense, which relied on more than seven hours of testimony by Mr. Smollett himself, has argued he was the victim of a real attack, perpetrated by the brothers, who then lied to investigators to avoid being prosecuted themselves.After six days of testimony, and a full day of closing arguments by both sides, the 12-person jury began considering the disorderly conduct charges late on Wednesday afternoon. But Judge James B. Linn agree
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deeplinks.js allows people to easily link directly to any text selection on your website. Here's an example of what one of these links looks like. It's intended mostly for blogs and other such websites, but it's relatively agnostic to the environment it's running in. People can select text on the site as the normally would, and when they do, the fragment identifier (the thing that comes after the # in the URL) changes. If they want to share the text they have selected, they simply copy the URL and send it to someone. When that person visits the URL, the same text that was originally selected will be selected and scrolled into view. This description might make it sound a little complicated, but it's actually pretty simple and intuitive once you play with it — go check it out! If you're interested in knowing the details of how it works under the hood, check out docs/design/. Goals Plug-and-play. Copy the files, drop in your website, and it works. Robust. Updates will not break links to older URLs. Short links. Long URLs are ugly and frequently mangled by messaging apps. URLs should be short and not contain characters likely to be mangled by misbehaving apps. Subtle. It shouldn't get in the reader's way. It doesn't break normal fragment-identifier links. Reasonably small. It's around 1.7kb gzipped right now (1.6kb brotli), and shouldn't grow too much more. Fast. This isn't hard, but it's worth making explicit. Non-goals Handling frequently-changing content, such as wikis. It should be robust to occasional small edits, but if you want truly robust deep linking, you really need support from the authoring environment (CRDTs, etc). Working for every usecase. I have specific things that I want in a script like this, and other people will have other things they want. Those people should build their own similar scripts — diversity is good! For instance, this intentionally does not implement the WICG Text Fragment interface, although it's possible it may in the future if that ends up standardized in a form that I like. Installation First, consider whether you really want to do this. If you do, you are making new URLs, which will break if you ever r
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Meghan McCain got a reality check Wednesday after blasting out a not-so-hot take about the Fox News Christmas tree that went up in flames.“I don’t want to hear anything about how radical some of you believe republicans to be when there are lunatics running around New York City setting Fox News Christmas tree on fire,” the conservative pundit wrote.Fox News security saw a man climbing what the conservative network calls its “All-American Christmas Tree” outside its headquarters in Manhattan’s News Corp building just after midnight, New York City Police Department said.A 49-year-old man, who police said was homeless, was arrested on charges including criminal mischief, arson and trespassing.McCain deleted her tweet on Wednesday after critics observed she appeared to be conflating alleged arson of one tree with Republican extremism ― which, beyond the Jan. 6 insurrection led by a pro-Trump mob, has recently seen one sitting GOP lawmaker post an anime video depicting himself slashing Democrats and another suggest her Muslim colleague is a suicide bomber.After removing the original tweet, McCain later wrote an entire column about the incident, which was published by the Daily Mail.“The Democrats can gaslight us over rising crime all they like but I really don’t think people want to live in a city where even the Christmas Trees need bodyguards,” the piece was titled.McCain, who left her co-hosting gig at “The View” earlier this year, was known for her controversial and sometimes eye-roll-inducing takes on the talk show and online.Some of the reaction to her tweet has been compiled below.Meghan McCain thinks someone setting a Christmas tree on fire is worse than attempting to overthrow the government. You have to wonder how the women of #TheView could stand this. pic.twitter.com/hM3oqLcKSe— Victoria Brownworth 🎄✨ (@VABVOX) December 8, 2021 Insurrectionists wanting to hang lawmakers & destroy the Capitol vs vandal setting fire to the Fox News Christmas treeMeghan McCain: pic.twitter.com/CDIqC86UN5— Artist formerly known as Deven Nunez Cow (@EmmReef) December 8, 2021 "I don't want to hear about Congressmen who attempted a coup and post
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Kickstarter is announcing some big changes to the foundations of its technology. The company said Wednesday that it will support the development of “an open-source protocol that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core functionality,” according to a Kickstarter blog post published Wednesday. The protocol will live on a public blockchain and will enable anyone, “even Kickstarter competitors,” to build upon or use it, the company says. An independent organization will start the development of the protocol, and Kickstarter will give this group funding, appoint a board, and will be one of the protocol’s first clients, the company says. It’s also making an “independent governance lab” that oversees “the development of the protocol governance.
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Multiplexing is a very old technology in which control signals are intermixed for the sake of being able to control more devices than there are control signals. For [mihai.cuciuc], the problems started when he multiplexed some very efficient LED’s, and it’s all well described on his Hackaday.io page. The problem? In two banks of six LEDs each, both LEDs connected to a single Arduino pin would light, even when only one bank was turned on at the ground side. The LED In the bank that was switched on lit brightly, and its corresponding LED in the bank that was off would also be very dimly lit. [mihai] was able to determine that the problem was not due to a leaky transistor, but rather due to a quality of the LED’s themselves. What is an LED but a diode, and it’s wel
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6.58pm EST 18:58 6th over: Australia 10-1 (Warner 7, Labuschagne 0) So Robinson gets Harris, and England are off and running. Marnus is in, he’s jumpy and leaving his first while exposing a fair few stumps. He’s forward to the next and the ball screws off his bat to gully. There’s a leg gully in for Marnus, which confirms a plan. The next one is left, and the final one whistles past the off stump, which some would call a “good leave”, perhaps kindly. A great over from Ollie Robinson. Ross Kettlewell (@RossKettlewell7) Ollie. Robinson. Forever. Lengths. @sjjperry December 8, 2021 6.55pm EST 18:55 WICKET! Harris c Malan b Robinson 3 (Australia 10-1) Robinson gets Harris! It’s on middle and off, Harris is half forward, and he lures him into an edge which is well taken by Malan going low and to his left at 3rd
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His writing for The Village Voice and other publications helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same planes as jazz and Abstract Expressionism.Credit...Nisha SondheDec. 8, 2021Updated 6:34 p.m. ETGreg Tate, a journalist and critic whose articles for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications starting in the 1980s helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same plane as jazz and Abstract Expressionism, died on Tuesday in New York City. He was 64.His daughter, Chinara Tate, confirmed the death. No cause was given.Mr. Tate exploded onto the New York cultural scene in the early 1980s, soon after graduating from Howard University, when he began contributing freelance music reviews to The Voice. Although he didn’t join the weekly newspaper’s staff until 1987, he almost immediately became its pre-eminent writer on Black music and art, and by extension one of the city’s leading cultural critics.New York at the time was an ebullient chaos of cultures, its downtown scene populated by street artists, struggling writers, disco D.J.s and punk rockers living in cheap apartments and crowding into clubs like Paradise Garage and CBGB. The Village Voice was their bible, and Mr. Tate was very often their guide.His tastes varied widely, as did his style; his whirlwind sentences might string together pop culture, French literary theory and the latest slang. He was equally at home discussing Chuck D or assessing the latest work of the theorist Edward Said, all deployed with a casual candor that left readers wanting more.He quickly graduated from reviews to cultural criticism. Among his most famous articles was “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke,” an incisive attempt, pu
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Robbie Shakespeare, acclaimed bassist and record producer, has died at the age of 68. The Jamaican artist was part of the duo Sly and Robbie with Sly Dunbar.According to The Jamaica Gleaner, Shakespeare had recently undergone surgery related to his kidneys. He had been in hospital in Florida.“When it comes to reggae bass playing, no one comes close to having the influence of Robbie Shakespeare,” tweeted Jamaican prime minister Robert Holness. “He will be remembered for his sterling contribution to the music industry and Jamaica’s culture.”Sly and Robbie had come together in the mid-70s after Shakespeare already carved out his own music career from a young age. The pair bonded over their varied taste in music but specifically their interest in reggae production. Their breakout work was on Mighty Diamonds’ 1976 album Right Time.In the following decade, their status grew as they worked with artists such as Joe Cocker and Grace Jones. They were also responsible for key shifts in reggae music as it headed to digital, introducing the “Rockers” beat and later working with Chaka Demus & Pliers to create a novel sound that distinguished songs such as Bam Bam and Murder She Wrote.The pair worked with artists such as Madonna, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones, Sting, Serge Gainsbourg and Britney Spears. In the 2011 documentary Reggae Got Soul: The Story of Toots and the Maytals, they were described as “one of the most influential artists ever to come out of Ja
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Sanctions, like aiming to cut oil exports, could also hurt European allies. “It’s a limited toolbox,” one expert said.Credit...Vasily Fedosenko/ReutersDec. 8, 2021, 6:18 p.m. ETLONDON — When Russian soldiers crossed into Ukraine and seized Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration responded with a slate of economic penalties that ultimately imposed sanctions on hundreds of Russian officials and businesses and restricted investments and trade in the nation’s crucial finance, oil and military sectors.Now, with Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s border, the White House national securi
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The Colorado representative is using her family Christmas portrait to evoke liberal hysteria.Alex Wong/GettyDecember 8, 2021, 6:30 PM ETAbout the author: Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic. As families around the country prepare to send out Christmas cards with letters and photos commemorating the year gone by, many elected officials do the same. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted one such family picture on Saturday, featuring himself and his clan armed to the teeth on a leather love seat, a merry tree glittering in the backdrop. Massie’s photo drew some ire. N
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New Zealand has announced it will outlaw smoking for the next generation, so that those who are aged 14 and under today will never be legally able to buy tobacco.New legislation means the legal smoking age will increase every year, to create a smoke-free generation of New Zealanders, associate health minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said on Thursday.“This is a historic day for the health of our people,” she said.The government announced the rising age alongside other measures to make smoking unaffordable and inaccessible, to try to reach its goal of making the country entirely smoke-free within
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On a pristine day two years ago, a group of mostly international day-trippers boarded boats and chugged over to Whakaari/White Island, a small active volcano and popular tourist destination 48km off New Zealand’s east coast. The guests roamed the moon-like landscape, observing the strangeness of a bubbling, living rock. But below the surface, pressure was building.At 2.11pm, while 47 people were on the island, the volcano erupted, spewing a mushroom cloud of steam, gases, rock and ash into the air. The eruption killed 22 people, seriously injured 25 and changed the lives of many families forever. It became the country’s deadliest volcanic disaster since the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera.“People saw things on that day that no person should ever see and they carry those memories and
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When it comes to the state of packaged web browsers for Debian GNU/Linux, unfortunately it leaves a lot to be desired at the moment and for those wanting to be secure and up-to-date it can mean resorting to proprietary or un-packaged browser builds. A Phoronix reader wishing to remain anonymous wrote in around the unfortunate state of packaged web browser support for Debian. Below is his synopsis on the state of web browsers packaged in Debian as a word of caution to users with regards to outstanding security updates. All of the Debian-shipped browsers (Chromium, Firefox ESR, Falkon, ...) are having severe open security issues which the package maintainers apparently are not able to fix easily: - Chromium is still at version 90.0.4430.212-1 which means it contains tons of security issu
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Note: A previous version of this blog post included the wrong CVE. It has been corrected. The timeline has also been updated. Yesterday, we released an update to Grafana fixing a directory traversal attack tracked under CVE-2021-43798. We wanted to blog about it again today for two reasons: First, we wanted to give more insight into our timeline as external events forced us to deviate from our planned timeline. On the “positive” side, we had our first 0day! Second, given the AWS outage yesterday, we wanted to re-amplify the message that all users should upgrade their Grafana 8.x instances as soon as possible. We are releasing this update in coordination with Jordy Versmissen, the researcher who notified us of the vulnerability. You can find the story of how he found the vulnerability
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U.S.|California Positions Itself as a ‘Refuge’ of Abortion Rightshttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/california-abortion-sanctuary-state.htmlA new legislative proposal includes the recommendation to fund the procedure for low-income women who come to California for abortion services.Credit...Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021, 6:20 p.m. ETPolitical leaders in California said on Wednesday that they would work to make the state a sanctuary for women seeking abortions if a Supreme Court ruling allows the procedure to be banned in more conservative parts of the country.The proposal, which was released with the backing of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the leaders of California’s two legislative chambers, calls for increasing funding for abortion providers and dozens of other me
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poly-lt-wire-logo Kailey Schwerman/The CW Even with Sabrina, the CW show is still its own best spinoff By Dec 8, 2021, 6:18pm EST Riverdale is once again the best show on TV. For a series that has swerved from one wild sequence to the next, Rivervale — the five-episode alternate universe spinoff show, airing now — feels particularly audacious, introducing a new horror concept each episode with litt
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Twitter’s secretive “Project Guardian” aims to shield controversial characters and users with large followings from an onslaught of trolls and haters, according to a report by Bloomberg. The platform reportedly maintains a list of thousands of users that Twitter deems high risk for harassment, which includes musicians, professional athletes, journalists, and other users who are particularly prominent — even if just for the moment. Bloomberg notes that when Twitter receives a report of an abusive post related to an account on the list, Twitter’s content moderation team will respond to that report faster than all the other ones it has lined up. The thinking behind the program is that Twitter can prevent harmful content from spreading, as well as keep prominent tweeters content a
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New York State Parks Police said a woman who was pulled from a submerged car near the brink of Niagara Falls on Wednesday has died.In a dramatic scene earlier in the day, a U.S. Coast Guard rescue diver deployed from a helicopter and climbed into the partially submerged car, pulling the woman out of the frigid water.Onlookers said the car was stuck on rocks about 100 feet from the edge of waterfall as the heavy current washed over the top of the windshield.Emergency personnel gather at the edge of the river where a woman was removed from a submerged vehicle.Jeffrey T. Barnes via APPolice Capt. Chris Rola said at a news conference afterward that the woman, who was in her 60s, was unresponsive after the rescue and was pronounced dead at the scene. Her name hasn’t been released, pending not
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Our best chocolate recipes hardly need an introduction. There’s layer cakes, chocolate cookies, chocolate frostings, mousses and puddings, pies and tarts, and everything in between. But I know you really just want to get to the recipes, so let’s do just that. 1. Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies Before we get into tortes and tarts, sheet cakes and shortbread, we have to start with the most classic chocolate recipes of all time—a soft and chewy chocolate chip cookie. Dorie Greenspan’s recipe calls for 12 ounces of bittersweet chocolate; use a chopped bar or chunks, versus chips, for the most chocolatey flavor of all. 2. World’s Best Ch
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Enlarge / The mushroom cloud from the Soviet detonation of "Tsar Bomba" on October 30, 1961, was so large that the photographers had a hard time capturing its full dimensions. The detonation of the first nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is seared into our collective memory, and the world has been haunted by the prospect of a devastating nuclear apocalypse ever since. Less well-known but equally significant from a nuclear arms race standpoint was the Soviet Union's successful detonation of hydrogen "superbomb" in the wee hours of October 30, 1961. Dubbed "Tsar Bomba" (loosely translated, "Emperor of Bombs"), it was the size of a small school bus—it wouldn't even fit inside a bomber and had to be slung below
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Here’s just hoping she stuck to a scantly populated VIP section.Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin apologized Monday on Facebook for hitting the club after knowing she was exposed to COVID-19.The 36-year-old prime minister partied in the country’s capital, Helsinki, Saturday night, just hours after her foreign minister had tested positive for the virus.In her Facebook message, which was translated by the BBC, Marin initially defended herself by saying she was fully vaccinated and was told she didn’t need to quarantine. But because she decided to deploy a work-life boundary at a pretty bad time, she neglected to bring her work phone with her during her night out and missed a text that advised her to avoid social contact.Marin — who apparently raged until 4 a.m., per TMZ — said
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NEW YORK (AP) — More than 40 people in the U.S. have been found to be infected with the omicron variant so far, and more than three-quarters of them had been vaccinated, the chief of the CDC said Wednesday. But she said nearly all of them were only mildly ill.In an interview with the Associated Press, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the data is very limited and the agency is working on a more detailed analysis of what the new mutant form of the coronavirus might hold for the U.S.But “the disease is mild” in almost all of the cases seen so far, she said, with reported symptoms mainly cough, congestion and fatigue. One person was hospitalized, but no deaths have been reported, CDC officials said.The omicron variant were first iden
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In Destiny, the legendary rocket launcher Gjallarhorn was the ultimate weapon for a time. Its ability to create explosions filled with more explosions was unparalleled — and, some would argue, in desperate need of a nerf. Amusingly, Bungie and toymaker Hasbro are now taking that part literally: the Gjallarhorn is now slated to become an official Nerf blaster, complete with Wolfpack Round-like cluster missiles of its own. The in-game version that just came back to Destiny 2. Image: Bungie Destiny 2 just brought the digital Gjallarhorn back this week as part of the $24.99 Bungie 30th Anniversary Pack, and you’ll have to pay a lot more than that for the Nerf v
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Some of the nation’s leading ocean and climate scientists are calling on the U.S. government to invest up to $1.3 billion in research on human interventions that could boost the oceans’ ability to suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide in the coming decades.The recommendation is part of a new, 300-page National Academy of Sciences report released Wednesday that explores six techniques for accelerating ocean CO2 removal and storage, some more radical than others. Potential areas of study include restoring degraded ecosystems, large-scale seaweed farming, dumping nutrients like iron and phosphorus in the water to promote plankton growth, and even jolting seawater with electricity to make it less acidic. The report outlines known risks and benefits, as well as costs and scalability, in order to provide policymakers with a framework for deciding next steps. It does not advocate for any individual tool or technology.“All of these approaches have some combination of tradeoffs and there are substantial knowledge gaps,” Scott Doney, an oceanographer at the University of Virginia and chair of the NAS committee that authored the report, told HuffPost. “It’s really trying to find investments on the research side that could fill those gaps in a way that would better prepare us to make those decisions.” An oil platform is pictured in the Persian Gulf.Dario Argenti via Getty ImagesBurning of fossil fuels and other human activities have driven atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to their highest point in 800,000 years, and there is a growing consensus among the world’s leading scientists that staving off potentially catastrophic climate change will require more than simply
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New York|Four Takeaways From the 8th Day of Ghislaine Maxwell’s Trialhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-takeaways.htmlA former pilot and a former assistant at Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach home testified, as prosecutors sought to bolster the accounts of Ms. Maxwell’s accusers.Credit...Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021, 5:45 p.m. ETThe jury in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial heard from four government witnesses on Wednesday, including one of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime pilots and the ex-boyfriend of one of Mr. Epstein’s accusers.One more woman who alleges Ms. Maxwell groomed her for abuse by Mr. Epstein is expected to testify before the government rests its case this week.The witnesses on Wednesday served to bolster the accounts of the government’s main witnesses so far — three women who have testified they were sexually abused by Mr. Epstein as teenagers with Ms. Maxwell’s help.Prosecutors say Ms. Maxwell, 59, helped to recruit and groom teenage girls for sexual abuse by Mr. Epstein, the notorious sex offender and financier who was her longtime companion. Mr. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting his own sex trafficking trial; Ms. Maxwell has pleaded not guilty and denied the accusations.Mar-a-Lago’s human resources director corroborated testimony about an outspoken Epstein accuser.The first witness to take the stand Wednesday was Janine Gill, the human resources director at former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, where Virginia Roberts — who is now called Virginia Giuffre and has been one of Mr. Epstein’s most outspoken accusers — has said she first met
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Following September's Epic v. Apple ruling. Following a judge's ruling that Apple must allow developers the option of linking to external payment systems in their iOS apps as part of its lawsuit with Epic Games, an appeals court has permitted Apple to delay making the change until it's fully able to hear the case.Back in September - following a lengthy court battle arising from Apple's decision to remove Fortnite from its App Store after Epic wilfully broke App Store guidelines by deliberately circumventing iOS' in-app payment mechanisms - California's Judge Gonzalez Rogers ruled against all but one of Epic's legal challenges.Gonzalez Rogers proclaimed Apple was free to control the payment system of its own platform - as Epic had failed to prove the iPhone maker held a monopoly as defined by antitrust laws - but also ruled Apple could not block developers from linking out to alternative payment methods from within their apps, or prevent developers from informing customers of alternative payments methods using contact details voluntarily provided for that purposes, as that would constitute "anti-competitive conduct" under state law. Epic's Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite short, released in response to Fortnite's removal from the iOS App Store. The ruling was initially set to be enforced from 9th December, but Apple petitioned the district court to delay the implementation date until all appeals in the Epic v. Apple trial were resolved. However, Gonzalez Rogers' denied the request, saying, "Apple's motion is based on a selective reading of this Court's findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction."Following that initial failure, Apple took its request to the appeals court, which has now (thanks, The Verge) granted the stay, allowing the company to continue insisting developers make exclusive use of iOS' in-app purchase system. Importantly, this doesn't reverse Gonzalez Rogers' initial ruling; it merely permits Apple to delay its implementation until the appeals court can fully hear the case - a process that, as T
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We don’t know how severe Omicron is, but we do know it’s spreading very fast.Josep Gutierrez / Getty; The AtlanticDecember 8, 2021, 5:45 PM ETA lot is still unknown around Omicron, but a worrying trend has become clear: This variant sure is spreading fast. In South Africa, the U.K., and Denmark—countries with the best variant surveillance and high immunity against COVID—Omicron cases are growing exponentially. The variant has outcompeted the already highly transmissible Delta in South Africa and may soon do the same elsewhere. According to preliminary estimates, every person with Omicron is infecting 3–3.5 others, which is roughly on par with how fast the coronavirus spread when it first went global in early 2020.In other words, Omicron is spreading in highly immune populations as quickly as the original virus did in populations with no immunity at all. If this holds and is left uncontrolled, a big Omicron wave lies ahead—bigger than we would have expected with Delta. Cases were already surging ahead of winter. The U.S. already had a too-low vaccination rate. And now Omicron threatens to eat away at the immunity we thought we had.To be clear, this does not mean the pandemic clock has reset to early 2020. Vaccines and previous infections can blunt the virus’s worst e
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Mayor Bill de Blasio was warned that he created an “appearance of coercion and improper access” by directly contacting donors who had business before the city.Credit...Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA, via Associated PressDec. 8, 2021Updated 5:42 p.m. ETWhen Bill de Blasio was first elected mayor of New York, he called two powerful real estate developers who had active projects in the city, and asked them to donate money to a nonprofit organization that he had created to advance his political agenda.The request to help his nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, violated the city’s ethics law, and a ban against asking for contributions from people who had business pending with the city. Within months of his solicitations, Mr. de Blasio was formally warned by the city’s Conflict of Interest Board — in a previously undisclosed letter — not to repeat the behavior.But even after that warning, the mayor continued to hit up well-connected donors for money, according to documents that the city recently released after years of an extraordinary legal campaign by the de Blasio administration to keep the documents secret.In February 2015, the mayor made a call to Jeffrey Levine, chairman of Douglaston Development, which had just won city approval for $12 million in financing for an affordable housing complex, and was given a parcel of city-owned land in the Bronx.The next month, Mr. de Blasio called David Von Spreckelsen, president of Toll Brothers, an affordable housing developer. A stop-work order had recently been lifted on the developer’s hotel and condominium project in Brooklyn Bridge Park.Both men later received follow-up calls from the nonprofit’s fund-raiser, Ross Offinger, and each donated $25,000.In April of that year, Mr. de Blasio spoke with James Capalino, a major city lobbyist with many clients doing city business, to ask for his support. The campaign’s fund-raiser made another follow-up call, and Mr. Capalino donated $10,000.As the mayor nears the end of his eight-year tenure, and navigates a likely bid for governor next year, his pattern of questionable fund-raising tactics and ethics violations may cast a shadow on his legacy and his politi
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In a blog post titled “No Dollar Signs This Time,” billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott said she won’t reveal how much she has given to charity since her last round of donations earlier this year, in an effort to reduce the attention she draws. Instead, she wrote a reflection on what philanthropy means.“I’m not including here any amounts of money I’ve donated since my prior posts,” Scott wrote in the post Wednesday. “I want to let each of these incredible teams speak for themselves first if they choose to, with the hope that when they do, media focuses on their contributions instead of mine.”Scott’s post intentionally offered few details on her giving. “Even by the traditional yardstick — money — contributions to the welfare of others by financially wealthy people don’t merit disproportionate attention,” she wrote.The reclusive novelist, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at $59 billion, had expressed similar sentiments in her last post in June when she announced that she gave $2.7 billion to charity. She remains a private person and doesn’t make public comments about her giving — or anything else — aside from what she writes on her Medium blog posts.But her latest comments are likely going to increase calls for more transparency about her giving style. Scott is advised by the nonprofit consulting giant The Bridgespan Group, but little is known about how she selects groups to fund apart from the little she puts on her blog posts every few months. And this time, the public also doesn’t know how much she’s giving away or who she’s giving it to.“The efforts to try to redefine who should get the most respect and attention as a donor is really laudable,” said Ben Soskis, a historian of philanthropy and a senior researcher at the Urban Institute. “But it’s problematic and a kind of disavowal of any responsibility towards transparency and accountability. It suggests one response to a discomfort with power is to try to deny it, in some sense.”Soskis said her approach of trying to focus on the grantee is admirable, but it “also undermines the public’s right to hold the wealthiest among us to account in terms
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Apple’s upcoming macOS 12.1 update will fix some odd interactions between its new MacBook Pros’ notched displays and menu bar apps, which should no longer be blocked behind the notch, according to MacRumors. Previously, some users had reported issues where menu bar icons could end up getting pushed behind the notch in the event that too many were open. Or, as Apple’s changelog describes the issue, prior to macOS 12.1, “[menu] bar extras may be obscured by the camera housing on 2021 MacBook Pro computers.” The bug admittedly was rare to begin with, requiring that users had enoug
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Epic v. Apple — The status quo will stay in place until an appeal has been resolved. Enlarge / A Fortnite loading screen displayed on an iPhone in 2018, when Apple and Epic weren't at each other's throats. Apple has won a last-minute stay on an injunction that would have required it to imminently begin allowing iPhone and iPad app developers to direct users to alternative payment options. The requirement to allow in-app linking to third-party
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Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.Dec. 8, 2021, 5:33 p.m. ET(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.) Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Wednesday.ImageCredit...Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times1. Pfizer and BioNTech said booster shots of their vaccine offer significant protection against the Omicron variant. Blood tests from people who received two doses had much lower antibody levels against the coronavirus variant compared with an earlier version of the virus, and “may not be sufficient to protect against infection,” the companies said.Blood samples obtained from people one month after they received a booster shot showed neutralizing antibodies against Omicron, comparable to the levels of antibodies against a previous version of the virus after two doses, the companies said. The laboratory tests cannot determine for sure how the vaccines will perform in the real world, but the results seem to underscore the importance of booster shots. A study out of South Africa suggested that Omicron might cause more breakthrough infections but not necessarily more severe illness.Separately, a new study found that the virus infects fat cells and immune cells within body fat, which may help explain why people who are overweight have been at higher risk of severe illness from Covid. ImageCredit...Doug Mills/The New York Times2. President Biden ordered that federal vehicles and buildings use renewable energy, with the goal of making the government carbon neutral by 2050. In a series of executive orders, Biden directed the government to power its 300,000 buildings by wind, solar or other carbon-free electricity by 2050 and stop buying gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. The government currently operates 600,000 cars and trucks.The move is just one piece of Biden’s climate plan, which now has the backing of unions representing electricians and steelworkers. But at least one group of workers appears less enthusiastic: coal workers, who continue to regard clean-energy jobs as a major risk to their standard of living.ImageCredit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times3. Lawmakers grilled the head of Instagram over the social media app’s reported harms to young users. Adam Mosseri was the highest-ranking executive from Meta, the parent company of Instagram, to testify before Congress after a whistle-blow
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Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem star as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Aaron Sorkin’s drama about one very bad week.Credit...Glen Wilson/ Amazon OriginalDec. 8, 2021, 5:30 p.m. ETBeing the Ricardos Directed by Aaron SorkinBiography, DramaR2h 5m“I’m not funny,” Lucille Ball once said (LOL). “What I am is brave.” It was performative modesty of the kind that celebrities excel at. And it was true. You get the tiniest peek at how brave she could be in “Being the Ricardos,” Aaron Sorkin’s very soft look at a very bad week that Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had while starring in their show “I Love Lucy.” She was America’s favorite redhead, he was her glamorous bandleader husband, and they were adored by millions. But not everyone loved Lucy.A lively, chatty, somewhat odd and insistently depoliticized biopic, “Being the Ricardos” reimagines what happened in 1953 after the powerful gossipmonger Walter Winchell dropped a not-so blind item about Ball into his radio broadcast: “The most popular of all television stars was confronted with her membership in the Communist Party.” Joe McCarthy was hunting supposed communists and the Hollywood blacklist was in full effect; Winchell’s item was potentially career killing and life destroying. But when a publicist told Ball that Winchell was probably talking about another big TV comic, Ball joked that she resented the implication. “Everyone knows that I’m the top comedian!”Sorkin jumps into the fray with Lucy (a tart Nicole Kidman) and Desi (an affable Javier Bardem), who come off like nastier, edgier versions of their TV alter egos. “Lucy, I’m home,” Desi announces right at the start at their
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If you buy something from a Polygon link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. The story of Halo, as told in the mainline video games, isn’t exactly the most interesting tale ever told. The larger world, however, is fascinating; there’s a religious cult of aliens, a few different wars, an infectious race that threatens to destroy the universe, and a set of rings designed to destroy it all first. The games tend to stick to the here and now of where the main characters are standing or who they need to shoot. Thankfully, Halo’s ancillary material — like books, comics, short stories, and data logs — helps fill out the background of the universe and explores the millions of years worth of history that lurks beyond Master Chief’s intergalactic travels. For those who don’t have dozens and dozens of hours to spend (waste?) reading the books — which mostly have names like Halo: Cryptum — here’s an abridged version of what they contain. In other words, here’s all the cool stuff the games mostly don’t tell you about. The creators of everything Halo’s history starts with the Precursors, a group of technologically advanced, Lovecraftian beings who ruled the galaxy millions of years before the events of the games. The Precursors created both the Forerunners, the race of aliens the Covenant worship, and ancient humans (more on them later). The Precursors believed in an idea called the Mantle of Responsibility, which they felt gave them r
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The new 5G C-band wireless broadband service expected to rollout on 5 January 2022 in the US will disrupt local radio signals and make it difficult for airplanes to land safely in harsh weather conditions, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Pilots rely on radio altimeter readings to figure out when and where an aircraft should carry out a series of operations to prepare for touchdown. But the upcoming 5G C-band service beaming from cell towers threatens to interfere with these signals, the FAA warned in two reports. Flights may have to be delayed or restricted at certain airports as the new broadband service comes into effect next year. The change could affect some 6,834 airplanes and 1,828 helicopters. The cost to operators is expected to be $580,890. “Radio altimeters cannot be relied upon to perform their intended function if they experience interference from wireless broadband operations in the 3.7-3.98 GHz frequency band (5G C-Band),” the aviation regulator said in one document [PDF]. “[It will require] revising the limitations section of the existing airplane/aircraft flight manual to incorporate limitations prohibiting certain operations requiring radio altimeter data when in the presence of 5G C-Band interference.” It’s likely that airports that have or will have C-band base stations will be affected. Rollout for AT&T so-called 5G+ technology and Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband platform has been slow. Both network carriers have agreed to delay deployment to give the FAA more time to deal with safety issues. The services were initially due to be up and running this month. “Although the FAA has determined the operations immediately at risk are those requiring a radio altimeter to land in low visibility conditions, a wide range of other automated safety systems rely on radio altimeter data,” the FAA added. “Harmful interference to the radio altimeter could cause these systems to operate in an unexpected way.” American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum 2033 is doomsday for 2G and 3G in the UK Tomorrow's wireless world will be fatter, faster, and creepier Phone jammers made my model plane smash into parked lorry, fumes hobbyist Flights to some destinations may not be available at certain times, depending on the weather, or they may be diverted more frequently. It’s unclear what changes the FAA will make yet; officials are still discussing the matter with the Federal Communications Commission as well as telcos, aerospace, and airline companies. “The FAA believes the expansion of 5G and aviation will safely co-exist,” it said in a statement. “The FAA is working closely with the Federal Communications Commission and wireless companies, and has made progress toward safely implementing the 5G expansion. We are confident with ongoing collaboration we will reach this shared goal.” ®
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The case, concerning a tuition program in Maine, seemed likely to extend a winning streak at the court for parents seeking public funds for religious education.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021, 5:15 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed ready to take another step in requiring states to pay for religious education, with a majority of the justices indicating that they would not allow Maine to exclude religious schools from a state tuition program.The court has said that states may choose to provide aid to religious schools along with other private schools. The question in the new case was the opposite: Can states refuse to provide such aid if it is made available to other private schools?Maine requires rural communities without public secondary schools to arrange for their young residents’ educations in one of two ways. They can sign contracts with nearby public schools, or they can pay tuition at a private school chosen by parents so long as it is, in the words of state law, “a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”Two families in Maine that send or want to send their children to religious schools challenged the law, saying it violated their right to freely exercise their faith.Religious people and groups have been on a winning streak at the Supreme Court, which seemed likely to continue in the new case. In recent decisions, the justices have ruled against restrictions on attendance at religious gatherings to address the coronavirus pandemic and Philadelphia’s attempt to bar a Catholic agency that refused to work with same-sex couples from screening potential foster parents.The court also ruled that the Trump administration could allow employers with religious objections to deny contraception coverage to female workers and that employment discrimination laws do not apply to many teachers at religious schools.The point of Maine’s law, said Christopher C. Taub, a lawyer for the state, was to provide something resembling a public school education to young people in remote areas. “That is the benefit at issue here: a free public education,” he said. “That private schools are sometimes enlisted to deliver the benefit is of no constitutional significance.”Justice Elena Kagan said Maine’s program sought to solve a distinct problem.“This is really a default program for a very small number of students living in isolated areas where the state has decided it does not have the resources to provide public schools,” she said.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked whether the program allowed parents to use state money for tuition at elite private boarding schools in other states but not at local religious ones.Mr. Taub said yes. “An Andover or a Phillips Exeter may be different from Bangor Public High School in many different ways,” he said. “But what they share in common is the most important feature, which is that they are not inculcating religion.”The case, Carson v. Makin, No. 20-1088, was broadly similar to one from Montana decided by the court last year. In that case, the court ruled that states must allow religious schoo
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Senate Democrats on Wednesday narrowly confirmed Rachael Rollins to be U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts, making her the first Black woman to become the state’s top federal law enforcement official.The vote was so tight for Rollins that Vice President Kamala Harris had to come in to break a 50-50 tie. Every Republican voted against her confirmation.It is extremely unusual for a U.S. attorney nominee to generate so much opposition. For some context, all 29 of President Joe Biden’s previously confirmed U.S. attorneys were confirmed in unanimous voice votes.But every Republican lined up against Rollins. Why?Rollins, who is currently the district attorney in Boston and a former
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The variant will change the risk landscape for the vaccinated. The question is, how much?Getty; The AtlanticDecember 8, 2021, 5:15 PM ETAnd there it is, the first trickle of data to confirm it. In the
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Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has entered negotiations to settle a class-action lawsuit over the game’s bungled launch. There are still a number of outstanding questions about any potential settlement, according to court documents, including all class certification requirements, the proposed allocation plan for the settlement fund, and how the settlement will be administered. In other words, it’s undecided exactly who will be eligible for anything awarded in a settlement or how much those eligible parties may receive. The plaintiffs in the case must next file a preliminary approval of the settlement or an update on its status by January 13th, 2022. Four lawsuits against the
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The golfer, who is still recovering from a serious car crash in February, has not competed in a tournament since he and his son, Charlie, last played in the family team event a year ago.Credit...Mike Ehrmann/Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2021Updated 5:10 p.m. ETLast week, Tiger Woods was emphatic that he would never again be a full-time player on the PGA Tour because of the serious leg injuries he sustained in a high-speed car crash in February. But Woods conceded that he could “play a round here and there,” which he called, “a little hit and giggle.”Woods is not waiting long to make an informal, and public, return to a golf course. On Wednesday, he announced he would play in a family team tournament with his son, Charlie, on Dec. 18 and 19. The event, the PNC Championship, has a small limited field — it was once called a father/son tournament — and will be contested at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in Orlando, Fla.“Although it’s been a long and challenging year,” Woods, whose doctors considered amputating his right leg 10 months ago, wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “I’m very excited to close it out by competing at the @PNC Championship with my son Charlie. I’m playing as a Dad and couldn’t be more excited and proud.”Although it’s been a long and challenging year, I am very excited to close it out by competing in the @PNCchampionship with my son Charlie. I’m playing as a Dad and couldn’t be more excited and proud.— Tiger Woods (@TigerWoods) December 8, 2021 Woods, who turns 46 on Dec. 30, has not played in a tournament of any kind since he entered the 2020 PNC Championship with Charlie, who is now 12, roughly a year ago. The duo finished seventh. Shortly afterward, Woods had a fifth back surgery that sidelined him for the next few months.The PNC Championship’s 36-hole team format should make it easier for Woods to avoid placing too much stress on his lower right leg, which was reconstructed by doctors using a rod, screws and pins during emergency surgery following his crash outside Los Angeles on Feb. 23. Each player in a pairing will begin a hole by hitting from the tee and players will then pick which tee shot is most advantageous to play. Both players hit a second shot from that spot, a process that is repeated until the hole is finished.Importantly for Woods, there will be only two 18-hole rounds rather than the usual four rounds on the PGA Tour and players can use golf carts driven within a few feet of a player’s ball. On the tour, golfers are required to walk.The players will also play from different sets of tees, which means Charlie Woods will play from the forward tees and often make his father’s tee shots, which will be struck from much farther away, unnecessary. While Tiger Woods was hitting golf balls at a practice range during last week’s World Hero Challenge, a PGA Tour event he hosted in the Bahamas, he also made several jokes about how his shots were traveling about half the distance they once did because he lacked strength and the nerves in his right leg were diminished. From 2018 to 2020, Woods averaged about 299 yards in driving distance during tour events.In last year’s PNC Championship, Woods s
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Joe Montemurro, the Juventus manager, scored a rare success in his battle with Chelsea counterpart, Emma Hayes, as the Italian side earned a Champions League point at Kingsmeadow, where Sam Kerr was booked for shoving over a pitch invader.“I don’t know why he didn’t wait to the end, he could have got a picture then,” a somewhat bemused Hayes said of the encroacher who tried to take a selfie with Chelsea’s captain, Magda Eriksson. “In all serious, we’ve got to think about player welfare and safety.”Hayes praised the resilience of her team in taking a point despite failing to sco
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Lawyers delivered their closing arguments on Wednesday in Jussie Smollett’s criminal trial where the former Empire actor is facing charges that he lied to Chicago police about an attack in 2019.Smollett denies the charges.Special prosecutor Dan Webb told the jury on Wednesday the evidence against Smollett is “overwhelming”, and that what he did in January 2019 caused Chicago police to spend enormous amounts of time and resources investigating an alleged crime that turned out to be fake.Smollett, who is Black and gay, told police someone put a noose around his neck and yelled racist and h
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In selecting a Manchester United XI that may never again play together due to its blend of fringe and senior squad members requiring game-time, Ralf Rangnick will have pleased all fielded while gleaning precious information regarding his new squad.Heading the file is how Mason Greenwood sparkled with a spectacular opener and was at ease executing the high press Rangnick demands. There were debuts, too, for the 35-year-old Tom Heaton and youngsters Zidane Iqbal and Charlie Savage, each 18. The German, though, was less enamoured of the way Donny van de Beek dozed to allow Young Boys an equaliser and the general sloppiness he observed.Rangnick, who changed all 11 players, said: “What was really annoying was the way we gave a goal away because we played too many balls into the first line of their pressing area.”United had already qualified as Group F winners and although victory was, of course, sought, this was a second satisfying match in charge for Rangnick before Saturday’s trip to Norwich. In Monday’s draw for the last 16 United can be paired with only six teams: Atlético Madrid, RB Salzburg, Sporting Lisbon, Internazionale, Benfica and Paris Saint-Germain.Amad Diallo, positioned on the right in Rangnick’s attacking trident, scuffed an early chance when clear in on Guillaume Faivre’s goal. The Ivorian, 19, was soon shown how by the lethal Greenwood. This was fluid from United as Anthony Elanga fed Luke Shaw who wheeled along the left, flipped the ball into the area, and the centre-forward spun 180 degrees in the air to smack home a scissor-kick that, sweetly, eliminated Faivre as a factor.“Technically, I have no worries,” said Rangnick of Greenwood. “Today he also showed, not only because of that beautiful goal, that he’s a massive talent: left foot, right foot, good on the ball, also the way that he set up the goal for Fred on Sunday [versus Palace]. Still, it’s about continuity, he has to develop physically but technically, for his age, he is a great player. My job is to develop him, to make an athlete out of him, and if he manages to do that can be a regular player for this club.”Amad Diallo provided some threat with his speed but overall it was a lacklustre Manchester United performance. Photograph: Eurasia Sport Images/Getty ImagesRangnick, dismayed at any possession being lost via errant passing, was hardly content when Eric Bailly did so and thus the German offered the centre-back a stern stare. The 63-year-old was happier with an arcing Juan Mata diagonal that cleared Young Boys defence and which Jesse Lingard’s deft touch pulled from the air though when Shaw took over the referee, Benoit Bastien, inadvertently blocked the left-back, much to the home crowd’s chagrin.Greenwood’s class was next evident when he muscled in from the left all the way into the area and laid off to Mata who, again, lacked the killer touch.Yet the measure of how easy this all was for United was illustrated in Fabian Lustenberger, the visiting captain, smashing a regulation 15-yard pass out. Rangnick’s men were cruising until nonchalance cost them: Van de Beek was too casual when passing to Wan-Bissaka – who ended as an injury
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The Biden administration will return land that was seized from a Texas family to build a border wall with Mexico, according to a court filing Tuesday, ending the family’s years-long legal battle against the federal government.The government claimed the 6.5 acres of land located along the Rio Grande river in Mission, Texas, via eminent domain in 2018. It wasn’t legally seized until earlier this year, despite legal objections by owner Eloisa Cavazos and her family.“It’s been in our family for generations,” Cavazos’ sister, Baudila Cavazos Rodriguez, told HuffPost on Wednesday. Rodriguez said the land was first owned by her grandmother and passed on to her father when he returned from serving in World War II. Her brother and sister today make a living by renting small houses on it to vacationers who enjoy boating and fishing on the river.“That’s kind of their livelihood. We were afraid we were going to lose all that because of the wall,” she said.The family had been offered $347,887 in compensation for the property so that a wall could be built with the purpose of keeping migrants from crossing into the U.S. without authorization.Properties on both sides of that belonging to the Cavazos family was readily developed for this purpose, Rodriguez said, with walls erected to the east and west of their property. One of the walls, which was privately funded by an organization related to Steve Bannon — the former chief strategist to President Donald Trump who is currently charged with contempt of Congress — was built directly on the banks of the Rio Grande and is already eroding, she said. “For us, it’s a useless waste of money that could be used for better things,” Rodriguez said of the wall, which Trump sought $5.7 billion to erect as part of a 2016 campaign promise. “Growing up, we saw people crossing the river but it was people who were seeking a better life, it was never what they say in the news, that it’s dangerous people or things like that. We were always taught to treat people the same.”Erosion damage caused by Hurricane Hanna is seen near portions of a privately funded border fence along the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas, in July 2020.via Associated PressIn April, the federal government took immediate possession of the land through a federal court ruling, despite President Joe Biden signing a proclamation on his first day in office ― just three months earlier ― that paused construction on all border walls. Like Rodriguez, Biden called the wall a “waste of money” and “not a serious policy solution.” But his administration failed to withdraw from or ask to dismiss more than 100 eminent domain cases, Politico reported in April, leading to the government taking possession of the family’s land this spring.Fortunately, Rodriguez said, the government had not yet touched the land. She credited the Texas Civil Rights Project, which provided legal representation for the family and some of the others whose land was seized, with helping keep their fight alive.“Sometimes I think that they do this to poor land owners who can’t afford high- priced lawyers and it doesn’t happen to other people that can p
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Game over. The delusions of grandeur can now finally be laid to rest. The years of feast are over and the years of famine are at hand. Barcelona are now a Europa League team, and in many ways this trouncing in the Munich snow merely confirmed what we have already long known about them.Whatever Barcelona once knew, they have forgotten; whatever they once had, they have lost. This club’s enormous debt can be measured not just in cash but in expertise, in talent, in pure footballing instinct.The house was already crumbling. We knew that too. And yet every passing month brings fresh indignities. Barcelona have already experienced the flash sales, the half-empty stadiums, the 8-2 against Bayern, losing the greatest player of all time for free and replacing him with Luuk de Jong.In terms of La Liga points they are closer to Levante in 20th place than Real Madrid in first. But elimination from the Champions League group stage – for the first time in 21 years – felt like another critical watershed: a second-tier competition for a second-rate club.There will be tangible, short-term consequences. Barcelona’s finances –already around £1.2 billion in the red – will take another monstrous hit. Their chances of attracting fresh players in January have also receded. But perhaps the biggest blow is to their sense of self.“Today is the start of a new chapter for us,” Xavi admitted. “We have to start demanding a lot more of ourselves. We must use this as a turning point to change many things. We are going to face this reality with all the dignity in the world and work to bring Barça back to where we deserve to be, which is not the Europa League. It really annoys me to face our reality. I am angry. Barça does not deserve this.”And yet going into this game they still held out faint hope. A win here, or anything other than a Benfica win against Dynamo Kiev, would do the trick.And yet both their lottery tickets were effectively shredded within the space of 45 minutes, as Benfica ran into an early 2-0 lead in Lisbon and Bayern eased into a two-goal lead of their own despite never really seeming to get out of third gear.Already qualified, Bayern had vowed to be ruthless. And in the absence of Leon Goretzka and Joshua Kimmich this was very close to Julian Nagelsmann’s strongest starting XI. It took them about 20 minutes to work out Barcelona’s lop-sided 4-3-3, and before long their celebrated front four were feasting on the open spaces behind the full-backs, running at defenders who looked not just outmatched but downright scared.Thomas Müller celebrates giving Bayern the lead with a looping header. Photograph: Andreas Gebert/ReutersThis was the pattern for the first goal: a simple ball in behind from Leroy Sané, Robert Lewandowski toying with the creaking Gerard Pique before crossing for Thomas Müller to score with a looping header. Lewandowski and Bayern have done this to far better teams than Barcelona, of course, but there was a sort of sadism to them here, brought into sharp relief by the paucity of Barcelona’s ambition.This much was evident late in the first half, when Ousmane Dembélé ran forlornly at the Bayern defence, pursue
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This is not uncommon. Software packaging is a nightmare. And when you’re trading financial instruments from market open to market close, you don’t want to have to constantly worry about the compatibility matrix of “oh sorry we upgraded to RHEL 8 which comes with Python 3.6(8?) so every trading desk has to rewrite their code and make sure it works with the new OS”.So yeah. We manage third party repositories with various changes we require to help make our software more independent of the OS.Even Linus talks about how Linux sucks at software packaging. Don’t blame the banks. This is just a symptom of the underlying problem.
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A new study out Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, suggests that grandmothers relate to their grandchildren differently than they do to their own offspring. (Sorry, parents: That suspicion you’ve
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The ProjectionistThe ratings flop that was the last ceremony provided useful lessons in what not to do. But there are steps the academy can take for an actually enjoyable evening.Credit...Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2021Updated 4:56 p.m. ETHis client was having a great night. He should have been thrilled. But on the last Sunday night in April, as this year’s dire Oscar ceremony continued to deflate, a top Hollywood representative texted me about the “beyond terrible” show and fretted, “The entire country has tuned out.”Later, as the ceremony entered an even worse final act that included a flop-sweat comedy bit and a bungled best-actor reveal, I got another text from him:
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The select committee investigating the Capitol riot said it would prepare a criminal contempt of Congress referral against Mark Meadows, who was President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff on Jan. 6.
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One word provides the comfort of continuity to James Bond fans, and perhaps elicits confusion or a chuckle from anyone else watching: Broccoli. But the vegetable that graces the beginning of nearly every Bond movie isn’t a reference to the unfairly demonized cabbage variant. Rather, it signifies the family that has had a unique relationship with the franchise since its earliest days on the big screen. In a new profile for The Hollywood Reporter, the family’s second-generation leader, Barabra Broccoli, opens up about what it was like growing up Bond as well as her hopes for the franchise in a post-Daniel Craig world. For starters, she wants No Time to Die’s Cary Fukunaga back. “We love Cary. He’s done an exceptional job,” she says. “I don’t have any idea whether he’d do another one. I think he did this because he wanted a challenge, and he sure pulled it off. But I’m not sure if he’d do another one. We’d love to work with him again.” The latest Bond film, Daniel Craig’s last, proved the relevance of the long-lasting spy franchise Photo: Nicola Dove/MGM For his part, Fukunaga told THR that he had “never worked with producers that were so creatively involved,” but working with the Broccoli family came part in parcel with a Bond picture, considering how “this is their baby.” Broccoli’s father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, didn’t invent James Bond — that was British writer Ian Fleming. But Cubby, a movie producer in the 1950s, quickly realized the movie potential of Fleming’s spy novels, which had been coming out to mostly critical praise and rising commercial success throughout the decade. He formed a partnership with another producer, Harry Saltzman to create two Bond-related companies: the first was Danjaq, which held the rights to Bond books, and the second was Eon Productions, short for the Bond-like “Everything or nothing,” which turned the books into films. Barbara Broccoli first entered the Eon world when she was just six years old. Her first memories were watching tea ceremonies on
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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) baselessly claimed this week that unvaccinated individuals are “basically” being put in “internment camps” abroad, downplaying the risk of an unvaccinated population in the face of the new, seemingly highly transmissible, omicron coronavirus variant.Johnson, who frequents talk radio shows in his home state of Wisconsin to fear-monger about COVID-19 vaccines, said it’s not “irrational” to forgo a coronavirus vaccine, basing his arguments on outdated, incomplete and often misleading data on death rates and vaccine side effects.“We are demonizing [unvaccinated] people,” Johnson said in an interview with Janesville-based radio station WCLO Tuesday. “Around the world, they’re putting them basically into internment camps.”Johnson went on to say that government officials and the media are suppressing and censoring the “truth” about the COVID-19 vaccines.According to his staff, Johnson was referring to Australia — namely, the country’s strict travel quarantine rules — when comparing the treatment of the unvaccinated to the U.S. incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. To be clear, Australia isn’t interning the unvaccinated. But the accusation does track with something conservative activist Charlie Kirk has also
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NATO promised Ukraine full membership in 2008, but without explaining how or when. Putin sees that promise as an ongoing threat to Russia.Credit...Gints Ivuskans/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2021Updated 3:10 p.m. ETBRUSSELS — Ukraine presents NATO with a dilemma many years in the making — one the alliance, itself, helped create.In 2008, NATO — an American-led alliance explicitly created to counter the Soviet Union — promised membership to two former Soviet republics, Ukraine and Georgia, but without specifying when or how.Russia saw the offer as a potential threat on its borders and an encroachment into the heart of its sphere of influence, the most serious in a series of affronts and humiliations by the West since the fall of the Soviet Union. From the outset, some NATO nations questioned whether the offer of membership was a wise move, and it is not clear that the promise will ever be kept, but predictably, it has fed a lasting conflict with President Vladimir V. Putin.With Ukraine a NATO partner but not a member, it does not benefit from NATO’s core principle, the commitment to collective defense, though Ukraine has sent troops to fight in NATO missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan.So, as thousands of Russian troops mass on Ukraine’s borders, NATO is not bound by treaty to protect Ukraine militarily, nor is it likely to try, but it has a compelling interest in trying both to deter Russia and avoid provoking an invasion.“It is important to distinguish between NATO allies and partner Ukraine,” Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, said last week. “NATO allies, there we provide collective defense guarantees,’’ while “Ukraine is a partner, a highly valued partner.”But what does NATO owe such a highly valued partner?“The question that NATO faces at its core is how it maintains the credibility of the alliance,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. For all its closeness to NATO, he said, Ukraine is not a member, so “how do you still guarantee its independence and sovereignty?”ImageCredit...Gleb Garanich/ReutersMarta Dassu, a former Italian
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Searching for nuance at a pivotal moment in the abortion debateChip Somodevilla / GettyDecember 8, 2021, 4:35 PM ETAbout the author: Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs, and the author of the Up for Debate newsletter. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction. Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Conversations of NoteAbortion has been discussed intensely this past week due to oral arguments in a Supreme Court case that could significantly alter the constitutional right to the procedure in the United States. At issue is a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, contra current precedent. If upheld, the law will likely inspire new abortion restrictions in many red states.The Legal FightWe begin with the law’s sponsor, Becky Currie, a Mississippi state legislator and registered nurse. “I pray my bill will save millions of babies,” she wrote in Newsweek, where she explained that she’s helped to deliver many, including a 14-week-old born too early to survive. “I stayed with the mother and baby, watching his heart continue to beat in his tiny chest for about 20 minutes,” she recounted. “Preborn babies can feel pain by 15 weeks,” she argued, noting that many countries protect them at 12 weeks. She wants SCOTUS to take what she characterizes as “a monumental step to limit abortions and protect preborn life by restoring the constitutional protections that long existed in our nation until the disastrous decision in Roe v. Wade.”The Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen framed the law differently. In her telling, it is not an attempt to restore a right to life; it is an attempt to abrogate a constitutional right to privacy and bodily autonomy. “The conservative Justices seemed eager to ‘return’ the question of abortion to the people,” she wrote after listening to oral arguments in the case. “But the point of a fundamental constitutional right is that it shouldn’t be at the people’s mercy, particularly when the composition of the Court itself has been shifted through polit
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Climate|Biden Orders Federal Vehicles and Buildings to Use Renewable Energy by 2050https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/climate/biden-government-carbon-neutral.htmlThe federal government would stop buying gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 and its buildings would be powered by wind, solar or other carbon-free electricity by 2050.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021Updated 4:32 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Biden unveiled a plan on Wednesday to make the federal government carbon neutral, ordering federal agencies to buy electric vehicles, to power facilities with wind, solar and nuclear energy, and to use sustainable building materials.In a series of executive orders, Mr. Biden directed the government to transform its 300,000 buildings, 600,000 cars and trucks, and use its annu
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During a hearing before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company is working on a version of its feed that would show users' posts in chronological order, unlike its current ranking algorithm that sorts posts based on user preferences. The company’s algorithmically sorted feed, introduced in 2016, and then updated in 2017 to include recommended posts, is widely disliked by users who prefer to have their posts and their friends’ posts surface in a timely manner. The current feed uses AI to create what Instagram considers a more personalized feed, based on users’ activity. But it has remained generally unpopular among a vast swath of users, despite the company’s assertions otherwise. Mosseri appeared before the Senate subcommittee where he wa
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Sienna Miller believes details of her 2005 pregnancy were obtained by the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, using “blatantly unlawful means”, a court has heard. Miller also believes phone hacking was practised by journalists at Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid newspaper.“I was told at the end of July 2005, by my friend and publicist, that Rebekah Brooks had found out that I was pregnant,” said Miller, in an excerpt from a draft statement read out by her lawyer at the high court.Miller said her pregnancy was then at a very early stage but Brooks knew about it before the actor had even been able to tell close family and friends.The court heard that Miller believes that her medical records were obtained by a “blagger” employed by Sun journalist Nick Parker before being passed to Brooks.When the story eventually became public, Miller said she felt the “the Sun took away her choice” in how to approach the pregnancy, the court heard.There has been no admission or finding of any wrongdoing on behalf of the Sun or any of those named.Miller, who flew in from Los Angeles for the phone-hacking hearing at the high court on Wednesday, said she had wanted to take the Sun to
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And even throws in a new trailer. Kratos is making the leap from PlayStation to PC early next year as 2018's acclaimed God of War heads to the platform - and in anticipation of its arrival, Sony has released a new trailer showing the PC version in action, alongside details of the enhancements it'll bring.God of War 2018, if you're unfamiliar, reunites with Kratos some time after his reckoning with the gods of Olympus. It's all change as the game begins; not only has our protagonist gained a big bushy beard and slightly mellower demeanour in the interim (not to mention, got himself a son), he's swapped the opulence of Ancient Greece for colder climes, living a quieter life in the snow-ravaged realm of the Norse Gods.Inevitably, things soon go awry and Kratos, with son in tow, is forced to embark on yet another epic adventure - enchanted axe in hand and rowboat paddle at the ready - stretching across God of War's meticulously designed semi open-world, and into at least some of the Nine Realms. God of War - PC Features Trailer. PC players will get all the good stuff of the original PlayStation game when God of War hits the platform on 14th January, alongside a couple of newly detailed platform-specific enhancements.There's nothing here you'd necessarily describe as transformative - in keeping with the relatively gentle enhancements previous PlayStation offerings Days Gone and Horizon Zero Dawn received in the transition to PC - but for those with appropriate GPUs, there's support for Nvidia's DLSS and Reflex technology, plus AMD's FidelityFX S
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WASHINGTON ― Republicans have been inaccurately deflecting criticism of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s anti-Muslim attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) by claiming Omar never faced consequences for her own controversial comments.“On the Democrat side they want to only go after Republicans,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Wednesday. “They don’t even ask their own members to apologize for things that were said, let alone go after their members. They want it to be a one-sided thing.”Scalise’s comment echoed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Friday. “Did anyone on your side of the aisle talk about when Omar said, ‘The only reason I support Israel is about the Benjamins’? I never got a public apology or phone call,” he said.These claims are not true.In February 2019, in response to a story about McCarthy vowing to “take action” against Omar for her anti-Israel views, the Minnesota Democrat tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” using a rap lyric to imply that campaign contributions control lawmakers’ support for the Jewish state. The tweet caused an immediate uproar, with Democratic leaders condemning Omar in a statement.“​​Legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies is protected by the values of free speech and democratic debate that the United States and Israel share,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a joint statement with her leadership team. “But Congresswoman Omar’s use of an
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THE ONION ROUTER — Tor Project leaders disconnect rogue nodes and call on volunteers to bypass censorship. The Tor anonymity service and anticensorship tool has come under fire from two threats in recent weeks: The Russian government has blocked most Tor nodes in that country, and hundreds of malicious servers have been relaying traffic. Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media, kno
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ImageCredit...Hannah Beier/ReutersMore than 200 million Americans — over 60 percent of the population — have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.The United States crossed that milestone as the threat of the Omicron variant spurred a flurry of jabs in recent days, though the daily rate remains far below its peak in April. And the U.S. lags significantly behind several other countries, which have inoculated over 80 percent of their populations.Providers are administering about 1.78 million doses per day on average, including first, second and additional doses, about a 47 percent de
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The US government will be a net zero contributor to the climate crisis by 2050 by slashing the planet-heating emissions from its operations and transitioning to an all-electric fleet of cars and trucks, according to a new executive order signed by Joe Biden.The federal government is the largest land owner, energy consumer and employer in the US and it will “lead by example in tackling the climate crisis”, the White House said, by eliminating greenhouse gases from its activities.Under the order signed by Biden on Wednesday, the government will cut its emissions by 65% by the end of this dec
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Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools. Apple works with developers around the world to create, contribute, and release open source code. Featured open source projects Many Apple products and services are built on open source software. Explore some of the projects we lead and contribute to below. View all projects C++, Swift, JavaScript Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using a modern approach to safety, performance, and software design patterns. Go Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of contain
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Apple says it will produce a movie about former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, with Jennifer Lawrence of Hunger Games fame in the starring role. The movie, to be directed by Succession creator Adam McKay, will be based on the bestselling book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. He wrote the first news stories detailing Theranos’ problems, even as the company and Holmes were being lauded in Silicon Valley. Holmes is currently on trial facing 11 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud after it was discovered that Theranos’ blood testing technology didn’t meet the standards it claimed to investors. At the time of its unraveling, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, and Holmes was labeled the you
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The number of Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19 reached 200 million Wednesday amid a dispiriting holiday-season spike in cases and hospitalizations that has hit even New England, one of the most highly inoculated corners of the country.New cases in the U.S. climbed from an average of nearly 95,000 a day on Nov. 22 to almost 119,000 a day this week, and hospitalizations are up 25% from a month ago. The increases are due almost entirely to the delta variant, though the omicron mutation has been detected in about 20 states and is sure to spread even more.Deaths are running close to 1,600 a day on average, back up to where they were in October. And the overall U.S. death toll less than two years into the crisis could hit another heartbreaking milestone, 800,
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The research may help explain why people who are overweight and obese have been at higher risk of severe illness and death from Covid.Credit...Nanographics, via ReutersDec. 8, 2021, 4:05 p.m. ETFrom the start of the pandemic, the coronavirus seemed to target people carrying extra pounds. Patients who were overweight or obese were more likely to develop severe Covid-19 and more likely to die.Though these patients often have health conditions like diabetes that compound their risk, scientists have become increasingly convinced that their vulnerability has something to do with obesity itself.Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune cells within body fat, prompting a damaging defensive response in the body.“The bottom line is, ‘Oh my god, in
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Flashing LEDs are all well and good, but they’re even better if they can sync up with ambient sounds or music. [mircemk] has built the LUMAZOID visualizer to do just that, relying on some staple maker components to do so. The build is open-source, and designed to work with strings of 60, 120, or 180 WS2812B LEDs. An Arduino Nano is charged with running the show, capturing audio via its analog-to-digital converter. A sensitivity pot enables the input level to be set appropriately. From there, a Fast Fourier Transform is taken, providing data on the intensity of the audio in various frequency bins. The LUMAZOID can be set up to respond to just bass or to all frequencies as a whole. This data is then used to pulse the LEDs in time with the beat. It’s a fun project that
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CareRev, a 100% remote company, is bringing the future of work to Healthcare. We are developing a robust marketplace that connects trusted Healthcare professionals to relevant per diem shift opportunities. We are working to change the traditional relationship between Healthcare professionals and Healthcare facilities alike, aiming to build a future that ensures people who work in Healthcare have better tools and are empowered to be the healers they want to be. What You’ll Do as a iOS Engineer at CareRev is work closely with our mobile development team to build a cohesive experience for our users both internally and externally. You will also participate in the full app life-cycle from design, build, deploy, test and release to play store, having a significant impact on our mob
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LAS VEGAS (AP) — Attorneys for entertainer Flavor Flav said Wednesday he’s working to stay sober following dismissal of a misdemeanor domestic battery charge stemming from a scuffle with his girlfriend at home in suburban Las Vegas.The 62-year-old former rapper, hip-hop and reality TV star, whose legal name is William Jonathan Drayton Jr., pleaded no contest in Henderson Municipal Court to a nonviolent misdemeanor coercion charge, admitted he took a cellphone, and paid $640 in fines, a court official and his defense attorneys said.“Mr. Drayton and his family are grateful to bring an amicable close to this matter and appreciate everyone’s support as he continues his one-year journey of sobriety,” defense attorneys David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld said in a statement.Drayton wa
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Thanks to the work of a clever game developer, we no longer have to imagine how Chris Pratt would sound as the voice of Mario. No, this isn’t any official voice reveal for the Mario role that Pratt is supposedly working so hard on. It’s a goofy and somewhat annoying Super Mario Bros. remake that adds Pratt’s voice into the classic game. The game is called Chris Pratt is Super Mario, and you can play it for free in your browser right now. Created by Woe Industries, the game adds in a bunch of exclamations voiced by Pratt. Each action has its own voice line; for example, when you die, you’ll hear Pratt say, “That’s super disappointing.” When Mario jumps, Pratt says, “Jumping jacks!” (If you keep jumping, then you’ll just hear Pratt shout over and over and over ... It
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Enlarge / The official Stadia Controller in "clearly white."Google In arguably the first good news for Stadia in 2021, Google's beleaguered game-streaming service has finally landed on a single company's TVs—and only those manufactured in 2020 and beyond. That's not necessarily a reason to strike up the band and throw a "Stadia is back" party (especially without any exclusive Stadia games on the horizon.) But the gaming service's arrival on modern LG televisions late Tuesday is still fascinating, mostly because of how neatly and seamlessly it works. The results make me wonder how much better the Stadia story might have turned out if app support like this had been in place from the start. Got any extra-long USB cables lying around
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For some reason, people won’t just let Jennifer Aniston live her best childfree life, drinking Smartwater, lathering up with Aveeno and cashing “Friends” residual checks in peace.As long as Aniston has been in the public eye, there’s been obsessive speculation about when she plans to settle down and start a family ― be it with Brad Pitt or Justin Theroux ― despite her repeatedly telling everyone to mind their business.But at least she’s stopped taking the “just nasty” pregnancy rumors personally, as the star candidly reflected on the pressures she has faced to have children in a Hollywood Reporter cover story published on Wednesday.“People certainly project onto you and all that, but my job is to go, ‘Listen, I’ll show you what I’m capable of, and you decide if yo
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A troubling buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border has Kyiv, Washington, and pretty much everyone else asking if Russia is about to invade Ukraine — again. The US and its allies, including Ukraine, are trying to forestall that scenario, most recently in a two-hour video call Tuesday between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the call, Biden told Putin the “US and our allies would respond with strong economic and other measures” if Russia pursued military escalation, according to the White House, and called for a return to diplomacy. To be clear, a military option is not among the “other measures,” as Biden said Wednesday sending US troops unilaterally was “not in the cards right now.” The Kremlin’s readout largely blamed Ukraine
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The Metropolitan police has said it will not investigate the Downing Street Christmas party widely reported to have been held last year.In a much awaited statement, the force said it had a policy of not retrospectively investigating alleged breaches of coronavirus laws.But policing and prosecution sources told the Guardian there was no reason in law for police not to investigate, and essentially the Met’s decision was a choice. A former Met police chief said the force was acting as judge and jury.Labour MPs had written to the Met asking for an investigation days ago, as pressure exploded after an ITV News video surfaced of No 10 aides joking about the party held at a time when many believed the rule forbade it.The Met said: “The Metropolitan Police Service has received a significant am
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Peter CoyDec. 8, 2021, 3:32 p.m. ETCredit...The New York Times; Photography by oculo/Getty ImagesThere is a chance — not a likelihood, but a chance — that the decision the Supreme Court reaches on abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will be confusing, inconsistent and even paradoxical. If so, it might not be the fault of the court. It could be because of an inherent problem in voting procedures — all possible voting procedures.The risk of a paradoxical decision is explained by a branch of economics called social choice theory, for which the economist Kenneth Arrow was awarded a Nobel in economic science in 1972. Arrow’s big idea was that no system for ranking preferences that satisfies basic criteria for consistency and fairness can guarantee that it won’t produce nonsensical results.In Dobbs, such a voting paradox could occur. David S. Cohen, a professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law, recently described for me a hypothetical situation — an unlikely one, he stressed — in which it would.The justices must answer three questions: Is Mississippi’s ban on almost all abortions after 15 weeks constitutional? Does Roe v. Wade require the ban to be found unconstitutional? And should Roe be upheld?As Cohen noted, it is possible for most of the justices to conclude that Mississippi’s ban is constitutional and for most of them to conclude that Roe requires the ban to be found unconstitutional — positions that in combination would say that Roe must be overturned — yet for most of them to conclude that Roe must be upheld.This diagram illustrates what that result could look like.ImageCredit...The New York TimesSo that could be
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The idea of turning J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings into a live-action feature film eluded filmmakers for decades. Then, when Peter Jackson finally accomplished the near-impossible — adapting the books, securing the money, realizing Tolkien’s vivid detail in every set and prop — he began the real challenge: selling audiences on his epic trilogy. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. This is Polygon's Year of the Ring. The hype was already real by the time promotion for The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring ramped up. In April 2000, the internet-exclusive trailer for Fellowship was downloaded from Apple Trailers 1.7 million times in its first 24 hours, breaking a record sent by Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. (Although compare that to the present-day record: Spider-Man: No Way Home’s first trailer, released in August and viewed 355.5 million times in the first 24 hours.) But by May of 2001, the time had come to re-assemble the fellowship ... for many, many, many step-and-repeat red carpet opportunities. Photographic evidence of the high-stakes press gauntlet for Fellowship suggests that Elijah Wood, Ian McKellan, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, and Liv Tyler (bringing some much needed femininity to the red carpet bro-out) had a decent time flying around the world to preach the blockbuster word. Or to quote McKellan’s blog from the time,
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Choosing what to read is both a small decision and one of utmost importance. For students, that choice is crucial in getting kids to read at all. Some books feel like magic, world-making and unforgettable. Some feel dangerous, upsetting. Many inspire both feelings, especially in young people. Reading is meant to be challenging, and literature should serve as a way to explore ideas that feel unthinkable, unfamiliar, and even illicit. So it is a matter of tremendous concern to witness government officials blatantly interfering with a free exchange of ideas within school libraries.Matt Krause, a Republican in the Texas House of Representatives, has gone hunting in public-school libraries for any books that might generate “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of [a student’s] race or sex.” In October, he distributed a watch list of 850 books. The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has in parallel called for a criminal investigation into the availability of “pornographic” books in public schools. What we’re witnessing is plainly a shakedown. And this week, a San Antonio school district pulled 414 books from its libraries in response to the ongoing pressure from Texas lawmakers and a vocal segment of angry parents to limit what children can choose to read.Many of the books in question are about sex, abortion, race, and sexuality. Some are nonfiction; others are novels. They span several decades in American publishing. They include Pulitzer Prize winners and beloved classics—and, yes, works by more than one Atlantic writer. Here is just a small sampling of the books that government officials in Texas really, really don’t want kids to read:• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson• How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi• The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, by Margaret Atwood• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates• Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates• The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan, by Jenny Nordberg• Reluctantly Alice, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor• Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides• Th
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Sony’s holding its Technology Day event to show off what it’s been working on in its R&D labs, and this year, we got some great visuals of tech the company’s been working on. Amidst the rehashes of the PS5’s haptics and 3D audio and a demo reel of Sony’s admittedly awesome displays for making virtual movie sets, we got to see a robot hand that Sony said could figure out grip strength depending on what it was picking up, a slightly dystopian-sounding “global sensing system,” and more. Perhaps the most interesting thing Sony showed off was a headset that featured OLED displays with “4K-per-inch” resolution. While the headset Sony used in its presentation was very clearly something intended for lab and prototype use, the specs Sony laid out for the panels were reminiscent of the rumors swirling around the PlayStation VR 2. This probably isn’t what the next PlayStation headset will look like. They don’t exactly line up, though; Sony said the headset it showed off was 8K, given the 4K display per eye, and the PS VR 2 will supposedly only be 4K overall with 2000 x 2040 pixels per eye. Still, it’s exciting that Sony is working on VR-focused panels
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Some of the Tory backbenchers looked furious. The others just appeared bewildered to have been fooled for so long. Taken for mugs, like the rest of the country. But they needn’t have been. After all, Boris Johnson was always going to be Boris Johnson. A liar is gonna lie. He speaks, he lies. He’s a man without moral authority who degrades and poisons everything with which he comes in contact. A sociopath whose main pleasures are self-preservation and laughing at those to whom he has a duty of care.There had been a few boos from the opposition benches and a silence from his own that Johnson tried to style out as he took his place for PMQs. But his eyes gave the game away. Bloodshot, furtive pinpricks. The tell-tale signs of the chancer who feels his world beginning to close in on him. Boris started with the non-apology.Let me get this straight, he said. A sure sign he was about to start lying. There again, breathing is also a sure sign Johnson is about to start lying. He was absolutely furious. But only that the video had been leaked. It would have been far better if its existence had never come to light. But now that it had, he was very, very angry with Naughty Allegra Stratton and her mates for undermining lockdown guidelines by being caught practising their excuses for a hypothetical Christmas party.Boris wasn’t angry about the party itself because that had never happened. It was just entirely coincidental Stratton had joked about a party on the same date as had been reported, had said she went home before the party that didn’t happen started and had appeared confused about how best to explain it. In the end she had settled on a cheese and wine party that wasn’t socially distanced. As a crap improviser, Allegra was up there with Boris himself.Within seconds we were on a mind-bending trip through the looking-glass as Johnson then announced there would be an investigation, headed by the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, into the party No 10 had spent a week saying hadn’t happened. And if it was found that the party that hadn’t happened had actually happened after all, then Boris would be sure to throw a few members at the bottom of the Downing Street
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Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesDec. 8, 2021, 3:20 p.m. ETSAN JOSE, Calif. — It lasted less than three weeks, centered on one person’s testimony and spanned topics such as financial projections, private jets, falsified documents and intimate partner abuse.On Wednesday, lawyers for Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing start-up Theranos, concluded their defense in her fraud trial. She was the final witness and, after spending seven days on the stand, her testimony ended abruptly on a question about justice.“You understand they were entitled to truthful answers about Theranos’s capabilities?” Robert Leach, an assistant U.S. attorney and a lead prosecutor, asked Ms. Holmes, referring to Theranos’s investors and patients who are at the heart of the case’s fraud charges.“Of course,” Ms. Holmes said.The end of her defense marked the final stages of a trial that has lasted nearly four months and captivated the public as a referendum on Silicon Valley’s start-up culture. Ms. Holmes, 37, faces 11 counts of fraud related to claims she made to investors and patients about Theranos, which collapsed in scandal in 2018.Next, lawyers from both sides of the case must agree on a set of jury instructions before delivering their closing arguments, which will begin Dec. 16. Then the jury will begin deliberations for a verdict in the case, which stands out because so few technology executives face criminal fraud charges. Who’s Who in the Elizabeth Holmes TrialErin Woo📍Reporting from San Jose, Calif.Who’s Who in the Elizabeth Holmes TrialErin Woo📍Reporting from San Jose, Calif.Carlos Chavarria for The New York TimesElizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the blood testing start-up Theranos, stands trial for two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud. Here are some of the key figures in the case → Ms. Holmes’s testimony made up the bulk of her defense. For seven days, she pointed blame at others for the failure of Theranos and its blood testing technology. She said that her words were misconstrued and that she had believed Theranos devi
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is slamming the recent Christmas photo made by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) that shows her family celebrating the holiday by posing with firearms.On Wednesday, the representative pointed out on Twitter that Jesus never endorsed guns in any of his teachings.“Tell me again where Christ said ‘use the commemoration of my birth to flex violent weapons for personal political gain’?” she asked rhetorically before slamming the GOP’s ongoing ”cultural hysteria of society ‘erasing Christmas and it’s meaning’ when they’re doing that fine all on
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The select committee investigating the Capitol riot said it would prepare a criminal contempt of Congress referral against Mark Meadows, who was President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff on Jan. 6.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDec. 8, 2021, 3:15 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said on Wednesday it would move forward with a criminal contempt of Congress referral against Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff for President Donald J. Trump, after he refused to appear for a scheduled deposition.“The select committee is
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The sound of my mother’s stainless-steel teapot clanking shut is always my signal that it’s time for chai. Chai has always been a part of my daily culture. As a child, I had the habit of walking around the kitchen table just to smell what was in my parents' cups.  There was something so intoxicating about that aroma—sweet and spicy, cozy and warm. I started drinking chai at a young age, mixed with plenty of milk when I was too young for the burst of caffeine; even today, when I am most definitely old enough to handle the straight-up version, it is the absolute anchor of my morning routine. In India, every family has a unique blend and the recipe is a deeply personal representation and tradition. My maternal grandmother's recipe is the one I cherish most. To celebrate my family’s blend, I created my own version of this special recipe: bursting with ginger and black pepper, and rounded out with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves.  The very first thing that we offer family and friends when we welcome them into our home is a cup of chai. It is the perfect mix of typical and special: a warm and homey greeting. As we wait for the chai to steep, we typically set out savory snacks, called farsan (in Gujarati) and namkeen (in Hindi). We place the various snacks on a big plate next to the chai for munching and sipping while visiting; there's no fancy china or elaborate table setting, but just good food, a hot drink, and loving company. Because chai is typically served sweetened, a salty snack is the perfect accompaniment and adds balance. My favorite of these salty snacks typically include cheese. During my visits to India, when chai was both a morning and afternoon ritual, I would jump for joy when my aunt would pull both paneer and white cheese from the fridge to make an afternoon snack to munch on. It felt like an acknowledgement of the blend of my Indian and American roots—and besides that, it was just so tasty. As a nod to my aunt, and a combination of my favorite snacks to eat with chai (chili cheese toast and cheese corn toast), I
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poly-lt-wire-logo Devil’s Reign brings the best of Daredevil to the rest of the universe By Dec 8, 2021, 3:11pm EST Art by Chip Zdarsky, Marco Checchetto/Marvel Comics It’s beginning to look a lot like a Marvel Event Comic, with Devil’s Reign following the likes of War of the Realms and King in Black by spinning out of an ongoing storyline in a regular series. This time around, it’s Daredevil who gets to take over some other comics for a few months for the first time since the mostly-forgotten 2010 crossover Shadowland. Can the Man Without Fear find more success being the anchor of a crossover event second time around? All signs point to yes. Who is making Devil’s Reign #1? Devil’s Reign doesn’t just spin out of the current Daredevil series, it comes from the entire Daredevil creative team from the past couple of years: Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto, with Marcio Menyz on colors and the reliable Clayton Cowles lettering. Considering how good their run on the regular DD title has been, this is definitely a good thing. What is Devil’s Reign #1 about? On the face of it, Devil’s Reign returns to a question that Marvel has explored repeatedly over the years: What happens when superheroes find themselves o
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A California man killed himself with a makeshift guillotine in an unusual and macabre case that resulted in the arrest of an alleged squatter who police say tampered with human remains.Police believe Robert Enger built the contraption, which was 20ft in length and dropped a large metal spike down rather than a blade, at his Santa Rosa home as early as 2019, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported. Neighbors told the newspaper that Enger was friendly and an “unbelievable craftsman”, who also struggled with mental health problems for many years.But the nature of his death didn’t become clear until after a woman came across a skull in the bushes near her brother’s home and reported it to police earlier this year.Officials eventually determined the skull, which had scrape marks on it and a wire handle, was that of Enger. The 62-year-old was last seen alive in July 2019 when he was treated at a local hospital for a head injury that police now suspect resulted from a failed attempt to use the homemade guillotine device. Police think he died by suicide using the contraption, but that his remains, at least initially, went undiscovered and his home was empty until a man named Robert Melvin Ross III started squatting there in 2020.Police allege Ross lived in the house with Enger’s remains for months and invited others there for parties and to use methamphetamine. Law enforcement were called to the property on multiple occasions, and say it was “filthy” and “filled with d
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Guest EssayDec. 8, 2021, 3:11 p.m. ETCredit...Willie B. Thomas/Getty ImagesAaron E. CarrollDr. Carroll is the chief health officer for Indiana University and a writer who focuses on public health research and policy.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, responded with exasperation this week to a question about distributing at-home tests to Americans: “Should we just send one to every American?,” she said.Yes, we should, and many more than one. Tests should be sent out week after week, free of charge.Ms. Psaki’s weariness is understandable. Everyone is tired and frustrated. But the United States should consider something new. Leaders have tried to get all eligible Americans vaccinated; the nation has fallen woefully short. Mandates, one of the most effective ways to get large groups of people vaccinated, are haphazardly applied in some areas and outright banned in others. Fears of Omicron have increased uptake of vaccines a bit, but there’s still not enough coverage to avoid surges in many areas of the country.Other measures, like masking, which help prevent some cases, aren’t enough, since they are also applied unevenly and many Americans don’t want to wear them.In the meantime, damaging school absences persist. When one child is infected, often an entire class is declared a close contact and told to stay home. This affects not only the children’s education, but also the routines and work of their parents, who often need to stay at home with their children. This happens to masked and unmasked classrooms alike.What might make a difference is testing. If people could check whether they are infectious, and check often, spread could be prevented in many cases. For tests to be useful, though, they have to be ubiquitous and simple.Other than widespread vaccination, no silver bullet exists to end the pandemic, rapid at-home antigen tests included. But plentiful free tests could help keep schools and businesses open at full capacity more easily. Test-to-stay strategies involve regularly testing children or adults who have been exposed to the coronavirus, allowing them to continue to attend school or work so long as they stay negative. These strategies can be used in lieu of 10-day or two-week quarantines, permitting life to go on more normally.New antiviral drugs will also need to be taken early when a person is sick to be most effective, and testing can help that (and those drugs need to be cheap or free, as well).The Biden administration’s announcement that it is making at-home tests reimbursable by insurance is insufficient. People who want their insurance to cover the tests must first go to a pharmacy (where hopefully tests are available), pay for them out-of-pocket and then submit documentation to get reimbursed. Anyone who has dealt with insurance before knows that this is likely to be cumbersome.Free tests will be available at some community centers and rural clinics for those without insurance, but this still requires people to go out and get them. Not everyone owns a car. Not everyone has the time or freedom to run to the store. Having plentiful tests available already in their homes could make the difference between pe
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Date: December 7, 2021 The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch. Some of the highlights: Updates to various networking drivers. Several updates to upstream contributed software. Several userland application improvements and kernel bug fixes. And much more…​ For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at: For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see: Dedication The FreeBSD Project dedicates the FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE to the memory of Ian Lepore. Availability FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, armv6, armv7, and aarch64 architectures. FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded as described in the section below. SHA512 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO, memory stick, and SD card images are included at the bottom of this message. PGP-signed checksums for the release images are also available at: A PGP-signed version of this announcement is available at: The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are as follows: dvd1 This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD operating system, the documentation, debugging distribution sets, and a small set of pre-built packages aimed at getting a graphical workstation up and running. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can burn and use DVD-sized media. Additionally, this can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work: # dd if=FreeBSD-12.3-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso \ of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct. disc1 This contains the base FreeBSD operating system. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages. Additionally, this can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages. As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work: # dd if=FreeBSD-12.3-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso \ of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct. bootonly This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but does not contain the installation distribution sets for installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to perform a network based install (e.g., from an HTTP or FTP server
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China’s economy has become heavily dependent on property development over the last decade. High-rise apartments have mushroomed across hundreds of cities to house a growing white-collar workforce, while glass and steel office blocks are dominating city centres, mimicking Shanghai’s glittering skyline.Valued at more than $50tn after 20 years of rapid growth, Chinese real estate is worth twice as much as the US property market and four times China’s annual income.George Magnus, an associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, says this real estate market ranks as the most important single commercial sector in the world.Leaders in Beijing, aware that the boom was running out of steam b
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Chelsea paid for their carelessness again. Just when their strikers remember how to score, their defenders forget how to carry out their jobs. Romelu Lukaku had scored on his first start since 20 Octo
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Budget Beats — Normally $80, the Soundcore Life Q30 are a great value at this deal price of $60. Enlarge / Anker's Soundcore Life Q30 noise-canceling headphones.Jeff Dunn It's tough to find quality noise-canceling headphones for less than $100, but Anker's Soundcore Life Q30 are one of the few budget-friendly sets we've tested that are worth your while. We named them a top budget-friendly pick in a recent guide to wireless noise-canceling headphones at their normal going rate of $80, but today the Q30 is down to $60 as part of an Amazon "De
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Farhad ManjooDec. 8, 2021, 3:00 p.m. ETCredit...Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe foreign-policy journalist Joshua Keating used to write a series for Slate called “If It Happened There,” in which
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