ABC’s “The View” co-hosts expressed their growing concern on Monday that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s high-profile trial against former President Donald Trump might actually be boosting his 2024 presidential campaign. The trial, centered on Trump’s plea of not guilty to 34 counts related to falsifying business records, has dominated headlines, overshadowing other significant news items.
Ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, testified on Monday in the case alleging hush money payments made to actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. As the prosecution wraps up its list of witnesses, anticipation builds around the defense’s forthcoming arguments.
Drama also unfolded on the set of “The View,” where the co-hosts debated the trial’s unintended media repercussions. Sara Haines highlighted the media’s obsessive coverage, noting, “I would say when you say the Biden campaign has to get more active, I actually blame the media slightly. We talked last week a lot about how I don’t think people are able to watch this Trump trial 24-7. Now we’re talking about we’re in a campaign.”
On Tuesday at Google I/O, Google‘s much relied-upon — but rarely loved — Google Workspace software suite got a major injection of additional AI features that are coming soon.
Gemini 1.5 Pro, from the language model family formerly known as Bard, is being plastered into the side panel in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides — not to mention Drive and Gmail. These applications are already interconnected, but this slate of features aims to automate those connections via a chirpy AI-powered assistant with the power to — in theory — teleport from app to app, doing work tasks that used to be labor-intensive.
Google is clearly envisioning a more seamless and integrated experience across Workspace, enabled by the centralization of all the user’s documents and data. With Gemini functionality perpetually available on the screen, users are being encouraged to ask the bot quotidian questions or request little favors. While in Docs, Gemini can dig up details found in emails, or organize lists into spreadsheets automatically.
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Users also aren’t required to specify exactly which applications they expect Gemini to use to perform the functions in question. In the demo, a user simply asks the AI assistant to help them organize, and it invents a system in which it will place files in a new folder, and organize the data from said files into a spreadsheet.
Credit: Mashable screenshot from Google’s presentation
If you’re excited by the prospect of an AI-assisted workflow, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider data security. Last year, a New York Times report notes, there was a great deal of internal discussion at Google when the company attempted to rework its privacy agreement to begin mining users’ publicly available Google Docs for AI training data. Google can now use such data according to its user agreement, but only chooses to incorporate data from users who opt into experimental Google features, the Times reported.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve only seen a demo so far. AI assistants have, thus far, been buggy, lying robots, seemingly rushed to the market way too quickly. With OpenAI nipping at Google’s heels, Google’s new AI-enabled glow-up for Workspace can’t just be on trend. As the name implies, it has to work.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued to attack Hamas terrorists in Rafah and throughout Gaza on Monday, which was Israel’s independence day, despite continued international criticism and caution from the White House.
In a statement, the IDF said:
IDF troops continue their operations against terror targets in the area of eastern Rafah and on the Gazan side of the Rafah crossing. IDF troops eliminated several armed terrorist cells in close-quarters encounters on the Gazan side of the Rafah crossing.
In eastern Rafah, IDF troops eliminated a number of terrorists and located weapons. An IAF aircraft struck a terrorist cell that was exiting a launch site. In addition, the IDF struck a launch post from which additional terrorists operated and fired at IDF troops.
Overnight, IDF troops expanded their activity in the area of Jabalya and conducted targeted operations on additional terror targets in the area.
Over the past day, the troops engaged in a number of battles, eliminated by tank fire dozens of terrorists who shot at the troops and dismantled an explosives network that was planted in the area.
An IAF aircraft struck and eliminated a terrorist armed with an RPG who was identified near IDF troops and was on his way to fire toward them.
Furthermore, IDF troops have continued their operation on terror targets in the area of Zeitoun over the past day. During the activity, IDF troops located tunnel shafts and dismantled several launchers. In addition, IDF troops eliminated several terrorists and dismantled a weapons storage facility and additional terrorist infrastructure.
Yesterday (Monday), IAF fighter jets struck a war room of the terrorist organizations in the central Gaza Strip and eliminated five terrorists that were operating in it.
Moreover, IDF troops eliminated by tank fire several terrorists that were moving toward IDF troops operating in the area.
Additionally, over the past day, IAF fighter jets and additional aircraft struck over 100 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip, including armed terrorists, booby-trapped structures, and additional terrorist infrastructure.
The IDF distributed photos of its soldiers in action across the Gaza Strip:
There were also unconfirmed reports on social media of IDF soldiers enjoying independence day fireworks in Rafah:
Givati Brigade in #Rafah Documentation taken by Follower A from the Givati Brigade last night in Rafah – fireworks on the occasion of Independence Day. Happy Independence Day pic.twitter.com/qHdLWYQw3h
In addition, the IDF struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. The airstrikes were rumored to have used bunker-busting bombs that can penetrate underground fortifications at depth, according to the Abu Ali Express Telegram account.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
“Warned Elon Musk” Against Picking China Over India: Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa
Indian-American academic, entrepreneur and author Vivek Wadhwa on Monday said that he had warned the Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk not to pick China as they would “rob him blind” and instead asked him to consider moving manufacturing to India.
Quoting the Director of Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, Theresa Fallon, in a post on X, who said that US and European automakers are failing in China because “they were looking only for short-term gain and transferring technology, management techniques and know-how to China,” Vivek Wadhwa said that he had “exchanged emails with Musk about the risks in China a few years ago.”
… “Elon is going to be the biggest loser here. I warned him they would rob him blind and urged him to consider moving manufacturing to India instead, where he would have dominated the market by now,” he wrote.
$6bn California agricultural company founded by Biden and Newsom donors sues state to stop a law meant to help farmworkers unionize
One of California’s most influential agricultural companies filed a lawsuit Monday against the state to stop a contentious law to help farmworkers unionize that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom reluctantly signed two years ago after pressure from the White House.
The action by the Wonderful Co. comes as it battles the United Farm Workers over a newly formed UFW local of 640 workers at one of its businesses. The $6 billion company founded by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who have donated to President Joe Biden and Newsom, makes a host of products recognizable to most grocery store shoppers, including Halos mandarin oranges, Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful pomegranate juice and Fiji Water brands.
Michael Cohen’s Testimony Gets Off To A Rough Start
Deputies to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg began the quizzing with relatively innocuous questions about Cohen’s work history with Trump, who allegedly paid him $525,000 annually toward the end of the 2016 election. Cohen has maintained that he personally paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who testified last week, to silence her from speaking with reporters about a tryst with Trump more than a decade ago…
Cohen further stepped on the prosecution’s case when he described the atmosphere of his former workplace. Working for Trump, “was fantastic… working for him of those 10 years was an amazing experience… there were great times, there were less than great times, but for the most part, I enjoyed the responsibilities given to me,” he testified.
Caltech’s T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Centre has unveiled a study in Nature Human Behaviour that reveals the successful creation of a device that was 79 percent accurate in predicting the word that a subject was looking at.
In a ruling that many in the religious community see as a threat to their own tax-exempt status, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic Charities, a Catholic Non-Profit that serves the poor and the homeless, is not, fundamentally a religious organization because serving the poor and homeless isn’t a religious act.
It turns out all the claims that American needs immigrants because there are more jobs than people might not be as true as many have been claiming for the past decade. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report that of the immigrants who have arrived in the U.S. after 2022, only 46 percent are gainfully employed.
Bank of America has suddenly terminated the account of independent journalist and documentarian Christina Urso, also known as Radix Verum. According to a video posted by Urso herself, Bank of America not only terminated her account, but has frozen her assets as well.
The Biden administration is ordering a CCP-owned cryptocurrency mining company to sell land it owns which is located near a U.S. military base. The question is, how did they get permission to buy this land in the first place.
Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY) was caught paying a Chinese Communist Party agent thousands of dollars to place ads in a Chinese-owned newspaper. Suozzi also happens to be on the House committee currently investigating China’s alleged ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs.
A recent paper from the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) suggests Artificial Intelligence (AI) is learning how to use various forms of deception to achieve the goals they were programmed to complete.
Peter S. Park, the paper’s author, said of the paper, ‘Generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI’s training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals.”
A recent paper from the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) suggests Artificial Intelligence (AI) is learning how to use various forms of deception to achieve the goals they were programmed to complete.
Based on congressional testimony from top military officials, Kash Patel, the former chief of staff of Donald Trump, is claiming that the military flat out ignored orders by President Trump to call the national guard to assure the January 6 protests didn’t get out of hand.
Despite decades of leftists claiming that oil is running out, a new report finds that we have enough oil for 200 more years of use at current levels.
These enviro nuts have been claiming since the 51950s that the oil is running out. Apparently the “follow the science” types are off… just a bit… in their calculations.
Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a free market think tank focusing on energy, told Just the News that anti-fossil fuel activists latched onto “peak oil” to push for alternatives, and with the U.S. leading the world’s production, their rhetoric has evolved.
“First, they said, ‘We don’t have the resources. We’re big consumers, but we don’t have the energy. So we have to get off of the resource. Then it became evident and clear that that was not the case,” Pyle said.
In 2011, IER produced its first North American Energy Inventory.
The protests in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death in police custody and today’s antisemitic, pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are rooted in the same ideology of Marxism, Katharine Gorka says.
Marxism preaches that the world “is divided between oppressor and oppressed,” says Gorka, co-author with Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez of the new book “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.” (Heritage launched The Daily Signal in 20014.)
German-born philosopher Karl Marx believed that the oppressors were the business owners and the oppressed were the workers. But Gorka says that Marxism today, or “NextGen Marxism,” holds that the “oppressors are white, Americans, Israelis, [but] some Asians … kind of the successful.”
President Biden will hold a real infrastructure week to highlight the historic progress America has made on infrastructure during his administration.
Here are some of Biden’s infrastructure accomplishments, according to a White House fact sheet:
Launched improvements on over 257,000 miles of roads and launched nearly 13,000 bridge repair projects making our roadways safer and reconnecting communities across the country;
Provided funding to deploy nearly 3,000 low-and zero-emission American-made transit buses and funded over 5,000 clean school buses in 600 communities across the country, prioritizing disadvantaged areas;
Rumble, a Toronto-headquartered video-sharing platform, has taken legal action against tech giant Google, alleging anticompetitive behaviour within its digital advertising products. As reported by Reuters, the lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks damages exceeding $1 billion.
According to Rumble, Google has established a monopoly within the ad stack by acquiring various companies along the advertising chain. This strategy allows Google to represent both ad buyers and sellers while operating the exchange connecting these parties. Additionally, Rumble accuses Google of colluding with Meta’s Facebook to hinder alternatives to Google’s ad tech ecosystem.
A newly published cyber threat report from Avast has revealed substantial dominance of social engineering in cyber threats during the first quarter of 2024. Per the report, nearly 90% of cyberattacks on mobile and 87% on desktop devices involved scams, phishing, and malvertising, exploiting human vulnerabilities more than technical weaknesses.
A significant rise in scams using sophisticated technologies like deepfake videos and AI-manipulated audio was noted. These scams often utilize hijacked YouTube channels and other social media platforms to spread fraudulent content. The report highlighted that such deceptive practices are becoming more complex, with cybercriminals leveraging high-profile events and figures to enhance the credibility of their scams.
YouTube, in particular, has emerged as a critical vector for these threats. Avast’s telemetry indicated that in the previous year, four million unique users were protected against YouTube-based threats, with around 500,000 users shielded in the first quarter alone. Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting YouTube’s automated advertising and user-generated content features to sidestep traditional security measures, deploying a variety of attack vectors from phishing campaigns to malware distribution.
Automakers love to wow us with the latest infotainment systems — and it’s not just to move more cars. The private data these apps gather provides a nice secondary income stream for car companies.
Dutch conglomerate Stellantis — which owns Ram, Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler, among other brands — harvests so much data that it recently started a separate company to sell it.
Overuse has blunted the power of the term “Orwellian,” but it certainly applies to the mobile surveillance states these companies have created in the vehicles they sell.
It is not alone. If your vehicle has any kind of connectivity, chances are you’ve inadvertently consented to having all sorts of data tracked: from your location and direction of travel to your speed. Not to mention the possibility of in-car audio recording.
As Apple and Google transform their voice assistants into chatbots, OpenAI is transforming its chatbot into a voice assistant.
On Monday, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up unveiled a new version of its ChatGPT chatbot that can receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos.
The company said the new app — based on an A.I. system called GPT-4o — juggles audio, images and video significantly faster than previous versions of the technology. The app will be available starting on Monday, free of charge, for both smartphones and desktop computers.
“We are looking at the future of the interaction between ourselves and machines,” said Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer.
Dazzling aurora borealis showed power of smartphones, while shedding light on more ‘fundamental questions’
Benjamin Shingler – CBC News
Posted: 2 Hours Ago
The northern lights as captured from Vancouver on Saturday. Many night sky enthusiasts reported seeing the northern lights more clearly on their phone or camera than with the naked eye. (Ethan Cairns/The Canadian Press)
The promised northern lights over the weekend did not disappoint, producing a dazzling light show across Canada and around the world.
Social media platforms were filled with hues of purple, green, yellow and pink skies in Canada, the United States, England, Switzerland and beyond.
CBC News spoke to experts about what transpired, and why it was even more dramatic than expected — especially when seen on your phone.
Why was it so powerful?
As you may have heard by now, the sun is near the end of what’s called a solar maximum , an 11-year cycle where it’s more active, producing plenty of sunspots on its surface. These sunspots are an entanglement of magnetic fields that can sometimes erupt with a solar flare.
The sun produced a series of strong solar flares last week, resulting in at least seven outbursts of plasma, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Northern lights appear over the Dreisamtal valley in the Black Forest near Freiburg, Germany, on Friday. (Valentin Gensch/dpa/The Associated Press)
Each eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), can contain billions of tonnes
of plasma from the sun’s outer atmosphere. In this case, the CMEs headed toward Earth and arrived around the same time, enhancing the power of the geomagnetic storm on Friday and through the weekend.
The NOAA declared a G5 magnetic storm on Friday, one that was even stronger than expected and the highest level since 2003.
“I think the intensity surprised a lot of people,” said Trevor Kjorlien, a Montreal-based space educator who runs the company Plateau Astro.
Such events are difficult to predict ahead of time, given the distance involved and all the variables considered, said Nikhil Arora, an astrophysicist and postdoctoral researcher at Queen’s University.
“It’s a very chaotic process. It can’t perfectly predict how much material is actually going to reach Earth,” he said. “So it ended up being a bigger one than we previously thought.”
Why did it look clearer on my phone?
Many night sky enthusiasts reported seeing the northern lights more clearly on their phone or camera than with the naked eye. The reason for that is simple, said Arora.
“Your phone is actually collecting light for a longer time than your eyes do,” he said.
“For our eyes, the collection time is very, very small, and so very dim things don’t come out as clearly to us.”
The aurora borealis, caused by a coronal mass ejection on the Sun, illuminates the sky over Jericho Beach in Vancouver on May 10. (Chris Helgren/Reuters)
Kjorlien noted that this most recent event was the first time where people were equipped with a smartphone camera capable of capturing the northern lights in all their glory.
“That, to me, is a really, really cool thing, that this is … probably the most photographed northern lights spectacle that we’ve seen,” he said.
I missed it. When will I get another chance?
These events aren’t quite as rare as the full solar eclipse that captivated many Canadians last month.
The solar maximum is expected to continue through the end of 2025, Arora said, which means the northern lights could soon be visible in more southern parts of Canada.
Riley Urschel, who took this photograph, said Friday’s display of northern lights in Grenfell, Sask., was the most intense he’d ever seen. (Submitted by Riley Urschel)
Arora himself wasn’t able to see the northern lights this time around, given the cloud cover in Kingston, Ont.
He said a trip to Yellowknife, where during the winter months the northern lights are even more dazzling, is “on my bucket list.”
Did it lead to any disruptions?
There had been concern the geomagnetic storm could lead to disruptions of satellites and communications equipment.
In some cases, farmers reportedly had to halt planting because of problems with self-driving tractors, which rely on GPS satellites.
But overall, there were no major problems, said Arora.
“Our satellites and our electronics are a lot better protected than they used to be.”
WATCH | What’s a solar storm, and why it matters:
Show more
Ian Cohen, a space physicist and deputy chief scientist of the space exploration sector at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, walked CBC’s Ben Shingler through what’s been happening on the surface of the sun and how it could affect our night sky. 6:08
Arora said the event will be studied to better understand the Earth’s magnetic field — and the universe beyond.
“It’s actually hugely important in better understanding planets in our solar system, and also the sun, as well,” he said.
“Within astrophysics, one of the biggest questions is: Why does our solar system, or our galaxy — or, more in general, our universe — look the way it does?
“So understanding these little details and better understanding these phenomena sheds light onto the fundamental questions of the universe.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Shingler
Journalist
Benjamin Shingler is a senior writer based in Montreal, covering climate policy, health and social issues. He previously worked at The Canadian Press and the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal.
What just happened? The problem of tracking devices like AirTags being misused to stalk people has been an issue since they first launched. Now, Apple and Google have announced that their previously confirmed industry specification for Bluetooth tracking devices is being rolled out to iOS and Android platforms, which should go some way in preventing these incidents.
The Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers (DULT) standard is being introduced in iOS 17.5 by Apple, while Google is bringing it to Android 6.0 and higher devices.
The companies write that thanks to the new standard, users will see a notification alert on their device that reads “[Item] Found Moving With You” if an unknown Bluetooth tracking device is detected moving with them over time, regardless of the platform the device is paired with.
Two years ago, Andrew Feldman couldn’t find Abu Dhabi on a map. But like many Silicon Valley leaders, the artificial intelligence entrepreneur has been wooed by the promise of Middle Eastern partnership and money.
On trips to the glittering capital of the United Arab Emirates, he’s toured a government-built synagogue and a local outpost of the Louvre. The city is so teeming with the tech sector that he ran into fellow California start-up founders in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. Meanwhile, millions from the oil-rich UAE are allowing Feldman’s Cerebras to build advanced supercomputer data centers in Stockton, Calif., Dallas and on theoutskirts of the Emirati desert city.
Astronomers continue to be puzzled about the formation of the so-called cotton candy planets, and now they’ve found another one that has the least density of any exoplanet yet found.
An international team of astronomers say the new planet, WASP-193b, is about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is 50% larger than Jupiter but 7 times less massive.
According to Khalid Barkaoui, a postdcotral researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy, this extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants.
“WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller,” says Barkaoui.
Xiaodan Li and Richard Kammerer have characterized an enzyme for the first time that could become an important tool for the circular economy. The monitor shows a schematic representation of the key part of the active center of this enzyme. Credit: Paul Scherrer Institute/Markus Fischer
Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have—for the first time—precisely characterized the enzyme styrene oxide isomerase, which can be used to produce valuable chemicals and drug precursors in an environmentally friendly manner. The study appears in the journal Nature Chemistry.
RFK JR. SUES MARK ZUCKERBERG, META FOR ELECTION INTERFERENCE AND CENSORSHIP
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will appear on the California ballot with the far-right American Independent Party, filed a lawsuit Monday against tech giant Meta.
The lawsuit accuses the company, and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, of censorship and election interference.
Lawyers on behalf of Kennedy and his super PAC, American Values 2024, filed the federal lawsuit Monday in the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division.
The lawsuit alleges Meta, which encompasses Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger, purposefully suppressed users from viewing and sharing a 30-minute documentary, “Who is Bobby Kennedy?” which was released by American Values 2024 on May 3.
