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.”
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.
A group of American parents is seeking to sue several video game companies, alleging their children have been harmed by video game addiction.
As reported by Bloomberg, one mother claims that her 14-year-old son has played such a quantity of video games over the last nine years that it has caused him brain damage, seizures, and a stroke. Another mother says that her nine-year-old who has been diagnosed with multiple psychiatric disorders has been gaming “at an increasing and uncontrollable pace”.
Targets of the lawsuits, of which over a dozen are expected to be heard on May 30 in Salt Lake City, Utah, include Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Epic Games, Roblox, and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
A key part of the lawsuit is research that shows Internet Gaming Disorder (the medical term for video game addiction) has a measurable effect on the brain in the way that other addictions do. However, the filing suggests that psychiatric problems such as ADHD are also caused by gaming – this is a contentious issue and research finds that the correlation is more likely in the other direction. That is to say, people with ADHD could be more likely to develop Internet Gaming Disorder, and not that Internet Gaming Disorder causes ADHD. The debate over the addictiveness of games is ongoing and hotly debated.
ORONO, Maine (AP) — As waves grew and gusts increased, a wind turbine bobbed gently, its blades spinning with a gentle woosh. The tempest reached a crescendo with little drama other than splashing water.
The uneventful outcome is exactly what engineers aimed for.
The demonstration featuring a 13-foot-tall (4-meter-tall) floating wind turbine in an indoor pool aimed to ensure it can withstand the strain of powerful water and wind when much larger versions are deployed in the ocean.
It’s the University of Maine’s contribution to a worldwide race to improve floating machines to tap wind that blows across deeper waters offshore, too deep to attach turbines to the seabed with permanent pilings.
In the next decade, UMaine researchers said, they envision turbine platforms floating in the ocean beyond the horizon, stretching more than 700 feet (210 meters) skyward and anchored with mooring lines.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Alphabet-owned Waymo (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) self-driving vehicles after receiving reports of collisions and instances in which the vehicle’s automated driving system (ADS) appeared to disobey traffic safety rules.
The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) received reports of 22 incidents involving Waymo vehicles wherein the vehicle ADS behavior caused single-party crashes and potential traffic safety law violations. Of the 22 incidents, 17 involved crash with stationary and semi-stationary objects.
ODI has opened a preliminary evaluation of an estimated 444 Waymo vehicles, which are equipped with Waymo’s 5th generation automated driving system. The investigation will evaluate the ADS’s performance in detecting and responding to traffic control devices and in avoiding collisions with stationary and semi-stationary objects and vehicles.
Did you know the average American adult spends between 2.5 and 3 hours a day on social media? Those Death Scroll Sessions (Taylor Swift’s next era, probably) inundate us with thousands of data bits, most of which we forget as quickly as we are exposed, so it’s notable when I think of something I saw online for the tenth time in 48 hours.
Sylvester Stallone, who is more attractive at 77 than he was fifty years ago, if I do say so myself, published a monologue about life getting easier and how hard work has become “strong medicine that tastes horrible going down, but makes you feel better.”
The World Health Assembly – “the decision-making body of the WHO” – convenes in Geneva, Switzerland, from May 27 to June 1 to discuss and presumably vote on final amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and the “WHO Pandemic Agreement.”
It’s imperative that we shed light on their supposed “mission critical for humanity.” The proposed WHO treaty and IHR amendments gravely threaten our rights and freedoms as they stand to:
Change IHR recommendations from “non-binding” to legally binding so that all member countries must comply.
Create requirements for health documents that could be used to restrict access and travel as the WHO sees fit.
Require surveillance of online information and censorship of information deemed “misinformation.”
Coerce extreme lockdown measures, including creating “quarantine of suspect travelers, preferably in facilities away from the point of entry,” aka “quarantine camps” seen during the COVID-19 pandemic in China and elsewhere.
Allow the WHO to declare an emergency at will.
Require member nations to use certain “relevant health products” like vaccines, drugs, etc., while prohibiting others during emergencies.
In medieval Europe, Christians who hated Jews spread the lie that Jews kidnap Christian children, slaughter them, and use their blood to bake matzos for Passover. This lie became known as “the Blood Libel,” probably the greatest libel in history. Over the course of many centuries, Jews were tortured and murdered, often by being burned alive, because of the Blood Libel.
The Blood Libel was particularly odious in light of two facts: it was the Jews who, through their Bible, first outlawed human sacrifice, and one of the first laws in the Hebrew Bible is a ban on consuming blood.
For centuries, Jews had to confront the fact that all around them, throughout Europe, a vast number of people believed an enormous lie about them. Jews have to confront the same thing today. We are now living through the Second Blood Libel: the claim that the Jewish state is committing genocide. But, unlike the first Blood Libel, this libel is not the product of Christians; it is the product of Muslims and the left. The very people against whom the greatest genocide in recorded history—the Holocaust—was directed are now accused of the very same crime.
(CNN) — A Louisiana bill would classify the abortion-inducing drugs misoprostol and mifeprostone as Schedule IV controlled dangerous substances in the state, placing them in the same category as highly regulated drugs such as narcotics and depressants.
The amendment that would classify the drugs as Schedule IV substances was added to a Senate bill that would make it a crime to give abortion medication to a person without their consent.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Thomas Pressly, said he proposed the legislation after his sister was given misoprostol against her will.
Abortion is already banned in Louisiana with no exceptions for rape or incest.
The bill sparked outcry from a group of nearly 270 Louisiana physicians, health care providers and medical students, who signed a letter to Pressly expressing concerns over the reclassification.
Attorney specializing in child welfare cases, Michael Discioarro, called out Child Protection Services (CPS) for ignoring “dying children” across the U.S. on Monday while discussing the ongoing treadmill abuse murder trial.
Discioarro appeared on “Cuomo” to discuss the trial involving the death of 6-year-old Corey Micciolo, who prosecutors believed died due to blunt force trauma he suffered from his father forcing him to run on a treadmill, even after falling multiple times. Before bringing on Discioarro, NewsNation host Chris Cuomo explained that his team attempted to get in contact with a CPS official, however, none were willing to respond.
As Cuomo slammed the government agency, he questioned Discioarro on how CPS was allowed to “get a pass on accountability” as Micciolo’s mother reportedly contacted CPS multiple times about the father.
(Reuters) -Illinois state treasurer Michael Frerichs urged Exxon Mobil shareholders to vote against the election of CEO Darren Woods, as the oil major pursues a lawsuit against two shareholders, a filing showed on Monday.
Frerichs also recommended voting against Exxon’s Lead Independent Director Joseph Hooley at the company’s annual shareholder meeting scheduled to take place on May 29.
Exxon, which is frequently the focus of critical shareholder resolutions, struck back earlier this year when it filed a lawsuit seeking to block a vote on a climate proposal submitted by two small activist investors.
While the investors responded by dropping the proposal, Exxon has refused to drop the legal action against them.
“The actions taken by the company signify poor judgment and oversight by board leadership,” Frerichs said in a letter dated May 9, according to the filing.
Last Friday, Glass Lewis had recommended investors vote against Hooley, citing concerns about Exxon’s “unusual and aggressive tactics” in pursuing a lawsuit against activist investors.
“By telling people to vote against our board, these groups are making it clear they have no interest in creating long-term shareholder value,” an Exxon spokesperson said in response to Frerichs’ letter.
A spokesperson for Frerichs’ office said he would vote against Hooley and Woods with the shares he directly controls, including assets in the state’s college-savings plans, only about 82,000 shares in all, rather than larger state pools.
(Reporting by Sourasis Bose and Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Shounak Dasgupta)
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM – Get Free Report) CEO Marc Benioff sold 15,000 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 10th. The shares were sold at an average price of $276.59, for a total transaction of $4,148,850.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 12,602,327 shares in the company, valued at $3,485,677,624.93. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at this link.
Home Depot’s sales continued to soften in the first quarter as the nation’s largest home improvement retailer was not only constrained by high mortgage rates and higher inflation for its customers, but it also had to deal with a delayed start to spring.
Sales slipped 2.3% to $36.42 billion for the period ended April 28, just shy of the $36.65 billion that analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research expected. It was the third consecutive quarter of declining sales for the retailers, which saw sales skyrocket during the pandemic.
Customer transactions dipped 1% in the quarter, with shoppers also spending a bit less, averaging $90.68 per receipt compared with $91.92 a year earlier.
Sales at store open at least a year, a key gauge of a retailer’s health, declined 2.8% globally, and 3.2% in the U.S.
The S&P 500 could be on the verge of a sharp move down, as inflation isn’t cooling much further from here, according to Stifel analysts.
In a note, the investment firm predicted the S&P 500 would fall to 4,750 in the second or third quarter of this year. That implies around a 10% decline from the benchmark index’s current levels at around 5,222 on Monday.
Inflation will likely remain stubbornly high, the strategists predicted, as the economy is coming out of what they described as a “pseudo-recession” that took place from early 2022 and lasted through the middle of 2023. That accounted for the bulk of the disinflation seen to date, and economic activity has since revved up.
“We have been wary of a broad S&P 500 correction in the middle quarters of 2024. While most strategists were expecting a recession last year or eagerly attempting to call the start of one in the next year, we have been of the view that the ~5 quarters 1Q22 to 2Q23 were a ‘pseudo-recession’ and the Fed has already harvested all the normal post-recession disinflation we would expect,” the firm wrote.
