Extreme Heat Hits Europe for the Third Time This Year
It is continent’s third spell of scorching weather since May. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent.
Platner’s Democratic Support Evaporates After Sexual Assault Allegation
Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, called the allegation false but said he would “reflect” on his political path forward, as many allies rescinded their endorsements.
Trump Wanted a U.S. Soccer Star to Play in the World Cup. FIFA Found a Way.
There was nothing unusual about a call from President Trump or the reversal of Folarin Balogun’s suspension, said the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino.
Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster
Many Democrats want representatives as furious as they are. That makes it easier for unfit candidates to escape proper vetting.
Death Toll From Oppressive Heat in New Jersey May Be as High as 29
In New York City, emergency rooms last week logged the highest number of patients treated for heat-related illnesses in years.
In CNN Interview, Woman Details Alleged Sexual Assault by Graham Platner
“This is something that I tried for many years to forget,” the woman, Jenny Racicot, said on CNN.
McConnell Has Been Hospitalized for 3 Weeks, and Aides Won’t Say Why
Senator Mitch McConnell was admitted to the hospital on June 14, and his office has provided few updates about his condition. Here’s what we know.
New Videos of Charlie Kirk’s Killing Emerge in Court, but Few Can Watch
On Day 1 of what is expected to be a weeklong hearing, prosecutors played videos of the shooting for a judge, but they were graphic and kept from public view. Erika Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. were in court.
Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World
locater16 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup's AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item's molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifies the medication from its molecular profile -- or reports that it's phony.
Pharmacies were using the system in more than a dozen countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Myanmar, and Alonge's native Nigeria. But that morning in South Africa, it didn't work. "I was shocked," Alonge says... So Alonge immediately asked his engineers to shrink the AI model down to a smaller, low-power, unconnected version that could run entirely on his Android phone. They produced it 2 hours later, and that saved the demo. More importantly, the work birthed a new version of his device, which can authenticate a pill in places without broadband, computers, or even reliable electricity. It also turned Alonge into an advocate for this kind of "small AI." "The article goes on to detail other immediately useful 'small' AI applications without any subscription or billion dollar data centers needed," writes locator16. For example, Bala Murugan and colleagues at Vellore Institute of Technology in India developed a drone-based system that photographs cashew plants and identifies disease-indicating splotches on the plants. The key advantage is that all processing happens on the drone itself, so farmers do not need a computer, broadband connection, or cloud server access.
In a Uruguayan vineyard, researchers developed small-AI systems to identify ant infestations. The article doesn't go deep into the deployment details, but it presents this as another example of a narrow, localized model trained to recognize a specific agricultural threat. Small AI has also been used to detect the presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in multiple countries. This is especially useful in regions where public-health teams may lack reliable network access or expensive lab infrastructure, but still need fast, local detection.
In parts of Brazil without access to more complex medical equipment, researchers have used small AI to run electrocardiograms from an Arduino device. The article also describes Marcelo Jose Rovai's work on a TinyML model that generates electrocardiograms in a patient simulator lab. Rovai also describes a newer experiment using an Arduino UNO Q with a Qualcomm chipset. The device runs a language model locally, collects sensor data, and analyzes it to detect tiny pools of water where mosquitoes might breed -- while using only about 3 watts of power.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump Tries to Take Credit for Walmart Price Cuts of Beef and Other Products
The retailer said it will lower prices for beef, produce, drinks, pools, toys, grills and summer clothing.
Who Might Replace Graham Platner if He Drops Out of the Maine Senate Race?
Graham Platner can be replaced on the ballot if he withdraws in the next week. If he does, Maine Democrats would face an uncertain two-week race to choose a replacement.
Inside Trump’s Ideological Fight With the Smithsonian
Publicly and behind the scenes, the president continues to try to impose his own views of American history and culture, presenting an ongoing challenge to Lonnie Bunch, the institution’s leader.
Supreme Court Allows Texas To Require Age Verification For Mobile Apps
The Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce a law requiring app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps. Tech industry groups argue the law broadly restricts young people's access to digital speech, but the court let a 5th Circuit order stand without explanation or noted dissents. CNN notes that the Supreme Court's decision "doesn't resolve the case but rather will allow Texas to enforce the law while the litigation continues to play out." From the report: "A minor child who downloads a software application from an app store agrees to contractual terms of service, including whether the child's location will be tracked, whether the child's privacy will be protected, whether information from the child's phone can be sold by the developer, and whether the child waives the right to sue," Texas told the Supreme Court in urging the court to allow its law to take effect.
But the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members include Apple and Google, said the law would effectively bar young people from accessing a wide range of content, "be it a book by Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling, a Taylor Swift album, or a subscription to National Geographic." Allowing the law to take effect, the group said, would have "profound consequences for the protection of digital speech."
[...] In the new case, involving Texas' age verification for apps, a federal district court blocked the law's enforcement in December -- days before it was set to take effect. But a three-judge panel of the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals put that decision on hold in early June, allowing the state to enforce it. By declining to take up the emergency appeal from the computer and student groups, the Supreme Court has left the 5th Circuit's decision in place.
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Key Health Care Panel Is Again Blocked From Meeting Under RFK Jr.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force has been stymied under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Canada Bets on NATO Partners for Its Expanded Submarine Fleet
In selecting a joint bid from Germany and Norway, Prime Minister Mark Carney is elevating Canada’s naval power and reducing its military and economic dependency on the United States.
Trump Passports Debut, Delighting Some and Dismaying Others
The Washington Passport Agency started issuing the limited-release documents with President Trump’s image on Monday, catching a few applicants by surprise.
Historians Reject Trump Administration’s Criticism of Smithsonian Museum
The nation’s largest group of scholars of U.S. history denounced a White House report attacking the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
South Korea's SK Hynix Launching $28 Billion US Listing To Ride Global AI Wave
SK Hynix is launching a Nasdaq listing expected to raise about $28 billion, giving US investors easier access to one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI memory-chip boom. Reuters reports: The company will sell 17.79 million new shares in the depository receipt listing on the Nasdaq. Ten ADRs will represent one common share and the stock will be sold in a price range that is due to be revealed on Monday, based on SK Hynix's Seoul trading price. SK Hynix's share price was down 4% at 2,327,000 won each on Monday, but the stock is up about 273% this year, as it rides surging global investor demand for AI stocks. Korea's KOSPI was down 2.2% on Monday. [...]
SK Hynix has been among the world's largest beneficiaries of the AI boom as it outperformed its major rivals Samsung and Micron. "This is more than a liquidity event," said Dave Mazza, the chief executive officer of Roundhill Investments in New York, which manages an exchange-traded fund tracking DRAM manufacturers, which is one of the most popular ways for U.S. investors to trade SK Hynix's stock. "SK Hynix has been one of the most important companies in the world that most U.S. institutions could not easily own." "The listing removes an accessibility discount, not a quality discount."
[...] SK Hynix said the proceeds from the listing of the American Depositary Receipts will be used to build chip factories in South Korea and buy chipmaking equipment including an extreme ultraviolet scanner made by Dutch equipment maker ASML. The final price of the New York listing is due to be set on Thursday, ahead of the stock starting trade on Friday, regulatory filings showed. The company's management will meet global investors on a roadshow this week. The deal is expected to be the second-biggest share sale after a record $85.7 billion initial public offering by SpaceX last month, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $25.6 billion IPO in 2019 and Alibaba's similar-sized offering in 2014.
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‘Confessions II’ Review: Madonna Returns to the Dance Floor
On “Confessions II,” a successor to her hit 2005 album “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” the pop superstar gives new energy to her origin story and shines light on the troubles she’s danced away.
Zombie 'Who Owns Unix?' Lawsuit Comes Alive Again
The long-running SCO/IBM Unix and Linux ownership dispute has resurfaced yet again, this time through SCO successor Xinuos, which is trying to pursue old license and copyright claims tied to Project Monterey. "The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired," reports The Register. From the report: [T]he roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created "Project Monterey" -- an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors. By 2001, Project Monterey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO.
By then, a little project called "Linux" already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterey -- then allegedly contributed some Monterey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM.
SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM's code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday. The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.
The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing. The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.