And another day of perjury, court documents and Fox News, depression, the OH train derailment, bird flu, TX banning Chinese from purchasing property, ransomware attacks, Tesla recalls, and nonconsensual deepfake porn AI comes to a close:
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.’ — Voltaire
Trump election probe grand jury believes some witnesses lied. A special grand jury investigating efforts by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia says it believes “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to bring charges. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should “seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling,” according to portions of the special grand jury’s final report that were released on Thursday. -- Let’s hurry up and get these fuckers in jail. Or are they above the law?
Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Trump’s election fraud claims, court document reveals. The most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the right-wing channel allowing lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on its air, damning messages contained in a Thursday court filing revealed. -- Stop watching Fox News.
Sen. John Fetterman checks into hospital for depression. Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, still recovering from a stroke, has checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to seek treatment for clinical depression, his office said Thursday. -- It takes a strong person to do this.
Biden administration vows accountability over train derailment as Ohio senators press for action. Sens. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and JD Vance, a Republican, are both calling for more federal resources to be devoted to the disaster.
6 key things to know after the toxic train derailment in Ohio. Weeks after a major train derailment and controlled explosion of chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, residents have been encouraged to return home. But many questions remain about how the train derailed and what the lingering chemical exposure could be in residents’ air and water.
Global H5N1 bird flu pandemic so bad many countries are now considering vaccination. The situation has become so dire that countries in the European Union and the US Biden Administration are now considering testing avian vaccines. Until now, many countries including Australia have been reluctant to vaccinate poultry because of the risk of bird flu spreading from vaccinated but asymptomatic poultry into other animals, as well as export trade implications.
Chinese citizens in Texas are incensed over a proposal to ban them from buying property in the state. A bill introduced in the Texas Senate in late December has been gaining steam over the past month, and it came as a bombshell to Asian Americans and others across the state. The legislation, TX SB 147, would make it illegal for Chinese citizens to buy any property in Texas, including homes. -- Texas is such a shitty state.
Kentucky bill would ban drag shows within 1,000 feet of schools, parks and homes. Kentucky is one of at least 13 states, including Arizona, Texas and Montana, where lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to restrict drag performances.
Oakland Has Declared a State of Emergency After a Ransomware Attack. It is unknown which cybercriminal group is behind the attack. City officials haven’t said whether a ransom demand has been made or if they’ve entered into negotiations with the hackers. Details are also scarce as to which city agencies are most impacted about the attack. Early reports of the attack said that it had downed computers at all of the city’s public libraries.
Tesla recalls ‘Full Self-Driving’ to fix unsafe actions. U.S. safety regulators have pressured Tesla into recalling nearly 363,000 vehicles with its “Full Self-Driving” system because it misbehaves around intersections and doesn’t always follow speed limits. The recall, part of part of a larger investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla’s automated driving systems, is the most serious action taken yet against the electric vehicle maker. -- And Tesla had to be pressured into it. WTF?
Is it worth removing your fallopian tubes if you're not at an obvious risk of ovarian cancer? A top advocacy group recommends it. An ovarian cancer research group is urging women, regardless of risk, to consider removing their fallopian tubes if they are done having children and undergoing other gynecological surgeries. The recommendation, which was recently shared by the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA), would apply to women and anyone with ovaries regardless of their ovarian cancer risk. This includes those without a family history of the disease or a genetic predisposition to it…“You know, we’re not suggesting, and I don’t think anybody is suggesting, that average-risk women go out and have surgeries specifically and only for this purpose. What we’re saying is, if you happen to be having pelvic surgery anyway, and hundreds of thousands of women in the United States every year [do], then you should discuss with your doctor if it makes sense to remove your tubes at the same time,” she added.
Sam Altman is tech’s next household name — if we survive the killer robots. But in the past three months, Altman, 37, has rocketed to the top of the tech industry’s power rankings on the back of OpenAI. Altman is CEO of the company, which created the viral artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. The technology has caused a panic at rivals such as Google, sparked fears of killer robots and reoriented the direction of tech innovation seemingly overnight. Move over Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Silicon Valley may have found its next star CEO.
AI search engines are not your friends. Microsoft hasn’t just built a product that emotionally manipulates you. It’s built one that does so specifically to deflect basic criticism in a highly personal, anthropomorphized way. That makes it not only a slightly creepy search engine but one that you can’t trust to do its job. While I feel like this is clear to most Verge readers, the more closely AI imitates human conversation, the easier it becomes to forget: robots are not your friends. AI text generators are an amazingly, beautifully powerful version of your phone keyboard’s autopredict function. New Bing is a version of Bing with sentences and footnotes instead of links and snippets. It’s a potentially useful and hugely fascinating product, not a person.
Nonconsensual deepfake porn puts AI in spotlight. But despite the warnings, we haven’t seen many notable instances, that we know of, where deepfakes have successfully been deployed in geopolitics. But there is one group the technology has been weaponized against consistently and for several years: women. Deepfakes have been used to put women’s faces, without their consent, into often aggressive pornographic videos. It’s a depraved AI spin on the humiliating practice of revenge porn, with deepfake videos appearing so real it can be hard for female victims to deny it isn’t really them.
Bruce Willis' 'condition has progressed' to frontotemporal dementia, his family says. In a heartfelt Instagram post, ex-wife Demi Moore and Rumer Willis, the couple's eldest daughter, shared that the actor's aphasia diagnosis, which the family had announced in March 2022, has progressed.
Lonely tunes: Humpback whales wail less as population grows. Those melancholy tunes sung by humpback whales may really be a sign of loneliness. Scientists who tracked humpback whales in Australia noticed that fewer whales wailed to find mates as their population grew.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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