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Stormont minister Maurice Morrow told an official he would not raise the issue with the Northern Ireland Executive, despite similar measures being considered in England and Wales. A file on planning arrangements for the jubilee celebrations reveals a series of civil service correspondences on how Northern Ireland would mark the occasion. It includes a letter sent on January 11 2001 from an official in the Office of the First Minister/Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) to the Department of Social Development, advising that a committee had been set up in London to consider a programme of celebrations. The correspondence says: “One of the issues the committee is currently considering is the possibility of deregulating liquor licensing laws during the golden jubilee celebrations on the same lines as the arrangements made for the millennium. “It is felt that the golden jubilee bank holiday on Monday 3 June 2002 is likely to be an occasion on which many public houses and similar licensed premises would wish to stay open beyond normal closing time.” The letter said a paper had been prepared on the issue of extending opening hours. It adds: “You will note that paragraph seven of the paper indicates that the devolved administrations ‘would need to consider deregulation separately within their own jurisdictions’. “I thought that you would wish to be aware that this issue is receiving active consideration for England and Wales and to consider whether anything needs to be done for Northern Ireland.” Some months later a “progress report” was sent between officials in OFMDFM, which again raised the issue of licensing laws. It says: “I spoke to Gordon Gibson, DSD, about Terry Smith’s letter of 12 January 2001 about licensing laws: the matter was put to their minister Maurice Morrow (DUP) who indicated that he would not be asking the NIE (Northern Ireland Executive) to approve any change to current licensing laws in NI to allow for either 24 hour opening (as at the millennium) nor a blanket approval for extended opening hours as is being considered in GB. “In both cases, primary legislation would be required here and would necessitate consultation and the minister has ruled out any consultation process.” The correspondence says individual licensees could still apply for an extension to opening hours on an ad hoc basis, adding “there the matter rests”. It goes on: “DSD await further pronouncements from the Home Office and Gibson and I have agreed to notify each other of any developments we become aware of and he will copy me to any (existing) relevant papers. “Ministers may well come under pressure in due course for a relaxation and/or parity with GB.” The document concludes “That’s it so far...making haste slowly?” Emails sent between officials in the department the same month said that lord lieutenants in Northern Ireland had been approached about local events to mark the jubilee. One message says: “Lord lieutenants have not shown any enthusiasm for encouraging GJ celebrations at a local level. “Lady Carswell in particular believes that it would be difficult for LLs to encourage such activities without appearing political.”
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- SMU coach Rhett Lashlee said Friday the Mustangs ' No. 8 ranking in the latest College Football Playoff selection committee rankings is the reason they should make the 12-team field, no matter what happens in the ACC championship game. The Mustangs face No. 17 Clemson (9-3) on Saturday night with an automatic playoff berth on the line. SMU (11-1), in its first year in the ACC, was the only team to complete league play 8-0. "The reason I know we should be in is because the committee has ranked us in. They've said we're good enough," Lashlee said during an ACC championship game news conference. "The regular season is complete. All 134 teams have played their regular season. It is over. "The case is closed on that, and they said you're the eighth-best team in the country. They said you're better than two other teams that are currently in the field for an at-large. You're better than them. Those teams didn't earn the right to play in a conference championship game, and we did. So I don't get how you could punish anybody for that." Editor's Picks How SMU's first season in the ACC became a massive success 8h Dave Wilson How the conference championship games will shake out and impact the playoff field 29m Bill Connelly Inside Iowa State's chase for its first conference title in 112 years 6h Max Olson Selection committee chair Warde Manuel left wiggle room Tuesday when asked directly whether SMU could fall behind No. 11 Alabama (9-3) with a loss and he responded, "potentially yes." "They can move above teams, as well. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game," Manuel said. Manuel also said the teams that are not playing Saturday are essentially locked in and cannot move up or down. He said the teams playing in their championship games will be moved. "If the team ranked No. 9 can't jump the team ranked No. 7 because neither of them played, then there's no way the team ranked ninth or 11th can jump the team ranked eighth or fifth or whatever because they are playing this week," Lashlee said. There has been much debate about the role of conference championship games in the expanded playoff era, as coaches have wondered throughout the season whether playing in an extra game could end up punishing teams that lose. Lashlee said skipping the ACC championship game never entered his mind. "We did the right thing. We showed up. We value the opportunity to play in a conference championship game," Lashlee said. "We value the opportunity to go compete with Dabo (Swinney) and Clemson for an ACC championship. That is a big deal. To have a chance to win our league, it's a bigger deal than just playing for seeding, though that's a part of it, too. But that's the right thing to do. To me, that's integrity. We're going to show up and do the right thing and not find a way to bounce out because we were told on Tuesday night that if you don't play, you're in at 8. "But we also know the committee has a tough job, so we believe and trust they're going to do the right thing and reward our guys who've earned the right not only to play here tomorrow night but to be one of the 12 best teams in America because they ranked them that."
Encore Capital Management's Condominium Hotel in Kissimmee, first to carry Hilton's Embassy BrandBig data needs AI; AI needs big data It’s that time of year again, when people publish their top-10 or top-20 lists of what to expect in the year ahead. As usual, rather than pile on with another list, I’m limiting my contribution to one compelling (or half-baked) trend for the year ahead. In the year ahead, big data will be back. Data is becoming more than the “new oil,” it is becoming the new money. Big data, which became a big deal about a decade ago as analytics hit center stage as the path to business success, faded a bit as big data suddenly was everywhere, making the term irrelevant. Over the past two years, amid all the excitement about generative AI, it almost seemed as if data — or attention to its quality and trustworthiness — took a back seat to all the jazzed-up illustrations and hyper-insightful insights generative AI was delivering. Now, with genAI so critical to business, people are realizing that their AI foundations are built on piles of very loose sand. When AI “hallucinates,” it’s not because it’s mind is wandering, because it has no mind to speak of. It’s simply running probabilities to grab on to the next piece of available and related data to complete a narrative. Now, there’s even concern that we’re starting to run out of data to feed the machines. “Most of the world's publicly available data — whether it is obtained legally or not — has been exhausted,” said Andy Thurai , senior analyst with Constellation Research. When will the madness end, right? Mystery Drones Saga: Ohio Air Force Base Sees More Drone ‘Incursions’ (Updated) Elon Musk Xmail Teaser Poses New Threat For Billions Of Gmail Users Sydney Sweeney Bikini Photos: The Internet’s Reaction, Explained So, yes, data will very much be back in the spotlight in 2025, because we need it, lots of it, and it has to be really good and really timely. “Data was all the rage during the 2010s, the age of so-called big data,” said Tony Baer , principal at dbInsight. "As cloud scale made big data the norm, we began taking data, and managing lots of it, for granted. Then genAI burst on the landscape last year, and the venture funds began chasing AI with a vengeance.” Big data and AI “have a synergistic relationship,” states a report out of Qlik. “Big data analytics leverages AI for better data analysis. In turn, AI requires a massive scale of data to learn and improve decision-making processes.” Big data will either make or break AI. “While AI is always about data that models were trained and tested on, it is becoming even more clear data is the differentiator with winning AIs,” said Thurai. At least 86% of executives report data-related barriers to AI, such as difficulties in gaining meaningful insights and issues with real-time data access, a survey of 1,000 IT executives out of Presidio finds. Half believe they plunged into gen AI before they were fully prepared. The venture capitalist community remains hot on AI, “but guess what? It's going to take high quality, validated data that doesn't traipse on privacy or data sovereignty,” Baer said. Consequently, there’s a growing emphasis on retrieval augmented generative (RAG) solutions, which form the bridge between standard databases and large language models, Baer said. Baer points to the latest announcements out of the AI Alliance , a consortium of leading technology companies, which emphasizes the need for establishing trustworthy data foundations. “Data is the most important constituent of AI models and systems, yet today data for AI too often has murky provenance, unclear licensing, and large gaps in quality and diversity of languages, modalities, and expert domains represented,” according to a statement announcing the AI Alliance's Open Trusted Data Initiative . The goal of the initiative is to release “large-scale open, permissively licensed data sets with clear provenance and lineage across all domains and modalities essential for AI.” The initiative brings together more than 150 participants from more than 20 organizations including Pleias, BrightQuery, Common Crawl, ServiceNow, Hugging Face, IBM, Allen Institute for AI, Cornell, Aitomatic, Tokyo Electron, and EPF. The initiative's members are “working to develop better requirements, processes and tooling to curate data sets that are more transparent, trusted, accurate, and applicable broadly.” Along with refining the specification for open trusted data, alliance members plan to build out tooling and publish pipelines for trusted data processing, including end-to-end lineage tracking capabilities. The alliance also intends to “significantly expand the data catalog aiming to include data for most of the world’s languages, large repositories of high-quality multi-modal data including images, audio and video, as well as time series and scientific modalities.” As the world’s data becomes more precious, Thurai foresees less and less differentiation between leading large language models. As a result, enterprises will turn to narrower or more focused models that leverage data coming out of specific sectors. Examples are industry-specific models such as BloombergGPT for finance, Med-PaLM2, developed by Google specifically for the healthcare industry, and Paxton AI legal language model, trained on tons of legal cases, statutes, and regulatory sources. BloombergGPT is “a 50-billion parameter LLM that was specifically trained on a wide range of financial data,” Thurai said. “Because of that, it outperforms similarly sized open models on financial natural language processing tasks compared to other AI models.” Med-PaLM2 “is trained on large amounts of medical datasets, including textbooks, research papers, patient records, and more,” said Thurai. “This intensive training has helped the model to acquire deep medical knowledge, allowing it to understand the complex language and concepts used in the healthcare field.” The Paxton AI legal language model “provides real-time access to millions of legal sources, including laws, court rulings, and regulations, across all 50 U.S. states and federal jurisdictions,” said Thurai. Along with big data from various sources will be increased use of synthetic data, but Thurai advises caution with its adoption. “Synthetic data generation to train AI models has become a larger cottage industry now,” he said. “While a lot of them are used to fill data blind spots, at times it could defeat the purpose. By using AI to produce data, one might produce models that might barely encounter real-world problems and are trained on expected scenarios. These models can balk at unexpected real-world problems or the so-called unknown unknowns.”
Rocky Hulne: Turning back time to honor the L-P girls basketball team that started a memorable runWASHINGTON – Jimmy Carter, the earnest Georgia peanut farmer who as United States president struggled with a bad economy and the Iran hostage crisis but brokered peace between Israel and Egypt and later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, died at his home in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday, the Carter Center said. He was 100. “My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” said Chip Carter, the former president’s son. “My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.” A Democrat, he served as president from January 1977 to January 1981 after defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford in the 1976 US election. Carter was swept from office four years later in an electoral landslide as voters embraced Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, the former actor and California governor. Carter lived longer after his term in office than any other US president. Along the way, he earned a reputation as a better former president than he was a president – a status he readily acknowledged. His one-term presidency was marked by the highs of the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, bringing some stability to the Middle East. But it was dogged by an economy in recession, persistent unpopularity and the embarrassment of the Iran hostage crisis that consumed his final 444 days in office. In recent years, Carter had experienced several health issues including melanoma that spread to his liver and brain. Carter decided to receive hospice care in February 2023 instead of undergoing additional medical intervention. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023, at age 96. He looked frail when he attended her memorial service and funeral in a wheelchair. Carter left office profoundly unpopular but worked energetically for decades on humanitarian causes. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 in recognition of his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” Carter had been a centrist as governor of Georgia with populist tendencies when he moved into the White House as the 39th US president. He was a Washington outsider at a time when America was still reeling from the Watergate scandal that led Republican Richard Nixon to resign as president in 1974 and elevated Ford from vice president. “I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president. I will never lie to you,” Carter promised with an ear-to-ear smile. Asked to assess his presidency, Carter said in a 1991 documentary: “The biggest failure we had was a political failure. I never was able to convince the American people that I was a forceful and strong leader.” Despite his difficulties in office, Carter had few rivals for accomplishments as a former president. He gained global acclaim as a tireless human rights advocate, a voice for the disenfranchised and a leader in the fight against hunger and poverty, winning the respect that eluded him in the White House. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his efforts to promote human rights and resolve conflicts around the world, from Ethiopia and Eritrea to Bosnia and Haiti. His Carter Center in Atlanta sent international election-monitoring delegations to polls around the world. A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher since his teens, Carter brought a strong sense of morality to the presidency, speaking openly about his religious faith. He also sought to take some pomp out of an increasingly imperial presidency – walking, rather than riding in a limousine, in his 1977 inauguration parade. The Middle East was the focus of Carter’s foreign policy. The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, based on the 1978 Camp David accords, ended a state of war between the two neighbors. Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland for talks. Later, as the accords seemed to be unraveling, Carter saved the day by flying to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal shuttle diplomacy. The treaty provided for Israeli withdrawal from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and establishment of diplomatic relations. Begin and Sadat each won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. By the 1980 election, the overriding issues were double-digit inflation, interest rates that exceeded 20% and soaring gas prices, as well as the Iran hostage crisis that brought humiliation to America. These issues marred Carter’s presidency and undermined his chances of winning a second term. On November 4, 1979, revolutionaries devoted to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, seized the Americans present and demanded the return of the ousted shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was backed by the United States and was being treated in a US hospital. The American public initially rallied behind Carter. But his support faded in April 1980 when a commando raid failed to rescue the hostages, with eight US soldiers killed in an aircraft accident in the Iranian desert. Carter’s final ignominy was that Iran held the 52 hostages until minutes after Reagan took his oath of office on January 20, 1981, to replace Carter, then released the planes carrying them to freedom. In another crisis, Carter protested the former Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. He also asked the US Senate to defer consideration of a major nuclear arms accord with Moscow. Unswayed, the Soviets remained in Afghanistan for a decade. Carter won narrow Senate approval in 1978 of a treaty to transfer the Panama Canal to the control of Panama despite critics who argued the waterway was vital to American security. He also completed negotiations on full US ties with China. Carter created two new US Cabinet departments – education and energy. Amid high gas prices, he said America’s “energy crisis” was “the moral equivalent of war” and urged the country to embrace conservation. “Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth,” he told Americans in 1977. In 1979, Carter delivered what became known as his “malaise” speech to the nation, although he never used that word. “After listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America,” he said in his televised address. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” As president, the strait-laced Carter was embarrassed by the behavior of his hard-drinking younger brother, Billy Carter, who had boasted: “I got a red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.” Carter withstood a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination but was politically diminished heading into his general election battle against a vigorous Republican adversary. Reagan, the conservative who projected an image of strength, kept Carter off balance during their debates before the November 1980 election. Reagan dismissively told Carter, “There you go again,” when the Republican challenger felt the president had misrepresented Reagan’s views during one debate. Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan, who won 44 of the 50 states and amassed an Electoral College landslide. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, one of four children of a farmer and shopkeeper. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1946, served in the nuclear submarine program and left to manage the family peanut farming business. He married his wife, Rosalynn, in 1946, a union he called “the most important thing in my life.” They had three sons and a daughter. Carter became a millionaire, a Georgia state legislator and Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975. He mounted an underdog bid for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, and out-hustled his rivals for the right to face Ford in the general election. With Walter Mondale as his vice presidential running mate, Carter was given a boost by a major Ford gaffe during one of their debates. Ford said that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” despite decades of just such domination. Carter edged Ford in the election, even though Ford actually won more states – 27 to Carter’s 23. Not all of Carter’s post-presidential work was appreciated. Former president George W. Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, both Republicans, were said to have been displeased by Carter’s freelance diplomacy in Iraq and elsewhere. In 2004, Carter called the Iraq war launched in 2003 by the younger Bush one of the most “gross and damaging mistakes our nation ever made.” He called George W. Bush’s administration “the worst in history” and said Vice President Dick Cheney was “a disaster for our country.” In 2019, Carter questioned Republican Donald Trump’s legitimacy as president, saying “he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Trump responded by calling Carter “a terrible president.” Carter also made trips to communist North Korea. A 1994 visit defused a nuclear crisis, as President Kim Il Sung agreed to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for resumed dialogue with the United States. That led to a deal in which North Korea, in return for aid, promised not to restart its nuclear reactor or reprocess the plant’s spent fuel. But Carter irked Democratic President Bill Clinton’s administration by announcing the deal with North Korea’s leader without first checking with Washington. In 2010, Carter won the release of an American sentenced to eight years hard labor for illegally entering North Korea. Carter wrote more than two dozen books, ranging from a presidential memoir to a children’s book and poetry, as well as works about religious faith and diplomacy. His book “Faith: A Journey for All,” was published in 2018. – Rappler.comMartinez WWII Veteran and TikTok Star Turns 102 Years Old on Friday, Getting Deluged With Birthday Cards
Stormont minister Maurice Morrow told an official he would not raise the issue with the Northern Ireland Executive, despite similar measures being considered in England and Wales. A file on planning arrangements for the jubilee celebrations reveals a series of civil service correspondences on how Northern Ireland would mark the occasion. It includes a letter sent on January 11 2001 from an official in the Office of the First Minister/Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) to the Department of Social Development, advising that a committee had been set up in London to consider a programme of celebrations. The correspondence says: “One of the issues the committee is currently considering is the possibility of deregulating liquor licensing laws during the golden jubilee celebrations on the same lines as the arrangements made for the millennium. “It is felt that the golden jubilee bank holiday on Monday 3 June 2002 is likely to be an occasion on which many public houses and similar licensed premises would wish to stay open beyond normal closing time.” The letter said a paper had been prepared on the issue of extending opening hours. It adds: “You will note that paragraph seven of the paper indicates that the devolved administrations ‘would need to consider deregulation separately within their own jurisdictions’. “I thought that you would wish to be aware that this issue is receiving active consideration for England and Wales and to consider whether anything needs to be done for Northern Ireland.” Some months later a “progress report” was sent between officials in OFMDFM, which again raised the issue of licensing laws. It says: “I spoke to Gordon Gibson, DSD, about Terry Smith’s letter of 12 January 2001 about licensing laws: the matter was put to their minister Maurice Morrow (DUP) who indicated that he would not be asking the NIE (Northern Ireland Executive) to approve any change to current licensing laws in NI to allow for either 24 hour opening (as at the millennium) nor a blanket approval for extended opening hours as is being considered in GB. “In both cases, primary legislation would be required here and would necessitate consultation and the minister has ruled out any consultation process.” The correspondence says individual licensees could still apply for an extension to opening hours on an ad hoc basis, adding “there the matter rests”. It goes on: “DSD await further pronouncements from the Home Office and Gibson and I have agreed to notify each other of any developments we become aware of and he will copy me to any (existing) relevant papers. “Ministers may well come under pressure in due course for a relaxation and/or parity with GB.” The document concludes “That’s it so far...making haste slowly?” Emails sent between officials in the department the same month said that lord lieutenants in Northern Ireland had been approached about local events to mark the jubilee. One message says: “Lord lieutenants have not shown any enthusiasm for encouraging GJ celebrations at a local level. “Lady Carswell in particular believes that it would be difficult for LLs to encourage such activities without appearing political.”Today’s ‘Wordle’ #1290 Hints, Clues And Answer For Monday, December 30th
Federal judge rules Alabama city must allow gay pride float at Christmas parade
Arkansas-Pine Bluff earns 120-61 victory over EcclesiaBy Stephanie Lai and Hadriana Lowenkron, Bloomberg News Donald Trump says he is selecting venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures LLC to serve as his artificial intelligence and crypto czar, a newly created position that underscores the president-elect’s intent to boost two rapidly developing industries. “David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness. David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas,” Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social network. Trump said that Sacks would also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Related Articles In Sacks, Trump is tapping one of his most prominent Silicon Valley supporters and fundraisers for a prime position in his administration. Sacks played a key role in bolstering Trump’s fundraising among technology industry donors, including co-hosting an event at his San Francisco home in June, with tickets at $300,000 a head. He is also closely associated with Vice President-elect JD Vance, the investor-turned-Ohio senator. Sacks is a venture capitalist and part of Silicon Valley’s “PayPal Mafia.” He first made his name in the technology industry during a stint as the chief operating officer of PayPal, the payments company whose founders in the late 1990s included billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and investor Peter Thiel. After it was sold to eBay, Sacks turned to Hollywood, where he produced the 2005 satire Thank You for Smoking. Back in Silicon Valley, he founded workplace communications company Yammer, which was bought by Microsoft Corp. in 2012 for $1.2 billion. He founded his own venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, in 2017 and has invested in Musk-owned businesses, including SpaceX. Sacks said on a recent episode of his All-In podcast that a “key man” clause in the agreements of his venture firm’s legal documents would likely prevent him from taking a full-time position, but he might consider an advisory role in the new administration. A Craft spokeswoman said Sacks would not be leaving Craft. In his post, Trump said Sacks “will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship.” Protecting free speech is a keen interest of Sacks. He regularly speaks about “woke” interests that try to muzzle unpopular opinions and positions. The new post is expected to help spearhead the crypto industry deregulation Trump promised on the campaign trail. The role is expected to provide cryptocurrency advocates a direct line to the White House and serve as a liaison between Trump, Congress and the federal agencies that interface with digital assets, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Trump heavily campaigned on supporting crypto, after previously disparaging digital assets during his first White House term, saying their “value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” The president-elect on Thursday said Sacks would “work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S.” During the campaign, Trump spoke at a Bitcoin conference, accepted crypto campaign donations and met with executives from Bitcoin mining companies and crypto exchanges multiple times. Trump’s desire to give priority to the digital asset industry is also reflected in his close allies and cabinet selections, including his Commerce secretary pick, Howard Lutnick, and Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent. On the AI front, Sacks would help Trump put his imprint on an emerging technology whose popular use has exploded in recent years. Sacks is poised to be at the front lines in determining how the federal government both adopts AI and regulates its use as advances in the technology and adoption by consumers pose a wide array of benefits as well as risks touching on national security, privacy, jobs and other areas. The president-elect has expressed both awe at the power of AI technology as well as concern over the potential harms from its use. During his first term, he signed executive orders that sought to maintain US leadership in the field and directed the federal government to prioritize AI in research and development spending. As AI has become more mainstream in recent years and with Congress slow to act, President Joe Biden has sought to fill that void. Biden signed an executive order in 2023 that establishes security and privacy protections and requires developers to safety-test new models, casting the sweeping regulatory order as necessary to safeguard consumers. A number of technology giants have also agreed to adopt a set of voluntary safeguards which call for them to test AI systems for discriminatory tendencies or security flaws and to share those results. Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s order. The Republican Party’s 2024 platform dismissed Biden’s executive order as one that “hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology.” Sacks can be expected to work closely with Musk, the world’s richest person and one of the president-elect’s most prominent supporters. Musk is also a player in the AI space with his company xAI and a chatbot named Grok — efforts which pit him against Silicon Valley’s giants — and he stands to wield significant influence within the incoming administration. The appointment won’t require Sacks to divest or publicly disclose his assets. Like Musk, Sacks will be a special government employee. He can serve a maximum of 130 days per year, with or without compensation. However, conflict of interest rules apply to special government employees, meaning Sacks will have to recuse himself from matters that could impact his holdings. Sacks’s Craft Ventures is known more for enterprise software investing than for crypto, but it has made a few crypto investments, including BitGo and Bitwise. Still, Sacks has firm opinions on the sector. Speaking last month on All-In, Sacks praised a bill on crypto regulation that had passed in the U.S. House but not the Senate earlier this year. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act would regulate certain types of digital assets as a commodity, regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “The crypto industry basically wants a really clear line for knowing when they’re a commodity and they want commodities to be governed, like all other commodities, by the CFTC,” he said on the November podcast. He also disparaged some of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s positions on crypto under its chair, Gary Gensler. “The days of Gensler terrifying crypto companies,” he said. “Those days are about to be over.” Earlier this week, Trump nominated crypto advocate Paul Atkins to lead the SEC. With assistance from Zoe Ma, Bill Allison, Sarah McBride, Anne VanderMey and stacy-marie ishmael. ©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.NFA ready to release more rice
ASX to drop after tech giants slide in the USNANOBIOTIX to Introduce Vision for Transforming Drug Design and Development with Next Nanotherapeutic Platform on 19 December 2024
Dragon's Dogma 2 understands that fantasy's at its best when it knows how to revel in the mundane
Chehalis baker Megan Knudsvig competed against some of the best bakers in North America during her stint on season 11 of the Food Network’s “Holiday Baking Championship” and made it through five rounds of holiday party-themed challenges. But the sixth episode of the series, which aired Monday, Dec. 2, ended with Knudsvig’s elimination from the competition. Knudsvig was the sixth baker eliminated of the 12 bakers competing this season. “Well friends, my time in the Holiday Baking Championship kitchen has come to an end,” Knudsvig posted on the social media accounts associated with her business, The White Whisk, on Wednesday after the episode aired. “This experience has been one of the most wonderful, challenging, exciting, exhausting and rewarding things I've ever done.” Knudsvig, 31, completed a bakery and arts program at South Puget Sound Community College and went on to work as a decorator at Frosted: The Cupcake Shop in Walla Walla. She later moved to Lewis County and worked for several years as a decorator for Dawn’s Delectables in Centralia before deciding she wanted to stay home with her three young daughters. About three years ago, Knudsvig started The White Whisk, a business that offers recipes, decorating tutorials, classes, dessert marketing content development and restaurant food photography. “When I was approached to do the show I kept having the same thought ... are they sure? I felt wildly inadequate to compete but holy cow I'm SO glad I did it scared anyways,” Knudsvig wrote. Knudsvig and Rolf Runkle, a pastry instructor from Canada, landed in the bottom two of this week’s office Christmas party-themed episode’s spirited truffle challenge, with the judges ultimately deciding to advance Runkle through to next episode’s semifinals and to eliminate Knudsvig. During her tenure on the show, Knudsvig won one main heat challenge and placed in the top two for a second, with judges Nancy Fuller, Duff Goldman and Carla Hall praising her on her flavor combinations and decorations. “I learned SO much from the challenges, the other bakers, the judges and was stretched in my baking abilities in many ways. It was so hard to go home so close to the end, but I walked away from this experience feeling more inspired than ever to pursue new things in baking.” Knudsvig thanked her fellow competitors and the judges, as well as her friends, family and other supporters back at home. “To everyone who's supported me along this journey, thank you for every word of encouragement, cheering me on, watching the show and supporting me like crazy. It truly has meant so much and I've been overwhelmed with the love and kindness shown,” Knudsvig wrote. Her full statement, as well as recipes that she presented on the Holiday Baking Championship, can be found on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.white.whisk/?hl=en or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100071904943877 . For information on classes, tutorials, ebooks and other services offered by The White Whisk, visit https://thewhitewhisk.com/ or @the.white.whisk on Instagram. The 11th season of the Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship premiered on Monday, Nov. 4, with episodes airing every Monday at 8 p.m. and going up onto streaming services the Wednesday after. The remaining two episodes of this season air Dec. 9 and Dec. 16. The season winner will earn the title of Holiday Baking Champion, a feature in Food Network Magazine and a grand prize of $25,000.None
