Seven Republican state senators battle for re-election against candidates backed by Donald Trump
Indiana voters go to the polls today in a test of the Republican party’s staying power after the party’s state lawmakers resisted Donald Trump’s bruising campaign to pressure them into redrawing the congressional districts.
The vote has turned into a statewide referendum on political retribution.
Continue reading...Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary wants to bring the epic poem to the big screen using the power of artificial intelligence. It can’t be any good
The thing about unfilmable works of literature is that most of them eventually turn out to be quite filmable after all. The Lord of the Rings was a bit of a mess when shot in rotoscope on a minuscule budget by the guy who filmed Fritz the Cat; it won Oscars when handed to Peter Jackson, given the GDP of a small nation and a visual effects department the size of Gondor. The 1984 version of Dune was a disappointment, despite the presence of David Lynch in the director’s chair, largely because all that gleaming, tawdry galactic opulence couldn’t make up for the comprehensively bad acting, clotted exposition and obsession with freaky heart plugs. And yet the 2021 adaptation from Denis Villeneuve ended up being a tour de force of masterly restraint and monolithic scale.
Milton’s Paradise Lost? The 17th-century epic poem has always felt like an outlier, a work of literature too religiously inspired to be filmed purely as a work of fantasy, yet too riotously bonkers to be treated with puritanical reverence. It contains more drama than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in every line of thunderous God-baiting iambic pentameter. And now Roger Avary, co-writer of Pulp Fiction and director of Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction, wants to bring it to the big screen using the power of AI.
Continue reading...Robert Cyr Jr, a US navy airman, had gone missing in 1944 when his seaplane crashed in the Segond channel
The remains of a US military aviator who went missing after his crew crashed during the second world war were recovered and identified through DNA analysis and his family recently laid him to rest in Florida, according to officials.
US navy airman Robert Cyr Jr’s burial in Clearwater, Florida, brought to an end a decades-long saga that began on 22 January 1944, when he and eight fellow crewmates crashed while they were aboard a seaplane as it took off in the Segond channel in what is now the south Pacific’s Republic of Vanuatu.
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Ryan Cohen said he didn’t understand questions about how the video games retailer could afford its $55.5bn bid
GameStop’s shares fell more than 10% on Monday as questions emerged about how the company would finance its surprise $55.5bn bid for eBay.
In an interview with CNBC, Ryan Cohen, GameStop’s CEO, skirted repeated inquiries about how the video games retailer could afford the deal, saying he didn’t understand the questions.
Continue reading...Musk won’t have to give up any money he allegedly saved from delaying disclosure of initial purchase of Twitter stock
Elon Musk settled the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil lawsuit accusing the world’s richest person of waiting too long in 2022 to disclose his initial purchases of stock in Twitter, now known as X.
A trust in Musk’s name will pay a $1.5m civil penalty, without admitting wrongdoing. Musk won’t have to give up any money he allegedly saved from the delay.
Continue reading...Reform UK is ‘doing something right when it comes to visibility’ on multiple AI systems, say researchers
AI platforms are more likely to reference Nigel Farage than any other UK leader when prompted about British politics, according to an AI search analytics firm.
“We are confident in saying that Reform are showing up significantly more than you would expect,” said Malte Landwehr, an expert at Peec AI, the firm that did the research. “So they’re doing something right when it comes to LLM [large language model] visibility.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: Worker pointed to Iran war and Pentagon’s Anthropic feud as indications the department is ‘not a responsible partner’
Workers developing Google’s artificial intelligence products in the UK have voted to unionize, in part out of concerns about a deal between the company and the US military that was announced last week.
In a letter slated to go to management on Tuesday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, workers at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research laboratory, requested recognition of the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives of the lab’s UK-based staff.
Continue reading...The transition towards renewable energy received a boost last week when representatives from 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, for a world-first climate meeting aimed at bringing the fossil fuels era to an end. Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s global environment editor, Jon Watts, about how the landmark conference came about, who was missing, and whether the optimism can translate into real world action
Could Santa Marta climate talks mark ground zero in push to ditch fossil fuels?
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Continue reading...Decades of advice on what to eat and what not to might have been missing one key ingredient, according to new research
Reduce your calories. Eat more vegetables. Limit soft drinks and junk foods. For years, even decades, this has been the advice for those wanting a healthy body weight, lower blood pressure and better markers of metabolic health. Most weight-loss advice has focused on either what to eat (and what to avoid), or how much to eat. Think of dietary pyramids produced by government agencies, calories on food packaging and meals, and typical nutritional advice.
It’s all true, to a certain extent: it’s obviously better to eat a healthier, nutritionally balanced diet, and yes, lower body weight is broadly linked to reducing calories. But this type of approach can be hard to sustain. Even as a personal trainer who knows what I “should” be eating according to government dietary advice and has heard too much about calorie deficits, I take a slightly different approach to food. I think we need to bring nuance and a balanced approach to food and what we eat.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)
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