Leif Ames

  • Remco Evenepoel dominates men’s event in Montreal

  • Marlen Reusser denies Zoe Backstedt in women’s race

Remco Evenepoel etched his name into the history books with a dominant fourth successive men’s world time-trial victory in Montreal on Sunday.

The 2024 Olympic champion came into the race as the overwhelming favourite and he did not disappoint. Evenepoel was already more than 30 seconds ahead of the rest by the second intermediate time check, just over halfway along the 39.2km (24.4 mile) route.

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Chicago were held to three points as Caleb Williams was carted off, while New Orleans fought back to upset Baltimore

Bengals 0-0 Texans 13:20, 1st quarter

It is ruled as not a catch so the Bengals punt it away. Cincy bring up a quick 3rd down on the Texans. CJ Stroud backpedals finds his receiver but the ball is juggled and the Texans have a punt of their own.

Will Reichard 35 yard field goal

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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current: The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the digital communication infrastructure by which governments and private corporations automate and ultimately control public discourse. Following her Pulitzer Prize win for "We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution" (2025), "I wanted to think about whether liberal constitutional democracies can survive this moment in time," Lepore shared in a phone interview... [In the "current ChatGPT moment"] Lepore found herself asking: "Who are the people who are clamoring to be replaced by machines, to have movies made by machines, and novels written by machines?" And who, she continued, is pushing for our government to be determined by these machines? In the book, Lepore notes that technological tools are increasingly influencing elections around the world... However, she sees the 2026 U.S. midterms as an inflection point. In a recent piece in the Financial Times, Lepore wrote, "This year marks the first AI election. Voters are asking chatbots how they should vote. Campaigns and activists are using AI to analyze the electorate, send micro-targeted messages, produce tailored ads and even deepfakes...." Lepore stresses in the book that "nobody should trust historians to make predictions," but she believes it's possible for democratic citizens to wrest back control. Referencing proposals such as New York's data center moratorium law, Lepore ends by describing a "growing and increasingly noisy tech backlash." "It's not foreordained. This isn't inevitable," she said during the interview. "In the book's epilogue Lepore predicts, as her title suggests, a fall of the Artificial State," writes the California Review of Books. "That argument turns out to be speculative, much more of a hope than a certainty." [Lepore] does support her prediction by positing that the Artificial State is "poorly designed and badly built," that it has not given people safety and happiness but rather a prison of glowing screens, and that a majority of Americans want more control over AI. To escape the Artificial State we will have to imagine a different future by gaining more knowledge of the past in a search for meaning. Of course, powerful forces want to deny that and turn us into servile automatons. The Guardian adds that "While Lepore interprets much classic sci-fi, such as Isaac Asimov, as cautionary, she observes that "the architects of the Artificial State seem to have read these stories, unironically, as instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule the world". (The Atlantic writes that "What one gathers from these misreadings is not so much that science fiction itself is nefarious, but that arrested development might be...") But The Indian Express writes that despite the author's bleak conclusion, "Lepore is not a pessimist. Because the Artificial State is a construct, neither alive, nor truly indestructible, she argues it is still possible to take it apart... [T]his is a clear-eyed reckoning rather than a doomsday tract. It is not an easy read, but an essential one for anyone unsettled by the pace of the AI wave."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Remco Evenepoel dominates men’s event in Montreal

  • Marlen Reusser denies Zoe Backstedt in women’s race

Remco Evenepoel etched his name into the history books with a dominant fourth successive men’s world time-trial victory in Montreal on Sunday.

The 2024 Olympic champion came into the race as the overwhelming favourite and he did not disappoint. Evenepoel was already more than 30 seconds ahead of the rest by the second intermediate time check, just over halfway along the 39.2km (24.4 mile) route.

Continue reading...

College football hits Wembley in Union Jack Classic
Get in touch: send your thoughts to Graham via email

Bengals 0-0 Texans 13:20, 1st quarter

It is ruled as not a catch so the Bengals punt it away. Cincy bring up a quick 3rd down on the Texans. CJ Stroud backpedals finds his receiver but the ball is juggled and the Texans have a punt of their own.

Will Reichard 35 yard field goal

Continue reading...
  • Caleb Williams leaves game with leg injury

  • Tyler Shough’s late touchdown cheers New Orleans

Carson Wentz passed for 143 yards, Aaron Jones Sr. rushed for 105 yards, and the visiting Minnesota Vikings escaped ⁠with a 9-3 win over the Chicago Bears, who lost their quarterback to a hamstring injury.

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Getting rid of rodents like squirrels, mice, or groundhogs is a lot like digging a hole on the beach. No matter how much you remove, it’ll always fill back in. …read more

College football hits Wembley in Union Jack Classic
Get in touch: send your thoughts to Graham via email

Bengals 0-0 Texans 13:20, 1st quarter

It is ruled as not a catch so the Bengals punt it away. Cincy bring up a quick 3rd down on the Texans. CJ Stroud backpedals finds his receiver but the ball is juggled and the Texans have a punt of their own.

Will Reichard 35 yard field goal

Continue reading...
  • Union score four goals in nine minutes v Sporting KC

  • Caden Clark helps Sounders to late draw

Sam Surridge scored in the first half and Brian Schwake finished off his league-leading 12th clean sheet of the season as Nashville SC clinched a playoff spot and remained unbeaten at home with a 3-0 victory over the Chicago Fire on Saturday night.

Eastern Conference-leading Nashville lead the Supporters’ Shield race and are the only team in the league unbeaten at home with 12 wins in 13.

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The PM hopes to be firmer with the US leader than his predecessor without provoking diplomatic warfare, as the Iran war weighs on the UK economy

No international relationship has more power to determine the success of Andy Burnham’s premiership. So you might imagine the stakes for the prime minister’s first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump on Tuesday would be high.

Yet Burnham may prove to be a lucky general. The balance of risk has shifted. Trump is unpopular at home, where inflation remains high, and is mired in an intractable conflict in Iran that has the potential to sink his midterm dreams.

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When you think of wartime cryptography, you probably think of World War II and Enigma, although there were other famous codes used during that war. But in fact, there have …read more