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☆ Australia bushfires: Victoria orders 30,000 people to evacuate due to ‘catastrophic’ fire risk
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-28 | by ( Kathleen Magramo | Morayo Ogunbayo | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

Hot, dry and windy conditions have created “extreme to catastrophic fire dangers” in parts of Victoria and South Australia, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. Around 30,000 people had been ordered to evacuate parts of Victoria before midday Wednesday, when authorities warned it would be too late to leave. Bushfires in Victoria, Australia have been burning since February 22, 2024. AAP Image/David Crosling/ReutersSix homes have already been destroyed and authorities fear windy and dry conditions may fan the flames close to high-density residential areas. More than 100 state forests have been closed, the Forest Fire Management of Victoria said on social platform X.

Persons: Jason Heffernan, we’re, David Crosling, Victoria Organizations: CNN — Firefighters, Meteorology, Fire Authority, CFA, Melbourne, ” Firefighters, Fire Management Locations: Australia, Victoria, South Australia, Casterdon, Hamilton, Kanagulk, ”, Bayindeen, Melbourne, Wimmera

☆ Strong Winds Cause Power Outages, Fan Bushfires in Australia's Southeast
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-13 | by ( Feb. | At P.M. | ) www.usnews.com time to read: +2 min

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of residents across Australia's Victoria state remained without power on Wednesday after wild weather knocked down transmission lines, forcing a major power plant to disconnect from the grid, while strong winds fanned bushfires. AGL's Loy Yang A power station, responsible for about a third of the state's power, had to shut down on Tuesday afternoon impacting half a million properties, which officials said was one of the largest outages in Victoria's history. Some properties were completely destroyed by fire with the exact number to be confirmed after fire crews finish their rescue efforts. Firefighters are battling to contain three bushfires, but better weather conditions could help crews to contain the fires quickly, Heffernan said. Australia's weather bureau forecast milder conditions on Wednesday with temperatures in the low to mid-20 degree Celsius (68°F) and moderate winds, but warned the risk was not over yet.

Persons: AGL's Loy Yang, Clare O'Neil, We've, O'Neil, Jason Heffernan, Heffernan, Renju Jose, Bill Berkrot Organizations: SYDNEY, Mobile, Federal Home Affairs, ABC, Firefighters Locations: Australia's Victoria, Melbourne, Hotham, Victoria's, Victoria, Sydney

☆ How to Hunt the Sasquatch
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-06 | by ( Virginia Heffernan | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE SECRET HISTORY OF BIGFOOT: Field Notes on a North American Monster, by John O’ConnorWhy do Americans need Bigfoot? This question propels John O’Connor’s “Secret History of Bigfoot,” a farrago of participatory journalism, anthropological speculation, pop-culture parentheticals and broadsides against Donald Trump that often seems stuck together by sap and tar. Officially O’Connor was seeking Bigfoot — or at least the enduring wellspring of faith in Bigfoot, which struck him as just as elusive. Like a forty-niner cutting ties with the uptight Victorians, O’Connor sought instead “wild places” where men are men, go unmasked and hope for moral redemption by Sasquatch. A stay-at-home dad in Cambridge, Mass., he became, during lockdown, a literal stay-at-home dad.

Persons: John O’Connor, John O’Connor’s, Donald Trump, O’Connor, Covid, “ wokesters, irked, he’s, ” Locations: American, Antarctica, O’Connor, Cambridge, Washington, Boston

Prosecutors are still pursuing plea agreements with defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and other cases at Guantanamo. Political Cartoons View All 253 Images“That call dropped our hearts into an abyss, where they remain to this day,” Hall told the commission, with the two defendants in the hearing room. More than two decades later, Hall said, she came to Guantanamo Bay because “it's time for Megan to be recognized, and Megan's demise to be recognized. Chris Snodgrass of Glendale, Arizona, told of struggling with a “toxic” hatred of Muslims since the bombings killed his 33-year-old daughter, Deborah Snodgrass. Reporters watched the proceedings from Guantanamo and by remote link from Fort Meade military base in Maryland.

Persons: ” Matthew Arnold of, Arnold, Bonnie Kathleen Hall, Megan Heffernan, ” Hall, Hall, Megan, Jemaah, Chris Snodgrass, Deborah Snodgrass, “, ”, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, Mohammed Nazir Bin, Prosecutors haven't Organizations: Prosecutors, State Department, Reporters, Fort Meade Locations: Cuba, Guantanamo, ” Matthew Arnold of Birmingham, England, Bali, Florida, Glendale , Arizona, Maryland, U.S, Indonesia

☆ Families Head to Guantánamo Bay Seeking Justice in Bali Bombing Case
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-19 | by ( Carol Rosenberg | More About Carol Rosenberg | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Frank Heffernan thought his daughter Megan was in South Korea where she was working as an English teacher when he heard the news of a devastating terrorist attack on the Indonesian island of Bali on Oct. 12, 2002. She had gone there with friends on a vacation. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her,” said Mr. Heffernan, mopping his eyes with a tissue at his home in Florida. In the random, cruel fashion of terrorism, the bombing killed tourists and workers from 22 nations who happened to be in a commercial district, including 38 Indonesians. Among the dead were Australian and British citizens who were there for a rugby match, Americans passionate about surfing — and Megan and two Korean friends, who were out sightseeing when the bombs exploded.

Persons: Frank Heffernan, Megan, Megan Heffernan, ”, Heffernan Organizations: State Department, Al Locations: South Korea, Indonesian, Bali, Alaska, Al Qaeda, Florida

SYDNEY, Oct 3 (Reuters) - A bushfire in Australia's Victoria state more than trebled overnight and authorities urged residents in a remote part of Tasmania state to evacuate as a spring heatwave fanned fires across the country's southeast. Across the Bass Strait in Tasmania state, residents on the northern edge of Flinders Island were told to evacuate from an out of control bushfire. Fires are being stoked by hot, dry winds across southeast as the country experiences an unseasonably hot spring. Australia began spring with its driest September on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, with rainfall 71% below the 1961-1990 average. Conditions are expected to change rapidly in Victoria Tuesday afternoon, with heavy rains expected to help douse fires but potentially trigger flash flooding.

Persons: Jason Heffernan, Heffernan, they're, Lewis Jackson, Richard Chang Organizations: SYDNEY, Country Fire Authority, Meteorology, Greater, Thomson Locations: Australia's Victoria, Tasmania, Victoria state's Gippsland, Bass, Flinders, Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Greater Sydney Region, Sydney's

☆ Bushfires in Parts of Southeast Australia Amid Spring Heatwave
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-02 | by ( Oct. | At P.M. | ) www.usnews.com time to read: +2 min

By Lewis JacksonSYDNEY (Reuters) - A bushfire in Australia's Victoria state more than trebled overnight and authorities urged residents in a remote part of Tasmania state to evacuate as a spring heatwave fanned fires across the country's southeast. "It is quite a large fire spread across a large area. Across the Bass Strait in Tasmania state, residents on the northern edge of Flinders Island were told to evacuate from an out of control bushfire. Fires are being stoked by hot, dry winds across southeast as the country experiences an unseasonably hot spring. Australia began spring with its driest September on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, with rainfall 71% below the 1961-1990 average.

Persons: Lewis Jackson SYDNEY, Jason Heffernan, Heffernan, they're, Lewis Jackson, Richard Chang Organizations: Country Fire Authority, Meteorology, Greater Locations: Australia's Victoria, Tasmania, Victoria state's Gippsland, Bass, Flinders, Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Greater Sydney Region, Sydney's

☆ ‘Unhappy Hour’: U.K. Pub Chains Adopt Surge Pricing for Pints
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-13 | by ( Jenny Gross | More About Jenny Gross | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A pint of beer may cost more during peak hours at some pubs owned by Britain’s largest pub company, which has in recent weeks adopted surge pricing. About 800 of the 4,000 pubs owned by the company, Stonegate Group, are either using “dynamic pricing,” in which prices rise at times of increased demand, or may use it in the future to help cope with higher costs for staffing and licensing requirements, Maureen Heffernan, a spokeswoman for Stonegate, said on Tuesday. Stonegate owns the popular pub chains Slug & Lettuce and Craft Union. Ms. Heffernan said that the timing of surge pricing, in which a pint of beer would cost about 20 pence (25 cents) more, would vary by pub, but that generally prices would be higher on weekends and evenings. In July, the average price for a pint of draft lager was 4.31 pounds (about $5.37), up from £4 a year earlier, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics.

Persons: Maureen Heffernan, Stonegate, Ms, Heffernan Organizations: Britain’s, Stonegate, Craft Union, National Statistics

☆ Video has become the hottest topic in podcasting, as some look to it to supercharge growth and others worry about how it will change the industry
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-27 | by ( Marta Biino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

And while Schwarzenberger comes from the world of YouTube, it's not just content creators and influencers who have embraced video. "Sometimes they don't differentiate between a podcast on an audio platform, and a podcast on a video platform. Spotify recently started partnering with payment startup Creative Juice to support podcast creators. Hosting company RSS.com launched a tool in June to generate video from audio podcast tracks to repurpose on social media. And several AI tools have launched that automatically chop up long-form video content for short-form social platforms.

Persons: it's, Jordan Schwarzenberger, Schwarzenberger, influencers, Alison Lomax, Louise Kattenhorn, Matt Wells, — chatty, Conal Byrne, Will Ferrell, Nikki Glaser, Ryan Seacrest, Joe Gagliese, Liam Heffernan, RSS.com, Josh Adley, YouTube's, Natalie Amos, Listen's Adley, Keith Jenkins, Jenkins, Kristen Bousquet, Bousquet, Jay Clouse Organizations: YouTube, Ireland, BBC, Cumulus Media, Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Viral, Gleam Locations: London

☆ To video or not to video? Inside the biggest debate in podcasting and how it could shape the industry's future
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-26 | by ( Marta Biino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

☆ How ‘Going Viral’ Became a Thing
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Virginia Heffernan | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Select a party anthem (“YMCA”), a quality in a dream partner (“ravenous”) and presto: your spiritual home. Too many people got Wyoming — more than actually lived in Wyoming — and this turn of events was so exciting that people stomped over to Facebook to protest. Then, according to Ben Smith in his engrossing and suspenseful book, “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” the team at BuzzFeed noticed something that changed media forev —Well, not forever. This is Ben Smith, after all. Co-founder of Semafor, former New York Times media columnist, onetime editor in chief of BuzzFeed News.

Nanoco and Chicago-based litigation funding firm GLS Capital said in a release that the settlement, which includes a license agreement and the "transfer of certain patents," resolves litigation in the United States, Germany and China. Nanoco's quantum dots improve the backlighting of LED displays without the use of toxic heavy metals like cadmium. The Texas lawsuit said Samsung began incorporating Nanoco's technology into high-end QLED TVs launched in 2017. Third-party funding of lawsuits has becoming increasingly common in recent years, though details about specific investments are rarely publicized. The case is Nanoco Technologies Ltd v. Samsung Electronics Co, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No.

☆ Happy New Year! In 2023 kick out Trump, Elon Musk, Kanye and Depp
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-01 | by ( Lynn Stuart Parramore | Lynn Stuart Parramore Is A Cultural Historian Who Studies The Intersection Of Culture | Psychology | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +9 min

Though in far different fields, men like Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Johnny Depp and Sam Bankman-Fried will forever be linked by this ignominious characteristic. Over the past 12 interminable months, America has witnessed the rantings of Hitler-loving Ye; Musk’s edgelord trolling on his new plaything, Twitter; Depp and his toxic TikTok fanboys; and Trump being Trump on any given day. While seemingly not vain like Ye or Depp or openly thuggish like Trump and Musk, he nonetheless exhibits traits that point to something sinister behind the “just-a-regular-dude” persona. Trump seems to be losing ground, and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee finally took down their “Kanye. Musk asked Twitter users whether he should step down as CEO, and they voted “yes.”Unfortunately, until we address roots causes, there will always be another blustering bully, another Trump, another Ye.

☆ Biden calls deadly shooting at LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs a 'senseless attack' that 'happens far too often': 'Get weapons of war off America's streets'
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-20 | by ( Taylor Ardrey | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

President Biden denounced the mass shooting that occurred at an LGBTQ nightclub over the weekend. Police said at least five people were killed, and many others were injured from the attack at Club Q in Colorado Springs. (AP Photo/Geneva Heffernan)"Today, yet another community in America has been torn apart by gun violence. We must address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms." We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America's streets."

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