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☆ It's not easy being a bicyclist in the US. Better infrastructure could help.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-30 | by ( Eliza Relman | Juliana Kaplan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

Advocates are asking for more funding for bike safety measures, in addition to e-bike tax credits. The best way to address biking safety concerns, advocates say, is to build better bike infrastructure, including a robust system of bike lanes. If passed, the law wouldn't directly address the most pressing safety and infrastructure concerns facing bicyclists, but advocates say it could help. At the same time, this growing community of new bicyclists would likely demand better bike lanes and other infrastructure. Ultimately, advocates say it's about return on investment: More bikes, and better bike infrastructure, could lead to big savings for commuters and a rethinking of how everyone navigates their landscape.

☆ A nuclear plant that leaked 400,000 gallons of radioactive water will be shut down after second incident
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Erik Ortiz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

This second leak involved hundreds of gallons of radioactive water, according to the utility company, far less than the 400,000 gallons that was discovered leaking in late November. "I think the general public needs to be informed more about this," Megan Sanborn, 31, who lives 6 miles upstream from the nuclear plant, said. Tritium spills do happen occasionally but are typically contained within a nuclear site, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The incident comes as Xcel Energy is in the midst of seeking an operating license renewal for Monticello. At a town hall meeting over the license on Wednesday, before the latest leak was known publicly, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials sought to allay residents' fears.

☆ The US's B-29 bomber was more expensive than the nuclear bomb it dropped on Japan at the end of World War II
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-21 | by ( Miguel Ortiz | We Are The Mighty | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

The Manhattan Project cost about $2 billion, or nearly $30 billion in 2021 dollars. The US's B-29 bomber program cost $3 billion, or just over $44.5 billion in 2021 dollars. In total, the program cost about $2 billion, or nearly $30 billion in 2021 adjusted for inflation. It was pushed through though because it was necessary for the Manhattan Project to work and the war to be won. It was also incapable of carrying and delivering the atomic bomb being developed by the Manhattan Project.

Dozens of employees at a Tesla factory in upstate New York have been fired just days after launching a union campaign, organizers alleged Thursday. In a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, Workers United said Tesla fired more than 30 workers from its Autopilot unit at a Buffalo plant as a retaliatory measure and to discourage union activity. Employees at the Buffalo facility on Tuesday launched organizing efforts under the union Tesla Workers United. Workers received an email Wednesday evening laying out a new policy that prohibits them from recording workplace meetings without the permission of all participants, Tesla Workers United said in a release Thursday. In 2017, Tesla fired a union activist named Richard Ortiz, and in 2018, Musk tweeted a comment found to have violated federal labor laws.

☆ David ‘Big Papi’ Ortiz Asks $12.5 Million for Miami-Area Mansion
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-14 | by ( E.B. Solomont | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Be the first to know about the biggest and best luxury home sales and listings by signing up for our Mansion Deals email alert. Longtime Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz is listing his Miami-area mansion for $12.5 million.

Feb 14 (Reuters) - U.S. federal agents arrested and charged four suspects in Florida for alleged roles in the plot that led to the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise, authorities said on Tuesday. A person holds a photo of late Haitian President Jovenel Moise, who was shot dead earlier this month, during his funeral at his family home in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, July 23, 2021. Veintemilla, a U.S. citizen, lent over $170,000 to CTU Security to finance their operations in Haiti, officials added. The arrests and charges were reported earlier on Tuesday by the Miami Herald and the New York Times. The resulting violence has left much of the country off-limits to the government and led to routine gun battles with police.

☆ Online sports betting is surging. So is gambling addiction
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-10 | by ( Nathaniel Meyersohn | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

The booming sports betting industry, lawmakers and even the professional sports leagues themselves are making it easier, faster and more tempting for people to bet on games — and develop gambling problems, say gambling researchers and addiction specialists. A flood of advertising, technology that allows for one-click betting at home, and nearly unlimited betting options during games have collided. The sports gambling industry is most similar to financial markets, he said, but financial markets are much more regulated than banks. Most states require that sports betting ads disclose the minimum legal age to gamble and responsible gambling messages, such as problem gambling hotlines. From DraftKingsRegulators are wary of how tightly they can curtail messages in gambling advertising without running afoul of First Amendment protections on commercial speech.

☆ Exclusive: Huge chunk of plants, animals in U.S. at risk of extinction
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-06 | by ( Brad Brooks | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +6 min

REUTERS/Luisa GonzalezFeb 6 (Reuters) - A leading conservation research group found that 40% of animals and 34% of plants in the United States are at risk of extinction, while 41% of ecosystems are facing collapse. Importantly, the report pinpoints the areas in the United States where land is unprotected and where animals and plants are facing the most threats. Nearly half of all cacti species are at risk of extinction, while 200 species of trees, including a maple-leaf oak found in Arkansas, are also at risk of disappearing. The threats against plants, animals and ecosystems are varied, the report found, but include "habitat degradation and land conversion, invasive species, damming and polluting of rivers, and climate change." California, Texas and the southeastern United States are where the highest percentages of plants, animals and ecosystems are at risk, the report found.

☆ 3 arrested following fatal shooting of 11-year-old girl killed in drive-by walking home from store
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( Minyvonne Burke | Minyvonne Burke Is A Senior Breaking News Reporter For Nbc News. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +2 min

Three people were arrested in the death of an 11-year-old girl who was killed in a drive-by shooting as she walked home from a nearby corner store, Syracuse, New York, police said. Brexialee Torres-Ortiz had left her home on Jan. 16 to buy a carton of milk for her family. She was returning home when the suspects allegedly opened fire from a car, targeting a 19-year-old boy. The third suspect, an unidentified 16-year-old boy, was arrested in Lincolndale, New York, with the assistance of state police, authorities in Syracuse tweeted Friday morning. Fitzpatrick said the 16-year-old was a "resident of a juvenile facility" and was on furlough from the facility on the day Brexialee was killed.

The Virginia teacher who was shot by her 6-year-old student texted a loved one before she was wounded that the boy was armed and that school officials were failing to act, according to a source close to the situation. "At least one administrator was notified of a possible weapon," Parker said in a video reviewed by NBC News. The principal and vice principal of Richneck did not respond to requests for comment from the Post on the teacher’s account. It is set to reopen on Monday and will be outfitted with a metal detector, school officials have said. The district has secured funding for 90 state-of-the-art metal detectors that will be placed at all district schools, officials said.

On the night that Alex Murdaugh's wife and son would be fatally shot on the grounds of their rural estate in Colleton County, South Carolina, the 22-year-old sent out a video on Snapchat to several friends. Newman is expected to hear arguments on the motions once the jury of 12 plus six alternates is seated. Newman has already ordered representatives from Snapchat, as well as Google, to be subpoenaed to testify at the trial to attest to evidence on electronic devices. Besides potential digital evidence, forensics may also play a key part during the trial. There is DNA from the victims on Murdaugh's shirt, but his defense said that was the result of coming into contact with their bodies, which were lying near dog kennels on the property.

They said they plan to share the footage with the Justice Department. The main entrance to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Mississippi Department of CorrectionsThe crisis in state prisons had become so acute that Gov. Some changes were already in the works under new leadership, the Justice Department said at the time, with cooperation coming from state officials. The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for further comment.

But the perceived spectacle means that not only will Murdaugh be on display — so will the county seat of Walterboro, population 5,460. “We didn’t want this, but it’s happening, and it’s here,” Scott Grooms, Walterboro’s director of tourism and downtown development, said last week. A portrait of Randolph "Buster" Murdaugh Jr., Alex Murdaugh's late grandfather, was removed from the Colleton County Courthouse ahead of Alex Murdaugh's trial. From left, Paul, Margaret and Alex Murdaugh. While he didn’t know Alex Murdaugh personally, he said few with longstanding ties in the area had not been touched by the Murdaughs’ orbit in one way or another.

☆ AI art generators face separate copyright lawsuits from Getty Images and a group of artists
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-19 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Two separate lawsuits have been launched against AI text-to-image generators. Getty Images also began separate litigation against Stability AI, which is behind Stable Diffusion. On Tuesday, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, the company behind AI art tool Stable Diffusion, alleging it used copyrighted images to train software. The company said in a statement that Stability AI "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright." A representative for Stable Diffusion told Insider that the artists' "allegations represent a misunderstanding about how our technology works and the law."

A school administrator in Newport News, Virginia, was alerted to a possible weapon on a 6-year-old boy before a first-grade teacher was shot, but a search of the student's bookbag that morning turned up empty, school district officials said. "At least one administrator was notified of a possible weapon," Parker said in a video reviewed by NBC News. The student's mother bought the gun used in the shooting legally, according to Newport News police. During the 2019-20 school year, less than 2% of public elementary schools performed random metal detector checks on students, schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Officials said there will be mental health clinicians for students and staff when school resumes, and that a security officer will be installed full-time at the school.

When students return to the Virginia school where a first-grade teacher was shot by a 6-year-old, the campus will be outfitted with a metal detector. The Newport News Public Schools district announced Thursday that a detector will be installed at Richneck Elementary School, where Abigail Zwerner was shot while teaching. At least that is one extra layer of support.”Use of metal detectors rare at American schoolsThe use of metal detectors in schools, particularly elementary schools, is still rare, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. During the 2019-2020 school year, less than 2% of public elementary schools performed random metal detector checks on students. About 54.6% of elementary schools had security staff present at least once a week; at middle schools, it was 81.5% and at high schools 84.4%.

It’s a plot twist the romance writers did not see coming. “I saw the auction that was going on to help raise funds for her funeral,” romance writer T.E. “To find out that it was a hoax, two-and-a-half years later, was just a slap in the face to everybody,” fellow romance writer Samantha A. Cole told NBC News. Cole said she met Meachen around 2017 in one of several online romance writer and reader groups that proliferate on Facebook and elsewhere on the web. Some angry romance writers confronted Meachen online and demanded an explanation, screenshots of the exchanges revealed.

"The Idaho state lab later located a single source of male DNA (suspect Profile) left on the button snap of the knife sheath." But Kohberger's phone did not come up in that search. Another search warrant, granted Dec. 23, gave investigators Kohberger's cellphone location during the 24 hours before the killings and the 24 hours afterward. The evidence was sent to the Idaho State Lab for testing and a DNA profile was compared with DNA discovered on the knife sheath. There's likely to be a lot more evidence — more sightings of the Elantra, more information about where Kohberger's phone traveled — that was not included, Martin said.

☆ Thousands seeking asylum crowd Mexico refugee offices amid fears of a U.S. policy change
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

TAPACHULA/MEXICO CITY — Thousands of migrants have flocked to government offices in southern Mexico seeking asylum since the United States said it would keep restrictions used to quickly expel hundreds of thousands of migrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Cuban migrant German Ortiz, who is waiting to apply for asylum in the Mexican city of Tapachula near the Guatemalan border, wants to make his way quickly to the United States. Title 42 was originally put in place to curb the spread of COVID, but U.S. health authorities have since said it is no longer needed for public health reasons. Ramirez said many migrants seek asylum to obtain documents they believe are necessary to traverse Mexico so they can then go to the U.S.-Mexico border later. Ramirez believed the mass of recent arrivals could be migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti seeking to reach the United States before rules change.

[1/5] A government official talks to migrants waiting to regularize their migration status outside Mexico's Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) in Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico January 3, 2023. Title 42 was originally put in place to curb the spread of COVID, but U.S. health authorities have since said it is no longer needed for public health reasons. Immigrant advocates say the policy is inhumane and it exposes vulnerable migrants to serious risks, like kidnapping or assault, in Mexican border towns. 'GIVE US A CHANCE'Police in Tapachula and the National Guard erected fences around COMAR offices to block large crowds of migrants, Reuters images show. Nearly 400,000 migrants were detained in Mexico through November, twice as many as in 2019, official data show.

The killings of four University of Idaho students in mid-November at an off-campus residence stunned the small community of Moscow, Idaho, where investigators grappled with what the town's police chief would later describe as a "very complex" case. Nov. 13At about 1:30 a.m., Goncalves and Mogen are seen ordering from a nearby food truck, according to the truck's livestream. People place flowers at a memorial in front of a campus entrance sign for the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho on Nov. 16. Nov. 18Police say the victims were most likely asleep when they were slain, and some of them had defensive wounds. Nov. 30A vigil is held at the University of Idaho in honor of the victims, with some family members in attendance.

☆ 2022 was the year the Overconfidence Man fell back to earth
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-29 | by ( Maureen Tkacik | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +22 min

Naturally, Elon Musk, the platonic ideal of the peculiar self-aggrandizing, self-parodying personality type that thrived during the Trump years and peaked during the pandemic, tops this list. By 2022, the media had pronounced him variously the next Warren Buffett, J.P. Morgan and Charles Koch. "bye bye @trussliz Congrats to lettuce", tweeted Putin's one-time stand-in Dmitry Medvedev, to which Elon Musk could not resist replying, "pretty good troll tbh." Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in March 2020. Elon MuskIt's weird to recall now that Elon Musk once seemed like, graded on the billionaire curve anyway, a net positive for a cursed American society.

Police investigating the fatal stabbings of four University of Idaho students are denying a professor's involvement in the unsolved case after a self-described internet sleuth and Tarot card reader posted accusations on TikTok claiming a connection. "At this time in the investigation, detectives do not believe the female associate professor and chair of the history department at the University of Idaho suing a TikTok user for defamation is involved in this crime," police in Moscow, Idaho, said Tuesday. In an attempt to clear her name, Scofield filed a federal lawsuit last week against Ashley Guillard, the Texas woman who posted accusations on TikTok that the professor planned the killings with another University of Idaho student. After a lawyer for Scofield sent a cease-and-desist letter to Guillard on Nov. 29, she kept posting what the suit calls defamatory videos. The Moscow Police Department said in a news release Tuesday that it would not comment on the litigation.

☆ 3 times the US military brought back 'obsolete' weapons to take on new enemies
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-28 | by ( Miguel Ortiz | We Are The Mighty | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Most military enthusiasts are familiar with the Reagan administration's 600-ship Navy and the reactivation of the battleships USS Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin. However, USS New Jersey was brought back into active service once before. US ArmyAn evolution of the famed M1 Garand of WWII and Korea, the M14 battle rifle became the standard-issue rifle for the US military in 1959. It served as the basis of the M21 Sniper Weapon System introduced in 1968 and M25 Sniper Weapon System introduced in 1991. Though both weapon systems have been largely replaced by the M24 Sniper Weapon System, the M14 lives on as the Mk14 Enhanced Battle Rifle.

Ten of the 13 people Dominican authorities accused of attempting to murder former Major League Baseball player David "Big Papi" Ortiz have been convicted. On June 2019, Ortiz was shot in the back while at a bar in his native Dominican Republic. According to the attorney general, Rodríguez Mota is "the person who paid those who carried out the act" against Ortiz. The remaining seven men received sentences of less than 10 years. Ortiz underwent multiple surgeries in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. after the attack.

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