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The AI bubble will burst. It’s up to us to replace it responsibly

The AI bubble will burst. It’s up to us to replace it responsibly

Mark Surman writes: It was December 1999. Tech investors were riding high, convinced that a website and a Super Bowl ad were all it took to get rich quick. Spending was mistaken for growth; marketing was mistaken for a business model. In just a few months, the dot-com boom would go bust: $1.7tn in market value vanished, and the broader economy took a $5tn hit. Yet something remarkable emerged from the wreckage. The post-crash internet wasn’t defined by speculation, but…

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Once thought to support neurons, astrocytes turn out to be in charge

Once thought to support neurons, astrocytes turn out to be in charge

Ingrid Wickelgren writes: The human brain is a vast network of billions of neurons. By exchanging signals to depress or excite each other, they generate patterns that ripple across the brain up to 1,000 times per second. For more than a century, that dizzyingly complex neuronal code was thought to be the sole arbiter of perception, thought, emotion, and behavior, as well as related health conditions. If you wanted to understand the brain, you turned to the study of neurons:…

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Profile in courage: Nearest witness of Alex Pretti’s murder describes everything she saw

Profile in courage: Nearest witness of Alex Pretti’s murder describes everything she saw

  CNN’s Anderson Cooper speaks with Stella Carlson, the witness who captured crucial video showing exactly what happened when Alex Pretti was shot and killed by DHS officers: “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Like, what? What? And I knew he was gone, because I watched it. And then they come over to try to perform some type of medical aid by ripping his clothes open with scissors and then maneuvering his body around like a rag doll, only…

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Instead of focusing on national security, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is hunting for 2020 election fraud

Instead of focusing on national security, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is hunting for 2020 election fraud

The Wall Street Journal reports: Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials, a role that took her to a related FBI search of an election center in Georgia on Wednesday. Gabbard is leading the administration’s effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes, a priority for the president, the officials said. The national intelligence director is usually focused on…

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FBI’s search of Georgia election center is ‘dangerous,’ experts warn

FBI’s search of Georgia election center is ‘dangerous,’ experts warn

By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica When the FBI executed a warrant on Wednesday to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in Fulton County, Georgia, it marked both an extraordinary event in the history of American elections and a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms, several legal experts said. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him and blamed Georgia, in…

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Chief federal judge in Minnesota says ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders this month

Chief federal judge in Minnesota says ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders this month

The New York Times reports: The chief federal judge in Minnesota excoriated Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” The extraordinary broadside by the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, came in a ruling in which he temporarily rescinded an order he had issued on Tuesday, summoning Todd…

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ICE pretends it’s a military force, but its tactics would get real soldiers killed

ICE pretends it’s a military force, but its tactics would get real soldiers killed

John Publius (a pseudonym) writes: As a veteran of the war on terror, I have spent the past year watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers expand their operations across the country on a heretofore unprecedented scale and with a new faux-military bearing. From equipment to weapons to tactics, ICE and other immigration enforcement bodies want to be seen as combat forces carrying out their missions. Witness on Thursday, when White House border czar Tom Homan talked about Minneapolis as a…

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India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI

India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI

Rest of World reports: On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident. The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley. Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. Nine months prior, he’d landed a coveted job at…

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Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not

Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not

Pack-Shot/Shutterstock By Florian Neukart, Leiden University Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and we die, in exactly that order. We plan our lives around time, measure it obsessively and experience it as an unbroken flow from past to future. It feels so obvious that time moves forward that questioning it can seem almost pointless….

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Local prosecution is the answer to federal lawlessness

Local prosecution is the answer to federal lawlessness

Barry Friedman and Stephen I. Vladeck write: In the wake of another fatal shooting by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, many people are wondering what can be done. The answer has been right in front of us all along. Despite the incredulity with which some legal observers meet the idea, state and local prosecutors can prosecute federal officials for violating state criminal laws. Prosecutors should be gathering and securing evidence and seriously considering filing charges — sooner rather than later….

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ICE’s brutality is its weakness

ICE’s brutality is its weakness

Omar Wasow writes: I study the political consequences of protest and state violence. So when federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this month, I was reminded of Jimmie Lee Jackson. On the night of Feb. 18, 1965, police officers and state troopers attacked civil rights demonstrators in Marion, Ala. Jackson, a 26-year-old woodcutter, fled with his mother and grandfather into a cafe. Troopers followed them inside and began beating his mother; Jackson tried to protect…

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Next nationwide No Kings protests on March 28 with flagship event in the Twin Cities

Next nationwide No Kings protests on March 28 with flagship event in the Twin Cities

NBC News reports: The “No Kings” nationwide demonstration that has come to symbolize the resistance to the Trump administration is returning March 28, this time with a flagship event in the Twin Cities. Organizers with Indivisible, the grassroots group behind No Kings, said it was only suitable to stage a marquee march in Minnesota in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti by immigration agents Saturday and the shooting death of Renee Good weeks earlier. Other demonstrations are again…

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Key Gulf allies say they will not aid U.S. in an Iran strike, limiting Trump’s options

Key Gulf allies say they will not aid U.S. in an Iran strike, limiting Trump’s options

The Wall Street Journal reports: Saudi Arabia on Tuesday ruled out the use of its airspace and territory for a potential U.S. attack on Iran, complicating the Trump administration’s options in response to Tehran’s violent crackdown against Iranian protesters. The Saudi move follows a similar statement Monday by the United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry. The statements from the two Gulf states represent a foreign policy setback for the Trump administration as it seeks to ratchet up pressure on Tehran, which…

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Instagram ‘is a drug’: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

Instagram ‘is a drug’: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

Ars Technica reports: Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and death. These can be the consequences for vulnerable kids who get addicted to social media, according to more than 1,000 personal injury lawsuits that seek to punish Meta and other platforms for allegedly prioritizing profits while downplaying child safety risks for years. Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they’ve never had to convince a jury that they aren’t liable for harming…

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