Air Force One Production Still Marred by Assembly Woes, GAO Says
Boeing Co. 's new Air Force One faces several issues including unresolved technical modifications that could further delay delivery, congressional auditors found.
Air Force program officials told auditors that 'ongoing design issues, modification rework, and workforce challenges' are slowing progress toward modifying two Boeing 747-8 planes into presidential aircraft, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday.
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CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Suisun City votes to move forward with California Forever annexation project research
SUISUN CITY -- The Suisun City city council voted 3-1 on Tuesday night to enter into a reimbursement agreement with California Forever, which means the city's plan to consider annexing up to 22,000 acres of land owned by the development group now takes a big step forward in what is projected to be a years-long process. California Forever, a billionaire-backed initiative that drew national attention for its plans to build a new city in Solano County, withdrew its "East Solano Plan" from the November ballot in July 2024. The group was asking Solano County voters to support their proposed city adjacent to Travis Air Force Base of around 400,000 people. Instead, the group went back to the drawing board amid public pushback to put together a full environmental impact report on the proposed city's impact, planning to put a measure back before voters in 2026. Suisun City, as has the city of Rio Vista, engaged in talks with California Forever beginning in early 2025 to consider annexing some of the group's land into each city. Tuesday's vote by the Suisun City city council now means California Forever will front the cost of all of research needed for the annexation proposal, including environmental impact reports and paying consultants chosen by the city. California Forever will pay the city an initial $400,000. If the proposed annexation is eventually adopted by the city council and then approved by the county's LAFCO authority, California Forever will pay Suisun City $10 million. Currently, the city is facing a projected more than $1 million budget deficit for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. City manager Bret Prebula spoke in support of the annexation project vote, calling it the city's path forward that now allows them to engage in talks with California Forever that could secure a 'prosperous' future for the city. "What it does is open the door for Suisun City to shape the conversation and ensure we are not left behind," said Prebula at Tuesday's meeting. More than one hundred community members signed up to give public comment Tuesday night, which meant conversation on this topic went on for more than four hours. There was standing room only as Solano County residents both for and against the vote packed the chambers. Several people in support of the annexation project said it stands to provide decades of work for skilled laborers in the county. "What's the problem? I don't get it. It should be an easy 'yes' vote to take the time and do the research. As far as I'm concerned, the project should go forward as well," said Alicia Mijares, representing local sheet metal workers and their union. Those in opposition made it clear they do not trust California Forever and they do not want the city's future tied to their initiative. "When it was happening last summer to go on the ballot, nobody wanted it. They took it off the ballot. Now with this, we don't even have that right anymore. For it to have our vote, our count. It's disgraceful," resident Jan Bartz told CBS News Sacramento before the meeting. Several called what they heard in Tuesday night's public hearing and presentation 'empty promises.' "You may think you are being transparent, but many people I speak to in Suisun City do not agree. Brief public comments are no substitute for genuinely transparent and publicly participatory processes," said one community member from the podium in public comment opposing the vote. Councilmember Princess Washington was the sole "no" vote on the reimbursement agreement with California Forever. Washington expressed hesitancy in her comments by saying that she doesn't feel five people, the council, should 'dictate the fate of the entire county.' She added that proposals of this nature should be up to voters. Mayor Alma Hernandez and the other members of the council commented that this is step one in a long process that will provide the city answers, not result in an outright decision, on annexation. CBS13 asked California Forever for a response to Tuesday night's meeting. "We look forward to working with Suisun City and Rio Vista to bring new industries, amazing neighborhoods, and new sources of tax revenue to the region," a spokesperson responded in a statement. Suisun City is also considering a recent offer by California Forever's CEO Jan Sramek to purchase $1.5 million in downtown city property to help the city offset its budget shortfall. The item is expected to return to the council for a vote in late fall 2025.
CBS News
an hour ago
- CBS News
Mega Millions jackpot reaches $264M for Friday the 13th, a historically lucky day for Michigan players
If history is any indication, Friday the 13th could be a lucky day for a Michigan resident to take a chance at winning the Mega Millions jackpot. Friday's Mega Millions jackpot stands at $264 million, with a cash option of $117.3 million. While the superstitious consider Friday the 13th a cursed day, through the years, four Michiganders won the Mega Millions jackpot on the "unlucky" day. The four jackpots totaled $171 million in winnings. A Kent County man became the first in Michigan to win a Mega Millions jackpot on Friday the 13th, when he won $57 million on June 13, 2008. A Kalamazoo man followed up nearly three years later when he won $27 million on May 13, 2011. A Port Huron woman took home $66 million on June 13, 2024, and a Waterford man collected a $21 million payday on Oct. 13, 2017. The Mega Millions jackpot was most recently won in Michigan in January 2021, when an Oakland County lottery club took home a $1.05 billion jackpot. It's still the largest jackpot ever won in Michigan. Residents in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands can play Mega Millions. Each Mega Millions ticket costs $5 and includes a built-in multiplier that multiplies non-jackpot prizes up to 10 times to a maximum of $10 million, according to the Michigan Lottery. Tickets can be purchased at lottery retailers and until 10:45 p.m. The drawing is at 11 p.m.
Associated Press
an hour ago
- Associated Press
Meta invests in AI firm Scale and recruits its CEO for 'superintelligence' team
Meta said Thursday it is making a large investment in artificial intelligence company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing 'superintelligence' at the tech giant. The move reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from competitors such as Google and OpenAI. Meta announced what it called a 'strategic partnership and investment' with Scale late Thursday but didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. Scale said the added investment puts its market value at over $29 billion. It won't be the first time a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them. Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division. Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets. Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016. They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI. Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier. Scale's pitch was to supply the human labor needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them. General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers. What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs. More recently, the growing commercialization of AI large language models — the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama — brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams. The company claims to service 'every leading large language model,' including from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, by helping to fine tune their training data and test their performance. It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers. Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration. The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government. Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open-source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components. Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs. It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as 'one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet.' Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed skepticism about the tech industry's current focus on large language models. 'How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?' LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year. These are all characteristics of intelligent behavior that large language models 'basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way,' LeCun said. Instead, he emphasized Meta's interest in 'tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman.' LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau. Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research 'remains unwavering' and described the work as 'building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology.'
