Latest news with #JoeBiden-era
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
WA news LIVE: Man with blow torch threatens to light Bunnings gas cylinders on fire
Latest posts Latest posts 9.30am Man with blow torch threatens to light Bunnings gas cylinders on fire First up this morning, officers from the Tactical Response Group, WA Police and DFES swarmed a Bunnings in Perth's southern suburbs last night after a man, allegedly armed with a blow torch and threatening to set gas cylinders on fire, was arrested. An exclusion zone was set up outside the warehouse in Cannington, after police received reports of a man acting suspiciously inside the warehouse around 7.20pm. Further reports received stated the man had then armed himself with the weapon and was making threats to ignite the gas cylinders outside the store. Police said officers attempted negotiations with the man when they arrived, and he was then taken into custody soon after. Footage of the dramatic arrest, posted to Facebook by a bystander, shows multiple officers from the TRG and WA Police swarming in to make the arrest. The 42-year-old Kelmscott man has been charged with burglary and commit, stealing, being armed in a way that may cause fear and endangering the life, health or safety of a person. The man's bail was refused and he is due to appear before the Armadale Magistrates Court today. Across the nation and around the world Here's what's making headlines today: The United States has launched a review into whether the AUKUS submarine deal should be changed or scrapped, with the Pentagon saying the Joe Biden-era arrangement must be examined to ensure it meets President Donald Trump's 'America First' priorities. Australians have some of the most critical attitudes towards US President Donald Trump and his administration among the world's voters, with an international survey revealing most people find him arrogant, dangerous and a threat to the global economy. A Manhattan jury found Harvey Weinstein guilty on a sex crimes charge on Wednesday, though the jury has not yet reached a verdict on all counts the former movie mogul faces in deliberations that have been marred by infighting and threats. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is preparing to order a radical investigation into the future of the Liberal Party, going beyond a standard post-election review, as she seeks to rebuild it after its historic electoral loss. Critical worker shortages and inflationary pressure on high-volume materials are among the causes driving the unprecedented cost of building a house in Australia, as experts warn that snowballing expenses could doom ambitious housing reform to failure.
The Age
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Age
WA news LIVE: Man with blow torch threatens to light Bunnings gas cylinders on fire
Latest posts Latest posts 9.30am Man with blow torch threatens to light Bunnings gas cylinders on fire First up this morning, officers from the Tactical Response Group, WA Police and DFES swarmed a Bunnings in Perth's southern suburbs last night after a man, allegedly armed with a blow torch and threatening to set gas cylinders on fire, was arrested. An exclusion zone was set up outside the warehouse in Cannington, after police received reports of a man acting suspiciously inside the warehouse around 7.20pm. Further reports received stated the man had then armed himself with the weapon and was making threats to ignite the gas cylinders outside the store. Police said officers attempted negotiations with the man when they arrived, and he was then taken into custody soon after. Footage of the dramatic arrest, posted to Facebook by a bystander, shows multiple officers from the TRG and WA Police swarming in to make the arrest. The 42-year-old Kelmscott man has been charged with burglary and commit, stealing, being armed in a way that may cause fear and endangering the life, health or safety of a person. The man's bail was refused and he is due to appear before the Armadale Magistrates Court today. Across the nation and around the world Here's what's making headlines today: The United States has launched a review into whether the AUKUS submarine deal should be changed or scrapped, with the Pentagon saying the Joe Biden-era arrangement must be examined to ensure it meets President Donald Trump's 'America First' priorities. Australians have some of the most critical attitudes towards US President Donald Trump and his administration among the world's voters, with an international survey revealing most people find him arrogant, dangerous and a threat to the global economy. A Manhattan jury found Harvey Weinstein guilty on a sex crimes charge on Wednesday, though the jury has not yet reached a verdict on all counts the former movie mogul faces in deliberations that have been marred by infighting and threats. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is preparing to order a radical investigation into the future of the Liberal Party, going beyond a standard post-election review, as she seeks to rebuild it after its historic electoral loss. Critical worker shortages and inflationary pressure on high-volume materials are among the causes driving the unprecedented cost of building a house in Australia, as experts warn that snowballing expenses could doom ambitious housing reform to failure.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump stops civil rights investigations into local police departments
The Department of Justice is dismissing lawsuits against several local police departments, ending critical investigations into allegations of constitutional violations and civil rights abuses in the wake of high-profile police killings. Justice Department officials announced on Wednesday they were pulling Joe Biden-era lawsuits targeting police departments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, which came under scrutiny following the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, whose deaths galvanized racial justice protests in 2020. The department is also ending investigations into law enforcement agencies in Memphis, Oklahoma City and Phoenix as well as Trenton, New Jersey and Mount Vernon, New York. A case against the Louisiana State Police also was dropped. Justice Department probes into police departments in Louisville and Minneapolis — known as pattern-or-practice investigations — revealed histories of excessive force, discrimination against Black residents, and First Amendment violations. Those investigations followed criminal trials into the officers involved in the killings of Floyd in Minneapolis and Taylor in Louisville. The Justice Department under Donald Trump's administration is now retracting those findings. The Justice Department now claims that the consent decrees reached with those agencies and the federal government to rectify civil rights violations 'went far beyond the Biden administration's accusations of unconstitutional conduct' and 'would have imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.' Trump's appointed chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, has recast the agency's mission into one that leans into the president's grievances and shifts its focus away from critical missions like police oversight and combating racial discrimination. 'Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,' Dhillon said in a statement Wednesday. 'Today, we are ending the Biden Civil Rights Division's failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees,' she said. This is a developing story
India Today
02-05-2025
- Business
- India Today
Anthropic says Nvidia GPUs getting smuggled into China in prosthetics, Nvidia calls it utter rubbish
Anthropic and Nvidia are at war, a war of words, over the merits - and demerits - of the upcoming US export restrictions on advanced semiconductors, primarily GPUs, to China. While Nvidia has expressed sharp disagreement, Anthropic has argued that the time to safeguard US dominance in artificial intelligence by strengthening export controls - most importantly on China - is now. The spat comes just weeks before the Joe Biden-era 'AI Diffusion Rule' comes into effect on May 15, controversy began after Anthropic published a lengthy blog alleging that Chinese actors have been smuggling Nvidia GPUs using bizarre methods such as 'prosthetic baby bumps' and shipments 'packed alongside live lobsters.' A GPU, which is short for graphics processing unit, is the backbone for developing AI. The thumb rule is that more advanced GPUs, the type that Nvidia which is an American company, specialises in building, can make better AI. Though, with Chinese startups like DeepSeek being able to make competitive AI with limited GPU resources, the jury is still out on whether this is always the case - and if companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind have been Anthropic, which is an AI startup backed by Jeff Bezos' Amazon, is urging the US government to tighten controls, especially on a few countries – particularly China - to prevent leakage of high-powered compute resources so America has the upper hand in building the latest and greatest AI. Nvidia has shot back suggesting these claims are utterly 'American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales,' a spokesperson from Nvidia was quoted as saying by CNBC, adding the AI Diffusion Rule should not be used to stifle competition. (Nvidia believes China already has significant AI expertise.)So, what is this AI Diffusion Rule? It is basically a system where the US has divided different countries into tiers and, based on which group they fall into, these countries will have different levels of access to AI chips made in the US. Tier 1 has 17 US allies, like Japan and Taiwan. They will get unrestricted access to AI chips from the US. In tier 2, there are 120 countries. They will face strict caps which means that companies like Nvidia can sell chips to them with certain conditions in place. Countries deemed adversaries 3 are barred from getting the technology altogether. The list includes China, Russia, Iran, and North to Anthropic, this is not enough - and that the US should not delay the proposed timeline of May 15 to enforce it - warning that compute access is the key chokepoint in global AI development and tighter restrictions are needed for both US security and ensure its economic leadership remains intact. It has proposed that the US government should lower chip export thresholds, increase enforcement budgets, and narrow access for tier 2 nations to stop alleged smuggling of whose H20 AI chips are under scrutiny, is already feeling the heat. The chipmaker has warned that it could lose up to $5.5 billion in revenue in FY26 due to these new licensing terms coming from loss of business from former President Donald Trump reportedly planning his own updates to the AI Diffusion Rule, the road ahead seems a bit uncertain. It remains to be seen if the rules do come into effect this month and, if yes, what are the far-fetching consequences of some of these In
The Guardian
22-02-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Missouri lawmaker proposes registry of pregnant women ‘at risk' for abortions
A Republican lawmaker in Missouri has introduced legislation to create a registry of pregnant women who are 'at risk' of having an abortion – a proposal the bill's author characterized as an 'eHarmony for babies' that could also help match adoptive parents with babies. If passed, the bill would create two registries: one for people 'at risk' of abortions and one for people looking to adopt. Members of each registry could access the other, while Missouri government officials would be tasked with helping members meet each other and facilitating adoptions. The bill's goal is to 'reduce the number of preventable abortions in Missouri'. 'Mothers who choose to put their children up for adoption need to match with prospective adoptive parents,' Gerard Harms, an adoption attorney and the author of the Save MO Babies Act, testified in a Missouri state legislative committee hearing on Tuesday. 'That's what this database is.' The bill does not define what puts someone 'at risk' of abortion. The Save MO Babies Act is the latest in a series of anti-abortion efforts to expand government tracking of pregnant women and abortion patients. Project 2025, the famous conservative policy playbook, suggested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expand its 'surveillance' to force states to turn over data on 'exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother's state of residence, and by what method', as well as information on miscarriages, stillbirths, and 'treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy)'. Project 2025 also proposes rolling back Joe Biden-era guidance that uses the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Hipaa), the US law governing patient privacy, to narrow the circumstances under which healthcare providers can talk to law enforcement about patients who may have undergone abortions. While still a senator, JD Vance signed on to a letter condemning the guidance. Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has spearheaded much of the rightwing attack on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, has also sued over it. In an interview with Time last year, Donald Trump signaled that he would be open to letting states monitor women's pregnancies to ascertain whether they had undergone abortions. 'I think they might do that,' he said, adding: 'The states are going to say. It's irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not.' (He later tried to walk that statement back.) At the state level, Indiana is embroiled in a legal battle over abortion patients' records, as the state's Republican governor and a local anti-abortion group have sought to access records about the few people who have managed to recently undergo the procedure in Indiana. (The state only permits abortions in cases of rape, incest or medical emergency.) A judge ruled this week to block the records' release. If the anti-abortion group obtains the records, the judge wrote, 'it will be free to publicize those medical records further, including by posting them on the Internet, depriving patients of their privacy, which cannot be adequately remedied through money damages'. On Tuesday, Harms suggested that people had misunderstood his intentions in writing the bill. The proposed Missouri registry, he said, was not an attempt 'to go out and data-mine'. Instead, he suggested that abortion clinics could provide patients with information about the registry so they could join it on their own. 'This is a completely voluntary program as it comes to the parents of these children,' he said. The bill, Harms added, was 'inartfully drafted' and suggested that lawmakers should fine-tune the legislation. It is not clear whether the bill will move forward. But Missouri Republican state lawmakers have introduced a barrage of other abortion restrictions, including legislation to roll back a November ballot measure that added abortion rights to the state constitution. Missouri has moved to the epicenter of the national war over the procedure over the last few months. After the passage of the November ballot measure, abortion providers sued to strike down the state's near-total abortion ban and a raft of other restrictions on the procedure. Abortions finally resumed in the state this week.
