Latest news with #KevinKelly
1News
08-08-2025
- Politics
- 1News
Four more electorate names changed for next general election
The names of four more electorates will be changed for the next general election. The Representation Commission, who outlined proposed changes to electorates in March this year, have now finalised boundary adjustments to 49 general electorates and three Māori electorates. Nineteen were unchanged. It said the main areas of change were in Auckland, the Bay of Plenty, Christchurch and the lower North Island. The loss of an electorate in Wellington was also finalised, with Ōhāriu, Mana and Ōtaki being replaced with two new electorates named Kenepuru and Kapiti. ADVERTISEMENT After hearings and submissions were made on the proposed changes in June, the commission today announced four additional electorate name changes. The proposed electorate name of Rānui is now named Henderson, the East Coast is now East Cape, Wellington Central is now Wellington North, and Rongotai is now Wellington Bays. Representation Commission chair Judge Kevin Kelly said most of the changes outlined in March have remained, but some amendments were made following the feedback process. The morning's headlines in 90 seconds, including a cold weekend on the way, Israel reveals a new plan in Gaza, and what not do when driving over a rail crossing. (Source: 1News) The amendments included the following, from north to south: An area around Balmoral remains in Epsom rather than being moved to Mt Albert. Part of Arch Hill is moved from Auckland Central to Mt Albert. An area south of Tauranga city in the lower Kaimai Range no longer shifts into Rotorua and instead remains within Tauranga. There are related minor changes to the boundaries between Mt Maunganui and Rotorua. Proposed boundary changes north of Gisborne will no longer proceed. Instead, Napier gains several rural areas from Tukituki. Redwood remains with Christchurch Central, and instead Christchurch East gains an area from Christchurch Central in Linwood and Phillipstown. In the Māori electorates, the boundary change between Te Tai Tonga and Ikaroa Rāwhiti is confirmed and a minor technical adjustment is made to the boundary between Te Tai Tonga and Te Tai Hauāuru. The commission said the final electorate boundaries and names will be used for the next general election, and any byelections held before that election will be conducted using the 2020 electorate boundaries. ADVERTISEMENT 'We received considerable feedback from the residents of Ashhurst on the proposal to include it within Wairarapa instead of Palmerston North or Rangitīkei," Judge Kelly said. "We looked at options to avoid this change, but it was not possible without making major changes to surrounding electorates throughout the lower and central North Island. "Overall, we consider we have struck the appropriate balance so that each electorate has about the same number of people as is required of us under the Electoral Act." There were over 700 written submissions on the proposed boundaries and public hearings were held in June.
RNZ News
08-08-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
From new names to new boundaries: Here's what's happening to your voting electorate
Photo: Electoral Commission The North Island will lose an electorate seat as part of a sweep of new electorate boundaries and names across the country announced on Friday. The independent Representation Commission has confirmed the final boundary changes to electorates ahead of next year's general election. The boundary changes are largely in Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Christchurch and the lower North Island. Nineteen electorates are unchanged, and the boundaries of 49 general and three Māori electorates have been adjusted. Wellington Region boundaries. Photo: Electoral Commission It affects about 20 percent of people in the North island, about three percent of people in the South Island, and 0.6 percent of those in the Māori electorates. The changes includes having one fewer electorate in the lower North Island to account for seven percent population growth in the South Island - which by law can only have 16 seats. Ōtaki, Mana and Ōhāriu, are reconfigured into two electorates, Kapiti and Kenepuru. The number of Māori seats were unchanged. There were 717 written submissions on the proposed boundaries and public hearings were held in June. Representation Commission chair Judge Kevin Kelly - the independent body responsible for reviewing electorate boundaries said the public's contributions were "invaluable" and he was heartened so many people took an interest. Auckland Region boundaries. Photo: Electoral Commission "Most of the boundary changes were signalled in the proposed electorates report published in March 2025, but we have made some amendments to those proposals following public consultation," Kelly said. As a result of submissions, there are four more electorate name changes. The proposed electorate name Rānui becomes Henderson. East Coast becomes East Cape, Wellington Central becomes Wellington North, and Rongotai becomes Wellington Bays. Amendments include the following, from north to south. Christchurch boundaries. Photo: Electoral Commission The final electorate boundaries and names will be used for the next general election. Any by-elections held before that election will be conducted using the 2020 electorate boundaries. Find the final boundary maps here . Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
The Guardian
29-07-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
We face daunting global challenges. But here are eight reasons to be hopeful
Don't fret the future. A lot of people do, and for powerful reasons – we are facing enormous challenges unprecedented in human history, from climate change and nuclear war to engineered pandemics and malicious artificial intelligence. A 2017 survey showed that nearly four in 10 Americans think that climate change alone has a good chance of triggering humanity's extinction. But we seem largely blind to the many profound reasons for hope – and it's not entirely our fault. Humans are wired with a 'negativity bias' that triggers a stronger emotional response to bad news than good news – evident in the journalism maxim 'if it bleeds, it leads'. This loss-aversion behavior served a purpose in our evolutionary past, when information and resources were scarce, but in the age of endless information access, it can lead to pessimism, anxiety and a distorted vision of what humanity is capable of. In reality, we are making incredible progress in global poverty, health, longevity, climate change and much more, but these trends are harder to perceive because they accumulate gradually and quietly. As the Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly points out, progress is often about what doesn't happen – the children who won't die of smallpox, or the farmers whose crops won't get raided. The world is still an awful place in many ways, and the crises we face are daunting. But looking past the dark headlines, we can see bright trendlines that give us profound reasons to be optimistic for our future. Just a decade ago or so, it appeared that civilization was on a course to cause a disastrous 4C-5C of warming above pre-industrial levels. But since then, major nations and markets have responded with surprising force and urgency; global carbon dioxide emissions have significantly slowed, and in many countries, per capita emissions are falling even while per capita GDP and energy use are going up. We are still not doing enough – there is a lingering risk of runaway carbon cycle feedback loops that could push us over 4C – but nations are making ambitious net-zero commitments that, if realized, could feasibly keep warming below 2C. The pathway for avoiding the absolute worst outcomes – humanity's extinction, for one – is increasingly clear and doable, and involves a combination of decarbonization, renewable energy breakthroughs, responsible geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal. The central reason for optimism, however, remains the coming age of radically cheap renewable energy, primarily from solar photovoltaics. The exponential growth in solar energy has stunned even expert forecasters. In 2015, the International Energy Agency predicted that the world would add about 35 gigawatts of solar energy capacity by 2023. Their estimate was off by a factor of 10. The costs of solar have fallen below the cost of coal, a tipping point that will financially incentivize markets to go green even in the absence of policy pressures. There are strong reasons to believe this exponential progress will continue; soon it could become cheaper to create fuel out of thin air and water using solar energy than to drill for it underground. More signs of an energy revolution are all around: The same expert-defying growth is happening in the adoption of electric vehicles, and global investment in clean energy now far outstrips that of fossil fuels. With worldwide access to radically cheap renewable energy and carbon-neutral fuels, underdeveloped countries can achieve first-world standards of living without a corresponding increase in carbon emissions. Already wealthy nations will see new waves of growth as energy abundance triggers new economic possibilities, including affordable desalination, which could address water shortages in many parts of the world. We may be on the verge of a new industrial revolution and a new era of human prosperity. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, you've never seen a newspaper run the headline '137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday' – yet this incredible statistic has been accurate every day for decades now. Since 1990, more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, with the impoverished share falling from 38% of the global population down to 9.1% today. That still leaves more than 600 million people living below the international poverty line of $2.15 a day, making it clear that the fight is far from over. But with energy abundance driving new growth and economic modalities, we can expect to see the downward trend continue; ultimately, we should strive for no less than a 0% rate of poverty globally. Further progress is there for the taking. It might be the most feelgood statistic of all time: an average person born today can expect to live more than twice as long as someone born around 1900. In South Korea, life expectancy has more than tripled, surging from just 23.5 years in 1908 to more than 83 years today. This dramatic increase is thanks to huge advances in medicine, public health and living standards, but also by a stunning fall in child mortality: for most of human history, about half of all children died before their 15th birthday; today the figure is less than 5% globally and as low as 0.4% in some wealthy nations. We can, and probably will, save millions of children's lives by driving the global rate this low – a feasible and morally urgent goal for the 21st century. On top of all this progress, advances in ageing biology are leading to breakthroughs in slowing the ageing process and keeping laboratory animals healthier for longer. We now have numerous ways of accomplishing this with mice and primates; what is needed is an injection of funding to bring these experiments to human trials. Ageing is responsible for about two-thirds of all deaths; channeling our resources to lessen its tragic effects will have enormous and immediate benefits to human society. If the funding does come, the next few decades could get very interesting. Converging advancements in AI and biotechnology are pointing toward a radical enhancement of human health and wellbeing. Already, projects like Google's AlphaFold are discovering structures of pathogens and potential treatments for cancer much faster than humans could. New gene-editing tools like Crispr have the potential to cure many of the more than 10,000 diseases that are caused by single-gene mutations. Barney Graham, an immunologist who played a pivotal role in developing mRNA vaccines, puts it thusly: 'You cannot imagine what you're going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.' In the coming decades, we could potentially gain the power to regenerate limbs, engineer designer life forms, eliminate all disease and possibly extend our life spans indefinitely. If you've ever watched two-legged robots navigating obstacle courses and landing synchronized backflips, you are familiar with the incredible developments in robotics over the past decade. But the real reason to get excited now is not the leaps in physical capabilities (save for the potential of a future robot Olympics), but in intellectual abilities. OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, has partnered with Figure, a robotics startup, to incorporate multimodal artificial intelligence into a humanoid form factor. Their walking, talking full-body robots are learning tasks merely by watching videos – no manual training required. Tesla's Optimus bot is a direct competitor that its CEO, Elon Musk, believes will eventually be more valuable than the company's electric car business. It's not hard to see the value: humanoid robots could address acute labor shortages and replace labor-intensive and dangerous jobs, taking on roles in disaster response, healthcare, manufacturing, space exploration and much more – freeing real people to pursue more desirable jobs, elevating quality of life and boosting economic growth. Of course, humanity will only benefit if we can address the risks of job displacement and human safety. Half of the battle will be controlling these risks and ensuring we reap the benefits, rather than be overcome by armies of terminators. For decades, the final frontier was only accessible to a handful of major nations with mainly geopolitical interests. But in the past 10-15 years, launch costs have fallen drastically thanks to the advent of reusable rockets and innovative fuel types, enabling a new generation of space technologies and opening up the final frontier to a wave of commercial and scientific interests. Satellite broadband is starting to bring internet access to rural and underdeveloped parts of the world, which will bolster agriculture, education, health, economic opportunity and participation in democracy. Low-gravity environments are uniquely ideal for cell research, where scientists are growing miniature organs for study, and could lead to pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Eventually, bolder prospects like asteroid mining could supply trillions of dollars' worth of rare materials without compromising environments back on Earth. You can almost feel the pace quickening: this decade has already seen twice as many moon missions as the 2010s. Plans for commercial space stations like Orbital Reef and Starlab are under way and slated to be operational before 2030. Nasa has plans to put humans on the moon again as soon as 2026. To top it all off, the recently launched James Webb space telescope is already discovering new secrets of the universe only two years into its mission. It's finding water vapor on alien planets and holds the promise of detecting signatures of alien life. We may be on the verge of the most significant scientific discovery of all time. It's safe to say that a new space age has arrived. It's not far-fetched to speculate that a major disaster may await us in the coming centuries. But humans have a long history of rebounding from catastrophic collapse. Our ancestors have survived asteroid impacts, ice ages, supervolcano eruptions and deadly plagues – each time eventually bouncing back to new heights. The Black Death of 1347 killed up to half the population of Europe and one out of every 10 people globally. But even this did not derail human progress in the long term, and it was followed by the scientific revolution just 200 years later. The upward march of humanity has never been and will never be perfectly smooth, but progress is unmistakable over the long term. It will take a truly apocalyptic sequence of events to stop us. The modern world was built and shaped by optimists. We owe it to them to carry the torch. Optimism for the future is not only justified – it's a weapon in the fight for a higher future, and a moral obligation to ourselves and to future generations. No future is guaranteed; there will be injustices and suffering in every path forward, just as there have been forever. A utopia will never be achievable, but in striving to reach it, we can create the best possible world for us and our descendants. The larger the problems we face, the greater the opportunity for progress; the immense challenges of the 21st century can be the catalyst for a new leap in the human condition to heights we cannot yet imagine. We have everything we need to thrive. Our resiliency will protect us; our intelligence will propel us. If there is one lesson our history can teach us, it's to never underestimate the human race. Illustrations by Seba Cestaro John D Boswell is a film-maker, composer, visual effects artist and editor
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Rafaela's two-run, walk-off homer gives Red Sox 5-4 win over Rays
Boston Red Sox's Alex Bregman runs to second base on an infield double during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Kevin Kelly delivers during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the Boston Red Sox, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Trevor Story side steps a pitch during the eighth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Ceddanne Rafaela reacts after being doused after hitting a two-run walkoff home run during the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Ceddanne Rafaela, left, reacts after hitting a two-run walkoff home run during the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Ceddanne Rafaela, left, reacts after hitting a two-run walkoff home run during the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Alex Bregman runs to second base on an infield double during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Kevin Kelly delivers during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the Boston Red Sox, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Trevor Story side steps a pitch during the eighth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Ceddanne Rafaela reacts after being doused after hitting a two-run walkoff home run during the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) Boston Red Sox's Ceddanne Rafaela, left, reacts after hitting a two-run walkoff home run during the ninth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday, July 11, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) BOSTON (AP) — Ceddanne Rafaela hit a two-run, walk-off home run in the ninth inning and the Boston Red Sox extended their winning streak to a season-best eight games with a 5-4 win over the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday night. Rafaela had already extended his RBI streak to seven games when he turned on a slider thrown by Tampa Bay closer Pete Fairbanks (4-3) and sent it over the Green Monster for his 13th homer of the season. Advertisement Reinstated off the Injured List before the game, Red Sox All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman went 1 for 4 with a double off the Green Monster. Tampa Bay scored in the first inning against Red Sox starter Hunter Dobbins, who left the game an inning later due to right knee pain. Chris Murphy (2-0) was one of six relievers used by the Red Sox after Dobbins departed. Boston tied it in the second behind Rafaela's RBI single, but Tampa Bay pushed across three unearned runs to break a 1-1 game in the third. Boston got to within 4-3 in the fourth when rookie Marcelo Mayer doubled in a run and Abraham Toro followed with an RBI grounder. Advertisement With his double in the sixth, Tampa Bay outfielder Chandler Simpson extended his hitting streak to 15 games, the longest by a rookie in franchise history. Jonathan Aranda and Jake Mangum each had two hits for the Rays. Key moment Red Sox rookie Roman Anthony came off the bench in the ninth and drew a walk off Fairbanks, then scored on Rafaela's walk-off shot. Key stats Appearing in 1,000th MLB game, Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story had two hits and is now one away from 1,000 hits in his career. Up next Boston LHP Garrett Crochett (9-4, 2.39 ERA) goes against Tampa Bay RHP Baz (8-4, 4.34) on Saurday. On Friday, Major League Baseball announced that Crochet won't pitch in next week's All-Star Game. ___ AP MLB:
Al Arabiya
04-07-2025
- Sport
- Al Arabiya
Bader Walks Off Rays With 2nd Home Run Of Game For Twins
Harrison Bader hit his second home run of the game in the bottom of the ninth inning to give the Minnesota Twins a 4–3 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday. Bader, the No. 9 batter, lined the first pitch he saw from Kevin Kelly (0–1) into the first row of left-field seats to complete a three-run Minnesota comeback. It was the third career walk-off RBI for Bader–first on a home run. Louis Varland (3–3) pitched two scoreless innings for the win. Trailing 3–1 in the seventh, Minnesota got a two-out RBI double from Byron Buxton before Rays reliever Garrett Cleavinger hit Willi Castro and Brooks Lee with pitches, tying the game. Carlos Correa struck out with the bases loaded. Twins starter Chris Paddack allowed two earned runs and five hits in five-plus innings. Josh Lowe singled against Paddack leading off the sixth and scored on Yandy Díaz's double. Junior Caminero drove in Díaz with a single off Danny Coulombe for a 2–1 Rays lead. Lowe added an RBI single in the seventh. Zack Littell pitched six solid innings for Tampa Bay, allowing one earned run for the third straight start. He scattered four hits and struck out five. Tampa Bay shortstop Ha-Seong Kim had a hit in his Rays debut before leaving after he was caught stealing in the sixth inning and came up limping a bit. Kim missed the first 87 games this season recovering from right shoulder surgery. The 2023 Gold Glove recipient with San Diego signed a two-year, $29 million deal with Tampa Bay on Feb. 3. Tampa Bay's Brandon Lowe extended his career-high hitting streak to 19 games with a fourth-inning single. The longest active streak in the majors ties him with Jason Bartlett in 2009 for the second-longest in Rays history. Díaz hit in 20 straight games last season. The series continues Saturday when Tampa Bay plans to start RHP Taj Bradley (5–6, 4.84 ERA). The Twins had yet to announce a scheduled starter.
