The Marlon D. Beltran Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The Marlon D. Beltran Collection

handwritten on negative sleeve, "March-April, 1984"

The Guardian

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Trump officials sued over effort to ‘erase history and science’ in national parks

National Park Service also sued for removing rainbow Pride flag from Stonewall national monument in New York

Conservation and historical organizations sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over National Park Service policies that the groups say erase history and science from America’s national parks.

A lawsuit filed in Boston says orders by Donald Trump and interior secretary Doug Burgum have forced park service staff to remove or censor exhibits that share factually accurate and relevant US history and scientific knowledge, including about slavery and climate change.

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Wealthy Americans top ‘golden visa’ surge in New Zealand and applications from China double

US family who were 100th to be granted residency under investor scheme say they want to give back to ‘amazing’ New Zealand

Wealthy Americans are dominating applications for New Zealand’s “golden visa”, driven by a love for the country’s natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit, as well a desire to escape Trump’s administration.

New rules for the Active Investor Plus visa came into effect in April 2025, lowering investment thresholds, removing English-language requirements and cutting the amount of time applicants must spend in the country to establish residency from three years to three weeks. Successful applicants can only purchase homes in New Zealand worth more than $5m.

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Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says Trump exerting ‘unfair’ pressure on Kyiv during Geneva talks

Ukrainian president says he hopes Trump’s recent remarks are ‘just his tactics and not the decision’ as negotiators meet in Switzerland. What we know on day 1,456

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Epstein files suggest acts that may amount to crimes against humanity, say UN experts

Independent experts appointed by human rights council speak of ‘grave’ nature regarding scale of atrocities against women and girls

Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said.

The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.

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Norway curling team bring party pants back to Winter Olympics for ‘one-game’ tribute

  • Curlers wear diamond-printed trousers to honour ‘Team Ulsrud’

  • Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants page has 360,000 followers

Norway’s men’s curling team delighted supporters at the Olympics on Tuesday by reviving the famous red, white and blue-patterned trousers that became a sensation 16 years ago when they were worn by Thomas Ulsrud’s team.

The eye-catching pants, originally part of a sponsorship deal with sportswear company Loudmouth Golf, turned heads and captured hearts at Vancouver 2010, when Ulsrud’s Norwegian rink became the talk of the Winter Games.

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News for nerds, stuff that matters

NPR's Radio Host David Greene Says Google's NotebookLM Tool Stole His Voice

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!"

Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped.

As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. Greene's lawsuit cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. It gave a confidence rating of 53-60% that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence.

"If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," said Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Anthropic's latest Sonnet gets better at using computers, amid bouts of existential angst

Version 4.6 can also be 'warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny'

Anthropic has updated its Sonnet model to version 4.6 and claims the upgrade is better at coding and using computers, and also possesses improved reasoning and planning capabilities.…