Chandler Elena has added a photo to the pool:

Enmusubi Wind Chime Festival at the Kawagoe Hikawa Shrine in Saitama

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Man zwaargewond door schoten immigratiedienst ICE in Texas

AUSTIN (ANP/RTR) - Een agent van de Amerikaanse immigratiedienst ICE heeft zondag in de Texaanse stad Austin een man neergeschoten. Het slachtoffer is met een schotwond in zijn bovenlichaam naar het ziekenhuis gebracht. Zijn toestand is ernstig maar stabiel, melden lokale autoriteiten.

Volgens politiechef Lisa Davis schoot de ICE-agent de man neer na een korte achtervolging te voet. Over de aanleiding is nog niets bekend. De lokale politie was niet betrokken bij het schietincident.

Burgemeester Kirk Watson wil dat de politie van Austin en de Texas Rangers betrokken worden bij het onderzoek. Hij vindt het niet gepast als ICE de zaak zelfstandig onderzoekt. Watson zegt boos te zijn over het incident, maar niet verbaasd.

Na de schietpartij verzamelden zich demonstranten op de plaats van het incident. Agenten zetten chemische middelen in om de menigte uiteen te drijven. ICE heeft nog niet gereageerd.


The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

More than 800,000 bees stolen across far north Queensland in ‘sophisticated’ operation

Apiarists will lose not just the insects but the value of pollination contracts, which can be worth thousands of dollars

An estimated 800,000 bees, worth tens of thousands of dollars, have been stolen from properties in far north Queensland.

The industry is already reeling from the this month’s arrival of the varroa mite parasite.

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ICE agent shoots and wounds man at traffic stop in Austin, Texas, officials say

Anti-ICE protests break out in push for transparency as unnamed man is in serious but stable condition at hospital

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and wounded a man on Sunday afternoon in Texas’s capital of Austin, local authorities said, and anti-ICE protesters quickly gathered at the scene.

The unnamed man was in serious but stable condition at a hospital after being shot once in the torso on the city’s north side, Austin’s police chief, Lisa Davis, said at a news conference with the mayor and other city officials.

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Sinds een halfjaar geef ik op de muziekschool saxofoonles aan een aardig tienjarig jongetje. Het gaat niet heel snel vooruit maar hij heeft er duidelijk plezier in als op een…

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Plaats de cijfers 1 tot en met 9 zo in het diagram dat elk cijfer precies één keer voorkomt in elke rij, kolom, de negen vetomrande 3x3 vakken, én de vier grijze 3x3 vakken.

Don't Want to Know If You Are Less Than Lonely

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Don't Want to Know If You Are Less Than Lonely

Peter Luger

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Peter Luger

Found Slide 1969

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Slide 1969

date stamped on slide, January 1969

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Charts 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State'

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current:

The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the digital communication infrastructure by which governments and private corporations automate and ultimately control public discourse. Following her Pulitzer Prize win for "We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution" (2025), "I wanted to think about whether liberal constitutional democracies can survive this moment in time," Lepore shared in a phone interview...

[In the "current ChatGPT moment"] Lepore found herself asking: "Who are the people who are clamoring to be replaced by machines, to have movies made by machines, and novels written by machines?" And who, she continued, is pushing for our government to be determined by these machines? In the book, Lepore notes that technological tools are increasingly influencing elections around the world...

However, she sees the 2026 U.S. midterms as an inflection point. In a recent piece in the Financial Times, Lepore wrote, "This year marks the first AI election. Voters are asking chatbots how they should vote. Campaigns and activists are using AI to analyze the electorate, send micro-targeted messages, produce tailored ads and even deepfakes...."

Lepore stresses in the book that "nobody should trust historians to make predictions," but she believes it's possible for democratic citizens to wrest back control. Referencing proposals such as New York's data center moratorium law, Lepore ends by describing a "growing and increasingly noisy tech backlash."
"It's not foreordained. This isn't inevitable," she said during the interview.


"In the book's epilogue Lepore predicts, as her title suggests, a fall of the Artificial State," writes the California Review of Books. "That argument turns out to be speculative, much more of a hope than a certainty."

[Lepore] does support her prediction by positing that the Artificial State is "poorly designed and badly built," that it has not given people safety and happiness but rather a prison of glowing screens, and that a majority of Americans want more control over AI. To escape the Artificial State we will have to imagine a different future by gaining more knowledge of the past in a search for meaning. Of course, powerful forces want to deny that and turn us into servile automatons.


The Guardian adds that "While Lepore interprets much classic sci-fi, such as Isaac Asimov, as cautionary, she observes that "the architects of the Artificial State seem to have read these stories, unironically, as instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule the world". (The Atlantic writes that "What one gathers from these misreadings is not so much that science fiction itself is nefarious, but that arrested development might be...")
But The Indian Express writes that despite the author's bleak conclusion, "Lepore is not a pessimist. Because the Artificial State is a construct, neither alive, nor truly indestructible, she argues it is still possible to take it apart... [T]his is a clear-eyed reckoning rather than a doomsday tract. It is not an easy read, but an essential one for anyone unsettled by the pace of the AI wave."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AfD boekt ook zege in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, CDU mist voor het eerst de kiesdrempel

AfD boekt ook zege in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, CDU behaalt slechtste resultaat ooit