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“TikTok is a scourge attacking our children and our social fabric, a threat to our national security, and likely the most extensive intelligence operation a foreign power has ever conducted against the United States,” he said in a February hearing held by the commission.

Experts told The Intercept that there didn’t appear to be a legal conflict that would exclude Helberg from the commission, but the participation of tech company officials could nonetheless create competing interests between sound policymaking and corporate profits.

“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations about economic and security relations between the U.S. and China,” said Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and scholar of the U.S. defense industry.

Thiel, also an early investor in Pentagon aerospace contractor SpaceX and weaponsmaker Anduril, has for years blasted the Chinese tech sector as inherently malignant — claims, like Helberg’s, made with more than trace amounts of paranoia and xenophobia.

In a 2023 quarterly earnings call, Palantir Chief Operations Officer Shyam Sankar told investors that the company had China in mind as it continues to grow its reach into the Western Pacific.

Marshall said bodies like the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission can contribute to such conflicts because advisory boards that encourage revolving-door moves between private firms and government help embed corporate interests in policymaking.

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The course, at Frozen Head State Park, changes every year but covers 100 miles involving 60,000ft of climb and descent - about twice the height of the Mount Everest.

Pictures show her legs scratched from pushing through sharp bushes and scrub in dense forest on steep slopes.

David Miller, a professional photographer at the race, told BBC Scotland he had witnessed the “greatest ultramarathon achievement of all time”.

"There was a lot of anticipation at the finish line and three minutes before the 60 hour cut off we heard shouting and a roar and it was people cheering Jasmin on.

The idea for the race came when they heard about the 1977 escape of James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr, from nearby Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

Racers are also required to bring an additional “fee”, which in the past has included things such as a white shirt, socks, or a car registration plate, as a donation for being a non-finisher.

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Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week.

Stability AI, which has been backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, doesn’t have an immediate permanent replacement for the CEO role but has appointed its COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post.

He additionally asserted that it was his decision to step down from the top role as he held the most number of controlling shares.

In a post on X last year, he expressed his amusement at the generative AI companies’ “strange focus on revenue” even as “the technology is useful but far from vaguely mature as new breakthroughs happen almost daily.” He cited several examples, including MagicLeap, which spent billions before generating revenue.

“The payoffs on proper generative AI R&D are clearer and faster to market than just about anything we’ve seen.

It’s going to create way more economic value than self driving cars for example, the total investment in that has been $100b with no revenue pay off,” he wrote.

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Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Saturday suggested that terrorists who killed at least 133 people in Friday night’s attack at a Moscow concert hall were helped by someone based in Ukraine, without providing evidence.

Ukrainian officials have denied any involvement in the massacre, for which Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

“They tried to hide and moved toward Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the border,” Putin said in a speech on Russian television Saturday.

The shooting rampage occurred late Friday at the Crocus City Hall theater on the outskirts of Moscow.

“We will stand united against this common enemy international terrorism no matter where it shows its ugly head,” he said.

Ukraine, which has been defending itself from Russia’s full-scale invasion for two years, has repeatedly denied any links to the attackers, with the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry labeling Moscow’s accusations as a Kremlin attempt to mobilize Russian citizens against Ukraine and to try to distance the international community from Kyiv.

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Efforts to shoehorn the NY HEAT Act into a packed state budget are underway, with supporters contending that swift action is necessary because of the pressures of climate change and opponents say the proposed law should be set aside and more carefully considered.

The bill’s broader aim is to accelerate a shift away from natural gas and help limit emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that cause global warming.

“We are in a race against time,” said Liz Krueger, a Democratic senator sponsoring the bill, “not because of the mandates of our legislation, but because of the reality that the world is in crisis and at risk of self-destruction.”

Those who oppose NY HEAT have raised concerns that the rush to include the bill in the budget could result in future problems with the reliability of energy infrastructure.

One way it will do this is by encouraging entire neighborhoods to shift to renewable energy sources in unison, said Jessica Azulay, executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for a Green Economy.

And the possibility of a cap on energy bills is an enticement for many New Yorkers, said Sonal Jessel, policy director at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit group based in Harlem.

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In the following weeks, people started showing up at meetings, furious about the incident, believing the mishap had been an intentional effort to suppress the vote (an investigation attributed the problem to human error).

She was waiting for pollbooks to be delivered, and the deadline to send out ballots to overseas and military voters was just two days away, but she still didn’t have a final list of candidates because of pending court challenges.

There was shock when Trump flipped Luzerne county, long a Democratic stronghold in 2016, said John Kennedy, a political science professor at West Chester University in south-eastern Pennsylvania.

While Trump won it again in 2020, Biden was able to claw back some of the voters he lost in 2020, something he’ll try to do more of this year as he seeks to win Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state in the US presidential election.

That’s why she’s pushed to have the ballots posted on the county website early for public review, and to send out regular updates with what election tasks staff are working on.

“I think that there’s a certain portion of the population that wants elections to fail,” Crocamo said during an interview in a conference room in the county building, which she was using to work while a leak was fixed in her office.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed US warnings about a potential terror incident in Moscow just days before gunmen attacked a concert hall in the city on Friday.

At least 40 people are dead and more than 100 are injured after multiple armed individuals stormed the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, state-run news agency TASS reported, citing Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, which called the incident a “terrorist attack.”

According to Russian state media, the unidentified gunmen were armed with assault rifles and opened fire in the lobby of the building before moving into the main concern hall, where a band was scheduled to perform.

Earlier this month, the US embassy in Russia issued a security alert warning about a potential terror attack in Moscow and urged people to avoid crowds, monitor local media for updates, and be aware of surroundings.

Though concerts were mentioned as a potential target in the US security alert, it is unclear at this time if Friday’s attack is related to the threats that Washington was tracking.

“We strongly condemn the horrendous attack carried out at a concert hall in Moscow,” Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

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WASHINGTON — After voting to avert a government shutdown Friday, the House left town for its two-week Easter recess without passing critical military aid for Ukraine as the war-torn nation runs dangerously low on ammunition in its fight against the Russian invasion.

On Friday, Greene filed a so-called motion to vacate over her opposition to the government spending package, giving her the option to quickly force the vote next month if she doesn’t like Johnson’s strategy on Ukraine.

The speaker has instructed working groups to use the two-week break to flesh out the plethora of options on a foreign aid package raised by numerous members, an official familiar with Johnson’s thinking told NBC News.

Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs panel and its former chairman, said it’s a dereliction of duty for the GOP-led House to head home for its spring break without aiding its ally.

Desperate to unlock aid, some top Democrats indicated they would consider the eleventh-hour ideas being raised by House Republicans, but most prefer that the lower chamber put the Senate-passed package on the floor, which they say would pass overwhelmingly.

Even those who said the proposals could be worth discussing, including Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California, concluded that it was a “bad idea.” And it’s not even clear that a loan-based approach on nonlethal assistance to Ukraine could be enforceable, in the words of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who said it was his understanding that it would be a “waivable” loan.

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has filed a complaint asking for the disbarment of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over her relationship with a prosecutor she hired for her Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump.

Willis “should’ve been removed from her political persecution of President Trump after it was revealed she went on lavish vacations with her lover Nathan Wade,” Greene wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The Republican congresswoman wrote in a complaint filed with the State Bar of Georgia on Wednesday that she was “requesting an investigation of Fani Willis, her suspension, and her disbarment,” Bloomberg News reported.

Wade offered his resignation hours after McAfee’s ruling, saying in a letter to Willis that he was doing so “in the interest of democracy, in dedication to the American public and to move this case forward as quickly as possible.”

Defense attorneys alleged that Wade was paid large sums for his work on the case that Willis improperly benefited when he used his earnings to pay for trips for them.

Greene’s complaint is yet another effort by Trump allies to discredit the most sprawling of four criminal cases against the former president, who is now the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 election.

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WASHINGTON — Friday began with House conservatives holding a press conference to trash the $1.2 trillion spending bill their leaders negotiated with Democrats, sparking some fears about its prospects.

It was just the first headache of the day for House Republicans as they adjourned for a two-week recess, offering a distillation of the infighting and disenchantment that continues to plague the party 15 months into its narrow majority.

Moments later, far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., shocked her colleagues by filing a motion to overthrow Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., blasting his stewardship of the chamber and threatening renewed turmoil at the helm of her party.

It was the last vote for Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the conservative hardliner who was all but banished from the party after he insisted that its leaders stop spreading lies about the 2020 election and accept that former President Donald Trump lost.

But her move to relinquish the coveted gavel mid-session highlights the paralysis that has defined the government funding process, which took four stopgap measures and six months into the fiscal year to resolve.

“Absolutely incredible ‘last scene in a Godfather movie’ vibes in the U.S. House of Representatives today,” said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va.

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Wallander said the CNSP has said the status of forces agreement, which sets the terms of a U.S. military presence in a country, is now null and void.

But last July mutinous soldiers ousted the country’s democratically elected president and months later asked French forces to leave.

In Niger, U.S. personnel have largely consolidated to one base and continue to run drone operations, but those are limited to force protection, Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said.

The quick turn of relations had some U.S. lawmakers questioning how Niger could go from a strategic ally to being run by a junta in such a short time.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. Africa Command, said that disinformation has played a huge role in Niger and in a number of governments that have fallen across the Sahel in recent years.

There are more than 600 million people across the continent on social media now, compared to just a very small minority who had access just a decade ago, Langley said.

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Russia’s security services say they have arrested four gunmen responsible for the shooting that killed at least 115 people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, in one of the worst terror attacks in the country’s history.

The director of Russia’s federal security service (FSB) informed Vladimir Putin that 11 individuals had been arrested in connection with Friday’s terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall outside Moscow, including four suspects involved in the shooting.

The Crocus City Hall shooting was the deadliest attack in Russia since the 2004 Beslan school siege, in which 334 people, including 186 children, were killed after being held captive by militants for two days.

The attack on Friday came two weeks after western countries led by the US had issued terror warnings and told their citizens not to join public gatherings in Russia.

The FSB previously said it had foiled an attack on a Moscow synagogue by Isis-K, a group that seeks to create caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.

Russian authorities had also recently carried out a series of raids against armed Islamist militants in the region of Ingushetia, leading to firefights between police and the fighters.

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The name comes from that given to a region by some local Islamic rulers and so explicitly rejects modern national frontiers while evoking what its members consider the lost glory and power of Muslim empires.

It was formed at the peak of the expansion of IS in 2015 when the Iraq- and Syria-based group was trying to expand by building a network of affiliates through the Middle East, the Maghreb, west Asia and other parts of Africa.

The group was also responsible for a hugely destructive attack on Kabul’s international airport in 2021 that killed 13 US troops and more than 150 civilians during the chaotic US evacuation from the country.

Earlier this year, the US intercepted communications confirming the group had carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed nearly 100 people – though ISKP did not claim responsibility.

Sometimes a new leader brings a personal agenda, other times launching long-range international attacks is seen as a way to attract new recruits, win new resources from sponsors or mobilise followers otherwise disillusioned by local failures.

Michael Kugelman, of the Washington-based Wilson Center, said ISKP “sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims” and counts as members a number of central Asian militants with their own grievances against Moscow.

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The villagers fled at the end of November, chased away by violent Israeli settlers living in outposts that Israel hasn’t authorized, according to groups documenting violence in the West Bank.

“Levi led a group of settlers who engaged in actions creating an atmosphere of fear in the West Bank,” the State Department said in a Feb. 1 fact sheet about the new sanctions.

The United Kingdom and France have also recently slapped sanctions on Israeli settlers committing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the European Union is set to follow suit.

As Weiman and NPR’s reporting team leave Zanuta, the drive winds through rocky hillsides covered in olive groves and flowering almond trees.

Under the 1993 Oslo accords, some parts of the West Bank are administered by the Palestinian Authority, while the largest contiguous area is under Israeli security forces’ control.

After the U.S. sanctions in February, Israel’s settler-finance minister, Smotrich, blasted the measure, telling reporters the government would not allow for Israeli citizens to be harmed in that way.

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Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.

In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco.

The worldwide user base has been flat or down every month during Musk’s tenure began except one, when it grew slightly in October and then resumed falling, according to Sensor Tower.

Other social media apps experienced modest increases in their worldwide user bases during the same period, according to the research, with Snapchat growing 8.8%, Instagram 5.3%, Facebook 1.5% and TikTok 0.5%.

X had “the most material decline in active users compared to its peers,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, wrote in a research report.

“For microblogging platforms, X had dominant market share of app downloads right up until Threads launched,” Tom Grant, vice president of research at Apptopia, wrote in an email.

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In the midst of all of that success, NVIDIA is working on smaller and larger initiatives, but they all seem to have one thing in common: they are AI-centered.

One of these smaller initiatives comes from Ubisoft Paris, where a small team is testing out how to use AI, specifically Nvidia’s Audio2Face application and Inworld’s Large Language Model (LLM), to try to make a new generation of NPCs.

As we see many studios, especially under Microsoft, begin to form unions, like the recent announcement from Activision QA workers, it might be possible to alleviate some of the risks around introducing AI.

This could then allow the player to have a genuine conversation of discovery that provides a bespoke unique experience but would always still be true to the human writer’s intention.

However, with the improvement of ChatGPT over time and image and video generation, there seems to be a more open mind around the idea of having some games use integrated large language models (LLMs) for NPC interactions.

There have even been mods for popular games like Grand Theft Auto 5, where you can talk to NPCs with ChatGPT running to answer queries.

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United States v. Apple is a lawsuit written for the general public, an 88-page press release designed to be read aloud on cable news shows.

That’s not against the rules — note that United States v. Google (filed 2023) has a single, terse intro paragraph outside the numbered section — but US v. Apple powers up for two whole pages before getting into allegations.

There are even a beguiling few paragraphs in which the DOJ compares the need to regularly update AAA video game titles to the onerous process of App Store review and then concludes that “Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.” At no point does the DOJ allege that Apple is why I can’t play AAA games on my iPhone….

(At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)

It’s fun to engage with the legal distillation of nerd rage at the line level, but there’s also an overarching narrative here that the DOJ is trying to push, one with potentially enormous ramifications.

Meanwhile, the opening volley in its battle against one of America’s favorite companies is a killer start, not least in part because of an unusual degree of lawyerly insight into the human psyche.

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Instagram users have started complaining on X (formerly Twitter) after discovering that Meta has begun limiting recommended political content by default.

Instead, Instagram rolled out the change in February, announcing in a blog that the platform doesn’t “want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.”

For general Instagram and Threads users, this change primarily limits what content posted can be recommended, but for influencers using professional accounts, the stakes can be higher.

The change also came amid speculation that Meta was “shadowbanning” users posting pro-Palestine content since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, The Markup reported.

“Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, suppressed hashtags, and limited users’ ability to appeal moderation decisions,” The Markup reported.

On X, even Instagram users who don’t love seeing political content are currently rallying to raise awareness and share tips on how to update the setting.

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The hawkish move came 10 days before local elections and was seen by analysts as a signal that the central bank was independent from any political constraints and determined to tackle price rises.

The bank has now raised its key one-week repo rate by 41.5 percentage points from 8.5% since last June, after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s victory in May presidential elections and U-turn towards greater orthodoxy in economic policy.

The “tight monetary stance will be maintained until a significant and sustained decline in the underlying trend of monthly inflation is observed, and inflation expectations converge to the projected forecast range”, the bank said.

Piotr Matys, the senior FX analyst at InTouch Capital Markets in London, said the rate hike “stunned the market”, adding: “Today’s decision is a very strong signal that Governor [Fatih] Karahan, who took over from [Hafize Gaye] Erkan when she unexpectedly resigned, is determined to bring staggeringly high inflation under control.”

Inflation rose to a higher than expected 67% in February when the central bank had held rates steady after a sustained string of hikes since June.

Though inflation is expected to dip around mid-year, the recent lira slide coupled with declining foreign reserves had raised some expectations of more rate hikes ahead – though not until after municipal elections on 31 March in which Erdoğan’s AK party is hoping to win back key cities such as Istanbul.

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A Simpsons joke that aired during an episode in 1996 will become reality after almost three decades, as rap group Cypress Hill announce a gig with the London Symphony Orchestra.

The hit animated series featured the California hip-hop group in the episode “Homerpalooza”, in which Homer Simpson takes his family on a road trip to an alternative rock festival, Hullabalooza, in an attempt to prove to his kids Bart and Lisa that he’s “still cool”.

In an episode highlight, a roadie appears backstage to demand which of the artists on the bill booked the London Symphony Orchestra.

After the episode first aired, Cypress Hill fans kept up the rumour that the group would eventually perform with the LSO in real life.

The group have now confirmed that they will, in fact, perform with the orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 10 July.

Kathryn McDowell DBE, the LSO’s Managing Director said: “After years of social media teasing it, many fans may have started to believe it would only be a pipedream – but the LSO is delighted to finally be joining Cypress Hill on stage and in person, and look forward to creating an unforgettable musical moment!

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