Category: News and Views

TikTok plea live: Supreme Court hears arguments with TikTok ban looming | BBC News

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Just as the former solicitor general Noel Francisco, appearing for TikTok and ByteDance, sought to drive home their argument that the sale-or-ban law would burden the platform’s speech – current Solicitor General Elizabeth B Prelogar repeatedly returned to the government’s view that the Chinese state could, at some point, try to access sensitive US user data via the companies.

She stressed that TikTok collects more data than other platforms on an “unprecedented” scale – a claim the company has denied – and warned it represented risks of espionage and blackmail.

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Medical debt soon will be banned on credit reports under Biden administration rule | CNN Business

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Americans won’t have to worry about unpaid medical bills damaging their credit reports and scores much longer.

The Biden administration is finalizing a rule Tuesday that will end the inclusion of medical debt on credit reports and ban lenders from using certain medical information in loan decisions.

The rule will also remove an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million people, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said in a press release

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Here’s the latest sign the job market is cooling | CNN Business

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The “Great Stay” deepened in November as the number of people who quit their jobs that month dropped to under 3.1 million, a level not seen since the height of the pandemic.

The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report, which was released Tuesday, also showed that hiring activity remained at a decade-low, a further indication that a much cooler labor market is at hand.

Despite continued signs of a broader slowdown, Tuesday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that layoff activity held fairly steady in November. Additionally, the number of job openings increased to 8.1 million, its highest level since May.

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Viral disease HMPV is on the rise among kids in China — what is it? | Live Science

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A viral infection called human metapneumovirus (HMPV) is on the rise among children in China, according to Chinese state media.

The virus can cause upper respiratory tract infections — like colds — as well as serious lung infections and, according to state media, it’s now one of the top four most common viral infections among hospital visitors in China.

“HMPV has been recognized as a significant problem in the at-risk population across the world since the turn of the century when it was first discovered,” Andrew Easton, a virology professor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. who studies pneumoviruses, told Live Science in an email. “That risk has not changed significantly over the last almost 25 years.”

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EPA allows California to ban sales of new gas cars by 2035 | Fast Company

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday granted two requests from California to enforce strict standards for vehicle emissions, including a rule aimed at banning sales of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. The incoming Trump administration is likely to try to reverse the action.

The California rule is stricter than a federal rule adopted this year that tightens emissions standards but does not require sales of electric vehicles.

EPA said its review found that opponents of the two waivers did not meet their legal burden to show how either the EV rule or a separate measure on heavy-duty vehicles was inconsistent with the federal Clean Air Act.

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Congo accuses Apple of using conflict minerals | Fast Company

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The Democratic Republic of Congo has filed criminal complaints against Apple subsidiaries in France and Belgium, accusing the tech firm of using conflict minerals in its supply chain, lawyers for the Congolese government told Reuters.

Congo is a major source of tin, tantalum and tungsten, so-called 3T minerals used in computers and mobile phones. But some artisanal mines are run by armed groups involved in massacres of civilians, mass rapes, looting and other crimes, according to U.N. experts and human rights groups.

Apple does not directly source primary minerals and says it audits suppliers, publishes findings and funds bodies that seek to improve mineral traceability.

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Bid farewell to this small but helpful Windows 11 feature | Digital Trends

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As Microsoft mentions in a December 12 blog post, Windows 11 users will soon no longer receive future updates for the suggested actions menu. The helpful feature would offer you related actions when you copy items like dates or phone numbers with actions to create an event or make a call.

Microsoft first introduced the feature in a Windows 11 2022 update. It made the suggested actions menu appear and gave contextual information based on the copied data. Microsoft describes the feature as follows: “Suggested actions that appear when you copy a phone number or future date in Windows 11 are deprecated and will be removed in a future Windows 11 update.”

The feature’s end of support may be due to the decrease in usage and the upcoming release of the Click To Do features, which offer similar usability. However, it’s important to remember that Click To Do is only for Copilot+ PCs, so those with an older Windows 11 computer are left out of the cool kids’ club.

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General Motors pulls plug on Cruise robotaxi project | BBC

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General Motors has announced that it will stop funding the development of the Cruise self-driving taxi.

The company says it will now “refocus autonomous driving development on personal vehicles”.

GM also pointed to the increasingly competitive robotaxi market as a reason for the move.

In October, Tesla boss Elon Musk unveiled the electric car giant’s long-awaited robotaxi, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California.

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Coffee prices at record high after bad weather | BBC 

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Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.

On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.

It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.

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A test for AGI is closer to being solved — but it may be flawed | TechCrunch

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A well-known test for artificial general intelligence (AGI) is closer to being solved. But the tests’s creators say this points to flaws in the test’s design, rather than a bonafide research breakthrough.

In 2019, Francois Chollet, a leading figure in the AI world, introduced the ARC-AGI benchmark, short for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence.” Designed to evaluate whether an AI system can efficiently acquire new skills outside the data it was trained on, ARC-AGI, Francois claims, remains the only AI test to measure progress towards general intelligence (although others have been proposed.)

Until this year, the best-performing AI could only solve just under a third of the tasks in ARC-AGI. Chollet blamed the industry’s focus on large language models (LLMs), which he believes aren’t capable of actual “reasoning.”

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