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The United States is the world’s second-largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gasses and the presidential election next week will have a big impact on the extent to which those emissions are curbed

Troy Moon, the director of sustainability for Portland, Maine, described local government as “where the rubber meets the road” on decisions about schools, health services and, yes, sustainability policies.

Every city’s government operates differently, but by-and-large, elected officials and their appointees are responsible for a wide range of important environmental decisions: How to manage local flooding, building-efficiency targets and whether or not residents have access to recycling and curbside composting, to list just a few.

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality

Many people point to the interne

t’s not so much that Trump is lying more as that the lies have become qualitatively different — even more blatant, and increasingly untethered to any plausible political strategy.

In a way, Trump’s claims to be the victim of a vast “deep state” conspiracy were similar. They were obvious nonsense to people familiar with how the government actually works. But many voters aren’t experts in civics, and the conspiracy theorizing — like his claims that all negative reports are “fake news” — helped shield him from awkward facts.

On Tuesday the White House science office went beyond Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”

President Trump is closing his re-election campaign by pleading with voters to ignore the evidence of a calamity unfolding before their eyes and trust his word that the disease is already disappearing as a threat to their personal health and economic well being.

The president has continued to declare before large and largely maskless crowds that the virus is vanishing, even as case counts soar, fatalities climb, the stock market dips and a fresh outbreak grips the staff of Vice President Mike Pence.

“With the fake news, everything is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,”

Donald Trump lost the election. He knows it. But he won’t admit it.

He still hopes and believes that there is a way for the courts to erase enough votes to tip the election in his favor. This will not happen.

In the end, Trump hopes to push his case to the Supreme Court, where he has seated three conservative justices. That is also not likely to be a winning strategy.

Georgia has finished its statewide audit of the razor-thin presidential race and President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump

Biden beat Trump by 12,284 votes, according to the final results from the audit. This is a slight drop for Biden compared to the pre-audit results.

Officials have said repeatedly that the audit confirmed there was no widespread fraud or irregularities in the election.

In a style part investigative journalism, part polemic, the video’s hosts report that one of President Vladimir Putin’s allies, Russian senator Valentina Matviyenko, owns a multimillion-dollar villa on the Italian seafront. The video contrasts the luxurious lifestyle of Matviyenko and her family with footage of dead Russian soldiers, and with images of Russian artillery hitting civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. A voiceover calls the war “senseless” and “unimaginable.” A slide at the end urges Russians to head to squares in their cities to protest at specific dates and times. In less than a week, the video racked up more than 4 million views.

TV news is dominated by the misleading narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a peace-keeping exercise. Despite this, YouTube has largely been spared from the Kremlin’s crackdown on American social media platforms since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a month ago.

The app had been a particular venue for activism: Many Russian celebrities spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in their Instagram stories, and Navalny’s Instagram page posted a statement criticizing the war, and calling on Russians to come out in protest.

Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.

the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.

The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology

, he told a crowd of ambassadors that “global governance is needed, otherwise the risk is social collapse.” He also talked up the Rome Call, a Vatican, Italian government, Silicon Valley and U.N. effort he helped organize.

The author of many books (“Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition”) and a fixture on international A.I. panels, Father Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course called “The Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digital, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence.”

his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective

Last month, OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, said it was working to prevent abuse of its tools in elections, partly by forbidding their use to create chatbots that pretend to be real people or institutions. In recent weeks, Google also said it would limit its A.I. chatbot, Bard, from responding to certain election-related prompts “out of an abundance of caution.” And Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, promised to better label A.I.-generated content on its platforms so voters could more easily discern what material was real and what was fake.

Anthrophic also said separately on Friday that it would prohibit its technology from being applied to political campaigning or lobbying. In a blog post, the company, which makes a chatbot called Claude, said it would warn or suspend any users who violated its rules. It added that it was using tools trained to automatically detect and block misinformation and influence operations.

How effective the restrictions on A.I. tools will be is unclear, especially as tech companies press ahead with increasingly sophisticated technology. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled Sora, a technology that can instantly generate realistic videos. Such tools could be used to produce text, sounds and images in political campaigns, blurring fact and fiction and raising questions about whether voters can tell what content is real.

or Donald Trump or Ryan Lochte to believe in something, or to express genuine regret, would require some conception of the world outside their enormous egos, and also some conception of a moral code that ought not to be transgressed. Their instrumental and cynical understanding of politics and celebrity and sport and everything else — the worldview behind the fake apology that never addresses the misdeed, or seeks to remedy the harm — is certainly not new, and not yet ubiquitous. How far has it spread, and how much damage has it done?

one-quarter of younger Americans say they believe democracy is either a “fairly bad” or “very bad” political system. You can argue that those people are wrong, but on empirical grounds that’s not an inherently irrational belief. When one of our major political parties nominates someone who transparently doesn’t believe in democracy, or at any rate has no idea how it works — and when at least 40 percent of the public plans to vote for him — we might have a problem.

"What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?" he tweeted.

US District Judge James  Robart, a Seattle federal judge and George W. Bush appointee, granted a nationwide temporary restraining order on the immigration ban Friday night

Robart's ruling

“Frankly, we’ve never said we’re interested in food,” said Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, a venture capital firm that has backed Google and Facebook — and Beyond Meat. “What we’re interested in is big problems needing solutions, because they represent big potential markets and strong opportunities for building great returns.”

Among the problems he listed that his firm’s investment in Beyond Meat are intended to address are land and water use, stress on global supply chains and the world’s growing population. “These are venture-scale problems with venture-scale returns,” Mr. Komisar said.

More than anything we’re trying to reverse what we see as a problem, which is cheap and convenient food that is always going to win in China, win in India and win with my father, but isn’t good for the body or animals or the environment.”

The fundamental problem with policing via social-media data is that it misrepresents what social networks actually look like on the ground. Despite what techno-evangelists might wish, not all social relationships can be described using computational logic

The problem is structural and epistemological. Like all computer programs, databases are ultimately based on binary logic. If you want shades of meaning, you have to explicitly build that capability into your system. And building nuance is far harder than it seems.

On Facebook, there are only two options for a post: either you click the like button, or you don’t click the like button. There’s no field for someone like Jelani Henry to indicate “I clicked the like button on this post so I wouldn’t get harassed on my way to school.” A like is simply a number used as a flag, true (1) or false (0). Humans are the ones who invest likes with context and meaning. The computer only displays the results of its computation.

a study published in Biological Psychiatry brings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.

One difficulty of investigating meditation has been the placebo problem. In rigorous studies, some participants receive treatment while others get a placebo: They believe they are getting the same treatment when they are not. But people can usually tell if they are meditating. Dr. Creswell, working with scientists from a number of other universities, managed to fake mindfulness.

Half the subjects were then taught formal mindfulness meditation at a residential retreat center; the rest completed a kind of sham mindfulness meditation that was focused on relaxation and distracting oneself from worries and stress.

Of course no country – not in the midst of endemic civil violence or civil war – has ever tried having totally unrestricted access to any number of firearms and any amount of ammunition either. We’re already in uncharted territory.

The fact that Trump suggested this idea was entirely predictable. I would almost go as far as to say that it is the mainstream policy response from “gun rights” Republicans, which is to say almost all Republicans who are vocal on this issue.

But it goes back further still, more than a decade to a largely discredited and significantly disgraced “gun rights” economist named John Lott. Lott wrote some foundation studies that didn’t withstand serious scrutiny. He also got in trouble for creating fake online identities to praise his work

Testifying alongside Wylie was Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the co-founder of personaldata.io, who has been fighting to force the social network to apply European data protection law. Dehaye revealed that Facebook repeatedly tried to argue it was exempt from fulfilling “subject access” requirements, which allow individuals to see the data that companies hold about them, because it would be too expensive to comply.

“They’re invoking exceptions … involving disproportionate effort,” Dehaye said. “They’re saying it’s too much effort to give me access to my data. I find that quite intriguing, because they’re making a technical and a business argument as to why I shouldn’t have access to this data.

“In the technical argument they’re shooting themselves in the foot, because they’re saying they’re so big the cost would be too large to provide me data.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the US intelligence community's assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election in his favor, dismissing the investigation into whether or not his campaign colluded with Russia as "fake news," a "hoax" and a "witch hunt."

In a tweet hours after the indictments were issued, Trump acknowledged that Russia did indeed wage a years-long operation against the United States. He maintained, however, that his campaign in no way colluded with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.