Today’s posts that caught my eye:
Some Tesla workers in Germany have reportedly been visited at home by their supervisors on days when they have called in sick.
More than half of U.S. states have either restricted cellphone use in K-12 schools or are currently considering legislation to do so.
Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” bombed at the box office in its opening weekend and received D+ CinemaScore rating from audiences.
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The World
Hurricane Helene’s devastating toll kept climbing as search and rescue teams, combing through the wreckage of splintered homes and wind-tossed vehicles, counted at least 93 storm-related deaths across five states. (Wall Street Journal)
‘Apocalyptic’ damage: Helene kills at least 30 in Western NC, severs power, water, roads. In the Western North Carolina town of Canton, Mayor Zeb Smathers has never seen anything like it. “It is truly the worst storm we have faced, and not just us, but our friends across the mountains,” Smathers said. “The word I keep coming back to ... is apocalyptic.” Said Gov. Roy Cooper: “Many people are cut off because roads are impassable. They don’t have power or communications.” (Charlotte Observer)
"Our hearts are heavy": NWS writes emotional letter to Carolinas, Georgia. (Axios)
Israel struck power plants and a sea port in Yemen after the Houthi rebel group launched two ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv in recent days, as the Israeli military continued an air campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The strikes in Yemen targeted the port city of Hodeidah as well as Ras Issa, the Israeli military said, and relied on dozens of aircraft, including jet fighters and refueling planes to hit the targets over 1,100 miles from Israel’s border. The targets are used by the Houthis to import oil as well as Iranian weapons, the military said. This was Israel’s second direct attack on the Houthis in Yemen, who have been firing drones and missiles at Israel throughout the past year. (Wall Street Journal)
How Israeli spies penetrated Hezbollah: Officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah. For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”. Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israel’s will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering. Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. (Financial Times)
Exit polls indicate that Austria’s far-right party has won a “historic first national election after tapping into voters’ fears of immigration and the Ukraine war.” The Freedom Party was expected to finish with 29.1% of the vote, with Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party at 26.2% and the Social Democrats at 20.4%. (Euronews)
“In its election program, titled ‘Fortress Austria,’ the Freedom Party calls for ‘remigration of uninvited foreigners,’ for achieving a more ‘homogeneous’ nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.” The party “also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defense project launched by Germany.” (Associated Press)
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry went on alert early Sunday “after detecting ‘multiple waves’ of missile firing deep in inland China, days after Beijing said it had carried out a successful test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.” The ministry said that starting just before 7 a.m., “it had detected ‘multiple waves of firing’ by China’s Rocket Force and army in the provinces and regions of Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang.” (Reuters)
As antiabortion protests escalate, new California law will crack down on harassers. (Los Angeles Times)
There are both “wide differences and common ground on immigration policy among registered voters who support Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.” While 88% of Trump supporters “favor mass deportations of immigrants living in the country illegally,” just 27% of Harris do so. However, “improving border security is supported by large majorities of both Trump supporters (96%) and Harris supporters (80%),” as is the admittance of more high-skilled immigrants. (Pew Research Center)
Netflix Cancellations Spiked After Reed Hastings Donated to Kamala Harris: Rate of cancellations almost tripled after Trump backers called for action against the streaming service. (Bloomberg)
The youngest voters “say they’re more conservative than the cohort that’s just older, according to the latest Harvard Youth Poll.” It is rare for any group of Americans that young “to be more conservative than their immediate predecessors. 26% of men ages 18-24 say they identify as conservative — five points higher than 25-to-29-year-old men. Among women, the younger group is more conservative by three points.” (Axios)
Economy
Shigeru Ishiba, who will become Japan’s prime minister on Tuesday, said that the country’s monetary policy “must remain accommodative as a trend, signaling the need to keep borrowing costs low to underpin a fragile economic recovery. It was not immediately clear whether Ishiba, who had been a vocal critic of the Bank of Japan’s past aggressive monetary easing, was taking a more dovish line with his remarks.” (Reuters)
Shigeru Ishiba’s election as Japan’s next leader expected to rattle stock market (Financial Times)
Freight rates rise as companies plan for costly US port strike: US retailers, automakers and other businesses face ballooning freight rates as they make contingency plans for a strike that threatens to close nearly three dozen ports next week. The International Longshoremen’s Association, which represents 25,000 dockworkers at ports between Maine and Texas, said it planned to walk off the job early Tuesday unless port operators agreed to substantially raise their wages and limit automation. The strike would close east coast and gulf coast ports that handle roughly half of the goods imported via container, including food, pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics and apparel, costing the US economy as much as $5bn each day, JPMorgan analysts estimate. (Financial Times)
Stellantis, which “owns more than a dozen brands including Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Peugeot and Ram, is facing challenges at seemingly every turn.” Sales and profits are down and “dealers stuck with parking lots filled with unsold cars are publicly criticizing Stellantis” and CEO Carlos Tavares “in unusually harsh terms. Stellantis’s stock price has fallen almost 50 percent from its high point in March,” and the United Automobile Workers could strike at several plants as early as this week. (New York Times)
Technology
Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes AI safety bill opposed by Silicon Valley: Newsom vetoed AI safety bill SB-1047, which was opposed by tech companies including ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Facebook parent company Meta. (Los Angeles Times)
Though OpenAI’s “plan to convert to a for-profit company is meant to simplify the world’s leading artificial-intelligence startup,” succeeding in that effort “will be enormously complex. The ChatGPT maker is in the midst of raising $6.5 billion from backers including Microsoft and Nvidia, along with venture-capital firms and a United Arab Emirates state-backed company.” But OpenAI, “currently governed by a charitable nonprofit, must within two years become a public-benefit corporation,” which requires regulatory approvals in several states. (Wall Street Journal)
Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPhone maker in another major Silicon Valley company. Apple recently fell out of the talks to join the round, which is slated to close next week, according to a knowledgeable person. Two other tech giants, Microsoft and Nvidia, have also been in talks to participate in the round. (Wall Street Journal)
Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Tennessee “reached a major milestone this week, bringing online all 100,000 advanced Nvidia chips at the same time.” The feat makes the data center, “nicknamed ‘Colossus,’ the most powerful known computer ever built and represents a significant technical achievement for xAI.” (Semafor)
X will have to pay an additional fine of about $1.9 million, on top of the $3.4 million it has already been fined, in order to resume service in Brazil. Brazil has frozen accounts belonging to X and Elon Musk’s Starlink to pay the original fine, but Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes “said Starlink needs to drop its appeal against the payments” in order to move forward. (TechCrunch)
Meta’s New Headsets Show Apple Has Lost Its Way With the Vision Pro: The Vision Pro is an amazing piece of technology, especially when it comes to watching video. You can turn any room into a virtual movie theater, and the fully immersive clips that Apple has published — including sports highlights and landscapes — are a sight to behold. The hardware also is a marvel, with its sleek aluminum-and-glass design, high-end cameras, advanced chips and dazzling displays. But the headset is really more of a technology showcase than a genuine consumer product. There’s little reason for someone to buy a Vision Pro instead of a computer, and the drawbacks are too big to ignore. It can’t be worn for long periods of time; there’s little third-party software or video content; and the device lacks compelling other features. (Bloomberg)
Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Gamble Pays Off With $201 Billion Fortune. (Bloomberg)
Smart Links
Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons. Product designers are embracing how users actually feel after years of pushing flat and sleek. (Wall Street Journal)
Leonard Leo-linked group attacking efforts to educate judges on climate (The Guardian)
U.K., home of the industrial revolution, shuts its last coal-fired power plant (Washington Post)
Students Paid Thousands for a Caltech Boot Camp. Caltech Didn’t Teach It. (New York Times)
What a 1,000-mile railway across the Yucatán jungle says about Mexico’s outgoing president (Los Angeles Times)
Researchers uncover remains of Ice Age mastodons in Peru. (Reuters)
Japan’s largest rice shortage in years is exacerbated by sushi-hungry tourists, weather. (CNBC)
Amazon in Talks With Brian Williams to Host Election-Night Special (Variety)
Good News
Choi Soon-hwa was “born almost a decade before the first Miss Universe contest was held in 1952,” but the 80-year-old “could now make history as the pageant’s oldest ever participant. Earlier this month, she was unveiled as a finalist in the annual Miss Universe Korea competition. On Monday, Choi will go head-to-head with 31 other contestants for the tiara — and a chance to represent South Korea at the Miss Universe final in Mexico this November.” (CNN)
Blockbuster is “having a comeback of sorts” because of a movement called Free Blockbuster, “which offers movies free of charge through community sharing rather than a store.” In 2018, Brian Morrison, “a former Blockbuster employee turned film and TV producer,” noticed empty newspaper boxes in his neighborhood around the same time that a friend “was moving from Los Angeles and was looking to get rid of a large collection of DVDs. He thought about the Little Free Library concept, and a lightbulb went on.” Morrison said, “I thought we could use the old newspaper boxes to share our movie collections we’ve been hoarding with our neighbors, and we could brand it in a way that makes it kind of fun and a throwback.” (Washington Post)
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