E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.
E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.
Owners of electric cars in Vermont recently got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1 they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.
In imposing the higher fee, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium for driving electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from no states a few years ago.
Now, as President Trump rolls back Biden administration measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering imposing a national fee to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire shape.
The fees are an attempt to make up for declining revenue from gasoline taxes that electric cars, for obvious reasons, don’t pay. They’re an example of how governments are struggling to adjust to technological upheaval in the auto industry.
Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they worry that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at extremely high levels to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberals.
That has already happened in Texas and other states, said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports who focuses on transportation and energy.
“E.V. owners should contribute to paying for the roads that they use,” he said. But, he added, “in some cases, states are implementing fees that are pretty punitive to E.V. drivers, significantly more than what the owner of a gas vehicle would pay.”
Flat fees are also unfair to low-income drivers or people who don’t drive very much, making it even harder for them to buy cars that pollute less, Mr. Harto and others said. Federal and state gasoline and diesel taxes are levied per gallon, so that people who drive more — or own gas guzzlers — automatically pay more.
The main reason that revenue from fuel taxes has declined is that internal combustion engines have become much more efficient, while political leaders have been reluctant to raise fuel taxes to keep up with inflation.
The federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has not been increased since 1993. The Highway Trust Fund, which finances transportation projects from proceeds of that tax, could become insolvent by 2027 without new sources of funding, analysts say. A list of tax and spending policies that Republicans in Congress are considering includes imposing fees on electric vehicles to help replenish the Highway Trust Fund.
There are 5.4 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry group. But that is roughly 2 percent of the total and not the main cause of revenue gaps.
“Lawmakers are finding a convenient scapegoat, and penalizing the cleanest vehicles on the road while ignoring the real cause of the shortfall,” said Max Baumhefner, director for electric vehicle infrastructure at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Some of the highest electric vehicle fees are in states that usually elect Republicans, like Texas, Wyoming and Ohio, all of which charge $200 a year on top of the regular registration fee.
Robert Nichols, a Republican state senator in Texas who sponsored legislation in 2023 establishing a fee, said that the amount was determined by analyzing how much the average owner of a gasoline vehicle pays.
“It’s not an anti-E.V. thing. We’ve got Tesla right here in Texas and we’re very proud,” he said, referring to the electric car maker, which has its headquarters and a factory in Austin. “But everybody needs to pay for the road.”
Texas is among the states singled out by Consumer Reports for overcharging electric vehicle drivers. The organization cites Texas’ relatively low gas tax of 20 cents a gallon, well below the national average of about 50 cents.
Mr. Nichols acknowledged that lawmakers were reluctant to raise taxes on drivers of gasoline cars. “Nobody wants that on their tombstone: ‘Raised the gas tax,’” he said.
But increasingly electric vehicle fees are not just a red state phenomenon. Washington, which charges $150, is as progressive as any blue state. And in Vermont, lawmakers passed a fee law last year because they were concerned that growing numbers of electric vehicles posed a risk to state finances, said Patrick Murphy, state policy director at the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
“Legislators recognized that we are nearing the tipping point where E.V. adoption has become mainstream in Vermont,” he said.
Electric vehicles accounted for 12 percent of new car sales in Vermont last year, above the national average of 8 percent. Mr. Murphy noted that fees collected from electric vehicle owners are earmarked for infrastructure like chargers. At $89 a year above the standard registration fee, Vermont’s fee is also at the low end of what states charge.
People on both sides of the debate agree that a fairer system would charge electric vehicle owners per mile driven. But doing that is complicated. Some states are experimenting with technology that tracks mileage and bills owners accordingly. But the systems are expensive and raise privacy issues.
A flat fee is “not perfect,” Mr. Nichols, the Texas legislator, acknowledged. “But it makes a big step forward. It’s fair without setting up a huge bureaucracy.”
Some states, including Iowa, Georgia and Kentucky, tax electric vehicle chargers. But that system misses a lot of cars. Most people charge at home, using public chargers only occasionally.
States that don’t charge electric cars higher fees include Alaska, Arizona, New York and Massachusetts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In 2026, Vermont plans to be among the first states to try to charge electric vehicle owners based on how much they drive.
That will be relatively easy in Vermont, Mr. Murphy said, because officials already collect odometer readings when owners bring their cars in for annual safety checks. That’s not the case in many states.
Even a system that tracks mileage has flaws. It taxes owners for trips in other states, and does not collect revenue from out-of-state visitors.
“The whole approach we have had is to keep things as simple as possible in the beginning, to get something in place where all vehicles are paying something for our infrastructure,” Mr. Murphy said, “and then to evolve over time to continually make it a fairer system.”
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The biggest Apple Intelligence upgrade of the year is expected to land in April – here’s what you can expect
The biggest Apple Intelligence upgrade of the year is expected to land in April – here’s what you can expect
iOS 18.4 is “due by April” according to top insider
The free update will bring major Siri upgrades to your iPhone
Powered by Apple Intelligence, Siri will get on-screen awareness and personal context
A new report claims iOS 18.4 is expected to launch in April and that’s huge news for the best iPhones and Apple Intelligence.
With the arrival of iOS 18.3 expected some time over the next few weeks, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is already dropping hints at when we can expect to see iOS 18.4.
In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman states, iOS 18.4 is “due by April”. iOS 18.4 is expected to be the biggest Apple Intelligence upgrade yet, with its headline feature, the long-anticipated Siri AI update. Siri will gain major new functionality such as on-screen awareness and personal context to make the virtual assistant a true AI-powered personal assistant.
Siri’s major Apple Intelligence upgrades were first revealed in June 2024 during Apple’s WWDC keynote and is one of, if not the, most impressive Apple Intelligence features we’ve seen so far.
This upgraded version of Siri should function similarly to the newly announced Galaxy AI features on the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S25 smartphones, allowing you to ask questions related to what’s on your screen and chain commands like asking Siri to find you a restaurant, add a booking to your calendar, and message your friend about it.
Gurman says iOS 18.4 will also “add the upgraded App Intents software that lets you more precisely control the operating system via your voice.”
Siri’s new era
Siri has already had some Apple Intelligence added (Image credit: Apple)
We’ve already received upgrades to Siri over the last few months. In September, iOS 18.1 added the ability to ask follow-up questions and gave the voice assistant a completely redesigned look on Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhones. Then, in December, iOS 18.2 added ChatGPT integration that allows users to ask OpenAI’s chatbot complex questions that Siri just isn’t capable of answering.
Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
While these updates have been well-received, many iPhone users have been waiting in anticipation of iOS 18.4’s huge arrival. While we had some indication that iOS 18.4 would arrive before WWDC 2025, it’s exciting to hear a trusted Apple source like Gurman say that we’ve only got a few more months to wait.
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Trump’s Crypto Venture Divides the Industry He Aims to Support
Trump’s Crypto Venture Divides the Industry He Aims to Support
Dressed in ball gowns, tuxedos and “Make Bitcoin Great Again” baseball caps, a crowd of some of the country’s most powerful cryptocurrency executives gathered a few blocks from the White House for a lavish party three days before President Trump’s inauguration, toasting an incoming administration that had vowed to promote the industry’s interests.
Even Snoop Dogg joined the festivities, offering a rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin.’”
But the crypto millionaires and billionaires were caught off guard by what happened next.
At 9 p.m. on Jan. 17, with the festivities in full swing, Mr. Trump announced on social media that he was launching a new cryptocurrency — a so-called memecoin known simply as $Trump.
The surprise disclosure raised fresh ethics and legal concerns about the ways in which Mr. Trump continues to cash in on his power and fame, in this case by marketing a digital asset in an inherently volatile and speculative market to millions of his followers.
And it set off a wave of criticism from inside the industry that he says he wants to champion.
Crypto executives criticized the move as a cash grab, saying that Mr. Trump had undercut the industry’s credibility at the very moment when proponents were seeking a more prominent place for digital currencies in mainstream finance and business.
His venture, they said, created a brief and highly publicized bubble that partly deflated within a few days even as Mr. Trump’s family and its business partners collected millions of dollars from fees on purchases and sales of the coin.
“It makes it all look corrupt and self-interested,” said Nic Carter, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump who runs the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures and was at the Crypto Ball as the new $Trump coin was announced.
An analysis by the crypto forensics company Chainalysis showed that the majority of people who bought $Trump were likely inexperienced retail investors, possibly dabbling in crypto for the first time. These traders “roughly broke even,” the analysis said, though more than 100,000 of them lost money.
Yet by one estimate, the launch of $Trump generated $58 million in fees for the Trump family in less than a day. As of Friday night, the family also owns, at least on paper, $23 billion worth of $Trump at its $29 price — already a 60 percent drop from the peak. That price would ****** even further if the family did a so-called rug pull and moved to rapidly sell off its holdings.
Asked about the coin’s launch on Tuesday at the White House, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t know much about it.”
But even after the inauguration, he continued to repost the celebratory announcement of the $Trump token — effectively urging more people to buy the coin after its price collapsed.
Ryan Selkis, a crypto entrepreneur who was one of the president’s earliest supporters in the industry, said on social media that the memecoin episode would cost the Trump administration “a lot of $ and goodwill.”
“Trump needs to fire his crypto advisors, from top to bottom and replace with people who know what they are doing,” another crypto executive, Gabor Gurbacs, wrote on X after the coin’s price plummeted.
The memecoin launch was the first time the Trump family had issued a digital currency that any investor could buy or sell on crypto exchanges. But the plan, one Trump Organization executive said, grew out of an earlier effort organized in part by Bill Zanker, a serial entrepreneur and friend of Mr. Trump’s who has previously sold back rubs, gym equipment and self-help courses.
Mr. Zanker and the Trump family began selling $99 digital trading cards in 2022 depicting Mr. Trump as a superhero in a crypto-based format known as a nonfungible token, or NFT.
But NFTs, at least in theory, serve as digital artwork or collectibles, whereas the Trump token was treated by buyers more like GameStop shares, the so-called meme stock that many amateur traders bought in recent years in hopes of earning a quick profit.
A onetime crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail last year, promising to end the Biden administration’s regulatory crackdown on crypto firms.
“We’re going to make a lot of money for the country,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday as he signed an executive order at the White House pledging to promote the crypto industry.
It’s a business in which Mr. Trump has a substantial personal stake. In September, he and his sons helped start World Liberty Financial, a company designed to facilitate borrowing and lending in digital currencies.
And since his election victory, Mr. Trump has made a series of personnel selections at regulatory agencies that seem poised to help the industry.
In an interview on Friday, Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, dismissed criticism of the decision to release the $Trump tokens and questions about whether it was a conflict of interest for the Trump family to be introducing its own digital currency while President Trump is appointing financial regulators.
“The $Trump trading card and World Liberty Financial are two of the most successful projects in crypto history,” he said.
The Crypto Ball was promoted as a celebration of the industry’s political success — the sort of party that crypto enthusiasts usually throw on yachts and beaches, just transplanted to an auditorium a 15-minute walk from the White House.
It was also an opportunity for top crypto executives to network with some of the most influential figures in Washington. Fred Thiel, the chief executive of the Bitcoin mining firm Mara Holdings, chatted with House Speaker Mike Johnson, who sent a text to President Trump right in front of him. “Everyone was very pumped,” Mr. Thiel said in an interview.
But it turned out the most important action in the crypto market was happening on social media. “Trump Meme is HERE!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social and X as Snoop Dogg took the stage. “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!”
Proponents of digital currencies say they can grow into a widely used means of exchange, allowing instant transfers of wealth efficiently and privately, outside the traditional banking system. Memecoins, a type of digital currency based on a joke or a celebrity mascot, are controversial in the crypto world. They have no practical utility and are often deployed in pump-and-dump schemes or other scams.
But traders with good instincts can generate quick profits — if they buy quickly as the price is rising and then sell their holdings before earlier buyers cash out.
Josh Bailey, a crypto trader in Austin, Texas, saw Mr. Trump’s announcement almost immediately after it was posted. At first, he wasn’t sure if it was real. “The president of the United States launching a memecoin,” Mr. Bailey said. “I was not expecting that.”
Soon the coin’s price was surging. Within a few hours, the total value of all the $Trump in circulation was more than $5 billion. Mr. Bailey decided to put in $12,000. By the time he cashed out, his trove had more than quintupled in value.
By Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s coin was among the most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world, and his partnership’s holdings were worth more than $50 billion on paper. A business entity controlled by Trump Organization and its partners owned 80 percent of the coins and collected fees as the coins were traded.
Eric Trump, in a social media post, hailed the new investment as “the hottest digital meme on earth.”
Already, though, Mr. Trump’s crypto supporters were growing frustrated. Many of the people who attended the Crypto Ball were effectively cut out of the moneymaking opportunity, unable to buy the coin early enough to profit because they were out partying rather than online.
“I’m legitimately heated about it,” Mr. Carter said. “Why wouldn’t they just do an announcement over the speakers?”
Then, on Sunday afternoon, a post appeared on Melania Trump’s X account: She was launching a memecoin of her own, essentially creating a competitor in the market. The price of $Trump plummeted by 60 percent over the next day.
Suddenly, the industry’s enthusiasm for Mr. Trump turned to fury.
Justin Bons, a crypto executive, said the back-to-back memecoin announcements were “nothing more than blatant money grabs.” Another trader said he was “missing Gary Gensler right now,” a reference to the former Securities and Exchange Commission chair who filed numerous lawsuits against crypto companies.
The new Trump token also quickly generated legal questions, centering on whether it constituted a security and should have been subject to federal disclosure and registration requirements.
The $Melania tokens “are digital collectibles,” the family said as it announced the offering, “not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity.” But trading patterns show that this was not how buyers treated these tokens — buying and selling them in most cases in an effort to make money.
During the Biden administration, the S.E.C. under Mr. Gensler adopted an aggressive posture toward cryptocurrencies, arguing that the vast majority of them were securities that should be closely regulated.
In 2023, the S.E.C. accused the backers of a cartoon NFT series called Stoner Cats of selling an unregistered security after the images were marketed in a way that “led investors reasonably to expect to profit from the managerial and entrepreneurial efforts of” the backers.
Allison Herren Lee, a former S.E.C. commissioner, said that during her tenure the new Trump-family coins would certainly have generated a staff review to evaluate if they complied with the law.
“That analysis does not turn on whether the promoters call it a security,” she said. “It turns on whether it’s marketed as an investment, meaning generally that purchasers will get a return based on the efforts of others.”
Democrats in Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have already written a letter to federal regulators asking them to investigate the matter.
But opening such an inquiry now would effectively require the S.E.C. to investigate the family of a president who just nominated the agency’s chairman — an experienced securities lawyer with close ties to the crypto industry.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist whom Trump appointed to oversee his administration’s tech policy, said this week that the coin was “like a baseball card or a stamp” and “totally fine” to sell.
It is already clear that some of the buyers of the $Trump token jumped too slowly and ended up losing money. During one series of trades, an investor using the pseudonym Ansem spent $9 million in cryptocurrency to buy $Trump just before it fell in value, and then sold the holdings two hours later at a roughly $2 million loss, according to public transaction records first identified by an account called Lookonchain.
Still, over the next few days, the Ansem account continued trading $Trump, the records show, perhaps in hope of making up the loss.
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E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.
E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.
Owners of electric cars in Vermont recently got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1 they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.
In imposing the higher fee, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium for driving electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from no states a few years ago.
Now, as President Trump rolls back Biden administration measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering imposing a national fee to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire shape.
The fees are an attempt to make up for declining revenue from gasoline taxes that electric cars, for obvious reasons, don’t pay. They’re an example of how governments are struggling to adjust to technological upheaval in the auto industry.
Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they worry that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at extremely high levels to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberals.
That has already happened in Texas and other states, said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports who focuses on transportation and energy.
“E.V. owners should contribute to paying for the roads that they use,” he said. But, he added, “in some cases, states are implementing fees that are pretty punitive to E.V. drivers, significantly more than what the owner of a gas vehicle would pay.”
Flat fees are also unfair to low-income drivers or people who don’t drive very much, making it even harder for them to buy cars that pollute less, Mr. Harto and others said. Federal and state gasoline and diesel taxes are levied per gallon, so that people who drive more — or own gas guzzlers — automatically pay more.
The main reason that revenue from fuel taxes has declined is that internal combustion engines have become much more efficient, while political leaders have been reluctant to raise fuel taxes to keep up with inflation.
The federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has not been increased since 1993. The Highway Trust Fund, which finances transportation projects from proceeds of that tax, could become insolvent by 2027 without new sources of funding, analysts say. A list of tax and spending policies that Republicans in Congress are considering includes imposing fees on electric vehicles to help replenish the Highway Trust Fund.
There are 5.4 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry group. But that is roughly 2 percent of the total and not the main cause of revenue gaps.
“Lawmakers are finding a convenient scapegoat, and penalizing the cleanest vehicles on the road while ignoring the real cause of the shortfall,” said Max Baumhefner, director for electric vehicle infrastructure at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Some of the highest electric vehicle fees are in states that usually elect Republicans, like Texas, Wyoming and Ohio, all of which charge $200 a year on top of the regular registration fee.
Robert Nichols, a Republican state senator in Texas who sponsored legislation in 2023 establishing a fee, said that the amount was determined by analyzing how much the average owner of a gasoline vehicle pays.
“It’s not an anti-E.V. thing. We’ve got Tesla right here in Texas and we’re very proud,” he said, referring to the electric car maker, which has its headquarters and a factory in Austin. “But everybody needs to pay for the road.”
Texas is among the states singled out by Consumer Reports for overcharging electric vehicle drivers. The organization cites Texas’ relatively low gas tax of 20 cents a gallon, well below the national average of about 50 cents.
Mr. Nichols acknowledged that lawmakers were reluctant to raise taxes on drivers of gasoline cars. “Nobody wants that on their tombstone: ‘Raised the gas tax,’” he said.
But increasingly electric vehicle fees are not just a red state phenomenon. Washington, which charges $150, is as progressive as any blue state. And in Vermont, lawmakers passed a fee law last year because they were concerned that growing numbers of electric vehicles posed a risk to state finances, said Patrick Murphy, state policy director at the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
“Legislators recognized that we are nearing the tipping point where E.V. adoption has become mainstream in Vermont,” he said.
Electric vehicles accounted for 12 percent of new car sales in Vermont last year, above the national average of 8 percent. Mr. Murphy noted that fees collected from electric vehicle owners are earmarked for infrastructure like chargers. At $89 a year above the standard registration fee, Vermont’s fee is also at the low end of what states charge.
People on both sides of the debate agree that a fairer system would charge electric vehicle owners per mile driven. But doing that is complicated. Some states are experimenting with technology that tracks mileage and bills owners accordingly. But the systems are expensive and raise privacy issues.
A flat fee is “not perfect,” Mr. Nichols, the Texas legislator, acknowledged. “But it makes a big step forward. It’s fair without setting up a huge bureaucracy.”
Some states, including Iowa, Georgia and Kentucky, tax electric vehicle chargers. But that system misses a lot of cars. Most people charge at home, using public chargers only occasionally.
States that don’t charge electric cars higher fees include Alaska, Arizona, New York and Massachusetts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In 2026, Vermont plans to be among the first states to try to charge electric vehicle owners based on how much they drive.
That will be relatively easy in Vermont, Mr. Murphy said, because officials already collect odometer readings when owners bring their cars in for annual safety checks. That’s not the case in many states.
Even a system that tracks mileage has flaws. It taxes owners for trips in other states, and does not collect revenue from out-of-state visitors.
“The whole approach we have had is to keep things as simple as possible in the beginning, to get something in place where all vehicles are paying something for our infrastructure,” Mr. Murphy said, “and then to evolve over time to continually make it a fairer system.”
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Republicans in Congress Who Love Trump Now Disagree With Some of His Policies
Republicans in Congress Who Love Trump Now Disagree With Some of His Policies
When Donald J. Trump huddled with Republican senators at a closed-door meeting in the Capitol days before his inauguration, Senator Rick Scott of Florida rose and gushed to him about the exhilarating opportunity the party had to “right-size” the federal government by slashing it mercilessly, a long-held conservative goal.
Mr. Trump brusquely agreed but quickly steered the conversation in a different direction, according to two people who attended the meeting. What he was really excited to discuss was tariffs, and he launched into a lengthy discourse about his plans, pulling out a paper from his jacket pocket and laying out calculations of potential revenue the nation could bring in from taxing imports.
The exchange underscored the chasm between Mr. Trump and many members of his party who are setting to work to push his agenda through a closely divided Congress. Even as Republicans have coalesced around broad fiscal policies like cutting spending and extending the tax cuts Mr. Trump enacted in 2017, many do not share his enthusiasm for several ideas he has proposed, including implementing broad tariffs and lowering the corporate tax rate.
Those disagreements are at the heart of Republican leaders’ efforts to piece together legislation carrying the bulk of Mr. Trump’s domestic policy agenda — a massive bill cutting taxes, slashing spending and slowing immigration that they plan to fast-track over the objections of Democrats. It will be a central topic of discussion this week as House Republicans convene in Miami for a retreat entitled “Delivering the America First Agenda.”
Mr. Trump is expected to address them Monday evening to kick off the gathering.
The president — who is famously vindictive and can count on a contingent of MAGA allies ready to hector and threaten any Republican who stands in his way — is likely to demand unbending loyalty from his party when it comes to domestic policy.
At a meeting with lawmakers this month at Fort McNair in Washington, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, described the major legislation taking shape in existential terms. His message, according to a person who attended the private session, was: You may not think the bill is perfect, but this is the be-all and end-all — and you will be with us.
While Republicans have traditionally agitated for less government spending, Mr. Trump has displayed a laissez-faire attitude toward cutting costs and proposed a number of policies that would actually increase the nation’s debt.
Some Republicans have privately made it clear that they’d rather not include some of Mr. Trump’s most expensive proposals in the legislation, especially as they battle concerns from hard-right Republicans that the bill will cost too much.
But Mr. Trump has personally been lobbying lawmakers on some of the issues he campaigned on. In a private meeting with Republican congressional leaders in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Wednesday, he urged them to implement his campaign promise to eliminate taxes on tips.
He told them repeatedly that he saw the move as a winning issue, according to two people familiar with his comments who were not authorized to discuss the private meeting.
Of the suite of tax cuts Mr. Trump proposed during the campaign, terminating taxes on tips has gained the most traction on Capitol Hill. The idea won bipartisan support during the campaign, and Republican aides are working on legislation that would translate the “no tax on tips” slogan into policy that won’t kick off a gold rush of tax avoidance.
There are several other promises Republicans would rather avoid. Free traders on Capitol Hill have particularly bristled at Mr. Trump’s vows to enact across-the-board tariffs. While the president has the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, some Republicans have studied the possibility of imposing tariffs through law — an idea that quickly proved unpopular within the party.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky emerged from the closed-door meeting with Mr. Trump and the other Republican senators saying that the main way the president discussed paying for the massive reconciliation bill was through “big, beautiful tariffs.”
“I still don’t think tariffs are a good idea,” Mr. Paul said. “International trade has made the entire world incredibly prosperous, and if you look at G.D.P. per capita over the last 70 years, it’s a hockey stick going straight up. I think trade is a good thing, and international trade is a great thing, and it makes everybody richer.”
Despite the warnings from members of his own party on trade, Mr. Trump, who has been dispensing threats to close trading partners, is likely to move ahead with sweeping tariffs. Much of the rest of his campaign agenda — like making interest payments on car loans tax deductible — will require nearly unanimous support from his party in Congress.
Among Mr. Trump’s ideas is to lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the United States. While Republicans on Capitol Hill are throwing around different ideas for new manufacturing incentives, some in the party, and even some corporate lobbyists, hope to leave the rate at 21 percent. They worry that lowering it further would raise the cost of the bill and potentially imperil its passage.
“I think that digs us a deeper hole,” said Senator Thom Tillis, a member of the Finance Committee. “I’m sympathetic to it, but arguably I think if we were at a percentage point or two more we’d have been OK and had less of a revenue problem.”
Mr. Trump has not weighed in on many of his promised tax cuts publicly since he won the election, and he is still assembling the members of his team who will put forward the administration’s policy positions.
Some Republicans are waiting to see how hard the Trump administration actually pushes for proposals like eliminating taxes on overtime pay before digging too far into their specifics. Other pledges are already considered dead: Republican lawmakers and aides expect that exempting Social Security benefits from taxes would run afoul of procedural rules in the Senate and are preparing alternative ways to cut taxes for older Americans.
It is unclear how much dissent Mr. Trump will tolerate as the package comes together. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close ally of Mr. Trump and ultraconservative firebrand, urged her colleagues at a House hearing this week to commit themselves to the full sweep of Mr. Trump’s fiscal agenda.
“When I saw him and heard him campaign saying loudly ‘No tax on tips,’ ‘No tax on Social Security’ and ‘No tax on overtime,’ people rose to their feet and cheered loudly — standing ovation after standing ovation,” she said. “I promise you President Trump, especially for Republicans, is more popular than you are in your district.”
Mr. Trump recently invited more than a dozen House Republicans to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, to discuss raising the $10,000 limit on the state and local tax deduction. The president endorsed raising the cap during the campaign, delighting Republicans from high-tax states like New York who have made doing so a political priority for years. At the Florida meeting, he asked the Republicans focused on the issue to come up with a compromise that could become law, according to lawmakers who attended.
But many in the party detest the state and local tax deduction, often called SALT, and would rather see it eliminated entirely than expanded. Republicans created the $10,000 limit in their 2017 tax law — which Mr. Trump signed — to help offset cost of the cuts they are now trying to extend.
“It’s a giveaway to the wealthy and the states that prioritize the woke agenda over good governance and it’s paid for by the hardworking taxpayers in states that do things right,” Representative Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, said.
Those divisions have left some Republican leaders convinced that the only way they will be able to quickly paper over longstanding policy disagreements is by rolling all the measures into one enormous bill, forcing lawmakers to go on the record in a single up-or-down vote on Mr. Trump’s agenda.
That would essentially dare Republicans to challenge the president, a move many have privately said they believe their colleagues are loath to make after Mr. Trump went after Representative Chip Roy of Texas last month for opposing his push to raise the debt limit.
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ASML Sinks as China AI Startup Triggers Panic in Tech Stocks – Bloomberg
ASML Sinks as China AI Startup Triggers Panic in Tech Stocks – Bloomberg
ASML Sinks as China AI Startup Triggers Panic in Tech Stocks BloombergStock Market Today: Dow, S&P 500 set to fall, Nasdaq to dive on DeepSeek worries; Nvidia, ASML, Microsoft shares rocked MarketWatchNasdaq futures tumble as China’s AI push rattles Big Tech Yahoo FinanceAll About DeepSeek – The ******** AI Startup Challenging The US Big Tech ForbesEuropean markets open lower; tech stocks fall 4% on China competition fears CNBC
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The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered
The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered
BBC
January 27 was formally designated Holocaust Memorial Day by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. But how we remember the Holocaust has evolved over the decades and even now – some 80 years on – it is a story of remembrance that is still unfinished
“Dear boy,” the short handwritten note from 1942 begins, “I was delighted with your May message. I’m healthy. I hope that I can stay here and see you again. I remain hopeful. Please write. Greetings, your father.”
The note is one of thousands of documents held by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives.
The Jewish man who wrote it was called Alfred Josephs, and he was sending it to his teenage son Wolfgang, who had escaped with his mother to England. Alfred had been arrested and was being held in the Westerbork detention camp in The Netherlands.
He was still, at the time, able to pass short messages through the Red Cross.
The Wiener Holocaust Library
In this letter Alfred Josephs said he was fine. It was the last message his son Wolfgang would ever receive from his father
What Alfred didn’t know was that Westerbork was a camp whose inmates were to be transported to Auschwitz. Wolfgang would never hear from his father again.
At first, Auschwitz was used by the Germans to house Polish prisoners of war. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it became a labour camp, where many inmates were worked to death. The Nazis called this “annihilation by labour”.
But what it became by 1942 is the Auschwitz that sits in our shared memory, for by now it was an extermination camp, whose main purpose was mass *******.
Getty Images
Auschwitz became a labour camp, having initially been used by the Germans to house Polish prisoners of war
Newsreel filmed by the allies after the liberation of Europe shows ******* civilians being forced to visit the camps by the troops.
“It was only a short walk from any ******* city to the nearest concentration camp,” says the American voice-over. The camera catches relaxed, smartly dressed Germans laughing and chatting as they make their way.
They walk past the corpses, piles of emaciated men and women, men and women who may even have been their neighbours, colleagues, friends in the past. The camera that had captured their relaxed, easy smiles before they entered the camps now records their horror.
Shock registers on their faces. Some weep. Others shake their heads, fold handkerchiefs to their faces and look away.
Getty Images
Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945. Posterity honours the memory of the victims each year on the anniversary
Post-war Europe looked at this horror and acknowledged the depth of the suffering. But how did post-war Europe make sense of the perpetrators?
When we talk of industrialised killing, we don’t just mean the scale of it, vast though it was. We also mean the sophistication of its organisation: the division of labour, the allocation of specialist tasks, the efficient marshalling of resources, the meticulous planning that was needed to keep the wheels of the killing machine turning.
Those same newsreels show well-fed Nazi guards, both men and women, now in allied custody.
What was the nature of the moral collapse that turned this horror into a normality for the Nazis who ran these camps, a normality in which mass ******* became, for them, all in a day’s work?
Turning away from a hard question
For years after the war, public attention turned away from this question. Though some Nazi war criminals were prosecuted, the new priority, in a Europe divided by the Cold War, was to turn West Germany into a democratic ally.
The Holocaust almost disappeared from popular memory, in much of the Western world. The post-war public wanted to turn the page on the war. In popular culture, in Britain, for example, the appetite was for stories that could be celebrated and cheered.
“The culture of memory of the Second World War was still emphasising heroism,” says Dr Toby Simpson, the director of the Wiener Holocaust Library. “There was an emphasis on the Normandy landings, for example.
“And in the stories that the survivors wanted to tell there was very little heroism to be found in a story where they’ve been stripped of their humanity, agency, their choice. They’d been turned into a non-person.”
Getty Images
Primo Levi initially struggled to find a publisher for his book, If This is a Man
The Italian survivor, Primo Levi, wrote his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man immediately after the war. He had been one of a few thousand still at Auschwitz when Soviet troops arrived on 27 January 1945.
Most prisoners had been forced to march west, towards Germany, in freezing winter weather. Already weakened by camp conditions, many died on the way in what came to be known as the Death Marches. Levi was too sick and Soviet troops found him close to death in the camp infirmary.
‘Not forgiving and not forgetting’
Today, If This is a Man is regarded as a masterpiece of survivor testimony and one of the most important memoirs of the entire era. But in 1947, Primo Levi found it hard to find a publisher, even in his native Italy.
Finally, a small independent publisher in Turin published it in a print run of 2,500. It sold 1,500 copies then disappeared. For publishers, and for the public, it was still too soon. Few, it seemed, wanted to look.
“Primo Levi didn’t sell because the time wasn’t right and because he was too great a writer to give a heroic answer. His answer is greater than heroism,” says Jay Winter, professor of history Emeritus at Yale University. Many of Prof Winter’s mother’s family were killed in the Holocaust.
He adds: “A lot of people turned Primo Levi into a saint but all you have to do is to read the poem at the beginning of If This is a Man to see that he is not forgiving anybody – he is not forgiving and not forgetting.”
Getty Images
“Primo Levi didn’t sell because the time wasn’t right and because he was too great a writer to give a heroic answer,” says Professor Jay Winter
“There was Holocaust memorialisation in the 1950s,” says Prof David Feldman at Birkbeck University in London, “but it was something that was done by Jews themselves, in small fragmented groups.
“These were occasions of mourning more than memorialisation. The idea that we have now, of memorialisation, that somehow there are lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, was not commonplace then”.
According to Prof Winter: “The countries that were reconstructing… needed a myth of resistance, of heroic armed conflict against the Nazis or Italian fascists.” That myth of resistance “had no place for concentration camp inmates”.
A cultural shift in attitudes
Only in the 1960s did popular interest return. When Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the extermination campaign, they put him on trial in Jerusalem, and televised it. Now, Holocaust memorialisation began to reach the wider public.
Through the Eichmann trial, the new mass medium of television brought survivors’ testimony into the living rooms of the western world.
It coincided, too, with a cultural shift in public attitudes to war. A generation born in the aftermath of World War Two were coming of age in the 1960s.
Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem incorporated the words of the World War One poet Wilfred Owen – whose poetry had also faded from popular consciousness – to a new generation. Anti-war sentiment was fuelled further by the US involvement in Vietnam.
Getty Images
The televising of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem helped spread Holocaust memorialisation to the wider public
“I would say the Eichmann trial also brought perpetrators into people’s living rooms,” says Prof Feldman. “Survivors’ testimony and the emphasis on survivors being central to Holocaust memorialisation came later. It developed slowly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was well established.”
The Holocaust story – at last – took its place in our collective consciousness.
From the 1960s onwards, Levi’s memoir found a global readership. Anne Frank’s father Otto had also struggled, in the early post-war *******, to find a publisher for his daughter’s diary. To date it has sold an estimated 30 million copies.
What became of Alfred Josephs
As for Wolfgang Josephs, as late as August 1946, he was still hoping against hope that he might find his father alive. He received a typewritten note from the British Red Cross. It informed him, with regret, that Red Cross officials in Europe had searched the lists of survivors, and his father’s name was not among them.
Wolfgang anglicised his name to Peter Johnson and settled in the ***, at a time when few in the western world wanted to hear the stories of those who had witnessed, or survived, the Holocaust. He donated his family papers to the Wiener Holocaust Library, which remains a vast repository of evidence of the darkest ******* in Europe’s history.
Now, 80 years on, there are so few survivors left that soon the duty to remember will pass to posterity.
“I think remembering the Holocaust is even more important now,” says Dr Simpson, “because it happened at such a scale, and with such an intensity of hatred, that the need to understand, to explain this continent-wide event in which six million Jews were murdered, where so many people attempt, and still attempt, to deny that this happened, in a world where misinformation is everywhere, there’s an ever greater need for us to remember the Holocaust: that this did happen. And the evidence is here.”
As Primo Levi wrote: “The injury cannot be healed. It extends through time.”
Top picture credit: Getty Images
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University graduates more likely to suffer from dementia compared to their less educated peers, research finds
University graduates more likely to suffer from dementia compared to their less educated peers, research finds
University graduates are more likely to suffer a swift demise from dementia than their less educated peers, research suggests.
Those who spend longer in education typically have “brain reserves” helping them to fend off early symptoms, a review of evidence found.
It means more advanced disease has usually set in by the time they are finally diagnosed, so they appear to die sooner.
Analysis of 261 studies, including 36 relating to educational attainment, found life expectancy after a dementia diagnosis fell for every extra year of education.
Patients typically survived for 10.5 years but researchers discovered each additional year of studies cut survival time by around 2.5 months.
The findings suggest someone who completed an undergraduate degree at 21 would live a year less than someone who didn’t go on to tertiary studies.
Dutch researchers have labelled it the “cognitive reserve paradigm”, where people of higher intelligence are able to function for longer without obvious signs or symptoms of the disease.
But when those cognitive reserves are depleted, the disease is more advanced, meaning they typically have fewer years to live compared with those diagnosed sooner.
“This paradigm postulates that people with higher education are more resilient to brain injury before functional declines,” the academics wrote in the BMJ journal.
“Once this reserve has been used up and dementia is diagnosed, these people are already at a more advanced stage of the underlying disease and clinical progression will be faster.”
The study at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam found men lived for an average of 5.7 years when they were diagnosed at age 65 and 2.2 years when diagnosed at 85.
Women lived for eight years and 4.5 years when diagnosed at the same ages.
Survival was longer among those with Alzheimer’s compared with other forms of dementia.
On average, people spend about one third of their life after diagnosis in a nursing home.
More than half moved to a nursing home within five years.
Dementia is the second leading cause of death in Australia, after heart disease. However, for women, dementia is the leading cause of death.
More than 70 per cent of dementia cases in Australia are attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.
Without a significant medical breakthrough, over a million Australians are forecast to have Alzheimer’s disease by 2058.
However, there is growing hope of a future with treatments or even a cure.
Lecanemab is a disease modifying treatment for people living with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment.
Lecanemab works by removing amyloid plaques from the brain and slowing cognitive decline.
In the ***, Alzheimer’s Research *** encourages people to boost their brain health.
“Regularly challenging our brain and staying mentally active can help protect our brain health as we age, lowering our risk of memory and thinking problems, and dementia,” it said.
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The Slavic fantasy action-slasher/rogue-lite “Folk Hero” is now available for the Nintendo Switch
The Slavic fantasy action-slasher/rogue-lite “Folk Hero” is now available for the Nintendo Switch
“The Yekaterinburg-based (Russia) indie games publisher Targem Games and indie games developer Chudo-Yudo Games, today announced with great thrill and joy that their Slavic fantasy action-slasher/rogue-lite “Folk Hero”, is coming to PC via Steam on October 5th, 2023.” – Jonas Ek, TGG.
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Fear and gunshots after Rwanda-backed rebels claim takeover of eastern Congo’s largest city
Fear and gunshots after Rwanda-backed rebels claim takeover of eastern Congo’s largest city
GOMA, Congo (AP) — Residents in eastern Congo’s largest city, Goma, woke up on Monday morning afraid and uncertain about who was in control of the area after Rwanda-backed rebels claimed to have captured the city, as their fight with Congolese security forces escalated in recent days in one of Africa’s longest wars.
Gunshots rang out across Goma overnight before dozens of men in military uniform were seen early Monday morning marching with their guns into the city, which is the capital of North Kivu province. It was unclear if the men — who were cheered on by some residents from the roadside — were the M23 rebels. The Congolese government has not confirmed the reported takeover.
The M23 rebel group, which neighboring Rwanda backs, is one of about 100 armed groups vying for a foothold in the mineral-rich region in the decades-long conflict. The rebels temporarily took over Goma in 2012 and resurfaced in late 2021, with increasing support from Rwanda, according to Congo’s government and United Nations experts. Rwanda has denied such support.
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Analysts have warned the latest escalation of hostilities could further destabilize the region, which is already home to one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises with more than 6 million people displaced. More than a third of North Kivu’s population are among the displaced, according to a U.N. report.
In a statement late Sunday, the U.N. Security Council called on the M23 to immediately reverse its advances.
“The members of the Security Council condemned the ongoing flagrant disregard for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the DRC … and that the M23 put an end to the establishment of parallel administrations in the DRC territory,” the statement added, referring to Congo’s other name.
The rebels announced early Monday they had captured the city just as a deadline they gave to Congolese security forces to surrender their weapons was about to expire. The rebels asked the Congolese military to assemble at the central stadium and urged residents to remain calm.
Congolese government officials have said the country is “in a war situation” and accused Rwanda of committing “a frontal aggression (and) a declaration of war.” The country severed ties with Rwanda over the weekend. Recent attempts at diplomatic talks between the two countries failed.
The reported advance into Goma is the culmination of a prolonged battle between the rebels and the Congolese security forces during which several towns fell to the rebels.
On Sunday, hundreds of residents marched in the heat and through the night along roads with heavy traffic as they tried to flee Goma into Rwanda, carrying their babies, clothes and other belongings on their backs and heads.
“We are fleeing because we saw soldiers on the border with Rwanda throwing bombs and shooting,” said Safi Shangwe, who was among those on the move.
The U.N.’s special representative for Congo Bintou Keita told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council late Sunday that “we are trapped,” with the airport shut down and roads blocked.
At least 13 U.N. peacekeepers have been killed in the hostilities in the past week. The U.N. peacekeeping force, also known as MONUSCO, entered Congo more than two decades ago and has around 14,000 peacekeepers on the ground.
The Uruguayan army, in Goma serving with the U.N. peacekeeping mission, said in a statement on the social platform X late Sunday that more than 100 Congolese soldiers were laying down their weapons.
—-
Associated Press journalists Monika Pronczuk and Wilson McMakin in Dakar, Senegal; Edith M. Lederer in New York contributed. Asadu reported from Abuja, Nigeria; and Mednick, from Jerusalem.
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***** has renewed its trademark for Skies of Arcadia
***** has renewed its trademark for Skies of Arcadia
***** has renewed its trademark for Skies of Arcadia.
Originally released on the Dreamcast in 2000, Skies of Arcadia was an RPG developed by *****‘s Overworks division, previously known as AM7.
Starring Vyse and Aika, members of a group of air pirates called the Blue Rogues, Skies of Arcadia was praised for its impressive visuals, its engaging story and its strong localisation which ensured its jokes were relevant for a Western audience.
The game was critically acclaimed (its Metacritic score sits at 93), and it was ported to the GameCube in 2002, but since then it has never seen a re-release.
Now, as spotted by X account ***** Informant, ***** has renewed its trademarks for both Skies of Arcadia and the game’s Japanese title Eternal Arcadia.
It should be stressed that the renewal of a trademark doesn’t necessarily mean that its owner has plans to do anything with it, but it does at least suggest some sort of desire to ensure the IP remains part of its portfolio.
While Skies of Arcadia has never seen a re-release, its protagonist Vyse did appear in 2012 racing game Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, alongside a Skies of Arcadia themed track.
***** is currently in the process of resurrecting a number of its dormant IPs in an attempt to reintroduce them to modern players.
In December 2023, ***** announced that it was developing new entries in the Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi and Crazy Taxi series.
Last month, it also confirmed that Like a Dragon developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is working on a new Virtua Fighter game.
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South Korean plane ****** report says bird remains were found in engines, but no cause yet revealed
South Korean plane ****** report says bird remains were found in engines, but no cause yet revealed
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The first report on last month’s Jeju Air ****** in South Korea confirmed traces of bird strikes in the plane’s engines, though officials haven’t determined the cause of the accident that killed all but two of the 181 people on board.
The preliminary accident report released by South Korea’s Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board on Monday said that feathers and bird blood stains were found in both engines.
“The samples were sent to specialized organizations for DNA analysis, and a domestic organization identified them as belonging to Baikal teals,” the report said, referring to a migratory duck.
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The report also said the plane’s two ****** boxes — the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — stopped recording about 4 minutes before the ******. This could complicate efforts to find the cause of the ******.
The Boeing 737-800 skidded off the runaway at Muan International Airport on Dec. 29 after its landing gear failed to deploy, slamming into a concrete structure and bursting into flames. The flight was returning from Bangkok and all of the victims were South Koreans except for two Thai nationals.
Many analysts said the concrete structure, which housed a set of antennas called a localizer that guides aircraft during landings, should have been built with lighter materials that could break more easily upon impact. South Korea’s Transport Ministry announced last week that it will remove the concrete structure at the airport.
Investigators earlier said that air traffic controllers warned the pilots about possible bird strikes two minutes before the aircraft issued a distress signal confirming that a bird strike had occurred, after which the pilots attempted an emergency landing.
The preliminary report said the pilots also noticed a group of birds while approaching the runway at the Muan airport and that a security camera filmed the plane coming close to birds during an aborted landing as well.
The report said authorities will disassemble the engines, examine their components in depth, analyze the ****** box and air traffic control data, and investigate the embankment, localizer and bird strike evidence.
“These all-out investigation activities aim to accurately determine the cause of the accident,” the report said.
The Transport Ministry said the preliminary report has been sent to the International Civil Aviation Organization, Thailand, the United States and France. It said the plane was built in the U.S. and its engines in France.
It said the Muan airport will remain closed until April 18.
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Jennifer Lopez Tears Up as Sundance Premiere of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ Gets Standing Ovation: ‘I’ve Been Waiting For This Moment My Whole Life’ – Variety
Jennifer Lopez Tears Up as Sundance Premiere of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ Gets Standing Ovation: ‘I’ve Been Waiting For This Moment My Whole Life’ – Variety
Jennifer Lopez Tears Up as Sundance Premiere of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ Gets Standing Ovation: ‘I’ve Been Waiting For This Moment My Whole Life’ VarietyJennifer Lopez Performs During the Sundance Film Festival, Plus Pamela Anderson, Carla Bruni, Tyla and More PEOPLE‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ Review: Jennifer Lopez Provides Welcome Escape From Grim World of Argentine Prisoners VarietyPark City Dispatch Day Four: JLo at TAO and the Future of Political Comedy VultureJennifer Lopez Turns Heads In Bold All-Leather Look At Sundance Yahoo Entertainment
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Maroons reunion of 1995 heroes to inspire Slater’s men
Maroons reunion of 1995 heroes to inspire Slater’s men
Queensland will receive an inspirational early boost to their State of Origin campaign when the Maroons heroes of 1995 are honoured at a reunion lunch in Brisbane on Friday.
Current coach Billy Slater will be in attendance at the 30-year celebrations of the Paul “Fatty” Vautin-coached side who won 3-0 in the greatest upset in the history of Origin football.
The Queensland Rugby League (QRL) has organised the gathering and will recognise the 1995 side in other motivational ways in the lead-up to this year’s series as Slater’s men aim to reverse their 2-1 loss last year.
Maroons legend and 1995 team manager Chris Close said the win had lessons for the current side.
“They can learn that it doesn’t matter who the opposition is. It matters who your team is and how your team plays,” Close told AAP.
“It is what you do that counts in Origin football. If everybody does it, then 1995 is the result.”
Slater said the recognition of the 1995 side would “instil pride and create inspiration” for his team and the people of Queensland.
“I am glad there will be a celebration around the 30 years of what the 1995 team did because all Queenslanders will remember where they watched this series and how this footy team made them feel,” he told AAP.
“Thirty years on we are recognising a memorable series for Queenslanders.”
In 1995 the Super League war was in full swing. Wayne Bennett, coach of the Super League-aligned Brisbane side, pulled out as coach when the ARL ruled none of the rebel league’s players would be chosen, including seven star Broncos who had been on the 1994 Kangaroo tour.
Ahead of Game One in 1995 the Maroons were without 11 of the players from their 1994 Origin outfit, had three Test players and a novice coach in Vautin.
NSW boasted nine Test stars and Phil Gould, the Blues’ greatest coach. The bookmakers installed the Blues as 9-1 on favourites.
The QRL needed a coach in a hurry after Bennett’s withdrawal and the managing director at the time, Ross Livermore, offered the job to 1980s Maroons hero Vautin. It proved an inspired choice.
“We arrived for our first camp and Fatty addressed the team and used all his wily ways to enhance and glorify the situation we were in,” Close recalled.
“Fatty outlined a game plan that no-one expected. They expected him to come in as host of The Footy Show and be a clown but it wasn’t the moment for that. Fatty has a genuinely gifted footy brain and his game plan was very simple and one that everyone could follow and participate in.
“All you needed to have was a big heart and a lot of want. He had a group in the room he convinced.”
The rest is history. Captain Trevor Gillmeister led a team of no-names to Queensland’s greatest series win against the odds.
“It is important to remember,” Slater said.
“I was 12 years old when this series was played and the inspiration and passion – you carry for the rest of your life.
“Fatty Vautin, coaching his first series up against one of the iconic coaches in our game, Phil Gould, and up against a whole host of stars.
“There was no Allan Langer and the like in this footy team but they were a group of Queenslanders who went out there and inspired their state against the odds.”
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World leaders to join commemorations marking 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation – CNN
World leaders to join commemorations marking 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation – CNN
World leaders to join commemorations marking 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation CNNAuschwitz-Birkenau: Survivors return to mark 80 years since liberation of Nazi ******* death camp BBC.comAhead of Holocaust memorials, Jewish leaders honor the last generation of survivors The Times of IsraelAt Auschwitz, a Solemn Ceremony at a Time of Rising Nationalism The New York TimesAmong monarchs and presidents, focus of Auschwitz anniversary is on 50 survivors The Guardian
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Public cloud: Data sovereignty and data security in the ***
Public cloud: Data sovereignty and data security in the ***
The *** government’s decision to designate datacentres as critical national infrastructure (CNI) in September 2024 signalled its ambition to build a digital economy that is secure and globally competitive.
But behind the headlines about protecting against cyber crime and IT blackouts lies a more complicated reality – a sector grappling with policy uncertainty, reliance on foreign cloud giants and a data sovereignty agenda that looks increasingly compromised.
In a blog post, Forrester principal analyst Tracy Woo wrote: “New sovereignty requirements such as SecNumCloud, Cloud de Confiance from France, and the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) from Germany, along with the push to keep data in-country, have created a broader push for private and sovereign clouds.”
But the promise of “protected infrastructure” rings hollow when hyperscalers openly admit they cannot guarantee that *** government data stored in cloud services such as Microsoft 365 and Azure will remain within national borders.
Woo points out that countries in the European Union (EU) and Asia-Pacific (APAC) have been attempting to more heavily leverage non-US-based cloud providers, create sovereign clouds, or leave workloads on-premise.
In the ***, regulatory scrutiny is exposing the fragile state of the ***’s digital independence. Looking at the ***’s approach to data sovereignty, law firm Kennedys Law describes the Data Use and Access (DUA) Bill, which was published in October 2024, as “a more flexible risk-based approach for international data transfers”.
Kennedys notes that the new test requires that the data protection standards in the destination jurisdiction must not be materially lower than those in the ***. According to Kennedys, this standard is less rigid than the EU’s “essential equivalence” requirement but raises questions about how “materially lower” will be interpreted in practice.
Understandably, with the government’s reliance on cloud-based productivity tools, concerns about compliance with *** data protection laws have intensified.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is now investigating cloud market practices that could lock customers into foreign providers. A provisional report is expected in early 2025, setting the stage for potential regulatory reforms aimed at boosting data sovereignty and curbing monopolistic practices.
Reshaping data sovereignty
This is not before time for Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, a ***-based cloud hosting specialist. “The inability to ensure data remains within *** borders underscores the risks of depending on hyperscalers,” warns Boost. “If we keep outsourcing critical data infrastructure, we risk losing more than just technical control, we lose national independence.”
The CMA’s review could reshape the country’s digital future, potentially mandating greater transparency and requiring *** data storage guarantees from global cloud providers. This is something Boost has been talking about for some time.
“Transparency isn’t just about where data is stored, it’s about how datacentres are powered, maintained and secured,” he says. His argument highlights the essential connection between data sovereignty and operational clarity, urging providers to adopt clearer accountability measures.
The inability to ensure data remains within *** borders underscores the risks of depending on hyperscalers. If we keep outsourcing critical data infrastructure, we risk losing more than just technical control, we lose national independence
Mark Boost, Civo
Despite these challenges around transparency, the *** datacentre industry has seen promising signs, particularly in regional investment. The government’s recent announcement of a £250m datacentre project in Salford showcases how local government cooperation and targeted investment can drive growth. But such projects remain exceptions rather than the rule.
Luisa Cardani, head of datacentres at TechUK and author of the report Foundations for the future: How datacentres can supercharge *** economic growth, warns that without a national policy statement (NPS), the datacentre sector risks becoming fragmented. Local planning authorities lack the expertise and resources to approve projects efficiently, creating bottlenecks that could delay critical infrastructure developments for years.
“The industry wants to work with local people and authorities, but clear national planning guidance is missing,” says Cardani. “Without a coherent strategy, we’re stuck in a cycle of fragmented decisions and regulatory inertia.”
The proposed inclusion of datacentres under the nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIP) regime could streamline the approval process, ensuring faster decision-making. However, this remains, for the moment at least, more of an aspiration. In reality, investment will remain stalled until the *** develops a coherent, national approach that balances public and private interests while streamlining the project approval process.
Data sovereignty and security requirements are fundamental to this, and to a large extent it will be market forces that determine the shape and size of the ***’s datacentre industry. On this front, Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester, says businesses must recognise the different risk profiles posed by local and hyperscaler-operated datacentres.
“It should be expected that hyperscalers will have more bandwidth, more scalability and more redundancy than their more localised counterparts, but having datacentres classified as critical to the ***’s infrastructure may help with mitigating some, but not all, security risks,” he says.
Complexity of keeping data within national borders
Nguyen also questions whether data sovereignty debates might be over-simplified in some cases.
“With data security, it comes down to what the organisation’s requirements are to determine whether or not to go to a hyperscaler or a local datacentre,” he says. “With sovereignty, that is a bit different. If there are components to the sovereignty laws to restrict access or use of data outside of the local datacentres, hyperscalers will need to ensure that guardrails are in place.”
Nguyen’s comments underscore the complexity of managing sensitive data across hybrid environments. Rather than focusing solely on whether to choose a local or global provider, businesses should consider managing workloads across hybrid cloud environments more strategically.
“Many organisations will find a mix of cloud and datacentres makes the most sense … the risk profile of each is different and that blend of risk when combining cloud and datacentres can be made to be optimised for them,” he says.
The security risks associated with data sovereignty are multifaceted, extending far beyond simple data storage concerns. For businesses in regulated sectors, particularly financial services, the stakes are immense.
When on-premise is the only option
Jon Cosson, head of IT and chief information security officer at wealth management firm JM Finn, underscores the potential dangers when businesses assume that using a large cloud provider automatically guarantees security.
“It’s absolutely imperative you know where your data is and how to secure it,” he warns. “You would not believe how many businesses still just rely on somebody else.”
The issue is compounded by the jurisdictional complexity of global cloud services. When sensitive data crosses borders, it may fall under multiple regulatory regimes, raising questions about legal access and government overreach. This concern has been amplified by legislation such as the US Cloud Act.
In 2019, the then home secretary, Priti Patel, signed a US Cloud Act Agreement covering the *** and Northern Ireland, in which the US and *** governments agreed to provide timely access to electronic data for authorised law enforcement purposes. The Cloud Act could compel US-based hyperscalers to provide foreign-stored data to US authorities, bypassing local laws.
“I want to know exactly where my data goes, how it’s encrypted and how quickly I can get out if needed,” says Cosson, reflecting a broader industry concern that opaque data paths and limited contractual assurances can expose businesses to significant compliance risks.
“We use the cloud when we have to, but still run key systems on-premise for control,” adds Cosson. This approach is typical of companies handling sensitive financial data. There is a lack of trust with organisations not prepared to take promises of “secure cloud storage” at face value.
While Cosson acknowledges that cloud adoption is inevitable for some services, such as Microsoft 365, he underscores the enduring role of on-premise infrastructure for businesses that require absolute control over sensitive data. This, of course, raises an additional problem of how to manage hybrid data environments securely and efficiently.
According to Cosson, companies like Nutanix play a critical role here, enabling organisations to manage workloads across cloud and on-premise environments while maintaining data control. Nutanix’s infrastructure services are designed to address sovereignty concerns, he says, by ensuring businesses have clear data management policies and remain compliant with local regulations.
We need coordinated efforts between government, industry and local authorities to build a resilient datacentre ecosystem. This means shared responsibility, clearer policy frameworks, and incentives for both hyperscalers and ***-based providers
Luisa Cardani, TechUK
“The next five years will be decisive,” says Civo’s Boost. “If transparency becomes a legal requirement, we’ll see businesses demanding more from providers, not just about where data resides, but also how infrastructure is managed and powered.”
TechUK’s Cardani believes public-private partnerships will play a crucial role here. “We need coordinated efforts between government, industry and local authorities to build a resilient datacentre ecosystem,” she says. “This means shared responsibility, clearer policy frameworks, and incentives for both hyperscalers and ***-based providers.”
Boost and Cardani each agree that the balance of power between hyperscalers and local operators may shift, particularly if future policies mandate data localisation or prohibit cross-border data transfers without explicit guarantees. Sovereignty-by-design, where infrastructure is built to meet local compliance from the start, could become the new standard.
Adhering to current standards
Until that point, organisations need to work out how they can meet existing standards. Cardani argues that adherence to standards must be supported by national policies that enable transparent reporting and clear accountability structures.
In practice, this means enforcing mandatory audits, data residency certifications and security benchmarks tailored to ***-specific legal frameworks. Without these measures, businesses risk falling into compliance gaps that could expose them to data breaches, fines and legal disputes.
Frameworks such as ISO 27001 for information security management, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for data privacy and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for payment security set clear operational expectations. Yet these standards are only part of the equation, as evolving regulations increasingly emphasise data sovereignty and security-by-design.
Ensuring that datacentres comply with such frameworks while offering sovereignty guarantees has become a pressing challenge. Hyperscalers operating across multiple jurisdictions complicate audits and compliance checks due to varying legal obligations and data transfer rules.
The introduction of the CMA’s investigation is urgently needed, if only to provide some clarity around what, for most buyers, has become a confusing subject.
For IT leaders, the critical takeaway is that responsibility cannot be outsourced. Security, compliance and sovereignty must be actively managed through risk assessments, compliance audits and multi-supplier strategies.
And as the ***’s digital infrastructure evolves, only businesses that stay ahead of regulation and demand transparency from their providers will be able to navigate the uncertainties.
On that score, the ***’s datacentre industry stands at a crossroads – but with policy clarity, local investment and industry transparency, it has the potential to become a global digital leader in this space.
It’s about trust and everyone playing by the same, fair rules, but from a *** perspective it is also about protecting that most valuable national asset – data.
At JM Finn’s Cosson puts it: “Data sovereignty is not a buzzword, it’s survival.”
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Return to Auschwitz: 'I want the world to remember us'
Return to Auschwitz: 'I want the world to remember us'
A Holocaust survivor on her journey back 80 years after liberation.
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Severance review: This is still the most thoughtful, complex show on television
Severance review: This is still the most thoughtful, complex show on television
Why is Mark Scout (Adam Scott) so important to the company?
AppleTV
Severance Dan Erickson Apple TV+ (Episodes releasing weekly from 17 January)
Good things come to those who wait, or so we say. But there is nothing worse than patience unrewarded by time, especially when weeks have stretched into years of anticipation.
Sitting down to watch season two of Severance (for my money, the best sci-fi show in a decade), I was nervous. I had put off watching it more than once. Long-neglected chores took on a startling importance. Three years after the first season ended on a…
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Australia in Sri Lanka: Rising West *********** all-rounder Cooper Connolly gets first taste of Galle
Australia in Sri Lanka: Rising West *********** all-rounder Cooper Connolly gets first taste of Galle
Rising West *********** all-rounder Cooper Connolly has had his first taste of the Sri Lankan sweat box as Australia trained in Galle on Monday.
Just two days out from the first Test on Wednesday, which will be streamed live and free on the channels of 7 and 7Plus, the Australians took to the field in front of Galle’s historic fort to acclimatise to the steamy conditions they will face throughout the two-Test series.
Australia arrived in the country after a pre-series camp in Dubai last week.
Connolly was given his first taste of conditions in a net session alongside 19-year-old sensation Sam Konstas as the pair bid to put their names up for selection.
The Aussies have been tight-lipped about the make-up of their final XI, with Matthew Kuhnemann still pushing to play despite having had thumb surgery just over a week ago.
The left-arm spinner reportedly made it through the session on Monday without issue and could keep Connolly, who is a batting all-rounder who offers left-arm spin, out of the team.
Vice-captain Travis Head was keen to keep the Sri Lankans guessing for all five days, suggesting Australia could use a floating order and change it mid-match.
The middle-order enforcer also refused to confirm where he would be in the order, with a move to opening like he did in India in 2023 a possibility.
“I don’t know where I’m gonna bat at this stage. See how that wicket plays out over the next couple of days; we’ve got to get through a main session today; I guess the staff and selectors will go through strategy on how we’re gonna win a Test match, and then we’ll line the team up,” Head said before training on Monday.
Camera IconNathan Lyon of Australia bowls. Credit: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
“It’s probably not just me. It’s just where we think our six batters are going to line up and being flexible around that.
Camera IconNathan McSweeney of Australia fields. Credit: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
“All you are trying to do is line it up to be flexible around what can win a Test match. If that lends itself to being more traditional on day one, and what’s not to say when it does turn and gets extreme, the order may change.
Camera IconSteve Smith of Australia bats. Credit: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
“A lot’s being drawn to me at the moment and where I may bat, but that may be different to everyone.
Camera IconSean Abbott of Australia bowls during an Australia nets session at Galle. Credit: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
“It’s been a topic of conversation for the last little bit in this team on whether the *********** first innings, second innings, why doesn’t the order change? Why can’t we be flexible? What moves? How can we be brave?
Camera IconAlex Carey of Australia bats. Credit: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
“That hasn’t played out as such yet. Is this the tour to do it? We’ll wait and see. I feel like this group’s experienced enough and got some really good players that can play in different roles and in different situations of the game, we may draw on different people.”
Camera IconSteve Smith of Australia inspects the pitch. Credit: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
The all-important pitch was the centre of attention during the training session as players and support staff alike took a gander.
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Asus ROG Phone 9 FE Design, Full Specifications Leaked; Said to Get Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, 5,500mAh Battery
Asus ROG Phone 9 FE Design, Full Specifications Leaked; Said to Get Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, 5,500mAh Battery
Asus unveiled the ROG Phone 9 and ROG Phone 9 Pro in November last year. The Taiwanese brand now appears to be working on a less powerful FE (Fan Edition) model of ROG Phone 9. While we wait for a formal announcement, alleged renders and specifications of the ROG Phone 9 FE have surfaced online. The upcoming phone looks similar to the regular ROG Phone 9 models, but is said to run on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC paired with 16GB of RAM. It could pack a 5,500mAh battery with 65W fast charging support.
The folks at 91mobiles have obtained alleged renders and specifications of Asus ROG Phone 9 FE from industry sources. The images shared by the publication show the phone in a ****** shade with a textured back panel. It appears to have a flat display with a hole punch cutout in the centre. On the rear, it seems to have a triple rear camera setup alongside an LED flash. The overall design of the FE model looks similar to the ROG Phone 9 and ROG Phone 9 Pro.
Asus ROG Phone 9 FE Specifications (Expected)
As per the report, the Asus ROG Phone 9 FE will run on Android 15 with ROG UI and have a 6.78-inch full-HD+ (1,080×2,400 pixels) Samsung Flexible AMOLED LTPO display with up to 165Hz refresh rate and 2,500nits peak brightness. The display could deliver 1,600nits brightness in High Brightness Mode (HBM) and feature Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection. It is said to run on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with Adreno 730 GPU, 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB UFS 4.0 storage. For context, the ROG Phone 9 uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.
Asus ROG Phone 9 FE is tipped to feature a triple rear camera unit comprising a 50-megapixel Sony IMX890 primary camera with OIS, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and a 5-megapixel macro camera. For selfies, it might include a 32-megapixel front camera. It could house a 5,500mAh battery with 65W fast charging support and wireless charging. The existing models have a slightly higher 5,800mAh battery with 65W fast charging support. It is said to have an IP68-rated build.
As per the report, the Asus ROG Phone 9 FE will feature dual stereo speakers, Hi-Res Audio, a 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi 7, and an in-display fingerprint sensor. It is said to be available in Phantom ****** colour and offer AirTrigger controls. It could measure 163.8×76.8×8.9 mm and weigh 225 grams.
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Marsupial Mole’s Evolutionary Mystery Solved: Genetic Study Links to Bilbies and Bandicoots
Marsupial Mole’s Evolutionary Mystery Solved: Genetic Study Links to Bilbies and Bandicoots
A backward-facing pouch, specialised limbs for digging, and a button-like nose have made the marsupial mole of Australia a subject of intrigue and scientific curiosity for decades. Despite its name and mole-like appearance, this elusive animal has perplexed researchers trying to determine its place in the animal kingdom. Rarely seen in the wild, this subterranean creature remains unfamiliar even to many Australians, further deepening the mystery surrounding its origins and evolutionary lineage.
Genetic Study Places Marsupial ****** in a Unique Group
According to a genetic study published in Science Advances, the marsupial mole, belonging to the Notoryctes genus, is confirmed as a true marsupial and not closely related to other ****** worldwide. Researchers, including Stephen Frankenberg, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Melbourne, utilised a frozen specimen from the South *********** Museum to conduct the study. The analysis revealed that while these creatures share some characteristics with other digging animals, they are more closely related to bandicoots and bilbies, both of which are marsupials.
Adaptations to Subterranean Life
As reported by Science News, the study noted that the marsupial mole exhibits remarkable adaptations to its underground lifestyle. These include a backward-facing pouch, which prevents soil from entering during burrowing, and the absence of external ears and functional eyes. Researchers also discovered an additional hemoglobin gene that might aid the animal in surviving in low-oxygen environments while burrowing through sand and soil.
Closer Relatives Found Above Ground
It was found that the closest relatives of the marsupial mole, such as the eastern barred bandicoot and the bilby, bear little resemblance to it. Bandicoots possess pointed snouts and functional eyes, while bilbies have large ears and a rabbit-like appearance. These findings highlight how life underground drives unique anatomical changes, distinguishing the marsupial mole from its daylight-dwelling relatives.
Evolutionary Links with Other Marsupials
The study also connected marsupial ****** to a group of marsupials that includes Tasmanian devils. According to David A. Duchêne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, the research underscores the dramatic transformations animals undergo when adapting to subterranean environments. This study adds a critical piece to the puzzle of marsupial evolution, shedding light on one of Australia’s most enigmatic mammals.
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Human Outer Ears May Have Evolved from Ancient Fish Gills, Study Finds
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Covid smell loss eased by injecting blood cells into the nose
Covid smell loss eased by injecting blood cells into the nose
Transmission electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (gold) within a nasal cell
BSIP SA/Alamy
People who had lost their sense of smell after catching covid-19 partly regained it following the injection of blood cells called platelets into their noses, which could help to improve their quality of life.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste has been considered a common covid-19 symptom.
“The SARS-CoV-2 virus enters cells in the nose, causing inflammation that can damage neurons,…
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Tourist who had his leg amputated after a kayaking trip in Tasmania returns home to Lithuania
Tourist who had his leg amputated after a kayaking trip in Tasmania returns home to Lithuania
A tourist who had his leg amputated following a 20-hour rescue mission in Tasmania is returning home to Lithuania after spending months in hospital recovering.
The 69-year old man had been white water rafting in the Franklin River with a group of friends from Lithuania when he slipped on a rock on November 22 last year, becoming trapped when his leg was wedged between rocks and running water..
A huge rescue mission involving dozens of police, paramedics, surf life savers, Rotor-Lift and health services worked to free the man for 20 hours
Camera IconA tourist who was kayaking in Tasmania’s Franklin River fell and became wedged between rocks in November last year. Following a 20-hour rescue mission a decision was made to amputate the man’s leg so he could be freed. Credit: Supplied, Tasmania Police
When rescuers ran out of options after several failed attempts to free him, a decision was made to amputate his leg above the knee amid fears of his deteriorating condition.
The man, who has been recovering at the Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH) since the accident, had a chance to meet some of his rescuers before he returned home to Europe.
Department of Health Acting Secretary Professor Dinesh Arya said the patient continued to recover after surviving an extraordinary event, which was a testament to Tasmania’s world class emergency rescue and healthcare services.
“This gentleman experienced a life-changing ordeal in a country far from his home and family, and has made a steady recovery,” Professor Arya said.
Camera IconDozens of police, paramedics, surf life savers, Rotor-Lift and health services worked to free the man for 20-hours after he became trapped between rocks in running water. Credit: Supplied, Tasmania Police
“Our frontline emergency services and acute hospital staff were faced with an extremely challenging situation and had to make difficult decisions to save the man’s life – putting their advanced skills, experience, and personal resilience to the test.
“This is a great example of a whole of health system and cross-agency effort that has resulted in this man’s life being saved.
“I applaud every individual who played a part in the rescue, as well as all staff who have been providing acute and ongoing care to the patient at the RHH over the past few months.”
Camera IconSurf Life Saving Tasmania Ace Petrie, Tasmania Police Tim Donovan, Lithuanian Ambassador to Australia Darius Degutis, Ambulance Tasmania Rohan Kilham, Ambulance Tasmania Adam Marmion, Dr Jo Kippax and the injured Lithuanian kayaker who was winched from Franklin River. Supplied Credit: News Corp Australia
Following the incident last year, Tasmania Police constable Callum Herbert said the rescue was one some of the most intense scenarios he’d ever seen in the region.
“Most entrapments would be more simple than this,” constable Herbert said.
“This patient was so entrapped it’s involved an amputation of a limb.
“It’s pretty much the worst case scenario you could get aside from drowning.
“He’s fallen into the river in an awkward position.
“The circumstances where he could not be physically removed, every available angle to try to manipulate him out and every available.”
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Power outages, flooding, landslide cause chaos for thousands of Oʻahu residents during flash flood warning
Power outages, flooding, landslide cause chaos for thousands of Oʻahu residents during flash flood warning
HONOLULU (KHON2) — Thousands of Hawaiian Electric customers are experiencing power outages while some residents on Oʻahu are reporting flooding and a landslide all while a flash flood warning was in effect across the island. The flash flood warning was first issued shortly before 7 p.m. and was cancelled around 9:35 p.m, but a flood watch remains ongoing until 6 a.m. Monday.
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According to Hawaiian Electric, approximately 1,100 customers were left without power in Kaneohe at 6:50 p.m. Sunday night. Within an hour, power was restored to all but approximately 240 customers in the area.
Heavy showers and thunderstorms in the forecast
Alongside Kaneohe customers, approximately 1,750 customers in Kailua were left without power at 7:50 p.m., according to Hawaiian Electric. At 9:20 p.m., the number of Kailua customers without power went up to approximately 3,820, more than doubling the amount from the original report.
In East Honolulu, including Hawaii Kai, over 13,225 customers are without power as of 8:12 p.m., according to Hawaiian Electric’s Oahu Outage Map.
Residents in Waimea Valley and Hawaii Kai are also reporting of flooded homes online, following reports of thunder and lightning in the area.
Meanwhile, a landslide on Old Kalanianaole Road in Kailua and Waimanalo has shut down the road, according to HPD.
Hawaiian Electric says first responders are en route to the sites of the power outages. For those experiencing trouble, Hawaiian Electric can be contacted at their trouble line at (855) 304-1212 or by visiting their website.
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