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FAA administrator plans to meet with Boeing CEO in Seattle FAA administrator plans to meet with Boeing CEO in Seattle By David Shepardson ARLINGTON, Virginia (Reuters) – FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said on Thursday he plans to soon visit Boeing’s Seattle offices to meet with CEO Kelly Ortberg as the planemaker resumes 737 MAX production. Earlier this month, the Federal Aviation Administration said it would boost its oversight of Boeing as the planemaker prepares to resume production of its 737 MAX jets following a 53-day strike that ended two weeks ago. “We are working closely with Boeing to make sure the safety management system is driving their actions during” the restart of production, Whitaker said, who spoke to Ortberg earlier this month on the production plan. Boeing did not immediately comment. The FAA noted that it maintained its enhanced on-site presence at Boeing factories throughout the strike “and will further strengthen and target our oversight as the company begins its return-to-work plan.” Whitaker capped production at 38 737 MAX planes per month in January after a door panel missing four key bolts flew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in flight that month, exposing serious safety issues at Boeing. The FAA said in October it was opening a new safety review into Boeing. That month, the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General criticized the FAA’s oversight of Boeing. At a holiday travel press conference at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington on Thursday, Whitaker did not directly answer whether he plans to remain as FAA administrator once President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. But he said he plans to engage with the transition team. Whitaker has a five-year term that does not expire until 2028. “I’m looking forward to working with the incoming (transportation) secretary,” Whitaker said. “Right now, we’re focused on safety and trying to make this transition as smooth as smooth as possible.” (Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Jonathan Oatis) Source link #FAA #administrator #plans #meet #Boeing #CEO #Seattle Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 Adds More Servers While Team Works “Around The Clock” To Fix Issues Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 Adds More Servers While Team Works “Around The Clock” To Fix Issues Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has already become one of the most memorable launches of the year, but probably not in the way that developer Asobo Studio hoped. It debuted earlier this week with a number of bugs and performance issues that have left it virtually unplayable for many. Consequently, Flight Simulator 2024 has been review-bombed on Steam. Now, Asobo Studio is attempting to assure players that the team is working “around the clock” to fix it. In a statement on X, Asobo Studio noted that Flight Simulator 2024’s server capacity has been increased, but “access issues continue.” Many of the game’s issues stem from Asobo underestimating the servers it would need to keep the game running smoothly. The large number of players attempting to access the game has overloaded the servers. The team also apologized to players and promised to continue working on fixing those problems. We have increased our server capacity and are seeing more players accessing the sim, however, we are still seeing access issues continue. This is not the launch experience we want for our players and want to apologize to the community. We will continue to work around the clock… — Microsoft Flight Simulator (@MSFSofficial) November 21, 2024 In a short video on YouTube, Asobo CEO Sebastian Wloch went into further detail about how the servers ******* despite the team’s attempt to stress test them by simulating 200,000 players at once. According to Wloch, the team tried to fix the issue by limiting the number of players, which “worked well for maybe half an hour or so and then all of a sudden the cache collapsed again.” “So we’re restarting,” continued Wloch. “We’re trying to investigate, doing our best and going as fast as we can to make sure everybody can go in.” For now, there’s no time for when Flight Simulator 2024’s server issues will be resolved. It’s been a bumpy ride so far, but hopefully the team at Asobo will be able to stick the landing. Source link #Microsoft #Flight #Sim #Adds #Servers #Team #Works #Clock #Fix #Issues Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

7 fitness tracker ****** Friday deals under $70: Save on getting your steps in 7 fitness tracker ****** Friday deals under $70: Save on getting your steps in The ****** Friday sales are almost in full swing now, and there are loads of deals on the best fitness trackers and the best smartwatches at all price points, from the smallest fitness band to the biggest, most rugged adventure watch. While many serious fitness enthusiasts are looking for high-powered pieces of kit to help them hit their goals in 2025, with tons of specialist features to dig into, just as many people are looking for simple, cost-effective fitness trackers and step counters to make doing everyday activities a little bit easier. These basic band-style trackers, like the Fitbit Inspire 3 (reduced from $99 down to $69 at Best Buy), are unobtrusive to wear, tend to have a longer battery life than most smartwatches due to their reduced power output, and are able to track your steps per day, sleep, workouts, and general activity levels. Some may prompt you if you’ve been sitting down too long, while others have *******, brighter screens to offer guidance mid-workout. There’s never been a better time to snap up one of the best cheap fitness trackers than ****** Friday. Below, we’ve highlighted seven excellent (and crucially cheap) fitness trackers you can bag for under seventy bucks. Now that’s a ****** Friday deal worth running to get. Today’s best fitness tracker ****** Friday deals Altogether, if you’re taking your first steps into fitness or you’re replacing an existing tracker, you’ll find an option out there for you. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more expensive tracker or a more powerful smartwatch, check out our guides to the ****** Friday Garmin deals, ****** Friday Fitbit deals, and ****** Friday Apple Watch deals. More of today’s ****** Friday sales in the US Amazon: TVs, smart home & air fryers from $12.99 Apple: AirPods, iPads, MacBooks from $89.99 Best Buy: $1,000 off 4K TVs, laptops & headphones Cheap TVs: smart TVs at Best Buy from $69.99 Christmas trees: top-rated trees from $54.99 Dell: best-selling Inspiron & XPS laptops from $279.99 Dreamcloud: mattress deals from $349 + free shipping Holiday: decor, lights, Christmas trees & PJs from $10.99 Home Depot: 40% off tools, appliances & furniture Lowe’s: holiday decor, appliances & tools from $17.31 Nectar: up to 50% off all mattresses Nordstrom: 46% off boots, coats, jeans & jewelry Samsung: $1,500+ off TVs, phones, watches & appliances Target: save on furniture, tech & clothing Walmart: cheap TVs, ****** vacs, furniture & appliances Source link #fitness #tracker #****** #Friday #deals #Save #steps Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Snow and ice shut schools as Storm Bert looms Snow and ice shut schools as Storm Bert looms Getty Images Several parts of the *** have seen heavy snowfall on Thursday as forecasters warn of Storm Bert’s arrival at the weekend. More than 100 schools across the Scottish Highlands and 30 in north Wales have closed, while almost 200 schools in Devon and Cornwall shut or were partially closed due to the snow. Yellow weather warnings have been issued for snow and ice in parts of the *** until Friday, with further warnings for rain and snow due to come into effect this weekend. This comes as the second named storm of the season is set to bring snow, rain and strong winds to parts of the *** on Saturday. Storm Bert, named by Ireland’s Met Éireann, is forecast to bring further disruption with gusts of 40-60mph (65-96km/h). Around Irish Sea coasts, gusts are expected to reach 70mph. The Met Office warned of possible travel disruption and flooding, and said parts of Wales and south-west England could see more than 100mm of rainfall. It also issued yellow weather warnings for rain and snow for Saturday and Sunday, and an amber warning of snow and ice in parts of the Highlands, Perth and Kinross and Angus. There is a yellow weather warning currently in place for much of Scotland, northern England and some of western and eastern England and Wales until 10:00 GMT on Friday. A yellow warning for snow and ice is also in place across Northern Ireland from 15:00 on Thursday until 10:00 on Saturday. BBC Weather Watchers/Cloud9Weather Devon saw heavy snowfall on Thursday On Thursday, the AA warned motorists to check forecasts before setting out on the road and to drive with “extreme caution”. Devon and Cornwall Police said it had received numerous calls about collisions due to the conditions, and urged drivers to check the weather before travelling. A number of train services were also cancelled in the area following the heavy snow. The AA said it predicted a “major increase” in its workload. In Inverness, bus services were suspended for the safety of drivers and passengers, travel company Stagecoach said. BBC Weather Watchers/John from Carmavy This furry friend was enjoying the snow in Carmavy Rain turned to steady snowfall over Dartmoor and Exmoor early on Thursday morning but as this turned heavier during the morning, heavy snow fell even at lower elevations. Snow also fell for some around the New Forest and South Downs on Thursday morning. While this area of snow, sleet and rain clears from southern England, heavy snow will continue in northern Scotland through into Friday morning. Wintry showers will also move into north Wales and parts of north-west England later on Thursday and through the night. Temperatures fell to -10C in Tyndrum, Scotland, on Wednesday night, but with a low of -8.7C in Topcliffe, North Yorkshire, it was England’s coldest night of the autumn so far. It was also the coldest night of autumn in Northern Ireland with -3.9C at Katesbridge. Temperatures will fall sharply again on Thursday night with a widespread frost and ice on untreated surfaces. BBC Weather Watchers/Janey girl Heavy snow covered much of Cornwall, as seen here at the Halvana Plantation in Bodmin Moor Meanwhile, the first amber cold weather alert of the season is in place for much of England until 18:00 on Saturday. The alert means there is an increased health risk to vulnerable people. As the weather turns colder, some may be eligible for cold weather payments – a government benefit to help with fuel bills during times of exceptionally cold weather. Those who qualify must already be receiving certain benefits and meet additional criteria outlined on the government’s website. The average temperature in the area must be 0C or less for seven days in a row or be forecast to be below freezing for seven consecutive days. People in England and Wales can check whether they are eligible via the government website. In Scotland, Winter Heating Payments are available to some people who meet the eligibility criteria. People in Northern Ireland can check their eligibility on this checker. Source link #Snow #ice #shut #schools #Storm #Bert #looms Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Army and its ‘fanatical’ coach aim for perfection. But is that enough? Army and its ‘fanatical’ coach aim for perfection. But is that enough? WEST POINT, N.Y. — Here is an Army football coach: Sunk into a large leather armchair facing other pieces of large leather furniture, in a room festooned with old drawings from his daughters and challenge coins gifted him by generals, wearing a gray knit sweater that’s a decent match for the crisply trimmed hair on his head, talking about obligation. The idea of it changes the longer you’re here, Jeff Monken thinks. At first, the focus is immediate success in the job at hand. Wins and bowl games and so forth, in his case. Then, classes of cadets move on. Their new responsibilities make football look silly, but they tell you what they learned is helping them lead soldiers protecting a country. The outlines of obligation expand. And you start to appreciate the victories yet to be won. “I could argue that I’m having more of an impact on people here than I could have anywhere else,” Monken says. “But personally – personally – I want to go play for a national championship. I’m not sure that can be done at an academy. Maybe it can. Maybe we can be the top Group of 5 and get into the playoff. But I can’t control that.” It’s mid-October and this 19,000-acre museum of a place, home to actual Civil War cannons and the first forward pass, is an epicenter of modern college football astonishment. Army – yes, that Army – is undefeated and nationally ranked with a view of the College Football Playoff. Down the hill from centuries-old Fort Putnam, steel hammers steel and machines move earth as part of a $170 million project to construct a new east side of Michie Stadium, flush with suites and club seats and a bar with a huge fireplace. If then and now sometimes work at odds here when it comes to football, they’re in total agreement at the moment. On Saturday, the No. 18 ****** Knights collide with history and No. 6 Notre Dame at ******* Stadium. By itself, it’s a movie. But what comes after could be a fascinating tangle of everything frustrating about college football, the demands of a place with a larger mission, and how far a coach and good soldier wants to go, assuming anyone notices him. The Army is doing what it can to make it easier for its football team and the man in charge. But easier isn’t easy. “Here, I got to be perfect,” Jeff Monken says. “It’s hard to be perfect at Army.” The current Cadet Chapel at the ******* States Military Academy sits atop its own hill, offering rapturous views of lower Hudson Valley foliage from the foot of its steps. It took over the spot from the first Cadet Chapel in the early 1900s. The old one giving way, though, was not the same as going away. It was disassembled, brick-by-brick, and then reassembled at the entrance to the West Point ********* a little less than a mile down the road. Which is another way of saying the people in this place aren’t afraid of painstaking work and heavy loads. By comparison, rebuilding a football program might seem like the odd chore. But it certainly was a chore. Army had posted one winning season in its previous 17 seasons when it hired Monken on Christmas Eve of 2013. In the previous 50 years, the ****** Knights had been ranked in the Associated Press poll for a total of six weeks. Most galling of all? Navy had won the Secretary’s Trophy 12 straight times. Nobody expected Army to be a modern-day powerhouse, but general football irrelevance and an annual broadside to morale was not an ideal regiment. “It wasn’t good,” says Luke Proulx, a defensive back when Monken arrived and now the program’s director of player development. “Everyone thought we were doing the things that we needed to do to win games. But it was made pretty clear that we were not doing the work requisite with getting a win on a Saturday.” It took Monken three years to produce a bowl team and fewer than eight to become the second-winningest coach in program history. As of this week, he’s 42 victories shy of Earl “Red” Blaik, whose name adorns the football field and whose bronze statue dominates the football center lobby. A less quantifiable appraisal of his achievements here, though, might be a more telling one: When academy superintendent Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland addressed the football team in the preseason, he declared the head coach the most disciplined person on the installation. “Most people, including some of our fans,” Army athletic director Mike Buddie says, “think that Jeff Monken is a West Point graduate.” In fact, Monken played wide receiver for Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., a couple hours south of home in Joliet, where his football life began as a waterboy for teams coached by his late father, Mike, a member of the state’s high school coaches Hall of Fame. Monken’s own nine-stop coaching journey – “There’s nothing else in my life I’ve ever wanted to do,” the 57-year-old says – started with a graduate assistant gig at Hawaii, where his approach told his fortune. He was single, so the football office was home. Need someone to monitor disciplinary conditioning at 5 a.m.? Monken raised a hand. “He was not a partier, not a go-out guy,” says Paul Johnson, the former Navy and Georgia Tech head coach who was then an assistant at Hawaii. “He worked in the cafeteria so he could eat free. That was his deal.” Can’t begrudge a 20-something grunt making $439.76 a month some industriousness. And, in any case, it carried Monken from Honolulu to two years of high school and Division III jobs back in Illinois all the way to the head coach chair at Georgia Southern in 2010 and, so far, the decade-plus of life at the ******* States Military Academy. (Literally so. Army’s coaches are housed on post, where there’s a commissary with curbside pickup and a K-8 school. West Point even has its own ZIP code.) But, no, he is not an Army grad. Just looks and acts and sounds like one. “You can’t win being void of talent,” Monken says. “We’re not void of talent. We got some talented guys on our team. But are we the most talented team on the field on Saturday? Probably never. But that means we got to do all the other things you’ve got to be tough for.” The temperature registered at 1 degree on the morning of the first winter workout Monken ran here, on the Michie Stadium turf. Because lockers weren’t kept to the standard expected by the new coaching staff, many players already were relocated and dressed in a visitors’ locker room that didn’t have heat. The workout itself comprised 13 stations, theoretically. If anyone made a mistake, everyone started the station over. “I hope not to embellish too much,” Proulx says, “but I think we went for about an hour and 45 minutes, no one’s wearing sleeves, no one’s wearing gloves, and we didn’t even get through one station.” It was an introductory lesson about both the program’s nonexistent margin for error and the fortitude required to avoid slippage. And since the Army hasn’t changed, neither has the approach. When Monken discusses his $15 million indoor practice field – and, truly, it’s as accommodating as any Power 4 facility – he calls it “the lightning shelter.” As in: That is the only reason his team uses it. A bye-week Tuesday practice in 2024 is minutes old when Monken stops a drill, annoyed. “Hold up, coach!” he barks. To rehearse proper technique for a dip-and-rip off the line of scrimmage, defenders have to grab a white towel laying 6 inches in front and a foot to the side as they come out of their stance. But 6 inches in front and a foot to the side means 6 inches in front and a foot to the side. Not closer. Not by a turf pebble. “Move the towel back!” Monken says, and after a quick reset, the drill begins anew. For two-plus hours, he stalks between fields and position groups, attentive to every technical success or glitch in any part of the operation. While “Born in the U.S.A.” plays during a water break, Monken leans down to attend to two yellow blocking pads. They’re partially unzipped. So Army’s head coach zips them all the way closed. “Everything he does, sometimes you might think it’s a little extreme, but it’s how he lives his life,” right tackle Lucas Scott says. “When you keep pushing that on a group of people, either they’re going to be made for it or they’re not. The guys that are made for it last.” Intimate instruction from the guy at the top of an org chart is uncommon enough. The ferocity of this is something else entirely. As he watched his very first practice as athletic director, Buddie saw his football coach picking up errant wrappers on the field. On a bye-week October afternoon, Monken walks into a conference room after a quarterback meeting disperses. While he makes small talk, he guides the chairs around the table back into place. “There’s no guy who’s more fanatical about details and fundamentals,” defensive lineman Cody Winkour says. Yet there’s only so much a coach can manipulate in this football program. There are only so many personal touches a man can apply when all the jersey nameplates read ARMY. Two phrases dominate the auditorium wall in the football building: DO YOUR JOB and FOLLOW THE PLAN. As Monken notes, the objectives and values were the same during a 2-6 start to the 2023 season as they are during the heady days of 2024. The difference? It has something to do with the inevitability of identity. Military academy offense – so, ultra-run-heavy option football – forever has relied on cut blocks. Then the NCAA tightened its blocking-below-the-waist rules heading into 2023. It spurred Monken to hire offensive coordinator Drew Thatcher from Division II Nebraska-Kearney and overhaul the scheme to rely less on what Army always had relied on. The ****** Knights attempted double-digit passes in each game during that 2-6 start. They were shut out three times en route to being the lowest-scoring offense, on a per-game basis, of Monken’s tenure. “I always felt like we could control games on offense here,” he says now. “I didn’t feel that way last year. It was a helpless feeling.” In a matter of months, Army has shed a sort of football personality disorder and once again thrives on complements. The retooled offense is voracious and efficient under new coordinator Cody Worley, ranking No. 1 in the country in rushing yards per game (334.9) and 22nd with 35.2 points scored per game. The defense, typically solid in most years under Monken, ranks second in the country in fewest points allowed per game (10.33, just .03 points per game behind Ohio State). The symbiosis – offense chews up clock, defense gets off the field quickly, repeat – is basically Army being all it can be. Consider a win at North Texas on Nov. 9: The ****** Knights went up two scores after a 21-play drive that lasted longer than a half-hour of real time, and then two fourth-quarter interceptions snuffed out the hosts’ attempts to rally. “That’s this place,” defensive coordinator Nate Woody says. “You don’t have to drill that into guys. It’s inherent in what they do every day: Working together, communicating, solving problems, doing it as a unit or as a team.” Another successful marriage of then and now. Thatcher left after that one disappointing season. Worley, who’d been on staff as quarterbacks coach since 2020, up-shifted into the coordinator role but didn’t roll a sizzle-reel of World War II-era offense to mark his promotion. Not every idea from 2023 was a bad one. It was maybe just too much of one idea. “We probably overcooked it,” is how Worley puts it. So he and the offensive staff pursued fusion and flexibility, not reinvention. Doing the predictable in unpredictable ways. Against East Carolina on Oct. 19, knowing its opponent had two weeks to prepare, Army was equipped to flip its season-long tendencies and run offense out of the shotgun twice as much as usual. And after a while of that, the ****** Knights called what Worley describes as a “Day 1, core play.” Quarterback Bryson Daily took a traditional snap, a linebacker mis-fit an assignment and the result was a touchdown. “Different presentations,” Worley says. “It may be the same play, but the speed is different. The fits are different up front. Even though it’s the same for us, it’s different for the defense.” Some stars aligning helps, too. Woody says leading tackler Andon Thomas reminds him of former Army linebacker Jon Rhattigan, who’s currently with the Carolina Panthers. The offensive line, in Monken’s estimation, is the most talented and possibly most ornery unit he’s had at West Point, all the way down to wrestling each other to settle arguments about who’s tougher. Savages, is how Daily refers to that group. “Mean. Tough. Violent,” right tackle Lucas Scott says. “The standard is really, really high in our room.” But when Worley describes the team’s personnel as “perfect,” there is no clearer illustration than the 6-foot, 220-pound Daily, who has evolved into a concrete thunderbolt. The Texan who had zero offers to play offense anywhere else in the Football Bowl Subdivision has accounted for 28 total touchdowns in nine games after 14 all of last season. An interception thrown against North Texas was his first of the year. Daily has rumbled his way into the periphery of Heisman Trophy chatter, bye-week appearances on “The Dan Patrick Show” and his head coach needling him by announcing he’ll be available for autographs after a team meeting. “I’ve been put in great situations and I’ve been lucky enough to capitalize on the situations I’ve been put in,” Daily says. “I think every time the guys see a post about me or post about an individual doing good, the guys internalize that, like, ‘Hey, that’s us. That’s us as an offense.’” All jobs on all fronts well done, at a place where failures are magnified tenfold when they’re not. Many of the current ****** Knights relearned this the hard way. They’ll sort of sidle up to a concession that, even at a place like West Point, some football orders might’ve been questioned early last season. That egos compounded the schematic hiccups. That the 4-0 finish to 2023 was a quietly critical realignment preceding all the noise they’re making in 2024. “Every guy on the team is taking personal ownership of, ‘This is what I gotta do today,’” second-leading rusher Kanye Udoh says. “Last year, when we were 2-6, there wasn’t the same level of everybody being bought in, up to that point, as it is now.” Nothing changes and everything changes. The Army football team wakes up before sunrise and leaves the practice field after dark, unbeaten and almost too busy to notice anyone noticing. Good day or bad day, there’s formation at 6:30 a.m. How they’re doing it is no mystery. How long it lasts is another story. Because nearly anywhere else, it’s enough to not be perfect. Army coach Jeff Monken, 57, is the second-winningest coach in program history. (David Jensen / Getty Images) Jeff Monken grew up on Tom Osborne and Woody Hayes and Joe Paterno. Or at least the college football coach archetype they represented. Longevity. Championships. There was a caption to the picture of them in Monken’s mind: I’m going to do that. Also, none of those guys coached at Army. “I’d like to have an opportunity to have that challenge at the highest level,” Monken says. “This is a hard job. People talk about other Power 4 (schools) – ‘That’s a hard job.’ ******* than the one I’ve got? What’s ******* than this job? Which one?” It’s not a complaint. He enlisted in his own way, though Johnson at the time did tell his former assistant that the Army job would afford Monken patience and a better salary. And Monken had the blueprint from his time at Navy, to boot. “Where he is,” Johnson says, “is a really good fit for him.” The results prove that. Over time, there have been conversations and maybe even close calls with schools inquiring about his services. And Jeff Monken is still the Army football coach. “If he gets the opportunity and it’s the right one, he’ll pursue it,” Buddie says. “He’s in Year 11. He’s earned that opportunity.” The part about the right one matters. Some places aren’t for Jeff Monken and Jeff Monken might not be for some places. The coach and his athletic director have discussed that very topic. Why haven’t there been any right ones, though? There’s loyalty involved – Johnson just about kicked Monken out of his office when Monken told him he might stay at Georgia Tech instead of taking the Georgia Southern job – and there are also biases and boosters and message boards afflicting the people doing the hiring. “There’s so many misnomers out there about, ‘You can’t recruit to the offense’ and ‘Fans won’t like it,’” Johnson says. “If somebody finally gives him a chance, they’ll be really happy they did.” In the meantime, Army offers a well-insulated refuge from transfer portal chaos and name, image and likeness negotiations. “That’s just a stressor, causing animosity among teammates,” Scott, the offensive tackle, says. The ****** Knights have two full-length practice fields and that indoor facility. They strive for power-conference level travel and technology. Nutrition is a priority, given the demands of a cadet’s day; there are the mandatory pair of robust mess-hall meals – “Heavy” and “Heavy Heavy” are the two options for the amount of food served at each table – and a nightly catered dinner at the football facility. “We maximize all of it,” Monken says, “because our guys need it.” Army finally started an athletic association in 2017 that allows it to profit from apparel and broadcast deals, raise funds and, as Buddie puts it, pay a head football coach “the going rate.” And while Army has clinched a spot in the ********* Athletic Conference championship in its first season in the league, membership alone creates an annual path to a College Football Playoff spot, however steep it may be. (A schedule ranked among the easiest nationally underscores that, as well as the significance of the Notre Dame showdown.) Inescapably, it is still the ******* States Military Academy. When Udoh talks about team bonding, he’s referring to eight days of Cadet Field Training and wearing night-vision goggles on two hours of sleep and ******* blank rounds into the dark. The program will never have “Taj Mahals with marble floors and fondue chocolate fountains and barber shops and slides,” as Buddie puts it, because it’s the Army. It’s supposed to be tough. It’s supposed to be a choice between two worlds. “I’m not going to be all ‘Pollyanna,’” Buddie says. “If a Power 5 had offered (Monken) a job in the last four or five years, would he have taken it? Maybe? But he’s not just, like, looking to get out. Now more than ever, I think people realize that the grass is not always greener. The challenges that we have here grow exponentially when Russia invades Ukraine – that makes it ******* for us to recruit. But he’s not having to negotiate with agents. He’s not having to negotiate with his starting quarterback every offseason. And I think there’s value in that, too.” Monken sees it. He grabs a notecard from his desk and starts the walk to a team meeting that begins at 1400 hours sharp. He points to a mostly empty hallway. “You know how many coaches got a line outside their office with kids wondering if they’re going to get paid more, are they going to get more playing time, or guys that walked in after four games and said, ‘I’m going to redshirt’?” Monken says. “I don’t deal with any of that.” Maybe it’s not worth losing sleep over in the end. Maybe it is, if he’s afforded the chance. Soon, he’s at the front of an auditorium with hip-hop music blaring over rowdy conversations. Nobody in the world wants to get shot at, as Monken notes, but there are people willing to do so for the sake of their country. And they’re in that room. “This place is hard,” Monken says. “Everything they do is a challenge here. But they stay here. They’re here for a reason.” (Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Dustin Satloff / Getty Images) Source link #Army #fanatical #coach #aim #perfection Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Review: Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire has got a fun premise, but a flawed ********** – Entertainium Review: Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire has got a fun premise, but a flawed ********** – Entertainium Angelus Victor said: When I first ***** my eyes on Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, I was quite interested, because there were some raving comments about it paying a homage to a Dreamcast classic: Skies of Arcadia. While the marketing for this game was absolutely abysmal, with many of my friends not even knowing of its existence, it looked promising in the trailers. So I absolutely had to check it out for myself. So prepare for takeoff, we’re off into an adventure. Source link #Review #Sky #Oceans #Wings #Hire #fun #premise #flawed #********** #Entertainium Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Yes, Google is a near-monopoly, but selling off Chrome won’t make it better Yes, Google is a near-monopoly, but selling off Chrome won’t make it better Google’s Chrome browser is dominant; not in the way Google’s search engine is, but at 67% market share, according to Stat Counter, it sits comfortably atop competitors like Safari, Edge, and Opera, who are mostly fighting over scraps. For the US Government, which is now calling for the breakup of Google by having it sell off Chrome and, perhaps, Android, it’s not so much the market share that matters as much as how Chrome acts as a powerful fulcrum for Google’s other interests, chief among which is maximizing advertising revenue. Here’s how it works. Chrome is a web browser like Safari and others, but it’s also a search engine interface. The default search engine when Chrome is delivered to your desktop or smartphone is, naturally, Google. These days there are few people who only type websites into their browser address bar (so-called because we were only supposed to put the ‘address’ or URL for our desired website in there). Now we use our browser address bars as prompt fields. That’s right; long before the advent of AI, we were typing in fully-formed sentences and, invariably, getting canny answers from Google’s powerful search engine. I’ve argued here and elsewhere that Google’s search dominance comes by way of quality not coercion. That’s not all we’ve been getting. If I type, “Where do I find the best mattresses?” into my Chrome address bar, Google Search instantly returns a page of results. ‘Sponsored’ links occupy, by my estimate, 95% of the desktop web page results. I have to scroll down to perhaps the fourth result to see some suggestions from The New York Times. Google gets paid for those ads; and, essentially every time you search, for every result with ads, Google gets a cut. If Google isn’t serving partner ads, then it has ads delivered in search and through millions of websites by its own Doubleclick ad network. It’s a system that barters and then fills countless bits of unsold inventory (pages where a specific advertiser didn’t choose to sponsor the site or page) to the highest-bidding advertiser. Google gets paid here, too (as do publishers). That’s a lot of ads (Image credit: Future) The everything of Google Even if you’re not on Chrome, Google search is pervasive. The search company pays Apple up to $20 billion a year to be the default search engine in Safari’s address bar. If you own an Android phone, Chrome is often the default browser, or it’s at least pre-installed, and virtually all phones also feature Google Discover, which you can usually find by swiping right on your Android homepage. This feed is full of news and ads, with Google again getting paid for the latter. Google’s reach and, perhaps, control, are undeniable. Is it a monopoly? A US federal judge said yes in August. I’ve argued here, and elsewhere, that Google’s search dominance comes by way of quality not coercion. Google entered a crowded search market and later a browser market dominated mostly by Microsoft and Internet Explorer. None of these competitors rolled over. Google just did it better. Technology has a habit of choosing winners and losers. It’s also the nature of the ****** to start demanding standards and uniformity. If there were two dozen operating systems across our desktops and mobile phones, developers would strain and probably break trying to support them all. In fact, they wouldn’t do it; and they, along with consumers, would soon pick the winners and losers. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff) Google in control Google is not blameless here. It’s hard to deny the power and control that dominating market share gives you, and while consumers might initially choose a laptop manufacturer and a platform, it’s ultimately the tech companies like Google that lead and make decisions for us. They choose how the platforms will work, and which third-party systems to invite. They’re the ones connecting the dots on the back end – and that again is a considered decision that’s usually hidden from our view. Chrome is not just a web browser; it’s an ecosystem, a platform inside platforms that we live and work in. I manage multiple email accounts, edit documents in Google docs, manage my photo library, post on social media, and, lately, conduct AI conversations all inside of Chrome, with every action and interaction passing by Google’s unblinking eye. (Image credit: Statcounter) I’m not complaining. Google Search is still the best search engine in the business, and Chrome is an excellent browser that is finally getting its resource-hogging issues under control. It still earns its place on my desktop. Will I be served by someone else owning Chrome and then taking the code in a different direction, perhaps away from its tight integration with the Google corpus? I don’t think so. I know Google definitely doesn’t think so. In a tersely worded response to the DoJ brief proposing the break-up, Kent Walker, Google & Alphabet President, Global Affairs & Chief Legal Officer, wrote: “DoJ’s approach would result in unprecedented government overreach that would harm ********* consumers, developers, and small businesses – and jeopardize America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment it’s needed most.” He added that it would hobble access to Google Search, endanger consumer privacy, and harm Google’s investment in AI. Handicapping Google Google is on the precipice of radically reimagining our search with deeper integration of AI overviews, Gemini-powered generative results that may soon overtake traditional Google Search results. Again, since Chrome is our de facto search prompt window, shifting the browser to another company means that it could be any AI that returns a result. Google’s AI is not necessarily the best, yet, but it’s in a strong competitive position against, for instance, OpenAI and ChatGPT. I like how these companies are pushing each other. A Google breakup won’t help the race, or put the US in a better position relative to the rest of the world when it comes to AI development. I also, ultimately, don’t want anyone to pull Google Search out of my Chrome. It’s a marriage I like, and one that works for me and, I bet, billions of others. Pulling them apart may make Google look less like a monopoly, but it won’t improve anyone’s life. I’d prefer that the DoJ and others focus on Google’s ad business and SEO control – there may be some more sensible remedies there. I don’t know what will happen next. Google is now been labeled a monopoly, and the DoJ is calling for a breakup that could even include Android. But the X-factor here is that we are about to see a new administration in the White House, and changes at the top of the DOJ. Those changes could mean this initiative is ******* off, or they could mean it’s accelerated; it could go either way, and your guess is as good as mine. Maybe ask Google Chrome – I’m sure it has the answers. You might also like Source link #Google #nearmonopoly #selling #Chrome #wont Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Forget Nvidia. This is the biggest tech earnings mover of the day and Goldman sees 70% upside Forget Nvidia. This is the biggest tech earnings mover of the day and Goldman sees 70% upside Shares of Snowflake surged more than 31% on Thursday, after third-quarter results beat analyst estimates on the top and bottom line. And analysts see even more gains in store. The sharp move higher puts the cloud-based data stock on pace for its best day ever. Snowflake executives on Wednesday upped their full-year product revenue forecast to $3.43 billion, or growth of 29%, compared to a previous estimate that called for $3.36 billion. SNOW YTD mountain Snowflake stock headed for its best day ever on Thursday. The company added on Wednesday that it plans to partner with the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy also noted that Snowflake could grow its business involving the federal government. Goldman analyst Kash Rangan reiterated a buy rating on Snowflake following its third-quarter results, and maintained his price target of $220 per share. Rangan’s forecast implies more than 70% upside from Wednesday’s $129.12 close. “Given the company’s strong competitive positioning, we continue to view Snowflake as well positioned to capitalize on a generational shift of data and analytics to the cloud, with strong secular tailwinds including cloud adoption, big data, AI/ML [artificial intelligence/machine learning], and secure data sharing which we expect will drive durable growth for the foreseeable future,” Rangan said. JPMorgan, others bullish too JPMorgan Chase analyst Mark Murphy maintained an overweight rating on Snowflake stock, but increased his price target to $185 per share. Murphy’s forecast implies more than 47% upside moving ahead. “We expect Snowflake to continue to grow revenue at a rapid scale,” Murphy said. “We believe the combination of alignment to secular trends like data growth and digital transformation, very rapid revenue growth at scale, and a solid, efficient business model makes Snowflake an exceptional asset among software companies.” Elsewhere, Bank of America analyst Brad Sills was encouraged that demand trends showed stark improvement in the third-quarter, and said he’s encouraged by the company’s efforts to broaden its data engineering and AI segments. The analyst reiterated his neutral rating on Snowflake stock but increased his price target to $185 per share from $160, equating to more than 43% upside moving forward. “We look for more material traction outside the core before concluding that Snowflake has widened the competitive moat from pure play and hyperscaler platforms,” Sills cautioned. Wells Fargo’s Michael Turrin reiterated an equal weight rating on Snowflake following its quarterly results, but hiked his price target to $150 per share from $125. Turin’s outlook calls for roughly 16% upside ahead. Turrin ******** neutral on the stock largely because Snowflake’s multiple current sits at the higher echelon of its peers in the software segment, he noted. He added that he ******** optimistic that the company will remain a key player in the space, however. “While SNOW ******** a leader in cloud data, heightened competitive intensity coupled with a budding AI-led product cycle presents questions on the platform’s [long-term] differentiation and the company’s ability to sustain similar levels of growth into the future,” Turrin said. Source link #Forget #Nvidia #biggest #tech #earnings #mover #day #Goldman #sees #upside Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Postecoglou: Bentancur made mistake, we'll support him Postecoglou: Bentancur made mistake, we'll support him Spurs boss Ange Postecoglou says Rodrigo Bentancur is an “outstanding person” despite his “mistake” in using ******* language. Source link #Postecoglou #Bentancur #mistake #we039ll #support Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

How does F1’s Las Vegas GP transform the Strip in 2 hours? ‘It’s a science’ How does F1’s Las Vegas GP transform the Strip in 2 hours? ‘It’s a science’ LAS VEGAS — Making a street race happen in Formula One is one of the toughest logistical challenges for the organizers of a grand prix. Each year in Monaco, Singapore and Baku, Azerbaijan, months of planning go into action to turn the center of a city into a racetrack for only a handful of days as the bumpy streets and beckoning walls pose a different challenge to the drivers than a normal circuit. But for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, that challenge is only multiplied by the fact its circuit, which proved a hit among the drivers last year, incorporates one of the most famous roadways in the world: the Strip. “I was in Singapore with the race and chatting to the promoter, and they were like, ‘We don’t understand how you open and close the track the way you do,’” said Emily Prazer, the chief commercial officer of F1 and the Las Vegas Grand Prix. “They keep the roads closed for seven days. Can you imagine us telling the (Las Vegas) council we’re keeping the roads closed for seven days? It would just literally never happen, ever.” As F1 embarked on its ambitious plan to return to Las Vegas after almost 40 years away (and insisted on having the Strip as part of its 3.8-mile track layout), it needed a plan to keep it open as long as possible before preparing it for F1 action each night. The task of opening and closing the roads that are part of the circuit is overseen by Terry Miller, the general manager of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. The event site he’s responsible for covers 450 acres. “That’s a big area, not to mention the fact that we have more than 45 significant businesses around that track,” Miller told The Athletic. “One of those 45 businesses owns five different resorts. So the ability for us to manage the logistics of our track build is significant.” The circuit installation, including the barriers, fences and lighting, commenced after Labor Day weekend. Miller instructed his team to approach the track build a little differently than in year one: completing a lap in a similar fashion to the drivers. “This year, we were able to be a little more consistent and targeted as to how we were building the track,” he explained. “You have to build all the track lighting before you can put up any track barriers. “We started at one corner of the circuit, and we worked our way around the path (the driver takes) and added all of our track lighting, and then we followed that same pattern with our track barriers, and then we followed with all of our electronics.” A general view of the circuit along the Las Vegas Strip during previews ahead of the 2023 Las Vegas GP. (Dan Istitene / Formula 1 via Getty Images) As part of the agreement with the local authorities, no track barriers are put along Las Vegas Boulevard until 12 days before the race to try and minimize disruption. “They didn’t want to disturb Las Vegas Boulevard any sooner than necessary,” Miller said. “We did our internal logistics calculations, and we said we could try and get it done in 12 days prior to the race event.” Removing the barriers on the Strip is one of the first tasks after the race so it can be cleared before Thanksgiving four days later. Preparing the Strip for the F1 cars to use the track every night is a scientific process, according to Miller, who conducted an extensive analysis of how his track crew last year worked to open and close the circuit. “We’d spent a lot of time with spreadsheets and stopwatches because we got it down to: How much time does it take to move a block? How much equipment, how many crews can you use at one time before they get into each others’ way?” he said. “It was a science last year, and that allowed us going into this year to do a little more ‘lab work’ on the science of how do you put all of this in place.” A team of 140 people works to open and close the track, assigned across 42 locations that open and close each day. There are 3,500 track barrier blocks, stretching out to 7.6 miles in length, twice the lap distance. Under the night sky, the track is illuminated by 1,750 temporary light units. Each of the 140 workers is assigned a duty with a “very specific set of logistics and equipment,” according to Miller. Training for the track opening and closing started in June to cover a team of 180, ensuring alternates are on standby in case any of the 140 drop out. “We don’t just leave it to guesswork,” Miller said. “It’s pretty sophisticated in terms of how we move that 140 group of crew people through that process.” Transforming the track from “open” to “closed” involves three stages. It starts as a “warm track,” remaining mostly open to public use so traffic can pass around the center of Las Vegas. This ******* ends at midnight Thursday (to allow the safety car to complete its high-speed tests) and lasts until 5 a.m. At 3 p.m., a transition ******* begins to prepare everything for on-track action before it becomes a “hot track” at 5 p.m. This phase lasts until 2 a.m. Friday, covering the first two practice sessions before another transition ******* to get the track back to “warm” again. “We have identified the time it takes to move each barrier,” Miller said. “We’ve got barrier number one on this corner, and where it is staged will take three minutes to move into position, then it will take another five minutes for them to set it, put the debris fence in and lock up the spiral connections. We know down to the minute.” Although there is a two-hour window to complete the process, Miller wanted to work in a buffer. “We’ve got it in the matrix of exactly how we’re going to make the two hours work, and clearly what we do is we make sure that what we have established is a one hour and 45-minute window, so we’re training to that with the 15-minute interval,” he said. “It’s extremely detailed in terms of how we move through each one of these openings and closings.” It takes precision planning to coordinate the opening and closing of the Strip. (Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via AP) Despite adding a support race, the Ferrari Challenge, to the schedule this year, everything has stayed the same for the open and closed track transition. A big buffer was put in place for the race’s first running in 2023, but the lessons from that year gave the organizers confidence that the race could handle something being added to the schedule. There can, of course, be incidents that lead to delays, such as the loose water valve cover that canceled FP1 and meant FP2 did not finish until 4 a.m. last year, but these are also planned for in conjunction with the FIA and the local authorities. “We’re also doing scenario planning with the local ***** department and police department, to everything from incursion of a spectator — ‘How the heck did they get on the track, what happens, how do we do that?’” Miller said. “So the level of planning that goes into this event is extraordinary.” By midnight Sunday local time, the race will be complete, and the post-race celebrations will begin. Miller’s team will immediately start the dismantling process. By 4 a.m., the track is back to “warm,” meaning cars can move around, and a degree of normality can resume for those driving in the middle of Las Vegas. “By Christmas, we will have picked up everything,” Miller said. It’s a sizable undertaking, but one was required to make F1’s dream of racing along the Strip possible. For Miller, even after a long and varied career in sports event planning and **********, it has been a completely different animal. “I’ve been involved in the design and construction of NFL stadiums, Major League Baseball stadiums, soccer facilities and Olympic facilities,” Miller said. “I’ve been doing it for 44 years now. Nothing compares to what I’ve seen here in Vegas for the F1 project.” (Top photo: Dan Istitene / Formula 1 / Formula 1 via Getty Images) Source link #F1s #Las #Vegas #transform #Strip #hours #science Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Three Kingdom Heroes brings top-level AI challenges to chess-like duels, coming soon Three Kingdom Heroes brings top-level AI challenges to chess-like duels, coming soon Koei Tecmo has announced a new entry in their Three Kingdoms franchise with Heroes A chess and shogi-inspired battler, it sees you taking on opponents using individual abilities But perhaps the biggest selling point is the challenging GARYU AI system The Three Kingdoms ******* of ******** history is a fascinating one, whether that’s the Arthurian tales of valour and strategy that lionize it, or the arguably even more intriguing attempts to sift truth from myth in this almost legendary era, which has proven a fertile ground for interactive media. One developer who’s explored it more than any other is Koei Tecmo with their legendary series of strategy titles, and now they’re bringing even more action to mobile with Three Kingdoms Heroes! For fans of the series, the familiar art-style and grand-scale operatic storytelling is there. But if you’ve ever been sceptical of trying it, Three Kingdom Heroes may be the most intriguing entry point into the franchise yet. This turn-based board-battler inspired by shogi and chess boasts a huge variety of abilities and stratagems wielded by famous figures from the Three Kingdoms *******. But perhaps the most intriguing feature of this upcoming release, hitting storefronts on January 25th next year, is not in the numerous visual, audio or gameplay features but instead in the intriguing, challenging GARYU system; an in-game AI trained to adapt and battle it out with you as an almost lifelike opponent. The only way to win is not to play Suffice it to say GARYU is what caught my eye here, and while I’m always sceptical about the AI buzzword, this system is developed by HEROZ, who also created shogi-dominating AI dlshogi. This system reportedly dominated the World Shogi Championships for two consecutive years and outwitted some of the top grandmasters of the sport as a result. Now, obviously, that’s probably not as clear-cut as you might expect. I mean, we all know the controversy behind chess “grandmaster” Deep Blue. But at the same time as far as selling points go, and for a ******* of history that so often focuses on ingenious martial gambits, I’d say the prospect of facing it off with a lifelike, challenging opponent has me sold. Source link #Kingdom #Heroes #brings #toplevel #challenges #chesslike #duels #coming Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Microsoft says Flight Simulator 2024 still suffers from access problems despite adding more server capacity to handle demand Microsoft says Flight Simulator 2024 still suffers from access problems despite adding more server capacity to handle demand After a troubled launch that has only grown more concerning as time goes on, Microsoft has provided an update on the ongoing situation with MSFS 2024 and its severe stability/crashing issues, and all is still not well. The team behind MSFS 2024 posted on X that more server capacity has been added to the simulator, helping improve player accessibility. However, this has not permanently fixed accessibility issues for all players. We have increased our server capacity and are seeing more players accessing the sim, however, we are still seeing access issues continue. This is not the launch experience we want for our players and want to apologize to the community. We will continue to work around the clock…November 21, 2024 Microsoft is continuing to struggle to meet the incredible amount of concurrent players playing (or trying to load) MSFS 2024. Playability issues began on launch day two days ago, when the vast majority of players couldn’t play the game, with some even unable to install the game at all, representing one of the worst game launches in history. The cheery on top was that Microsoft neglected to share any pre-launch codes with reviewers, preventing many 3rd-party reviewers, including Tom’s Hardware, from providing a thorough review of the game at launch. A day later, Microsoft provided a video update on the state of the game and clarification on the issues occurring. It turns out that Microsoft only tested the game’s servers with 200,000 simulated users before launch to ensure that the game could handle that many players. However, despite Microsoft’s preparation attempts, the backend was purportedly instantly overwhelmed on launch day and the days after. Obviously, player counts for MSFS 2024 are well over 200,000, which gives us an idea of how popular Microsoft’s new simulator is. MSFS 2024 is suffering from overwhelmed backend services responsible for virtually all game accessibility problems and the vast majority of game stability issues. The mission service database, in particular, is completely maxed out, resulting in many users being unable to fly missions in-game. Default planes are also missing from the user’s libraries. Thankfully, Microsoft is working on stopping these issues entirely. However, the trillion-dollar company has still not provided a roadmap or a deadline on when full game functionality will be restored to all players. We’re monitoring for more updates from the Microsoft team and will follow up as neccesary. Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Source link #Microsoft #Flight #Simulator #suffers #access #problems #adding #server #capacity #handle #demand Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Bank of America lifts Netflix target to $1,000 citing sports viewership Bank of America lifts Netflix target to $1,000 citing sports viewership Two catalysts may send shares of Netflix even higher in the months ahead, according to Bank of America. Analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich reiterated her buy rating on Netflix and hiked her price target by $200 to $1,000, implying more than 13% upside from Wednesday’s close. This comes as the stock has already soared more than 81% year to date. Netflix is also ahead more than 14% in the past month and nearly 27% in the past three. NFLX YTD mountain NFLX, year-to-date Reif Ehrlich sees last week’s boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul – which had 65 million live concurrent streams and 108 million total live viewers around the world – as a “knockout” opportunity for Netflix in live events. “The ****** was the most-streamed sporting event of all time and an emphatic proof point of Netflix’s ability to aggregate global reach at scale for live events,” the analyst told clients on Thursday. “Despite the reported technical issues, we see this event as a positive for Netflix’s ambition in live/sports and also as it relates to the company’s ability to drive growth in advertising.” “The ****** likely signals to sports leagues/promoters that Netflix can now deliver live viewership at a similar (if not greater) scale than linear television,” she continued. Broadcasting two NFL games on Christmas Day – one of which will feature a halftime performance by Beyoncé – and starting a 10-year contract with World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Raw” next year demonstrates Netflix’s ambition to more deeply pursue live programming. That, combined with its in-house ad tech platform, could spur even more upside, she said. “Live and advertising are complementary growth drivers, as more live programming drives additional high value, premium ad inventory,” Reif Ehrlich added. “Netflix’s ability to monetize this premium live inventory will be key to making advertising a multi-year growth driver.” Wall Street is mostly bullish on Netflix, with 32 of 48 analysts rating it a strong buy or buy, according to LSEG data. Most of the others (14) are neutral. Still, Netflix has an average price target of $787, implying about 11% downside from Wednesday’s close. Netflix gained 1.4% to ann all-time high of $896.40 in early trading Thursday. Source link #Bank #America #lifts #Netflix #target #citing #sports #viewership Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

This retiree accepted an investment broker’s invite for dinner at Ruth’s Chris — the decision cost him $158K This retiree accepted an investment broker’s invite for dinner at Ruth’s Chris — the decision cost him $158K This retiree accepted an investment broker’s invite for dinner at Ruth’s Chris — the decision cost him $158K There’s no such thing as a free lunch — or a free steak dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House, for that matter. At least, that’s what one retiree learned the hard way, after a trip to the restaurant cost him a hefty portion of his retirement savings. Accredited investors can become the landlord of Walmart, Whole Foods or Kroger — and benefit from regular distributions without lifting a finger. Here’s how Car insurance premiums in America are through the roof — and only getting worse. But less than 2 minutes can save you more than $600/year These 5 magic money moves will boost you up America’s net worth ladder in 2024 — and you can complete each step within minutes. Here’s how George Wilson, who shared his story with Business Insider, said he sometimes attended free presentations — usually held at a nice restaurant — on how to make money in retirement. He hadn’t acted upon any advice until that fateful night in 2010, when he attended a presentation at Ruth’s Chris and met broker David Escarcega. Escarcega encouraged Wilson to invest in a fixed-income alternative product from GWG Holdings, a now-bankrupt firm. The high-yield securities were based on life insurance policies purchased on the secondary market, according to Business Insider. While investors like Wilson earned a whopping 9% monthly return, brokers were earning up to 8% in commissions from GWG. Long story short, GWG’s insurance contracts had been overvalued and, after a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation, GWG filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and halted dividend payments. The steak dinner (and Wilson’s decision to invest) ended up costing him $158,000 of his retirement savings. The first few years for Wilson went well, with regular monthly payouts, and in 2017 he renewed his investment. But at that point, unbeknownst to Wilson, Escarcega had been barred from selling securities after misrepresenting investment risks, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulatory organization. More than a decade after that fateful dinner, Wilson is still fighting to get back his investment. While a recent arbitration decision awarded him $267,252 in compensation, including damages for emotional distress, all claimants received a payout of $103,000. So, after costs, Wilson still won’t be able to recoup his initial investment. Hosting a “free” lunch or dinner is common practice in the industry: taking potential clients out for a lavish meal and pitching them on investment opportunities (usually high-commission, high-risk products). Story Continues While this doesn’t mean all advisers and all “free” meals are dodgy, it does mean you shouldn’t be enticed to invest your retirement savings by a top sirloin steak. If something seems too good to be true, it just might be. If you’re considering alternative investments, you should be savvy enough to know what you’re getting into. In the case of GWG, there were red flags, but a rookie investor wouldn’t necessarily catch them, especially after a few years of high returns. But, in general, if yields are consistently outsized, then there’s a chance you’re taking on more risk that you may realize. Read more: Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey invest in this asset to keep their wealth safe — you may want to do the same in 2024 A good adviser can be invaluable in helping you protect and grow your retirement savings. But how do you find one? First, understand the different types of advisers out there. A fee-only adviser charges a fee for service (typically hourly or annually, or a flat rate) and doesn’t earn commission on the ***** of investment products. A fee-based adviser might also charge a fee for service, but they could be earning commission (which could influence their advice). If you’re not paying for service — and you’re getting free meals at fancy restaurants — then you should proceed with caution. The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) can help you find advisers in your zip code. You can also ask family and friends, but you’ll still need to be cautious, since Wilson also advised his ex-wife and a friend to invest with GWG. Ask a potential adviser about their credentials, if they’re a fiduciary and if they earn commission. Then, do your research. If, for example, an adviser holds a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) or Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) credential, they’re required to act as a fiduciary, which means putting their clients’ interests ahead of their own. They also have to abide by a code of ethics; otherwise, they lose their designation. These credentials can be verified with the CFB Board or CFA Institute. FINRA also has a search tool called BrokerCheck where you can find out if any disciplinary action has been taken against an adviser; it also has a list of brokers who have been barred. Before investing a chunk of your retirement savings into any kind of alternative investment, it’s useful to get a second (or even a third) opinion. That might mean talking to a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or even an attorney. And, next time you get invited for a “free” meal, you might want to think twice. This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind. Source link #retiree #accepted #investment #brokers #invite #dinner #Ruths #Chris #decision #cost #158K Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Why UNC star RJ Davis couldn’t resist returning for his fifth season — and one more shot Why UNC star RJ Davis couldn’t resist returning for his fifth season — and one more shot Welcome to the heartbeat. Take a seat. The Davis family living room in their White Plains, N.Y., home is, in many ways, ordinary. Two well-worn, cream-******** sofas directly across from each other. A circular coffee table between them. Floor-to-ceiling bay windows, with decorative candles on the ledge. And the soundtrack to it all? Usually, barking, courtesy of the family Yorkshire terrier, Diggy. “Any life decisions we make,” RJ Davis said, “yep, in that living room.” About five years ago, there was something else in that space, too: a poster board. On it, Davis, then a high school senior, had written the names of each of his four college finalists, the schools the four-star guard was considering attending. To make his choice, Davis used one of his mother Venessa’s favorite practices. “***** and *****,” she said. “As a psychologist, it’s something you use a lot.” With Venessa and the rest of his family — father Rob, younger brother Bryce and, of course, Diggy — gathered in the living room, Davis worked through his options. When he’d finished writing, the decision was obvious: North Carolina. If he only knew then what the next four years would hold. An up-and-down freshman season that ended with Roy Williams’ shocking retirement. Then a slog of a sophomore year — until the Tar Heels turned into a rocket ship and manufactured one of the most miraculous Final Four runs in March Madness history. That led to hype entering Davis’ junior year, all of which promptly went up in flames as UNC became the first preseason No. 1 team in the modern era to miss the NCAA Tournament. And, finally, Davis’ senior season, when he sprouted into a full-blown star, posting one of the best individual campaigns in the baby blue blood’s storied history. 𝘽𝙖𝙘𝙠 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙮 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚.@ariidavis_ is the 2024 ACC Preseason Player of the Year! pic.twitter.com/pMR3OiwYtT — ACC Men’s Basketball (@accmbb) October 15, 2024 This spring, at the end of April, the Davis family once again gathered in their operations center. Another decision needed to be made: Would Davis — a first-team All-********* last season and one of college basketball’s most recognizable figures — return to college for a fifth season, available because of the COVID-19 pandemic, or go pro? Because Davis is only 6 feet, the feedback he received from the NBA Draft advisory committee suggested he’d go late in the second round or undrafted entirely. But coming off his best season, what more could he prove to scouts? “I’ve always had dreams and aspirations of playing at the next level, of playing in the NBA,” he said, “and it’s like, why not right now?” Davis settled into one of the sofas. Time to talk. The first weekend of April, Davis was exactly where he’d dreamed of being: Phoenix, the site of the Final Four. Just not for the reason he’d hoped. That’s because the past two seasons, Davis had a singular motivation: a redo. Ever since North Carolina magically stormed through the NCAA Tournament in Hubert Davis’ debut season, advancing all the way to the 2022 national title game, he wanted another ****** at college hoops immortality. He was 20 minutes and a 15-point halftime lead versus Kansas away from hanging a seventh NCAA championship banner in the Dean Smith Center, and then, whoosh, everything evaporated. He’s one of five active players left from that team but the only one still wearing Carolina blue. Last season, Davis unequivocally became “the guy” for the first time in his college career, especially after his three-year backcourt mate, Caleb Love, transferred to Arizona. And he did everything in his power to will the Tar Heels back to that stage while rewriting UNC’s record books. Davis went from averaging 12 points and three assists per game during his first three seasons in Chapel Hill to setting career highs in points (21.2 per game), 3-point percentage (39.8), assist-to-turnover ratio (better than 2-1) and steals (1.2). But most importantly, he led UNC to its first ACC regular-season title and No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament since 2019. A redo, suddenly, seemed like a very realistic possibility. Then came the Sweet 16. Red-hot Alabama. And Davis, for the first time all season, went cold. He’d made at least one 3-pointer in all 36 games to that point but went 0-for-9 from deep in a 2-point loss to the Crimson Tide. “Shots I normally make,” Davis said. “Had I made one 3 …” His voice trailed off. “I kind of felt like it was my fault, just because we were so close to reaching … everything.” A week later, Davis was there in the desert as a finalist for the Naismith College Player of the Year Award, presented annually at the Final Four. Even brushing elbows with the biggest names in the sport, being recognized for his on-court excellence, Davis couldn’t shake one underlying thought: I’d rather be playing. He couldn’t bring himself to turn on any of that weekend’s Final Four games. On one hand, Davis’ jam-packed trophy case spoke for itself, including ACC Player of the Year and the Jerry West Award (given annually to the nation’s top ********* guard). He etched himself into North Carolina lore, in the same stratosphere of excellence as some of the school’s best guards, names such as Phil Ford, Ty Lawson and, yes, even Michael Jordan. By virtue of his accomplishments, his jersey is going the same place theirs did: the Smith Center rafters. But at the same time, he couldn’t stop ruminating. On the loss to Alabama. The what-ifs. Every minute detail that added up to defeat. By the time he landed back in Chapel Hill, offseason roster-building was already in full swing. Hubert Davis was holding end-of-season meetings with all his players. And Davis knew what his head coach was going to ask, whenever they sat down: So, RJ, what are you going to do? Tyler Hansbrough doesn’t play much basketball these days. “My knees,” the now-39-year-old joked. “If I’m on the court, my knees are gonna have some issues.” But Hansbrough still works out regularly, even sneaking over to the Smith Center for a lift when he can. One day in April, he was finishing a session when a familiar face approached. “Rarely do I try to give anybody advice,” Hansbrough said, “but he actually asked me.” It makes sense why Davis sought Hansbrough out. The star guard spoke to plenty of people in his circle about what he should do: Armando ******, his four-year teammate and close friend; Cam Johnson, arguably UNC’s top active NBA player; Theo Pinson, who won the program’s last championship in 2017; and even Marcus Paige, now on North Carolina’s coaching staff. But nobody could offer the perspective Hansbrough could. That’s because about 15 years ago, Hansbrough was in the same bind. After his standout junior season, when the 6-foot-9 forward was the unanimous national player of the year, averaging a career-best 22.6 points and 10.2 rebounds, he, too, had a pro decision to make. Had he declared, based on feedback that then-coach Williams had gathered, Hansbrough learned he likely would’ve been a late lottery pick. Tyler Hansbrough didn’t regret his decision to return to UNC for another run. (Rich Clarkson / NCAA Photos via Getty Images) But like Davis, he couldn’t get his mind off a recent NCAA Tournament heartbreak. UNC had just lost to Kansas in the 2008 Final Four, only its third defeat all season, and Hansbrough hadn’t been at his best. “Everyone thinks that whenever you get a chance to go to the NBA, you have to go. But if you believe in yourself and you think you can be a pro, one more year in college, that’s not going to derail your pro chances,” Hansbrough said. “One more year wasn’t going to change anything for me, and I felt like I could improve.” And? “And we had a chance to win a national championship.” The rest is history. Hansbrough came back, and his decision was validated when UNC did win the national title his senior season. Hansbrough was right about his pro prospects, too; the Indiana Pacers selected him 13th in the 2009 NBA Draft, the same late-lottery range that was forecast for him a year prior. The other consideration Hansbrough mentioned to Davis? Name, image and likeness, which didn’t exist in his heyday. Davis knew NIL wouldn’t be the primary factor in his decision — “If money wasn’t involved, I’d still be playing basketball,” he said. But by virtue of his record-setting senior season, he’d earned a bevy of endorsement deals: Crocs, Verizon and one of his favorites, JBL. (Although it probably wasn’t his neighbors’ favorite; Davis’ JBL speaker may or may not have earned him a noise complaint at his apartment complex. “There’s a bass boost, so I always press that,” Davis said with a wry smile, “and the next thing you know, it’s *****.”) Hansbrough explained his thought process to Davis in UNC’s weight room and left him with one final thought. “You can listen to all the most important people in your life,” Hansbrough said, “and you can take their advice — which you should value — but you’re the only one that has to live your life.” Not long after his talk with Hansbrough, Davis returned to White Plains. “I like to go home and get grounded,” he said, “because that’s where I feel safe, and that’s where my heart lives.” Still unsure of what he’d do, the guard continued training. Most days, he met with his skills trainer, Ross Burns, at the local Life Time Fitness, and he regularly drove to Connecticut to meet with a strength and conditioning specialist. And between those sessions, it wasn’t uncommon for Davis to swing by his old high school, Archbishop Stepinac, for an early morning or late-night ********* session. “My good companions here in the building are our maintenance guys,” said Patrick Massaroni, Davis’ high school coach at Stepinac. “We make it work.” Other schools poked around Davis, his parents said, seeing if he’d consider entering the transfer portal, but UNC and the NBA were the only options he considered. Whenever he thought he’d made up his mind, that lingering memory of not winning a championship reared its head. “My mind,” he said, “was changing every day.” GO DEEPER Men’s college basketball preseason All-Americans: Sears, Flagg, Davis lead the way With the May 1 deadline for Davis to decide rapidly approaching, he had to stop waffling. So, back to the living room for final deliberations. Bryce — now a freshman at Albany — wasn’t in town, so Davis FaceTimed his younger brother and put the phone in his lap. Rob and Venessa sat across from him on the opposite sofa. Diggy scurried across the hardwood floor. Rob and Venessa reiterated what Hansbrough said: It’s your life, and you have to live with your choice. With his mind racing, Davis stepped outside to gather his thoughts. He sat down on the family’s front porch steps and made a phone call. To Williams, the coach who recruited him to UNC in the first place. He walked around the block on the phone, and then came back to the family living room. “Whatever they talked about, he didn’t share,” Venessa said, “but it seemed to settle him, for sure.” Davis didn’t make up his mind right then, but a few days later, Davis came downstairs from his bedroom and announced he’d made his decision. Davis kept his decision close to the vest. He told his parents, obviously. Hubert Davis. But he didn’t even text his teammates. “I wanted,” he said, flashing a toothy grin, “to keep people on their toes a little bit.” So on the night of April 30, Davis set a timer on his phone for 3 a.m. and went to sleep. When the alarm went off, he woke up and posted a highlight video to Instagram with a simple two-word caption: “I’m back.” And then … Davis put his phone on “Do Not Disturb” and went back to bed. The ultimate mic drop, letting the college basketball world stir while he slept. “It wasn’t like I was saying no to my dreams (of playing in the NBA); it’s more so, I’m putting them on pause,” Davis said. “Besides the year I had this past year, there was no greater feeling than playing in that Final Four and playing in that national championship my sophomore year. I just remember watching the ball go up, and the buzzer sound hit, and we were on the losing side. … I want to be on that winning side.” His decision finally behind him, Davis drilled down on his ********* the rest of the summer, motivated by that 0-for-9 showing against Alabama. How much of his training was done through an NBA lens, knowing he’ll likely have to play point guard because of his size? Not much. “That’s where guys get in trouble: They start listening to critics or scouts and start thinking they’ve got to change something,” Burns said. “No. Really, just keep being the dominant, elite shooter and scorer you are — and because you’re going to have more eyeballs on you, be a facilitator.” So far, so good on that front: Through three games, Davis has 14 assists against just three turnovers. No. 10 UNC plays Hawaii on Friday and begins play Monday in the Maui Invitational. There is so much still on the table for Davis this season, but three things stand above the rest. A December rematch with Alabama as part of the ACC-SEC Challenge. The chance for Davis, if he scores the same number of points he did last season, to tie Hansbrough atop UNC’s, and the ACC’s, all-time scoring list (albeit with an extra season). “That’s hard to put into perspective,” he said. “Once I graduate and officially leave, then it’ll hit me. Like, wow, I really accomplished a lot of great things here.” And finally? Hang a banner. Complete the redo. “I’m just going to fulfill this moment,” Davis said, “and make the best of it.” (Top photo of Elon’s Nick Dorn and UNC’s RJ Davis: Grant Halverson / Getty Images) Source link #UNC #star #Davis #couldnt #resist #returning #season #shot Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

NYT Mini Crossword today: puzzle answers for Thursday, November 21 NYT Mini Crossword today: puzzle answers for Thursday, November 21 The New York Times has introduced the next title coming to its Games catalog following Wordle’s continued success — and it’s all about math. Digits has players adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers. You can play its beta for free online right now. In Digits, players are presented with a target number that they need to match. Players are given six numbers and have the ability to add, subtract, multiply, or divide them to get as close to the target as they can. Not every number needs to be used, though, so this game should put your math skills to the test as you combine numbers and try to make the right equations to get as close to the target number as possible. Players will get a five-star rating if they match the target number exactly, a three-star rating if they get within 10 of the target, and a one-star rating if they can get within 25 of the target number. Currently, players are also able to access five different puzzles with increasingly larger numbers as well. I solved today’s puzzle and found it to be an enjoyable number-based game that should appeal to inquisitive minds that like puzzle games such as Threes or other The New York Times titles like Wordle and Spelling Bee. In an article unveiling Digits and detailing The New York Time Games team’s process to game development, The Times says the team will use this free beta to fix bugs and assess if it’s worth moving into a more active development phase “where the game is coded and the designs are finalized.” So play Digits while you can, as The New York Times may move on from the project if it doesn’t get the response it is hoping for. Digits’ beta is available to play for free now on The New York Times Games’ website Source link #NYT #Mini #Crossword #today #puzzle #answers #Thursday #November Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Marjorie Taylor Greene with Musk, Ramaswamy on DOGE subcommittee Marjorie Taylor Greene with Musk, Ramaswamy on DOGE subcommittee Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., attends a roundtable discussion with members of the House Freedom Caucus on the COVID-19 pandemic at The Heritage Foundation on Thursday, November 10, 2022. Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has been tapped to lead a new House subcommittee that will work with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Greene and House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-***., have met with Ramaswamy and his team and are “already working together,” a source familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday. Comer aims to establish the subpanel early next year, the source said. Greene’s group will be dubbed the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, allowing it to share the DOGE acronym with the outside-of-government entity commissioned by President-elect Donald Trump. The congressional version, first reported earlier Thursday morning by Fox News, shares similar goals as the one led by the two billionaires. It aims to investigate government waste, and seek out ways to reorganize federal agencies and cut red tape, the source said. Read more CNBC politics coverage “A key step to driving greater efficiency in government is exposing the problem to the public,” a spokesperson for Ramaswamy said. “We are grateful that the House Oversight Committee has created a DOGE subcommittee to focus on this work. We look forward to working together.” Comer said Thursday morning in a Fox Business interview, “We’re going to work very closely with Elon Musk and Ramaswamy.” Decrying “too many **** cats in government,” Comer vowed that his committee will get the “chopping block going.” “I’m excited to chair this new subcommittee designed to work hand in hand with President Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the entire DOGE team,” Greene said in a statement to CNBC. She said her panel will lead to the firings of government “bureaucrats,” and vowed to “provide transparency and truth to the ********* people through hearings.” “No topic will be off the table,” she said. This is developing news. Please check back for updates. Source link #Marjorie #Taylor #Greene #Musk #Ramaswamy #DOGE #subcommittee Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

The State of Punditry – part 2: How the world analyses football – and the U.S. lead the way The State of Punditry – part 2: How the world analyses football – and the U.S. lead the way Football coverage is a divisive subject. Some think the standard of punditry is great, others will tell you it needs some work and some will deride it as awful. The analysis of the analysis never ends. This week, The Athletic is looking more closely at the state of the industry, starting with yesterday’s piece assessing what is demanded of pundits in the ******* Kingdom in 2024 and how people consume their work. Today, we broaden the discussion to see how *** coverage stacks up against the rest of the world, including the proudest of all football nations Germany, Brazil and Spain, together with those pesky upstarts in the U.S.. In Europe, the landscape of punditry can be wildly different. Travel to Italy, Spain or Turkey, switch on a television and scan through the channels and you’ll almost certainly be able to find some football coverage, be it via a football talk show, replays of matches, or on the news. This is the case in the ***, too, via Sky Sports’ network of channels, but we’re talking free-to-air here in countries where people are arguably far more obsessed with football than your average *** football diehard. It borders on fanaticism in a place like Turkey and the at-times frantic coverage reflects that. One grim incident recently showcased how seriously football is taken, when pundit Serhat Akin was shot in the foot when leaving a TV studio. The former Fenerbahce player had been covering the club’s match against Belgian side Union Saint-Gilloise from an Istanbul studio, after which he was approached and shot by a masked man. Akin posted a picture of his bloodied foot on Instagram with the caption: “They shot my foot, our last word is Fenerbahce.” Over in Germany things are a bit calmer. In many ways the coverage is very similar to in the ***, only probably a bit better. Standard Bundesliga behaviour. Why? Well, depending on your disposition, they don’t quite have as much forced melodrama that you tend to find with the Premier League. The punditry industry is not quite as accessible for ex-players, so the notion of former ***** that you’d get on, say, a certain national radio station in the *** where certain people will make certain comments to attract attention doesn’t really exist. Presenters, again, unlike in the *** with Gary Lineker, Alex Scott, or, until recently, Jermaine Jenas, are media professionals rather than players. Pundits include Per Mertesacker and Christoph Kramer, the 2014 World Cup winner who has been an analyst for many years already despite being only 33 years old and still not officially retired (he left Borussia Mönchengladbach in the summer). Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann speaks with Christoph Kramer (second right) and (right) Per Mertesacker (Tom Weller/picture alliance via Getty Images) They have a tactics corner on Sky via Dutchman Erik Meijer, the one-time Liverpool striker who spent much of his career in Germany. In a recent interview with The Athletic, Meijer described his reaction to being asked to appear on ******* television: “The first question I had was, ‘There are 80 million Germans in this country so why do they need to employ a Dutchman? But they wanted a different voice — someone who would say that Bayern Munich were c**p when they were.” Julia Simic, who used to play for the women’s national team, is also a regular, while pundits who cover the Premier League include former goalkeeper Rene Adler and ex-Croatia international and Fulham and West Ham striker Mladen Petric. While Germans do like other sports, such as basketball, handball and tennis, football is the main draw and the coverage can be dense and fanatical, although it tends to be quite considered and mindful of weighty issues. The rise of vloggers and influencers we have seen in the *** hasn’t yet caught on. Probably the most high profile figure is Wolff Fuss, inflection king extraordinaire. Search for him on TikTok and you’ll find 20 million matches. Fuss has the stage to himself because, in another difference to the ***, co-commentators are quite uncommon in Germany. If Fuss is the main man, then Lothar Matthaus is the loudest. Not necessarily in volume, but in the decibel level of his opinions (and his outfits… Matthaus caught the eye at this summer’s ********* Championship with some striking gilets). Lothar Matthaus (right), complete with gilet (Marcus Brandt/picture alliance via Getty Images) Matthaus could probably be compared to Gary Neville or Jamie Carragher in that he gives forthright views on “his” club, which in this case would be Bayern Munich. Neville and Carragher constantly attract the attention of Manchester ******* and Liverpool managers with their views but Matthaus — and his partner-in-******, Dietmar Hamann — tend to take it a bit further. In the past year alone, Matthaus has called for Thomas Tuchel to be sacked, questioned the signing of Eric Dier, claimed Jadon Sancho’s influence at Borussia Dortmund had been exaggerated by the media and said he “felt sorry” for Cristiano Ronaldo whose “ego trips” had “damaged the team and himself”. Last November, Tuchel referenced Matthaus and Hamann in a press conference after a 4-0 victory over Borussia Dortmund, saying: “Can I quote Lothar and Didi? For a team with no further development and a bad relationship between coach and players, that was alright today, I’d say. I’m sure the experts will tell you the rest themselves.” Nice. Matthaus is probably still tame compared to Rafael van der Vaart, who, since retiring, has very much earned a reputation for making unfiltered and inflammatory comments in his role as a pundit in the Netherlands. You may recall Van der Vaart had a pop at England’s Declan Rice after the Euro 2024 final on the coverage of Dutch broadcaster NOS, saying: “£100million for Declan Rice, what does he do? He comes to collect a ball only to pass it back to John Stones. He is useless. If you are truly worth £100m then you should be able to play a ball forward.” This was very much in character for Van der Vaart, whose appreciation for the England team seems to be somewhat lacking given he also decried the whole side as “s***”, also on NOS, after they defeated the Netherlands 2-1 in the semi-finals. Over in Spain, you may be most familiar with Spanish football TV punditry from clips of El Chiringuito de Jugones, a late-night debate show in which a cast of big personalities voice their opinions — usually quite loudly and with little sense of impartiality. “RAMOS, TE QUIERO. ERES MI CAPITÁN” ”¡¡FIRMA y QUÉDATE en el REAL MADRID!!” El discurso de @As_TomasRoncero que convencerá a @SergioRamos. #ElChiringuitoDeMega pic.twitter.com/SVdRd0HPcS — El Chiringuito TV (@elchiringuitotv) May 9, 2021 In recent years the programme has gained notoriety for interviewing Real Madrid president Florentino Perez after the attempted launch of the ********* Super League, using the phrase “tic tac” to announce incoming transfer news (imitating the ticking of a clock) and showing three minutes of former Madrid midfielder Guti looking sad after his old side’s 4-0 Champions League defeat by Manchester City last year. You will find a more sophisticated level of discussion on TV channel Movistar Plus and streaming platform DAZN. The former features former Madrid and Argentina player turned pundit Jorge Valdano while presenter Miguel Quintana and former Equatorial Guinea international Alberto Edjogo-Owono, who spent his career in the Spanish lower leagues, are two respected voices on DAZN. But the way fandom works in Spain — in particular with the big two clubs, Barcelona and Madrid — means those pundits are often labelled the ****** of one or other team, despite trying to be impartial. In Spain, there is also a deeper layer of scrutiny towards refereeing and why decisions do or do not happen (possibly linked to the above). There is no equivalent of Match of the Day, perhaps because there is not much interest in analysing games like Osasuna versus Getafe from a tactical perspective. And the tactical insight mainly comes from social media rather than mass media. As for other prominent pundits, Guti has made a name for himself on DAZN, while Gaizka Mendieta and Juanfran Torres are also regulars on television. Often more in-depth analysis can be found on late-night radio shows such as El Larguero on Cadena SER or Cadena COPE’s El Partidazo — both of which go on until the early hours and continue to attract huge audiences, as The Athletic’s Laia Cervello Herrero explored earlier this year. Even then, debates can get heated given the nature of football in Spain. You might think the tone would be fairly outrageous in a football-**** country like Brazil, but while passions undoubtedly run extremely high and some coverage can be melodramatic, there is also room for reasoned debate. The biggest difference in Brazil is the volume of the commentators, who are the stars of the show. “The commentator really goes for it,” Natalie Gedra, a football reporter for Sky Sports in the *** who previously worked for ESPN and Globo in Brazil, tells The Athletic. “Brazilians cannot understand countries who don’t scream ‘GOOOOOOAAAAAAL!’ There’s also a tune that comes with it, either the club’s anthem or a song that’s related to the national team. “Visually it’s different too — for example, you will have a gigantic ball going back and forth on the screen between transitions of replays. I remember watching World Cups growing up and they had a little mascot who would show up on the screen and dance around.” Having ex-referees as pundits, for example, has been a well-established practice in Brazil for at least a decade, formerly in the commentary box but now more as studio analysts. Oh, and the studios are always at TV HQ, not on site at stadiums. Talking of the commentary box, it’s typically filled with three people – a commentator, i.e. the star, a journalist and a former player. “They have more ex-players now, but a lot of journalists are co-commentators or pundits on both pre and post-match shows,” Gedra adds. “Everyone knows the commentator; they’re massive stars.” Reflecting how their best players tend to head to Europe, Brazil’s most famous ex-players aren’t really part of the TV coverage over there, other than for World Cups. Ronaldo worked on the 2014 World Cup and, most famously, ***** was a commentator for the 1994 World Cup. “There are some ex-players, like, for example (Walter) Casagrande, who played for Corinthians. He was the most prominent for many years,” Gedra says. “He was a bit of a pioneer, he had a big profile and didn’t back down from making big statements, but he was also very articulate. “The main Brazilian football names don’t become pundits in Brazil, but ***** in 1994 is by far the most famous example. There is a picture of him celebrating in the commentary booth with commentator Galvao Bueno which is one of the most iconic images in the history of Brazilian television. Meu amigo Édson se foi!! Que tristeza! Mas Pelé, não!! Pelé é eterno!! Rei Pelé!! Primeiro e único!! pic.twitter.com/AA56oWRdlZ — Galvão Bueno (@galvaobueno) December 29, 2022 “Galvao Bueno is probably the biggest name in the history of Brazilian TV, he’s absolutely huge and the voice of many of the biggest sporting moments, like all the World Cups. Yes, people love or hate him but everybody knows who he is.” Commentators in the *** don’t have anywhere near as big a profile. No wonder Guy Mowbray has started doing Gladiators. Another difference is in the make-up of the post-match chat. Gedra has observed that Brazil’s coverage is less data-orientated than in the ***, although the tone depends on the channel. Globo, the free-to-air channel, have largely monopolised coverage but they are now under threat from newer players such as Sport TV, ESPN and **** Sports. YouTube channels are also growing. “I worked for ESPN and I think they got the tone just right, very analytical and not too spectacular or passionate,” Gedra says. Unspectacular is definitely not a word you would use to describe the stylings of Alexi Lalas, one of the most prominent broadcasters in the U.S., whose brash persona brings a love-it-or-hate-it quality. He works as an analyst for Fox Sports, has a podcast called Alexi Lalas’ State of the Union and doesn’t care if people like him or not. But his bold, direct and outspoken opinions have made him an influential figure in the U.S. and beyond. Lalas is another who doesn’t seem to especially like English players, saying during the Euros that Gareth Southgate’s team were “insufferable as they are talented”. “But I’m in the entertainment business,” Lalas told The Athletic earlier this year. “I am a performer. When you say that, sometimes people cringe. By no means am I saying that I can’t be authentic and genuine. But I recognise the way I say something is as important as what I say. “When I go on TV, I put on a costume and when that red light goes on, I don’t want people changing the channel.” Lalas’ audacious approach is a bit of a leap from the English-style NBC coverage that rose to prominence a few years ago. A number of ex-Premier League players headed Stateside and made names for themselves, such as Robbie Earle and Robbie Mustoe — while having decent careers in England, neither was a household name when playing for Wimbledon and Middlesbrough respectively. GO DEEPER Access all areas at NBC: Three Premier League games, a Winnebago and tactical sushi The pair, who have their own podcast called The 2 Robbies, gave NBC’s coverage a familiar feel alongside commentator Arlo White and pundit Lee Dixon, while former Stoke City defender Danny Higginbotham is another face of the channel having moved Stateside. “What we’ve tried to do from the start is talk in a normal way about football,” Earle told The Guardian in 2017. An underrated concept. Fox Sports also employ recognisable names from *** TV coverage including commentator (sorry, ‘play-by-play announcer’) Ian Darke, former Newcastle defender Warren Barton and ex-Sky Sports reporter Geoff Shreeves. Fox also use Mark Clattenburg as a refereeing analyst. Undoubtedly the most renowned U.S. soccer coverage, though, is on CBS Sports via its hugely popular Golazo Champions League show, complete with the instantly recognisable line-up of Kate Abdo, Thierry Henry, Micah Richards and Jamie Carragher, whose on-screen chemistry make them a social media staple on every matchday. Left to right: Kate Abdo, Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards have been a hit on CBS (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images) Pete Radovich, the coordinating producer of the UEFA Champions League coverage on CBS Sports, told The Athletic in September on how he came to realise that the network’s Champions League Today studio now owns the global conversation on major nights of ********* football. “Thierry Henry, in no uncertain terms, says he gets asked more about CBS now than Arsenal,” he said. “That to me is wild.” The show’s razor-sharp use of social media and its mix of humour, analysis and engaging post-match interviews with managers and players is a winning formula, while most importantly the quartet’s camaraderie feels natural, warm and unforced. Americans showing the world how to make excellent football soccer coverage? It’s a brave new world. (Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb) Source link #State #Punditry #part #world #analyses #football #U.S #lead Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

The best Apple sales on iPads, AirPods, Apple Watches, MacBooks and AirTags The best Apple sales on iPads, AirPods, Apple Watches, MacBooks and AirTags Between the in May, the in September and the in October, Apple has been busy releasing a slew of new iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, MacBooks and more for 2024. If you’ve been waiting for a good ***** before diving in, now is the time. ****** Friday often represents the best discounts on Apple gear and this year is no different. We’re seeing new all-time lows on the Apple Watch Series 10, the 10th generation iPad and the M3 MacBook Air. There are also some returning discounts on new models and previous generations. We’re still waiting on ****** Friday deals to hit the AirPods Pro and we’ll update this post once we see those deals go live. For now, here are the best ****** Friday discounts on Apple gear we could find, from retailers including Amazon, Target and B&H Photo. The best ****** Friday Apple iPad deals Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget The line between Apple’s tablets and laptops is a little blurry at this point, especially with the release of the iPad Pro this year, which (at the time) housed the company’s most powerful chip. The iPad Air is our current pick for the best iPad you can buy and we were delighted by the iPad mini that came out just last month. The only problem is iPads are among the more expensive tablets you can buy. Hopefully these ****** Friday iPad deals help out. Apple iPad (2022, 10th gen) for $279 ($70 off): This is a new all-time low price on the base model iPad. It didn’t get an upgrade during Apple’s Let Loose event back in May, though it did get a quiet price reduction by $100 to $349. Now ****** Friday sales are bringing down the price even more. This is our current favorite budget iPad because it’s a capable tablet that’s great for casual browsing, streaming and gaming. It can even handle everyday productivity tasks well. Apple iPad mini (2024, 7th gen) for $450 ($49 off with coupon): Click the coupon to save nearly $50 on Apple’s newest iPad overall. The iPad mini was just released this October right before the announcement of a few new Macs (the new Pro and Air tablet came out back in May). In his review, Engadget’s Nathan Ingraham called the mini a “necessary update to the best small tablet on the market.” Apple iPad (2021, 9th gen) for $200 ($129 off): Apple discontinued this model with the release of the new iPad Pro and Air models earlier this year. In what’s likely an effort to get rid of current stock, the price is down to a new record low. The 9th generation iPad is the former budget pick in our guide to the best Apple tablets and will serve well as a casual browsing, streaming and game playing machine. Apple iPad Pro (2024, 7th gen, 11-inch) for $899 ($100 off): The latest iPad Pro came out back in May and, notably, was the first Apple device to sport the M4 system-on-a-chip. We gave it an 84 in our review calling it an engineering marvel and the best screen our reviewer had ever seen. It’s also our pick for the best iPad for power users. The only problem is it’s very expensive, but this ***** helps a little. Also at Amazon. Apple iPad Air (2024, 6th gen, 11-inch) for $499 ($100 off): The iPad Air is the Apple tablet we recommend for most people in our buying guide and it earned a high score of 91 in our review. It strikes the best balance between performance, price and features of all slabs in the lineup. It has an M2 chip which is really overkill for casual browsing and gaming, but will ensure that your tablet is compatible with the latest Apple Intelligence tricks and demanding games. Also at Target. The best ****** Friday Apple AirPods deals Billy Steele for Engadget Apple has four models of AirPods right now: The AirPods Pro 2, the over-ear AirPods Max and two AirPods 4, one with active noise cancellation and one without. Apple has been doing a lot of interesting things with their headphones lately, making this a good time to ***** in. Though the discounts for ****** Friday look to be minor, it’s better than paying full price. Apple AirPods Max (USB-C) for $539 ($10 off): Apple’s only over-ear headphones haven’t had a full revamp in a few years. When the iPhone 16 came out, Apple swapped out the lightning port for a USB-C connector and introduced new colors. While the overall design and build is a bit old at this point, they still deliver balanced sound in a premium package. Also at B&H Photo. Apple AirPods 4 (standard) for $119 ($10 off): Here’s a minor discount on Apple’s newest personal audio device. They were announced alongside the iPhone 16 back in September. There are two versions of the AirPods 4, this is the standard version without active noise cancellation. Both have a redesigned shape for a better fit and offer an open ear design (as opposed to the closed-ear shape of the Pro model). We gave them an 88 in our review. Apple AirPods 4 (ANC) for $169 ($10 off): The new buds with ANC got a respectable 86 in that same review. We noted they had pro-level features like letting you nod or shake your head to respond to Siri’s questions and Personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking. The best ****** Friday Apple Watch deals Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget If you take steps or do a workout and you’re not wearing a smartwatch, does it really count? Of course, the Apple Watch is more than a fitness tracker, it’s also a shortcut to your iPhone notifications, a handy Siri portal and an always-on weather forecast. Plus it tells time. While they’re not cheap, these ****** Friday Apple Watch discounts should help. The best ****** Friday Mac and MacBook deals Photo by Devindra Hardawar / Engadget Apple held a quiet Mac Week at the tail end of October in which it announced the new desktop M4 Mac mini, the all-in-one M4 iMac and the M4 MacBook Pro laptop. The MacBook Air from back in March is still the model we recommend for most people Apple MacBook Air (2024, M3, 13-inch) for $849 ($250 off): Here’s a new all-time low on the latest MacBook Air. It’s our top pick for the best laptop for most people, and this model has 16GB of RAM built in — double the previous base amount so it can tackle the demands of the burgeoning Apple Intelligence. Also at B&H Photo for $200 off. Apple MacBook Air (2022, M2, 13-inch) for $749 ($250 off): The previous MacBook Air has a (still very fast) M2 processor and it’s our previous pick for the best overall laptop for most people. This is the 13-inch model with 16GB of RAM. This is a return to an all-time low. Apple iMac (2024, M4, 24-inch) for $1,150 ($148 off with coupon): Apple just released the refreshed iMac last month, but now the silver model is already on *****. It has the latest Apple silicon, the M4 system on a chip that gives it a speed boost and enables the new Apple Intelligence features in macOS Sequoia. Also at B&H Photo for $100 off. Apple Mac mini (2024, M4) for $549 ($50 off with coupon): Use the coupon to get the full deal as this is a first-time low on Apple’s $599 example of good things, small packages. The five-inch by five-inch box can tackle some serious workloads and ******** the most affordable entry point to accessing Apple’s latest silicon. We gave it a solid score of 90 in our review, praising the incredibly fast M4 chip and useful ports. Also at B&H Photo, no coupon required. Apple MacBook Pro (2024, M4 Pro, 14-inch) for $1,400 ($199 off with coupon): The main update Apple gave to its most powerful laptops is the faster than ever M4 chip. Not much else changed, but that’s not a bad thing as the ***** are excellent machines that we recommend to pro users. They have enough power to handle even the most demanding video, audio and any other productivity tasks you can throw at it. The best ****** Friday deals on Apple gear Apple Check out all of the latest ****** Friday and Cyber Monday deals here. Source link #Apple #sales #iPads #AirPods #Apple #Watches #MacBooks #AirTags Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Disinformation and deepfakes played a part in the US election. Australia should expect the same Disinformation and deepfakes played a part in the US election. Australia should expect the same by Renee Barnes, Aimee Riedel, Lucas Whittaker and Rory Mulcahy, The Conversation Credit: Markus Winkler from Pexels As America takes stock after Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency, it’s worth highlighting the AI-generated fake photos, videos and audio shared during the campaign. A slew of fake videos and images shared by Trump and his supporters purported to show his opponent, Kamala Harris, saying or doing things that did not happen in real life. Of particular concern are deepfake videos, which are edited or generated using artificial intelligence (AI) and depict events that didn’t happen. They may appear to depict real people, but the scenarios are entirely fictitious. Microsoft warned in late October that “Russian actors continue to create AI-enhanced deepfake videos about Vice President Harris. In one video, Harris is depicted as allegedly making derogatory comments about former President Donald Trump. In another […] Harris is accused of ******** poaching in Zambia. Finally, another video spreads disinformation about Democratic vice president nominee Tim Walz, gaining more than 5 million views on X in the first 24 hours.” AI has enabled the mass creation of deepfake videos, which poses a threat to democratic processes everywhere. If left unchallenged, political deep fake videos could have profound impacts on *********** elections. It’s getting ******* to spot a deepfake Images have stronger persuasive power than text. Unfortunately, Australians are not great at spotting fake videos and images. The prevalence of deepfakes on social media is particularly concerning, given it is getting ******* to identify which videos are real and which are not. Studies suggest people can accurately identify deepfake facial images only 50% of the time (akin to guessing) and deepfake faces in videos just 24.5% of the time. AI-based methods for detection are marginally better than humans. However, these methods become less effective when videos are compressed (which is necessary for social media). As Australia faces its own election, this technology could profoundly impact perceptions of leaders, policies, and electoral processes. Without action, Australia could become vulnerable to the same AI-driven political disinformation seen in the US. Deepfakes and disinformation in Australia When she was home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil warned technology is undermining the foundations of Australia’s democratic system. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. Sign up for our free newsletter and get updates on breakthroughs, innovations, and research that matter—daily or weekly. Senator David Pocock demonstrated the risks by creating deepfake videos of both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. The technology’s reach extends beyond federal politics. For example, scammers successfully impersonated Sunshine Coast Mayor Rosanna Natoli in a fake video call. We’ve already seen deepfakes in *********** political videos, albeit in a humorous context. Think, for example, of the deepfake purporting to show Queensland premier Steven Miles, which was released by his political opponents. While such videos may seem harmless and are clearly fabricated, experts have raised concerns about the potential misuse of deepfake technology in the future. As deepfake technology advances, there is growing concern about its ability to distort the truth and manipulate public opinion. Research shows political deepfakes create uncertainty and reduce trust in the news. The risk is amplified by microtargeting—where political actors tailor disinformation to people’s vulnerabilities and political views. This can end up amplifying extreme viewpoints and distort people’s political attitudes. Not everyone can spot a fake Deepfake content encourages us to make quick judgments, based on superficial cues. Studies suggest some are less susceptible to deepfakes, but older Australians are especially at risk. Research shows a 0.6% decrease in deepfake detection accuracy with each year of age. Younger Australians who spend more time on social media may be better equipped to spot fake imagery or videos. But social media algorithms, which reinforce users’ existing beliefs, can create “echo chambers“. Research shows people are more likely to share (and less likely to check) political deepfake misinformation when it shows their political enemies in a poor light. With AI tools struggling to keep pace with video-based disinformation, public awareness may be the most reliable defense. Deepfakes are more than just a technical issue—they represent a fundamental threat to the principles of free and fair elections. Provided by The Conversation This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Citation: Disinformation and deepfakes played a part in the US election. Australia should expect the same (2024, November 21) retrieved 21 November 2024 from This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. Source link #Disinformation #deepfakes #played #part #election #Australia #expect Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

LG Gram 14 and 15 laptops get big ****** Friday discounts on Amazon – and here’s why I’d buy them LG Gram 14 and 15 laptops get big ****** Friday discounts on Amazon – and here’s why I’d buy them We’re now a week away from ****** Friday, and deals and sales are coming in fast. It can be easy to feel lost with so many offers popping up, and that’s why we’re taking the time to handpick the ones we’d recommend, like these LG Gram 14 and LG Gram 15 laptop deals on Amazon US and Amazon ***, respectively. On Amazon US, you can get the LG Gram 14 with 35% off, now $1,096.99 (formerly $1,699.99). In the ***, Amazon *** is offering a similar deal on the LG Gram 14, now £999 after a 36% slash from £1,549.99. The Amazon US deal brings you the 14-inch lightweight LG Gram laptop in ****** equipped with an AI-enabled Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage. It also comes with Windows 11 Home installed. These kinds of specs will see you through everyday tasks, work, projects, image and photo editing, as well as streaming media and gaming. Both models are pretty lightweight for what they include, with the LG Gram 14 clocking in at 2.47 lbs. As well as its portability, it comes with a backlit keyboard and anti-glare coating on its display. The display has a 16:10 ratio and up to 99% DCI-P3 ****** gamut expression, making its visuals bright and vivid. It’s also made to be durable, withstanding factors like high vibration and high and low temperature. In the Amazon *** deal, you can get the 2024 15.6-inch LG Gram 15 laptop in Obsidian ****** with an Intel Core Ultra 7, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage. It too comes equipped with Windows 11 Home. It’s lightweight at just 1.29 kg, and 15.44mm thick so you can work, do daily tasks, watch and stream, and even do a bit of gaming wherever you like. Equipped with both an anti-glare panel and a ****** gamut of sRGB 99%, movies and TV shows look great. It’s also made to be tough and durable, as it’s been put through military standard tests to make sure it can withstand most knocks and bumps. Today’s best LG Gram 14 laptop deal in the US Today’s best LG Gram 15 laptop deal in the *** Along with the thought put into both models, you also get great great battery lives for both. The LG Gram 14 can last up to 29.5 hours, while the LG Gram 15 can last up to 23 hours. If you’re looking for a PC that could keep you entertained and work, both of these models are good choices with handsome discounts. Want the latest US and *** deals straight to your phone? Follow the TechRadar WhatsApp deals channel! More of today’s ****** Friday sales in the US Amazon: TVs, smart home & air fryers from $12.99 Apple: AirPods, iPads, MacBooks from $89.99 Best Buy: $1,000 off 4K TVs, laptops & headphones Cheap TVs: smart TVs at Best Buy from $69.99 Christmas trees: top-rated trees from $54.99 Dell: best-selling Inspiron & XPS laptops from $279.99 Dreamcloud: mattress deals from $349 + free shipping Holiday: decor, lights, Christmas trees & PJs from $10.99 Home Depot: 40% off tools, appliances & furniture Lowe’s: holiday decor, appliances & tools from $17.31 Nectar: up to 50% off all mattresses Nordstrom: 46% off boots, coats, jeans & jewelry Samsung: $1,500+ off TVs, phones, watches & appliances Target: save on furniture, tech & clothing Walmart: cheap TVs, ****** vacs, furniture & appliances More of today’s ****** Friday sales in the *** Amazon: up to 68% off toothbrushes and TVs AO: savings on games consoles and appliances Argos: up to 50% off toys, Lego, TVs and gifts Boots: up to 50% off Dyson, *****-B and Philips Currys: early deals on TVs, appliances, laptops Dell: laptops, desktops, monitors from £299 Dyson: up to £150 off Ebay: up to 50% off refurbished tech EE: up to £600 off Samsung and Apple John Lewis: up to £300 off appliances and TVs LG: £1,000 or more off TVs and appliances Samsung: up to £600 off TVs, phones and tablets Very: up to 30% off phones, appliances & clothing Source link #Gram #laptops #big #****** #Friday #discounts #Amazon #heres #buy Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Peter’s Pies heir Dylan Thomas guilty of Cardiff ******* Peter’s Pies heir Dylan Thomas guilty of Cardiff ******* BBC Dylan Thomas had admitted the manslaughter of his friend but denied ******* The heir to a pie company fortune has been found guilty of murdering his best friend after stabbing him 37 times on Christmas Eve in the house they shared. Dylan Thomas ******* William Bush, 23, on 24 December 2023, a jury at Cardiff Crown Court decided. Thomas, 24, who admitted manslaughter but denied *******, had looked up details of the anatomy of the neck in the hours before the ******* in Llandaff, Cardiff, armed with a large kitchen ****** and a flick ******. Thomas is the grandson of Sir Stanley Thomas, the founder of south Wales-based Peter’s Pies, whose net worth was estimated to be £230m in 2013, and who sat in court throughout the trial. Dylan Thomas had been arrested weeks earlier for trying to scale the fence at Buckingham Palace, and is being treated for schizophrenia at a secure hospital. The jury went out to consider its decision on Thursday morning and returned its guilty verdict a few hours later. Prosecution barrister Greg Bull KC told the court that personal victim impact statements were being prepared, but that the sentence “has to be one of imprisonment”. The judge thanked the jury for the “care” with which they had carried out their task and listened to the “deeply upsetting evidence” during the trial. Sentencing will be on 16 December. Speaking outside the court, Catrin Bush, Mr Bush’s sister, said the family were completely devastated by the “brutal and senseless *******”. Ms Bush described Thomas as an “evil, manipulative liar” and said the family had seen “no evidence of any remorse or taking responsibility for his actions that day”. “Will was such a loyal, funny, caring and trusting person. He lit up every room he went into with his cheeky grin and quick-witted humour. “We cannot even begin to comprehend the ***** and suffering that Will endured on Christmas Eve last year and we will have to live with the hurt, grief, anger and upset for the rest of our lives,” she said. “We ask that he is remembered as the great person that he was, and that his memory is not defined by this barbaric *******.” Family photo William Bush was attacked and murdered at the home he shared with Dylan Thomas The prosecution told the trial that Thomas was in a “downward spiral” but in control of his actions at the time of the ********. The court heard that on the morning of the *******, Thomas’ grandmother, Sharon Burton, drove him to Llandaff, and she described him becoming “more and more agitated” and sending several text messages. When she parked outside the property, Thomas went in, got the knives, went to Mr Bush’s bedroom and stabbed him repeatedly. The prosecution said passers-by “heard screams of horror” from the house. A distressed Thomas banged on his grandmother’s car window and she found Mr Bush on the patio outside. Thomas claimed in a 999 call after the ******* asking for an ambulance that his friend had “gone mental” and stabbed him. But the prosecution told the trial it was “a planned *******,” by Thomas on Mr Bush, and he “deliberately armed himself with knives and attacked him from behind”. The court was given expert opinion that Thomas had been psychotic for months before the ********. Jurors heard that he told police officers he was ****** after his arrest for the ******** and offered one PC a “job with ****”. Dylan Thomas and William Bush shared a house in Chapel Street, Llandaff, Cardiff Following the earlier arrest at Buckingham Palace he spoke about the “illuminati” running the world. The court was told that Thomas believed he could harness gravity and told police he was “exploring energy fields” when arrested at Buckingham Palace on 6 November 2023. Dr Panchu Xavier told jurors that his patient was experiencing psychosis when he was admitted to Ashworth High Secure Hospital, Liverpool, in March 2024. Thomas and Mr Bush had been friends since they met at school at ******* College in Brecon, Powys. Gregory Bull KC, prosecuting, told the court that while Mr Bush was popular, Thomas had few friends and was viewed as something of a loner. Orlando Pownall KC, defending, had told the trial there was no question Thomas was psychotic, but said the dispute was over the timings. Mr Pownall told jurors Thomas had been through “a lot of stressful situations” including his parents’ separation, and there was “alleged domestic *********”. Police were called to the scene of the ******** in Llandaff on Christmas Eve 2023 The Thomas family company was launched as Thomas Pies in the 1950s, selling sausage rolls, pies and pasties around the south Wales valleys. In the 1970s it became Peter’s Pies, and is now known as Peter’s Food, based in Bedwas in Caerphilly county. It was founded by the late Stan Thomas, who passed it on to his sons Stan junior – Dylan Thomas’s grandfather – and Peter, the former chairman of Cardiff RFC rugby club, who ***** in 2023. They sold the company in 1988. Source link #Peters #Pies #heir #Dylan #Thomas #guilty #Cardiff #******* Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Sara Errani serves up another tantalising tennis moment for Italy at the Billie Jean King Cup Sara Errani serves up another tantalising tennis moment for Italy at the Billie Jean King Cup MALAGA, Spain — Sara Errani stands at the baseline and exhales deeply. She is about to hit a second serve, with Italy up match point against Poland. A place in the Billie Jean King Cup final is at stake. So Errani does what she has done many, many times before: she hits an underarm serve. The ball floats into the service box and onto the racket of Iga Swiatek, one of two women’s players who can claim to be the best in the world. Swiatek is on to it in a flash and hits her return deep to Errani’s forehand. Errani again does what she has done many, many times before: she gets the ball back. She does the same on her opponent’s next shot, hoisting a backhand lob into the air. Swiatek loops a forehand volley long and Italy is through to the final for the second year in a row. Errani collapses to the ground in relief, celebrating with her partner Jasmine Paolini and shaking hands with the defeated opponents a few seconds later, before allowing herself a what-have-I-just-done smile. For Errani, 37, it was another successful heist in a career full of them. On Wednesday, she added a fourth Billie Jean King Cup title (three of which came when it was the Federation Cup) to the career Golden Grand Slam in doubles she completed this year by winning gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics alongside Paolini. It has been a stunning year for Errani, who also won the mixed doubles title at the U.S. Open with another Italian, Andrea Vavassori. She thought 2024 would be her last on tour, having won her last major 10 years ago. “My thought last year was to play in the Olympics and then stop playing tennis, but we’re playing great in doubles and I’m having so much fun,” she said in an interview in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the WTA Tour Finals earlier this month. Completing the doubles Golden Slam in Paris put Errani in an elite group of just seven women. When looking back on her career, the underarm serve to Swiatek on Monday will feel like a defining moment for a player who uses the contentious tactic more consistently and more particularly than anybody else. Her story with the underarm serve goes to the heart of her tennis life. The underarm serve is one of tennis’s most curious shots, caught between the poles of disrespectful trick shot and tactical masterstroke. Big servers like Nick Kyrgios can use it to take advantage of opponents who are standing back anticipating a 140mph rocket. There is an element of showmanship too; this is very much the case with Alexander Bublik. He might be blessed with a big serve, but he is also the current player probably most synonymous with the cheeky alternative. Other players use it against specific opponents. World No. 68 Alexandre Muller told The Athletic at Wimbledon that he had specifically practised the shot to use it against Daniil Medvedev, who has one of the deepest return positions in the sport. Corentin Moutet, a master of the shot, started practising underarm serves after a shoulder injury. He has since incorporated them into his game, doing so to great acclaim at this year’s French Open. He used the underarm serve 12 times in his third-round win against Sebastian Ofner, winning nine of those points. He is the opposite of a player like Kyrgios, using the underarm serve because he doesn’t expect to win free points behind his first serve; there is no drop-off in expected value. GO DEEPER How Corentin Moutet’s 12 underarm serves shook Roland Garros Errani’s reason for using the shot will be familiar to many ******** players: she just doesn’t trust her serve. Errani stands at 5ft 5in (164cm) which is diminutive by modern tennis standards — just like her partner Paolini, whose serve has some heat despite her height of 5ft 4in. Errani does not have this pace, and her height has contributed to a shot often derided as the worst serve in the sport. Smiling, she says it would be amazing to be a bit taller. “Many times, I think about that.” Instead of letting her serve become a complete albatross, Errani has used her ground skills, tactical nous and the shock factor of a serve that regularly registers around 60mph (96.5kph) on the speed **** to reach the very top of tennis in singles and doubles. She reached the 2012 French Open final in singles and cracked the world’s top five a year later, despite her opponents feeling that they ought to break her every single game. Instead, they are bamboozled by her incredible dexterity at the net or from the back of the court, as well as struggling to read and return her serve. Sara Errani has struggled with her regulation serve throughout her career (Thomas Samson / AFP via Getty Images) “It comes so slow and it kind of floats in the air,” Mirjana Lucic-Baroni said in a news conference after losing to Errani in the 2014 U.S. Open fourth round, a match in which Errani’s average serve speed was 76mph. “It was really difficult to time the ******.” Errani’s serve became something of a meme in 2024 after Daniil Medvedev completely ******* to return it at all during a mixed doubles match at the Paris Olympics. Errani herself said in a news conference after that match that she has a different approach to serving from most players: “I don’t try to make winners,” she said. “I just try to make kick, make slice, try to change my game. I need to start the point where I want. So sometimes is better for me to serve not that fast, because if you serve fast the ball is coming (back) faster.” That conviction hasn’t always been there. Her serve reached a nadir in April 2019 when she was only recently back from a 10-month doping suspension for ingesting letrozole, which was increased from an original two months by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Errani said she was “really disgusted” by the length of the ban, saying that her case was because of contamination after her mother, who was taking letrozole for ******* *******, dropped pills on their kitchen counter where they prepared meals. At the Copa Colsanitas in Bogota, Colombia, Errani served 18 double faults per match in three consecutive matches (all of which she won) before hitting around half her serves underarm in a quarter-final defeat to Astra Sharma. Later that year at a low-level event in Asuncion, Paraguay, Errani took the nuclear option by serving underarm for the entire tournament. She reached the final, copping a huge amount of social media ****** in the process. In response, she wrote on Instagram: “In Italy, I keep being insulted by a lot of people, regarding mainly my serve. “If it is not ok for you, send a letter to WTA asking to change rules about serve or ask them to disqualify me for awful serve. If instead you just have other problems with me, send a letter to Santa.” Five years on, she says her serve had completely overtaken everything else. “I couldn’t compete. I was thinking all the time about my serve,” she says. “My coach said: ‘Do one tournament all underarm and just compete.’ It was to try to make my head free from, not panic, but the tough moments.” Despite recovering from those yips, Errani then endured an anxiety dream of a service game at the 2020 French Open during a second-round defeat to Kiki Bertens. Errani was given two time violations after five aborted ball tosses and landed only one overarm serve, with one attempt missing the baseline. Serving for the set, she was broken to love. “Sometimes it’s there and it can come out, but I try to manage it,” she says of the nerves that can grip her when serving. “When I was practising, my serve was good. But then in matches, I was feeling the block, the panic. I know it’s still there. It’s not like it’s in the past.” Errani, an unwitting trailblazer, can laugh at the fact that the underarm serve has come back into fashion, certainly on the men’s side, over the past few years. “If it can be a good tactic, why not?” she laughs. Against Swiatek, the decision was more of a vibe. “I just advised Jasmine after the first serve, so it’s just I feel it and I did it, just like that, not thinking too much,” she said in a news conference after the match. At 37, Errani is the Italian team’s most experienced player, and as her team-mates chorused in Wednesday’s celebratory news conference she is “the brain of the team”. Errani resembles her compatriot Jorginho, the Brazilian-born Italy and Arsenal midfielder who is so intelligent that he is a reference point for everybody else despite not being the most physically gifted. GO DEEPER Jorginho exclusive: Arsenal ‘energy’, no-hop penalties, love for Havertz, knowing strengths Paolini, who is the world No. 4 in singles and a two-time Grand Slam finalist this year, constantly looks to Errani for guidance on the doubles court. “She wants me to tell her what to do every point – even when she serves, she likes me to tell her where to put it and I’m trying to push her to tell me what she’s feeling more,” Errani said. Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini have formed a formidable partnership on the doubles court. (Robert Prange / Getty Images) Whatever the tactics, the Errani-Paolini partnership is contributing to a golden ******* for tennis in Italy. On the men’s side, Jannik Sinner is the world No. 1 and has won two Grand Slams this year. He is part of an Italy team that is hoping to defend the Davis Cup this week and make it a double with the victorious BJK Cup group. Errani, who lived through a ******* when she was one of the ‘Fab Four’ Italian women who all reached a Grand Slam final and the world’s top 10 between 2010 and 2014 (Francesca Schiavone, Roberta Vinci and Flavia Pennetta were the others), believes that all the current top players from her country are pushing each other to greater heights. And Errani has no ******* to leave the golden age behind just yet. “I said to Jasmine: ‘I’ll continue next year for sure and then we’ll see,’” she says. After the genre-defining underarm serve against Swiatek, this wily veteran still has at least one last heist in her. (Top photo: Fran Santiago / Getty Images for ITF) Source link #Sara #Errani #serves #tantalising #tennis #moment #Italy #Billie #Jean #King #Cup Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Elden Ring Is Just $20 For ****** Friday Elden Ring Is Just $20 For ****** Friday From Software has become synonymous with challenging and beautifully crafted action-RPGs, and for ****** Friday, you can get the studio’s very best game for just $20. Elden Ring typically sells for $60, and while we have seen it discounted several times in the past, this is the best price yet for an incredible adventure that’ll test your skills within its elegantly tragic fantasy world. Only 29 games have earned a 10/10 score across GameSpot’s long history, and Elden Ring is one of them. Back in 2022, Elden Ring was praised for creating a massive open-world environment with substance and giving players an action-packed experience that has become the gold standard for all Souls-likes. “In a genre that has become wrought with bloated and over-designed games, Elden Ring is defiantly contrarian in almost every way. Its commitment to design by subtraction and to placing the responsibility of charting a path through its world entirely on the player makes it stand head and shoulders above other open-world titles,” Tamoor Hussain wrote in GameSpot’s Elden Ring review. “Elden Ring takes the shards of what came before and forges them into something that will go down in history as one of the all-time greats: a triumph in design and creativity, and an open-world game that distinguishes itself for what it doesn’t do as much as what it does.” If you’re looking for the complete experience, you can also pick up Elden Ring with its one and only expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree. The expansion was released earlier this year and adds an absurd amount of extra content, like new weapons, equipment, skills, and magic not found in the base game, alongside new enemies, encounters, and plotlines. Normally $80, you can pick this up for $50 on Xbox Series X during ****** Friday, or for $40 on PS5. There’s also a digital code deal for Xbox Series X|S, priced at $40. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Edition Source link #Elden #Ring #****** #Friday Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Nvidia warns of gaming GPU shortage this quarter, recovery in early 2025 — Chipmaker rakes in record profits as net income soars by 109% YoY Nvidia warns of gaming GPU shortage this quarter, recovery in early 2025 — Chipmaker rakes in record profits as net income soars by 109% YoY Gamers searching for cheap graphics cards during the holiday season might be in for disappointment. While Nvidia’s earnings for the third quarter beat analyst expectations as it doubled its profits year-over-year, mainly due to massive strides in the data center market and gaming revenue also saw a healthy uplift, Nvidia’s CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Colette Kress sounded an alarm during the earnings call, saying there’s a potential gaming GPU supply shortfall coming this quarter. There are a lot of potential factors to consider, including the upcoming consumer Blackwell RTX 50-series launch, the wind-down in RTX 40-series production, and the existing shortages of top-tier RTX 40-series models. There’s also increased demand from the AI and data center sector, which is currently far more lucrative than consumer GPUs. With the hints of a gaming GPU supply shortage due to supply constraints, it ******** to be seen whether this will lead to actual shortages or only result in near-term higher pricing as gaming GPUs become more scarce. And having this happen right amid the holiday shopping season, with a potential boost in ASPs (average ***** prices), it’s not exactly a bad situation for Nvidia — the company gets to clear out remaining Ada inventory at a premium in advance of the next-gen GPUs — though we don’t expect lower-end models to come until later in 2025. “Q3 was a great quarter for Gaming with notebook, console, and desktop revenue all growing sequentially and year-on-year…. On Gaming, although sell-through was strong in Q3, we expect fourth-quarter revenue to decline sequentially due to supply constraints.” Colette Kress (Image credit: Nvidia) Despite Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs looming over the horizon, the gaming segment still brought in $3.2 billion — 15% more than last year. However, beyond the impressive numbers, Nvidia’s CFO warned of a GPU supply-demand mismatch this quarter. When asked for further clarification later during the earnings call, she said, “Our gaming supply, given what we saw selling through, was moving quite fast. Now the challenge that we have is, how fast could we get that supply getting ready into the market for this quarter? Not to worry, I think we’ll be back on track with more supply as we turn the corner into the new calendar year.” The rumor mill has it that Nvidia decided to cut back RTX 40-series production to make room for a Blackwell launch in January. This is seemingly backed by reports of shortages and recent price hikes, especially in the case of the RTX 4090. The statement thus becomes self-explanatory for the RTX 40 series. This could also mean that the initial RTX 50-series supply might be bottlenecked. Nvidia is expected to begin shipping chips to AIBs this quarter, though there’s as yet no official confirmation. It’s widely expected that Nvidia will reveal the first consumer Blackwell GPUs at CES 2025 in January, likely with the top two models, RTX 5090 and RTX 5080. CEO Jensen will take the stage in January to unveil Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs. Given the stated timing, this shortage will likely only affect the remaining RTX 40-series supply, especially for laptop sales during the holiday season. Leaks suggest that Nvidia will continue producing select RTX 40 mobile chips, selling them in parallel with their RTX 50 counterparts. Going over the financials, Nvidia’s revenue surged to a staggering $35 billion, a 94% bump year-over-year. The net income or profits spiked to $19.3 billion, landing Nvidia a sizeable 109% increase compared to Q3 23. A massive chunk of this increase is due to Nvidia’s H100/H200 and Blackwell B100/B200 offerings, with the data center segment contributing $30.7 billion to Nvidia’s total revenue (approximately 87.7%). Considering that breakdown, it’s no surprise that Nvidia might prioritize data center parts over consumer GPUs. Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Source link #Nvidia #warns #gaming #GPU #shortage #quarter #recovery #early #Chipmaker #rakes #record #profits #net #income #soars #YoY Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]