December 2023 - Cactus three

Canada Letter: Restaurants That Are Local Institutions, According to Readers

30

Dec

New miscellaneous

Canada Letter: Restaurants That Are Local Institutions, According to Readers

Things are tough right now for many restaurants. Worldwide food inflation has, in some cases, increased the costs of ingredients used in restaurant kitchens beyond the ability of these businesses to raise their menu prices. In January, the government will start charging interest on the emergency loans that kept many of them in business during the pandemic. And staff members remain difficult to recruit in many areas. A July survey by Restaurants Canada, a lobby group, estimated that 33 percent of restaurants were operating at a loss, compared with 7 percent before the pandemic.As we wrote earlier, restaurants that are…

Ohio Governor Blocks Bill Banning Transition Care for Minors

30

Dec

By Benjamin Hall

Health

Ohio Governor Blocks Bill Banning Transition Care for Minors

BackgroundLawmakers passed the measure earlier in December. Those in favor of the bill argued that parents are pressured by doctors to sign off on transition care treatments for their children. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Gary Click, said parents are “being manipulated by the physicians.’’In addition to banning transition care for minors, the bill says medical professionals who provide the care could lose their licenses and be sued. It also prohibits transgender girls and women from playing on high school and college sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.On Friday, Mr. DeWine said that if the bill were to become…

30

Dec

By Benjamin Hall

New miscellaneous

The football stadiums that never were

Peter Storrie can remember visiting the London studio of Herzog & de Meuron, the renowned Swiss architects, and being shown a striking vision of Portsmouth’s future.“It was something else,” he tells The Athletic. “They put it up on the screen for us and it certainly had the wow factor.”This was 2007 and the ambitious plans were for a new 36,000-capacity stadium on the city’s docks. Storrie, then chief executive, had accepted that Portsmouth would need to leave Fratton Park, the club’s home since 1899, and a proposed relocation could hardly have been more impressive.Located in between the Spinnaker Tower and…

Un estudiante mantuvo en secreto una criptomina de 6 millones de dólares

30

Dec

By Benjamin Hall

Science and Technology

Un estudiante mantuvo en secreto una criptomina de 6 millones de dólares

Jerry Yu reúne las características de lo que los chinos llaman un rico de segunda generación. Estudió en una escuela preparatoria de Connecticut. Vive en un condominio de Manhattan que le vendió Jeffrey R. Immelt, exdirector ejecutivo de General Electric, en 8 millones de dólares. Y es el dueño mayoritario de una mina de bitcóin en Texas, que fue adquirida por más de 6 millones de dólares el año pasado.Yu, un estudiante de 23 años de la Universidad de Nueva York, también se ha convertido —sin querer— en un caso de estudio sobre cómo los ciudadanos chinos pueden mover dinero…

Boom in A.I. Prompts a Test of Copyright Law

30

Dec

By Benjamin Hall

Investments and Business

Boom in A.I. Prompts a Test of Copyright Law

The boom in artificial intelligence tools that draw on troves of content from across the internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law.Authors and a leading photo agency have brought suit over the past year, contending that their intellectual property was illegally used to train A.I. systems, which can produce humanlike prose and power applications like chatbots.Now they have been joined in the spotlight by the news industry. The New York Times filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, the first such challenge by a major American news organization over the use of…

Surging Mexico Border Crossings Push U.S. Resources to Brink

29

Dec

By Benjamin Hall

New miscellaneous

Surging Mexico Border Crossings Push U.S. Resources to Brink

At a remote spot in the Arizona desert, near a hole in the border wall, dozens of migrants huddled over wood fires.After fleeing war in Sudan, violent gangs in Central America or Mexican cartels, the men had all crossed into the United States illegally, walked on foot over rugged terrain for hours, and arrived at this outpost exhausted, hungry and cold.They wanted to turn themselves into the authorities to ask for asylum, but were stranded here, miles away from the closest town, Sásabe.Then, as temperatures dropped on Tuesday night, a convoy of Border Patrol agents rolled in, loaded the men…