Golden Ten Data reported on May 8 that France's solar power generation reached a record high on Friday, surpassing grid operator forecasts and pushing electricity prices into negative territory.
You did remember to opt out of AI, didn't you?
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency "blatantly used" race, gender and other protected characteristics to execute the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
OpEd: Thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf, economic and political shrapnel from the Iran war has left longtime American allies nervous about the staying power and stability of their partnerships with the United States. read more
Four protesters are suing to stop the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from seizing DNA samples from Americans arrested while peacefully protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity.
@#11 ... The new districts would have prevented half of the state that is rural from having any voice in elections. ...
So, doing exactly what the Southern states have been doing (or trying to do) with respect to Blacks for decades?
Now, suddenly, your alias has an issue with this practice?
U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Voter ID Law (2016)
www.npr.org
...The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature "requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices" -- then, data in hand, "enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans."[emphasis mine]
The changes to the voting process "target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the circuit court wrote, and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."
The appeals court suggested that the motivation was fundamentally political -- a Republican legislature attempting to secure its power by blocking votes from a population likely to vote for Democrats....
Trump thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live' (May 1, 2026)
www.aol.com
... Donald Trump has not been coy about his desire to be remembered as the most powerful person to ever live. The 79-year-old president has been privately and publicly musing about his place in history as he serves his final term in the world's most powerful office, a longtime confidant and senior administration officials told The Atlantic.
"He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live," the Trump confidant told The Atlantic. "He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn't do, because of his sheer power and force of will." The Atlantics in-depth investigation drew on multiple White House insiders who spoke anonymously to candidly detail their private conversations with the president.
No longer competing with Lincoln or Washington
This internal rhetoric marks a shift in the president's self-perception as he seeks to leave a permanent mark on the global order. Trump no longer views himself as a peer to American icons like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Instead, he has allegedly set his sights on the world-historical status occupied by figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.
The philosophical framework the president's allies invoke is rooted in the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued that history is shaped by rare "world-historical individuals" -- men like Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon -- who redirected the course of civilization through force of will, often in ways that were condemned as norm-breaking in their own time. ...
Meanwhile ...
Need a new hard drive? Well, the price has gone up ...
The 2026 storage crisis: Why AI data centers are hoarding every hard drive on the market
www.howtogeek.com
... HDDs were, until not too long ago, seen as the premier option for escaping price hikes as SSDs began being affected by the ongoing global RAM shortage.
The problem is that these price hikes are starting to catch up to hard drives as well. ...
The problem now, however, is that hard drives are currently experiencing their own massive supply crisis. The exact same artificial intelligence boom that caused the memory shortage is simultaneously driving an unprecedented surge in demand for high-capacity hard drives within hyperscale data centers. While artificial intelligence operations require blazing-fast memory for active processing, the underlying foundation of these large language models relies on storing tens of thousands of petabytes of training data, images, and video.
SSDs are far too expensive for this bulk archiving, meaning the world's largest cloud service providers and artificial intelligence laboratories are aggressively buying up every available hard drive on the market. The situation has reached such an extreme that major storage manufacturers like Western Digital have publicly confirmed their entire hard drive production capacity is completely sold out for the entirety of calendar 2026. Data center giants have even locked in firm purchase orders for hard drives extending well into 2027 and 2028, effectively draining the supply pool for everyone else. ...
@#6 ... and what has our current Se c of HHS been doing to better-inform Americans about te benefits of vaccines? ...
Maybe this?
FDA vaccine studies censored by Trump admin after finding benefits of shots
arstechnica.com
... Despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's pledge to provide "radical transparency," the agencies under his control continue to suppress scientific research that conflicts with his anti-vaccine agenda.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported confirmation from the Department of Health and Human Services that the Food and Drug Administration had blocked the publication of studies showing the safety and efficacy of vaccines against COVID-19 and shingles.
The revelation follows a report from The Washington Post last month that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrapped a scientifically vetted study previously scheduled for publication that found COVID-19 vaccines sharply cut the risk of emergency care and hospitalization among healthy adults. The study was ultimately rejected by Kennedy's acting CDC director, who claimed to have concerns about the study's methodology. ...
FBI defends Kash Patel after report alleging he gifts custom whiskey bottles
www.theguardian.com
... The FBI said that agency director Kash Patel "followed all applicable ethical guidelines" after a report in the Atlantic alleged that he distributed customized bourbon whiskey bottles as gifts.
In an article published on Wednesday, the Atlantic described Patel as travelling with a stock of "personalized branded bourbon" that he allegedly hands out frequently to people around him. ...
Ben Williamson, the FBI's assistant director, said in a statement to the Guardian: "The Atlantic's premise is false and misleading. The bottles in question are part of a common practice in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived.
"Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself," the statement added. ...
Related ...
Global perceptions of US fall below Russia under Trump, survey finds
www.reuters.com
... Global perceptions of the U.S. have deteriorated for a second consecutive year and are now worse than views of Russia, an annual study on democracy published on Friday showed, as U.S. President Donald Trump's policies continue to severely strain the NATO alliance.
The Denmark-based Alliance of Democracies Foundation, which commissioned the survey, said the U.S. was also most frequently named in response to which country posed the greatest threat to the world, after Russia and Israel. The survey did not go into details on the criteria used, but the Alliance says its aim is to defend and advance democratic values.
"The fast decline of the United States' perception around the world is saddening but not shocking," alliance founder and former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
"U.S. foreign policy over the past 18 months has, among other things, called into question the transatlantic relationship, imposed widespread tariffs, and threatened to invade a NATO ally's territory," he added.
Trump's tariffs, his repeated threats to control Greenland, a fellow NATO member through Denmark, a cut in U.S. aid to Ukraine as well as the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and the ensuing spike in oil prices have deeply unsettled transatlantic relations. ...
many of the jobs were created in the health-care and education areas.
Manufacturing jobs decline.
Related ...
US consumer confidence falls to record low amid inflation
caliber.az
... Consumer sentiment in the United States has dropped to a new record low as Americans express growing concern over inflation, rising living costs, and deteriorating buying conditions, according to a preliminary survey. ...
From Sec of State (or whatever title he was using for this trip) it was, imo, a disaster.
Sec Rubio got nothing besides an awkward photo op from his excursion.