Former real estate developer leads press corps on tour of grounds and says ‘one thing I know how to do is build’
As the US national debt climbed past $40tn for the first time on Wednesday, and the war with Iran he started nearly six months ago dragged on, forcing Americans already struggling to pay the bills to spend more on fuel, Donald Trump led the press corps on a tour of the extensive remodeling of the White House grounds he is personally overseeing in his role as the self-styled “builder-in-chief”.
The tour, during which Trump showed off upgrades such as a new granite driveway and refurbished columns, and expounded at length on newly laid grass, culminated in Trump autographing the back of a stone, inscribed with his name, to go in the center of the ornate new helipad he insists he needs.
Continue reading...After 10 years and more than 17bn YouTube views, Geonroung Park, aka Baby Shark Boy, speaks about his life as a child star and his new K-Pop career
“I just remember having fun dancing and playing on what felt like a huge set,” Geonroung Park says, recalling the day 10 years ago when he was filmed, aged seven, doing the hand movements to a children’s song about a family of sharks.
That footage became Baby Shark Dance, now the most-watched video in YouTube’s history. It has racked up more than 17.2bn views and has held the platform’s global no 1 spot for 69 consecutive months.
Continue reading...Victorian court of appeal will consider whether triple murder and attempted murder convictions should be quashed
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Prosecution turns to argument Patterson wasn’t severely ill after beef wellington
McWilliams is touching on the prosecution’s argument in its closing address that Patterson was not severely ill after the poisoned beef wellington lunch. Patterson’s lawyers have pointed to evidence heard in the trial, including testimony about her lowered potassium levels.
McWilliams says her potassium levels were “clinically noted” but she did not present as having death cap mushroom poisoning after the meal. He says:
Whatever it was that she presented to medical practitioners with, it was not death cap mushroom poisoning.
Continue reading...Officers reportedly believed invitees were trying to make unauthorized entry on to Vandenberg base in California
Five news reporters and two members of the military who were invited to an event at Vandenberg space force base in California were briefly detained at gunpoint by security officers who thought they were gatecrashers, according to local news reports.
The incident happened Monday ahead of an invitation-only groundbreaking for a new training facility for missile operators at the federal airfield near Santa Barbara, California. Reporters from Noozhawk and KEYT were among those detained, and both outlets published articles detailing the detainment.
Continue reading...Zvezdelina Stankova says she used AI to ‘help edit’ an article about some of her students being ‘five to eight years’ behind
A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a “severe” math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece.
The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were “five to eight years” behind and lacked a “middle school” education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system’s test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren’t sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley’s mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared.
Continue reading...A landslide triggered by the quake had blocked access to the village where Paulina Pobi had lived, leaving her buried under the collapsed remains
An 84-year-old woman has been discovered alive in the flattened remains of her home three days after a powerful earthquake hit eastern Indonesia, authorities have confirmed.
The 7.7-magnitude quake struck off Indonesia’s Flores island on Saturday morning, killing at least 73 people, injuring more than 900 people and displacing nearly 60,000 others.
Continue reading...A landslide triggered by the quake had blocked access to the village where Paulina Pobi had lived, leaving her buried under the collapsed remains
An 84-year-old woman has been discovered alive in the flattened remains of her home three days after a powerful earthquake hit eastern Indonesia, authorities have confirmed.
The 7.7-magnitude quake struck off Indonesia’s Flores island on Saturday morning, killing at least 73 people, injuring more than 900 people and displacing nearly 60,000 others.
Continue reading...Zvezdelina Stankova says she used AI to ‘help edit’ an article about some of her students being ‘five to eight years’ behind
A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a “severe” math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece.
The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were “five to eight years” behind and lacked a “middle school” education on fractions and basic algebra. Stankova said the UC system’s test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren’t sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley’s mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared.
Continue reading...Officers reportedly believed invitees were trying to make unauthorized entry on to Vandenberg base in California
Five news reporters and two members of the military who were invited to an event at Vandenberg space force base in California were briefly detained at gunpoint by security officers who thought they were gatecrashers, according to local news reports.
The incident happened Monday ahead of an invitation-only groundbreaking for a new training facility for missile operators at the federal airfield near Santa Barbara, California. Reporters from Noozhawk and KEYT were among those detained, and both outlets published articles detailing the detainment.
Continue reading...Anyone who has frequently landed in New Zealand’s capital has a hair-raising story to tell, and this year’s ‘super’ El Niño could only intensify the winds
It had been a smooth late-July flight from Auckland, until the plane started its descent into Wellington. Then the bumps and swaying began.
“The more we went down, the rockier it got,” says Laura, a Wellington resident who wished to give her first name only. “There was one point where we must have got a horrible cross-wind and it felt like the plane was about to flip over. At that point, the entire flight screamed.”
Continue reading...St Gregory’s college says alleged attack on Saturday ‘antithesis of what we stand for and the values that we embrace’
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Three teenage boys, including two from a private school in Sydney’s south-west, have been charged over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl on Saturday.
New South Wales police said three 17-year-old boys were arrested on Wednesday after a 17-year-old girl was allegedly attacked at a home in Sydney’s south-west.
Support for anyone affected by the subject matter of this report is available at Full Stop Australia (1800 385 578)
Continue reading...The collapse was caused by a landslide, while local officials say the death toll is likely to rise as recovery efforts continue
More than 100 people have died after an artisanal goldmine at a small village in western Central African Republic (CAR) caved in due to a landslide, local officials and aid workers said on Wednesday.
The landslide happened on Tuesday afternoon in the village of Zamboye, about 50km (31 miles) from the town of Baboua and close to the border of Cameroon. Footage on social media appeared to show an avalanche of sand descend on a group of people, likely the miners, and cover them.
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