Menendez brothers' bid for freedom delayed until January
By Karen Garcia, Los Angeles Times A recent study that recommended toxic chemicals in black plastic products be immediately thrown away included a math error that significantly overstated the risks of contamination, but its authors are standing by their conclusions and warn against using such products. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Chemosphere , experts from the nonprofit Toxic-Free Future said they detected flame retardants and other toxic chemicals in 85% of 203 items made of black plastic including kitchen utensils , take-out containers, children’s toys and hair accessories. The study initially said the potential exposure to chemicals found in one of the kitchen utensils approached the minimum levels the Environmental Protection Agency deemed a health risk. But in an update to the study, the authors say they made an error in their calculations and the real levels were “an order of magnitude lower” than the EPA’s thresholds. The error was discovered by Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society in Canada. In a blog post, Schwarcz explained that the Toxin-Free Future scientists miscalculated the lower end of what the EPA considered a health risk through a multiplication error. Instead of humans being potentially exposed to a dose of toxic chemicals in black plastic utensils near the minimum level that the EPA deems a health risk, it’s actually about one-tenth of that. Though Schwarcz said the risks outlined in the study aren’t enough for him to discard his black plastic kitchen items if he had them, he agreed with the authors that flame retardants shouldn’t be in these products in the first place. “The math error does not impact the study’s findings, conclusions or recommendations,” said Megan Liu, a co-author of the study who is the science and policy manager for Toxic-Free Future . She added that any traces of flame retardants or toxic chemicals in cooking utensils should be concerning for the public. Flame retardants are getting into commonly used items because black-colored products are being made from recycled electronic waste, such as discarded television sets and computers, that frequently contain the additives. When they’re heated, the flame retardants and other toxic chemicals can migrate out. If you’re wondering whether your old black plastic spoon or other utensils are a part of this group, Liu shared some more guidance. It’s nearly impossible to know whether a black plastic product is contaminated. That’s because these products that include recycled e-waste don’t disclose a detailed list of all ingredients and contaminants in the product. Liu said it’s also unclear how many types of flame retardants are in these black plastic products. Some of the products that researchers tested in this recent study “had up to nine different harmful chemicals and harmful flame retardants in them,” she said. Anytime you’re looking for the type of recycled plastic a product is made of you’re going to look for a number within the chasing arrows (that form a triangle) logo. Recycling symbols are numbered 1 to 7 and we commonly associate the numbers with what we can toss in our blue recycling bins. The 1 through 7 numbers stand for, respectively, polyethylene terephthalate, high-density polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene or Styrofoam, and miscellaneous plastics (including polycarbonate, polylactide, acrylic, acrylonitrile butadiene, styrene, fiberglass and nylon). The study found higher levels of toxic flame retardants in polystyrene plastic, which is labeled with the number 6, said Liu. There isn’t a definitively timeline of when recycled electronic-waste started to be incorporated into black plastic products specifically, but e-waste started to get recycled in the early 2000s, Liu said. The way computers, cellphones, stereos, printers and copiers were being disposed of previously was to simply add them to a landfill without reusing salvageable parts. But as the National Conference of State Legislatures notes, electronics production required a significant amount of resources that could be recovered through recycling. Recovering resources such as metals, plastics and glass through recycling used a fraction of the energy needed to mine new materials. However, the study pointed out that flame retardants and other chemical contaminates have been detected in and near e-waste recycling facilities, in indoor air and dust at formal e-waste recycling facilities in Canada, China, Spain and the U.S. It also noted contamination in soil samples surrounding e-waste recycling sites in China and Vietnam. The safest nontoxic material options for kitchen utensil are wood and stainless steel. ©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Judge in Alex Jones' bankruptcy case orders new hearing on The Onion's bid for Infowars
McGregor must pay $250K to woman who says he raped her, civil jury rules
She added that she wanted to “bless you all for your beautiful messages” Victoria and Shane Victoria Mary Clarke has revealed how she spent today “in bed all day crying” on the anniversary of her wedding anniversary to her late soulmate and husband Shane MacGowan. “I am not going to lie,” she posted on X this afternoon. “Getting through today has been F***ing hard!!! Been in bed all day crying my eyes out. I love you so much @ShaneMacGowan.” She added that she wanted to “bless you all for your beautiful messages.” We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. And on a hopeful note she ended the powerful message with the declaration that: “I can see a better time!!!!” alongside a series of red heart emojis. It is coming up to a year to the day since the Pogues front man passed away on November 30, 2023. Ahead of the anniversary of his death, artist and writer Victoria spoke about her loss on the Under the Grill podcast with Kevin Dundon and Caoimhe Young. Victoria had joined Kevin and Caoimhe in the kitchen to chat about the homecooked meals she loved growing up, her angel art and, of course, the love of her life. She told the podcast: “Shane is very much with me. It’s weird, sometimes I feel Shane experiencing things through me. “It’s almost like he’s going, ‘go to that movie, I want to see it’. Or ‘talk to that person’, or ‘say that joke, I want to say that joke’.” Victoria also told how she finds solace in her belief in angels and is set to display her angel paintings for the first time ever in an exhibition in Dublin. She said: “Shane would be delighted; he was always nagging me to display my art.” Victoria also spoke about how Barry Keoghan had been approached to play her late husband in a new movie about the Pogues legend. “We talked about a movie long before he died and that’s still in the works,” she told the podcast. “We did talk to Barry Keoghan about playing Shane, and he’s keen,” she added. “Barry would be good,” Kevin agreed, although Victoria admitted it was a “little bit soon to be thinking about that stuff” following the death of Shane last year. “I know there’s a couple of people who want to do tribute things. I’ve been working with a lot of different musicians on a tribute album that I find really, really healing,” she added. To hear the full chat, you can find the Under the Grill wherever you get your podcast, it’s also available on YouTube.
Nvidia ( NVDA ) is assuaging Wall Street’s concerns about any potential slowdowns in the production of its next-generation Blackwell chip, telling investors during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday that it’s on pace to exceed its previous revenue estimates for the current quarter. “Blackwell production is in full steam,” CEO Jensen Huang said during the call. “I think we're in great shape with respect to the Blackwell ramp at this point.” Prior to the earnings call, The Information reported on Nov. 17 that Nvidia was contending with overheating issues related to its Blackwell-based servers leading suppliers to adjust the design of the racks that house the servers. Nvidia responded at the time saying that design iterations are normal and expected. The report followed a separate Blackwell design issue that Nvidia addressed over the summer, which gave Wall Street pause about whether the chip would land on customers' doorsteps on time. Now Nvidia is saying that the chips aren’t just shipping, they’re in the hands of all of the company’s major partners as well. In Q3, Nvidia reported that cloud service providers, companies like Microsoft ( MSFT ), Amazon ( AMZN ), and Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ), made up 50% of the chipmaker’s data center revenue . Ensuring they’re getting Blackwell chips sooner than later is paramount for Nvidia’s continued growth. And the company appears to be doing just that. Read more: Nvidia nearly triples in value over 11 months: Is it time to invest? “With any product ramp, there's always a great deal of complexity, and Blackwell is no different,” Dan Flax, senior research analyst and managing director at Neuberger Berman, told Yahoo Finance. “And I think what's notable is that Nvidia and its partners are executing well. I think supply will improve over the next couple of months as they really scale Blackwell.” But there’s one problem that continues to bedevil Nvidia: supply constraints. The sheer number of companies jockeying for position to grab the AI behemoth’s chips makes it difficult to meet demand. “It is the case that demand exceeds supply,” Huang told analysts. “And that’s expected as we’re in the beginning of this generative AI revolution.” For some perspective, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during the company’s most recent earnings call that the social media giant is training its Llama 4 AI models on a server cluster made up of more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips . The H100 is Nvidia’s prior-generation Hopper AI accelerator. With Blackwell promising far better performance than Hopper, it only makes sense that massive AI companies like Meta ( META ) are angling to get as many of those chips as possible. As Blackwell production continues to ramp, though, the company should be able to ensure its most important customers get the chips they need. “Nvidia's supply chain and all the data center power capacity is increasing at a very rapid pace,” New Street Research technology infrastructure analyst Antoine Chkaiban told Yahoo Finance in a video interview. “And so here the conclusion is that there is no bottleneck preventing Nvidia from ... meeting consensus expectations next year.” In its Wednesday earnings announcement, Nvidia reported better-than-anticipated results on the top and bottom lines, beating Wall Street’s estimates and modestly topping the outlook for its current quarter. Revenue jumped 94% year over year, while Data Center sales climbed 112%. Despite that, shares fell in early trading Thursday. This isn’t the first time the market has turned on Nvidia after it posted huge revenue growth. Investors pulled back after the company’s last earnings report as well before rallying behind the stock in the following weeks and making Nvidia the largest publicly traded company in the world ahead of Apple earlier this month. Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley . For the latest earnings reports and analysis, earnings whispers and expectations, and company earnings news, click here Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Fin ance.
By MICHELLE L. PRICE WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump’s supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump’s movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump’s Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer , a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer’s comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks , whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government , weighed in, defending the tech industry’s need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump’s world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift, and his presidential transition team did not respond to a message seeking comment. Musk, the world’s richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect , was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump’s movement but his stance on the tech industry’s hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry’s need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Related Articles National Politics | Should the U.S. increase immigration levels for highly skilled workers? National Politics | Trump threat to immigrant health care tempered by economic hopes National Politics | In states that ban abortion, social safety net programs often fail families National Politics | Court rules Georgia lawmakers can subpoena Fani Willis for information related to her Trump case National Politics | New 2025 laws hit hot topics from AI in movies to rapid-fire guns Trump’s own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration , including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order , which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump’s businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club , and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he told the “All-In” podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump’s budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada will “abide” by an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We stand up for international law, and we will abide by all the all the regulations and rulings of the international courts,” Trudeau said. “This is just who we are as Canadians.” On Thursday, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity and crimes committed” since the Israel-Hamas war began more than a year ago. The ICC was created in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity in cases where its member states are unwilling or incapable of doing so. Canada is among its 124 member states. The ICC also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, although Israel has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July. Both Israel and Hamas have rejected the allegations. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Trudeau reiterated the federal government’s call for a ceasefire in the war. “We need to see a ceasefire that protects civilians. We need to get back on track towards a two-state solution with a peaceful Israel living alongside a peaceful Palestinian state,” Trudeau said. In Washington, D.C., Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly repeated the prime minister’s position. “We need accountability in our world, and so based on that, Canada will abide by its obligation under the ICC treaty,” Joly said. Netanyahu’s office is describing the arrest warrants as “an antisemitic decision.” Israel’s Ambassador to Canada Iddo Moed, meanwhile, is speaking out against Canada’s stance to abide by the warrants. “We urge the Canadian government to stand firm in its support of Israel’s right to defend itself by rejecting and condemning the ICC’s decision,” Moed said in a statement. The United States, which is not an ICC member, is rejecting the ICC decision. "The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision," a White House National Security Council spokesperson said, adding the U.S. is discussing next steps with its partners. The ICC does not have its own police force to enforce the warrants. It will be up to the 124 member states to cooperate. With files from Reuters