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First seat filled in three-seater Limerick County constituencyReport: Hollywood Trump Resistance Broken, Demoralized, Won't Mass Organize -- 'Leave Your Pussy Hats at Home'Preview: Fenerbahce vs. Istanbul Basaksehir - prediction, team news, lineupsFormer U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi injured after falling at an event in Luxembourg
SUNRISE, Fla. (AP) — Spencer Knight made 20 saves, Mackie Samoskevich scored with less than a second left in the second period, and the Florida Panthers got four goals in the third to beat the Carolina Hurricanes 6-0 on Saturday and complete a two-day sweep. Aleksander Barkov, Sam Bennett, Aaron Ekblad, Evan Rodrigues and Adam Boqvist also scored for Florida, which won 6-3 at Carolina on Friday. The Panthers have won three straight — that streak following a stretch of six losses in seven games for the Stanley Cup champions. It was Knight's fourth career shutout, his first since Nov. 9, 2022 — also at home against Carolina. Spencer Martin made 23 saves on 28 shots for the Hurricanes, who have dropped four of their last six games (2-3-1). It was Martin's fourth consecutive start for Carolina. Hurricanes: This was the first time all season that the Hurricanes failed to get a point in the game immediately following a loss. Carolina was 4-0-1 after a defeat entering Saturday. Panthers: A big day for Samoskevich — his alma mater Michigan beat Ohio State in football on Saturday, that game ending just before the Florida-Carolina game started. The Panthers are 5-0-0 when he scores this season. Sam Reinhart had each of the four most recent Florida goals at 19:59, before Samoskevich got his Saturday. The Panthers scored two goals 11 seconds apart in the third to make it 5-0, and Yaniv Perets replaced Martin in the Hurricanes' net with 8:12 remaining. It was the second NHL appearance for Perets, who came on once in relief for Carolina last season. Ekblad's goal was his first in a span of 1,045 regular-season shifts since Feb. 20. Carolina starts a two-game homestand Tuesday against Seattle. Florida goes to Pittsburgh to start a two-game trip on Tuesday. AP NHL: https://www.apnews.com/hub/NHLJacksonville St. 86, East Carolina 78
December 13, 2024 This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlightedthe following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: fact-checked trusted source proofread by University of Edinburgh A new AI image tool could aid the development of algorithms to analyze wildlife images to help improve understanding of how species around the world are responding to climate change, a study suggests. The advance could help scientists create new AI-powered algorithms to perform rapid, in-depth analysis of the millions of wildlife images uploaded to the internet by members of the public each year. These could help reveal key insights into the impacts of climate change , pollution, habitat loss and other pressures on tens of thousands of animal and plant species, researchers say. Citizen science websites are a potentially rich source of information on how animals and plants are responding to climate change. However, while existing AI algorithms can automatically identify species in uploaded images, it was unclear if they could reveal other information too. Now, an international team of scientists has created a new tool to test how well AI algorithms can mine image banks for other information. This could include details such as what species are eating, how healthy they are, and with which other species they are interacting. The tool—called INQUIRE—measures AI's ability to draw conclusions from an image bank of 5 million wildlife photos uploaded to the iNaturalist citizen science website. The team found that current AI algorithms are capable of answering some of these types of questions, but they fail on the more complex ones. These included those that require reasoning about small features within images and ones that contain detailed scientific terminology. The findings highlight opportunities to develop new AI algorithms that can better help scientists efficiently explore vast image collections, the team says. The findings will be presented at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing System ( NeurIPS 2024 ), held in Vancouver Dec. 10–15. The team included researchers from the University of Edinburgh, University College London, UMass Amherst, iNaturalist and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The work was in part supported by the University of Edinburgh's Generative AI Laboratory. Dr. Oisin Mac Aodha, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, said, "The thousands of wildlife photos uploaded to the internet each day provide scientists with valuable insights into where different species can be found on Earth. However, knowing what species is in a photo is just the tip of the iceberg. "These images are potentially a hugely rich resource that remains largely untapped. Being able to quickly and accurately comb through the wealth of information they contain could offer vital clues about how species are responding to multi-faceted challenges like climate change." Dr. Sarah Beery, Assistant Professor at MIT, said, "This careful curation of data, with a focus on capturing real examples of scientific inquiries across research areas in ecology and environmental science , has proven vital to expanding our understanding of the current capabilities of current AI methods in these potentially impactful scientific settings. "It has also outlined gaps in current research that we can now work to address, particularly for complex compositional queries, technical terminology, and the fine-grained, subtle differences that delineate categories of interest for our collaborators." Provided by University of Edinburgh
The second-term president likely will seek to cut off spending that lawmakers have already appropriated, setting off a constitutional struggle within the branches. If successful, he could wield the power to punish perceived foes. By Molly Redden , for ProPublica ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox . Donald Trump is entering his second term with vows to cut a vast array of government services and a radical plan to do so. Rather than relying on his party’s control of Congress to trim the budget, Trump and his advisers intend to test an obscure legal theory holding that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike. “We can simply choke off the money,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video . “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending.” His plan, known as “impoundment,” threatens to provoke a major clash over the limits of the president’s control over the budget. The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate the federal budget, while the role of the executive branch is to dole out the money effectively. But Trump and his advisers are asserting that a president can unilaterally ignore Congress’ spending decisions and “impound” funds if he opposes them or deems them wasteful. Trump’s designs on the budget are part of his administration’s larger plan to consolidate as much power in the executive branch as possible. This month, he pressured the Senate to go into recess so he could appoint his cabinet without any oversight. (So far, Republicans who control the chamber have not agreed to do so.) His key advisers have spelled out plans to bring independent agencies, such as the Department of Justice, under political control. If Trump were to assert a power to kill congressionally approved programs, it would almost certainly tee up a fight in the federal courts and Congress and, experts say, could fundamentally alter Congress’ bedrock power. “It’s an effort to wrest the entire power of the purse away from Congress, and that is just not the constitutional design,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a Georgetown Law professor who has written about the federal budget and appropriations process. “The president doesn’t have the authority to go into the budget bit by bit and pull out the stuff he doesn’t like.” Trump’s claim to have impoundment power contravenes a Nixon-era law that forbids presidents from blocking spending over policy disagreements as well as a string of federal court rulings that prevent presidents from refusing to spend money unless Congress grants them the flexibility. Elon Musk and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during a campaign rally on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. In an op-ed published Wednesday , tech billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who are overseeing the newly created, nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, wrote that they planned to slash federal spending and fire civil servants. Some of their efforts could offer Trump his first Supreme Court test of the post-Watergate Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which requires the president to spend the money Congress approves. The law allows exceptions, such as when the executive branch can achieve Congress’ goals by spending less, but not as a means for the president to kill programs he opposes. Trump and his aides have been telegraphing his plans for a hostile takeover of the budgeting process for months. Trump has decried the 1974 law as “not a very good act” in his campaign video and said, “Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State.” Musk and Ramaswamy have seized that mantle, writing, “We believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.” The once-obscure debate over impoundment has come into vogue in MAGA circles thanks to veterans of Trump’s first administration who remain his close allies. Russell Vought, Trump’s former budget director, and Mark Paoletta, who served under Vought as the Office of Management and Budget general counsel, have worked to popularize the idea from the Trump-aligned think tank Vought founded, the Center for Renewing America. On Friday, Trump announced he had picked Vought to lead OMB again. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” Trump said in a statement. Vought was also a top architect of the controversial Project 2025. In private remarks to a gathering of MAGA luminaries uncovered by ProPublica , Vought boasted that he was assembling a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel so that Trump is armed on day one with the legal rationalizations to realize his agenda. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Vought said. Trump spokespeople and Vought did not respond to requests for comment. The prospect of Trump seizing vast control over federal spending is not merely about reducing the size of the federal government, a long-standing conservative goal. It is also fueling new fears about his promises of vengeance. A similar power grab led to his first impeachment. During his first term, Trump held up nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while he pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The U.S. Government Accountability Office later ruled his actions violated the Impoundment Control Act . Pasachoff predicted that, when advantageous, the incoming Trump administration will attempt to achieve the goals of impoundment without picking such a high-profile fight. Trump tested piecemeal ways beyond the Ukrainian arms imbroglio to withhold federal funding as a means to punish his perceived enemies, said Bobby Kogan, a former OMB adviser under Biden and the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning think tank American Progress. After devastating wildfires in California and Washington, Trump delayed or refused to sign disaster declarations that would have unlocked federal relief aid because neither state had voted for him . He targeted so-called sanctuary cities by conditioning federal grants on local law enforcement’s willingness to cooperate with mass deportation efforts. The Biden administration eventually withdrew the policy. Trump and his aides claim there is a long presidential history of impoundment dating back to Thomas Jefferson. Most historical examples involve the military and cases where Congress had explicitly given presidents permission to use discretion, said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Jefferson, for example, decided not to spend money Congress had appropriated for gun boats — a decision the law, which appropriated money for “a number not exceeding fifteen gun boats” using “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars,” authorized him to make. President Donald Trump listens while acting OMB Director Russell Vought speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Oct. 9, 2019. President Richard Nixon took impoundment to a new extreme, wielding the concept to gut billions of dollars from programs he simply opposed, such as highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation and disaster relief for farmers. He faced overwhelming pushback both from Congress and in the courts. More than a half dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the appropriations bills at issue did not give Nixon the flexibility to cut individual programs. Vought and his allies argue the limits Congress placed in 1974 are unconstitutional, saying a clause in the Constitution obligating the president to “faithfully execute” the law also implies his power to forbid its enforcement. (Trump is fond of describing Article II, where this clause lives, as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”) The Supreme Court has never directly weighed in on whether impoundment is constitutional. But it threw water on that reasoning in an 1838 case, Kendall v. U.S. , about a federal debt payment. “To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible,” the justices wrote. During his cutting spree, Nixon’s own Justice Department argued roughly the same. “With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds,” William Rehnquist, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel whom Nixon later appointed to the Supreme Court, warned in a 1969 legal memo, “we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.” Campaign Action
The City of Arlington premiered "The Heartbeat of Arlington" on Nov. 22, a documentary about the city's General Motors manufacturing plant's start, growth and impact on the community. The documentary was produced by the city's office of communication, which said the GM plant played a large role in shaping Arlington as "The American Dream City." “General Motors was the catalyst that made Arlington be the first city that exploded and became the DFW region,” said Victor Vandergriff, son of Tom Vandergriff. Tom Vandergriff is credited with helping to convince GM in 1951 to build a manufacturing plant in Arlington. The assembly plant opened three years later. “I'll argue the case that Arlington's luckiest day ever was when General Motors decided to cast its lot with us,” said Tom Vandergriff. Arlington said the documentary focuses on "pivotal moments in the assembly's history," including how the company landed in Arlington, its economic impact on the city, communitywide efforts to keep the plant open during potential closures in the early 1990s, technological advancements, and a glimpse into the future of vehicle production. “We used to talk about GM as ‘The Heartbeat of Arlington,’ and I am proud to say that yes, because of all the efforts made into the plant, they still are very much the heartbeat of our community,” said Arlington City Manager Trey Yelverton. “We are so appreciative of General Motors’ continued innovation and investment to keep the plant viable, productive, and highly efficient.” The documentary also featured the plant's shift in production of cars to trucks, it's process in becoming the exclusive plant to produce every new full-sized SUV in GM's lineup, to achieving the milestone of 13 million vehicles produced earlier this year. “I still believe to this day it took visionary people and political leadership to say, ‘We have to keep it here, but those workers made it happen,’” said Victor Vandergriff. “The result of what’s happened since in the decades that followed is just amazing.” The 45-minute production summed up a nearly two-year search through archival footage from The University of North Texas's "The Portal to Texas History" , which was primarily sourced by NBC 5. The footage held interviews with long-time employees, current and former leaders, historians and Arlington residents sharing their insight into the plant's impact. Several North Texas entities assisted and provided archival footage, including the Arlington Historical Society, the Arlington Public Library, the Dallas Public Library, the Delta County Public Library in partnership with the Delta County Historical Commission, General Motors Arlington Assembly, the University of North Texas’ Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington’s Special Collections and the Vandergriff family. GM says their employment of about 8,400 Texas workers and partnerships with more than 550 suppliers puts $1.2 billion into the economy. “We are very aware and conscious of the fact that this has been going on for a long time,” said GM Arlington Assembly Plant Executive John Urbanic. “It is a legacy, and we take that to heart. We’re really committed to continuing and growing that legacy here in Arlington.” In addition to watching the documentary at the top of this article, "The Heartbeat of Arlington" is available on the City of Arlington's YouTube Channel .Israeli defence minister claims responsibility for Hamas leader Haniyeh's assassinationAfrican Union chairperson candidates advocate for permanent UN Security Council seats