The enigmatic drones looming over the tri-state area are likely a deliberate distraction by a foreign power trying to hide other nefarious activities in the US, one expert has claimed.
“These drones and this activity is too large, too well-organized to be the work of hobbyists,” Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute think-tank and author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America,” told Fox Business.
“And that sort of leaves foreign powers. It could be Iran, it could be Iran in connection with China, but clearly, somebody is trying to absorb our attention,” he claimed of the numerous sightings of the well-lit drones.
Gordon Chang said the mysterious drones were too advanced to be controlled by nonprofessionals.FOX News
“The thing that really worries me is that if they’re trying to draw our attention to these drones, the question is what are they doing elsewhere in our country? So we could very well get hit,” warned Chang.
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Mysterious drones have been looming over the East Coast, particularly New York and New Jersey, over the past few weeks, with at least 3,000 sightings reported in the Garden State this month alone.
Tensions over the mysterious flying objects hit a boiling point Saturday in New York after Gov. Hochul declared it’s time to take action.
“This has gone too far,” she said in a statement announcing that she asked federal authorities to authorize local police departments to shoot down drones.
On Sunday, Hochul announced that federal authorities gave the go-ahead to deploy a high-tech drone detection system to New York State to aid in the investigation.
When Kathy Borum hugged 17-year-old Vaughn-Thomas goodnight on a December night three years ago, the Tennessee mom didn’t know she was holding her son for the last time.
A hard-working student and talented athlete, Vaughn-Thomas had just come home from the gym before getting ready for bed.
But to cope with the stress of school, he did something that has tragically become all too common among minors: He ingested a Xanax laced with fentanyl that he likely acquired via Snapchat.
When he didn’t wake up from his alarm the next morning, Kathy discovered that her son had fatally overdosed.
For years, platforms from Facebook and Instagram to Snapchat and TikTok have developed addictive algorithms to keep children scrolling as long as possible.
As a result, teens are on average spending 8.5 hours a day on their screens — and suffering rising rates of anxiety, depression and suicide.
At the same time, the algorithms are exposing children to unthinkable harms, including pro-suicide content, drug dealers and human traffickers.
Just in October, reports emerged showing that TikTok developed addictive algorithms even as company executives privately acknowledged the features led to mental health issues, including loss of memory and cognition.
At the same time, the platform fed self-harm and eating disorder content to minors while failing to remove posts promoting drug abuse and pedophilia.
Although TikTok’s impending US ban may end the Chinese-owned app’s dangers, many other social media platforms are also completely neglecting minors’ safety.
Earlier this year, for example, internal documents released through a state attorneys general lawsuit revealed that sexual predators on Facebook and Instagram sent sexually abusive content, including graphic images, to roughly 100,000 minors each day.
But when employees raised the alarm that Meta’s “People You May Know” algorithm connected minors with potential child predators, top executives ignored their warnings.
One thing is clear: Big Tech’s reckless disregard for children must come to an end — and Congress is on the cusp of ensuring that happens.
The legislation, which I led alongside Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), would provide parents and children with tools, safeguards and transparency to protect against online harms.
The legislation would create a duty of care for online platforms to prevent specific dangers to minors, including the promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse and sexual exploitation.
If enacted, KOSA would mark the first law to protect children in the virtual space since 1998, and provide safeguards for minors that are required for almost every other industry.
For months, however, KOSA has stalled in the House of Representatives because of blatant falsehoods peddled by the Big Tech lobby — including the lie that the legislation will lead to censorship.
To put this false narrative to rest, Sen. Blumenthal and I worked with Elon Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino to update the bill’s text, making clear that KOSA will safeguard free speech while protecting children online.
The changes include language stipulating the law does not permit the government to penalize companies based on users’ viewpoints, nor does it alter existing protections for third-party content under Section 230.
In addition, the new text narrows the law’s duty-of-care application regarding anxiety and depression, provides more guidance for platforms regarding those obligations, and ensures that audits under the legislation will solely focus on platform design — not content.
The revised text reflects X’s publicly stated goal of furthering open expression without fear of censorship. It immediately received the support of another free speech champion: Donald Trump Jr.
With the new Congress beginning Jan. 3, there is precious little time left to get KOSA across the finish line.
That’s why I recently joined my Senate Commerce Committee colleagues, including Chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Sen. Blumenthal, in calling on House leadership to hold a vote on KOSA before year’s end.
This is a matter of our children’s well-being. Too much is at stake to punt it into the new year.
I will remain in Washington as long as it takes to get KOSA passed so President Trump can implement its protections on Day 1, ensuring that social media is not a death sentence for any child ever again.
Marsha Blackburn (R) represents Tennessee in the US Senate.
The acquittal last Monday of former Marine Daniel Penny is a blow to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg: The jury came to the common-sense judgment thatPenny was justifiedin subduing a threatening vagrant, Jordan Neely, on a subway last May.
Worse for Bragg is that his office’s own bizarre actions may have tipped the jury in Penny’s favor.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s own office may have tipped the jury in Daniel Penny’s favor, writes Post columnist Nicole Gelinas.Andrew Schwartz / SplashNews.com
The jury of seven women and five men heard almost five weeks’ worth of arguments and evidence and deliberated for almost a week. And it ultimately came to a sound verdict on one of two charges: Penny had not acted in a criminally negligent way that led to Neely’s death.
But a puzzle remains: Why did the jury deadlock on thestronger count — manslaughter, with its potential 15-year-sentence — before acquitting on the weaker count, with its four-year possible sentence?
Logic dictates that if Penny wasn’t guilty of the weaker count, he must not be guilty of the stronger count.
So what changed the jury’s thinking, between the Friday deadlock and a Monday acquittal?
One answer: Bragg’s office made it clear before the intervening weekend that the trial was a sham.
Put yourself in a juror’s position. Counting two weeks of jury selection, you’ve been in court seven weeks, and you’ve endured autopsy photos and complex medical testimony.
You’ve done this because you’ve been told, since Day 1, how important this case is.
During voir dire, the prosecutor, ADA Dafna Yoran, asked you, personally: Can you, if the evidence leads you to do so, convict this man of manslaughter?
And during her closing argument, Yoran reminded you of this responsibility: “I told you it would not be easy,” she said. “But you each said that you could find someone guilty of recklessly killing another person.”
Now, though, you’ve pored over this testimony in days of deliberations, asking for a readback of the medical examiner’s testimony, asking to review videos, and asking the judge what “reasonable” means in the context of Penny’s mindset.
And you tell the judge you’re deadlocked on this critical manslaughter charge.
Per the law, you can’t consider a verdict on the lower charge until you come up with a verdict on the higher charge.
The judge sends you back to try again. He warns: “If you cannot reach a unanimous agreement . . . a new trial will have to be scheduled before a different jury.”
You return and say you’re stuck.
The judge sends you back into the jury room — then brings you back into the courtroom to tell you: The manslaughter charge is “dismissed.” You’re to go home, rest, and deliberate the lower charge on Monday.
Because you’re not in the room when the lawyers argue with each other, you don’t know that the manslaughter charge was dismissed at the request of the prosecutor, and over the objections of the defense.
The defense is worried that dismissing the higher charge and re-submitting the lower charge signals to jurors that they should compromise, finding Penny guilty.
But you, the juror, do know that this dismissal makes no sense. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know the basic fact: If a jury can’t reach a verdict on the main count, the case is a mistrial.
That’s to allow the prosecutor to try the case again, which makes sense: If the case is that important — as manslaughter is — the district attorney doesn’t . . . give up and go home.
But in this case, though, the judge has said, effectively, never mind.
How important, then, really, is this case, if what you have devoted the last two months to can instantly vanish, no explanation?
Plus: During her closing argument, Yoran had told you that Penny might not go to prison: “it is the judge . . . who decides . . . whether or not jail is warranted.”
You don’t know that it’s improper for her to say such a thing.
But you might well wonder: What the heck are we here for, if the punishment might be a slap on the wrist?
Are we here just for show?
After returning to court last Monday, it only took about an hour for the jury to render its “not guilty” verdict on the remaining count.
Everything jurors presumably had deadlocked on — cause of death, Penny’s state of mind — was magically fixed.
One explanation is that jurors concluded: If the court isn’t taking the top charge against Penny seriously, why should we weigh the bottom charge?
The jury decided on acquittal based on the evidence — but it sure didn’t hurt the defense that Bragg’s office self-sabotaged a major trial in its last moments.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Superfast chips are in high demand — not just by the artificial intelligence industry, but also by companies that work in computer graphics, robotics, autonomous vehicles, or drug discovery. “It’s fun to see all these amazing applications being created,” says Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia.
Speaking to David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, at the Communacopia + Technology conference in San Francisco, Huang explained how computer graphics, for example, rely heavily on AI infrastructure. “We compute one pixel, and we infer the other 32,” he says in an edition of Goldman Sachs Talks. “Computing one pixel takes a lot of energy. Inferring the other 32 takes very little energy, and you can do it very fast. And the image quality is incredible.”
Given this speed and flexibility, this infrastructure more than pays for itself, Huang says, responding to a question from Solomon about returns on investment for customers. By spending on such equipment, “the computing cost goes up a little bit — maybe it doubles,” Huang says. “But you reduce the computing time by a factor of about 20. You get 10x savings.”
How Huang sees the data center market
Chips that accelerate computing are everywhere, but there is no such thing as a universal accelerator, Huang says. Instead, every time a chip company enters a new market, it must learn new algorithms. They differ according to purpose; the algorithm for image processing would be different from the algorithm to model fluid dynamics.
“Usually, some 5-10% of the code represents 99.999% of the run time,” Huang says. “So if you take that 5% of the code and offloaded it onto an accelerator, then technically you should be able to speed up the application a hundred times.”
The promise of this kind of accelerated computing has led to keen investor interest in the data center market, Huang says. He thinks this infrastructure can yet be improved. For one thing, the average data center is “super-inefficient, because it’s filled with air, and air is a lousy conductor of electricity.” Making data centers denser — eliminating the air, in other words — will make them cheaper and more energy efficient.
Another revolution lies in how data centers now understand not just how to process data but the meaning of the data itself, and how to translate one form of data to another, Huang says: “English to images, images to English, English to proteins, proteins to chemicals.”
The chip supply chain needs to be resilient
The ecosystem of manufacturers and suppliers to the chip industry is sprawling and complex, and particularly concentrated in Asia. As a result, Nvidia tries to design diversity and redundancy into every aspect of its supply chain.
Companies need to have “enough intellectual property” to be able to shift their manufacturing from one “fab” — or chip-making facility — to another if they have to, Huang says. “Maybe the process technology won’t be as great, or you won’t get the same level of performance or cost, but you will still be able to provide the supply.”
This article is being provided for educational purposes only. The information contained in this article does not constitute a recommendation from any Goldman Sachs entity to the recipient, and Goldman Sachs is not providing any financial, economic, legal, investment, accounting, or tax advice through this article or to its recipient. Neither Goldman Sachs nor any of its affiliates makes any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the statements or any information contained in this article and any liability therefore (including in respect of direct, indirect, or consequential loss or damage) is expressly disclaimed.
Move over, BB-8: police in China are now testing a ball-shaped robot that "can identify and chase suspects" for the first time.
The spherical police robot in Wenzhou, China, features cameras, flashing lights, and a self-stabilizing design, according to the South China Morning Post. Equipped with tools like tear gas, it supports law enforcement and "cannot be smashed".
Authorities say it is also "resilient in hostile environments."
Developed by Zhejiang University's College of Control Science and Engineering, the 125kg spherical robot addresses challenges faced by wheeled and legged robots. According to Associate Professor Wang You, it can reach a top speed of 35km/h in just 2.5 seconds, Wenzhou Daily reported.
Wang You said: “This robot can cope with dangers such as falling or being beaten, and can perform tactical actions such as enemy identification, tracking and capture after modular modification.”
“Because it can complete tasks in hostile environments, it can make up for the deficiencies of [Wenzhou police] drones and robot dogs," Wang added.
The SCMP writes that the spherical robot remains functional even under attack, navigating crowds and harsh environments with ease. Equipped with speakers, net guns, and tear-gas sprayers, it enhances patrol efficiency and crisis response.
The robot is part of China's push for hi-tech innovation in policing. In March, the Ministries of Public Security and Industry issued a call for robot applications in areas like patrols, border defense, and evidence collection.
Examples of robot use will be showcased later for promotion in future initiatives. This week, Chengdu police deployed robots in commercial areas to prevent mob violence. In a simulated fight, a robot flashed lights, announced, “Win the fight, go to jail; lose the fight, go to the hospital,” and alerted nearby officers via text.
The Israeli military is preparing to deploy remotely controlled automated weapons across occupied West Bank checkpoints to target Palestinians, according to a report by the Israeli Army Radio on Sunday.
The system, named "Roeh-Yoreh" ("See-Fires"), is an advanced weaponry structure developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. It includes a tower with sophisticated surveillance equipment and a remote-controlled lethal fire mechanism.
Since its introduction into the Israeli military arsenal in 2008, the system has been exclusively used in Gaza, where it was deployed along the security fence to target Palestinians approaching the barrier.
According to Army Radio, the move to use the system in the West Bank comes despite its limited effectiveness in repelling the Hamas-led October 7 attacks out of Gaza.
In the early hours of the assault, Hamas used drones to hit the tower-mounted weapons, disabling them with ease and allowing fighters to cross the boundary into Israel.
The Israeli military plans to deploy dozens of Roeh-Yoreh systems in strategic locations across the West Bank, including settlement entrances and key control points, according to the report.
The goal, it added, was to prevent armed attacks and infiltrations into illegal Israeli settlements. The manufacturing of these systems for the West Bank has already begun.
Initially, they will be installed at high-risk locations by the Israeli military, with plans to expand deployment to additional sites.
According to the report, the 636 Reconnaissance Unit of the West Bank Division will operate the systems, amid rising Israeli concerns about growing security threats in the territory.
Around 700,000 Israeli settlers live in roughly 300 illegal settlements in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, which have been constructed since they were captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Under international law, settlement construction in an occupied territory is illegal.
Since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October last year, violence by the army and settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has skyrocketed.
At least 800 Palestinians from the West Bank have been killed by Israeli fire since the war began, with around 6,500 more wounded, according to Palestinian health officials.
