Over the last 48 hours, TikTok’s fate in the United States has been a whirlwind of chaos, politics, and sudden reversals. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ban on the app, slated to begin on Sunday, January 19. The Biden Administration, in its final hours, announced it would not enforce the ban immediately.…
I have a new idea for you, one that’s much more speculative than gold. It’s a play on a mineral that our government wants as much of as it can possibly get. And yet, it’s in desperately short supply. I’m talking about antimony – and a company that mines it, United States Antimony Corp. (UAMY), remarks Sean Brodrick, editor at Weiss Ratings Daily.
Antimony is a shiny gray metalloid. It’s used as a fire retardant, as well as in things like photovoltaic glass and lead-acid batteries.
It’s also essential as a hardener in weapons of all sorts. The US Interior Department has listed antimony as a mineral critical to our economic and national security just like cobalt and uranium. And no wonder. Antimony is used as a hardening agent for bullets and tanks. Other armored vehicles, artillery shells, cruise missiles, and javelin missiles all contain antimony, too.
China produces about half of the world’s antimony. Global supply was already tightening when China, the world’s biggest exporter, imposed export controls starting on Sept. 15. Then, more recently, China tightened the screws. It outright banned exports to the US of gallium, germanium, antimony, and other key high-tech materials with potential military applications.
Oddly, this is not about the military (at least for now). Beijing is mad that the US is tightening restrictions on semiconductor exports to China. So, it hit back by stopping its critical metals exports to the US.
The price of antimony has already TRIPLED since May. No wonder, then, that Western governments are fast-tracking antimony mine developments and have been backing billion-dollar loans for similar mining projects.
UAMY is an American company that operates the US’s only antimony mill in Montana, which runs at about 50% capacity. Interestingly, UAMY inked a deal recently to test another company’s antimony ore, with the idea of processing that in Montana.
What’s more, United States Antimony recently staked 4,000 acres of claims in Alaska’s interior around an antimony mine that last produced ore in World War I. Why Alaska? Only four US states have known antimony deposits — Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada. Alaska holds deposits of nearly all the 50 minerals that the US Geological Survey considers “critical” to the American economy and national security.
I firmly believe this stock is going much higher as the hunger for antimony increases.
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Tech titans directed a wave of criticism at President Donald Trump’s move to abandon the Paris climate agreement — eight years ago.
When he did the same thing this week, they ignored it.
The differences between 2017 and now are stark: Heat-trapping emissions continue to rise globally, and disasters are accelerating.That comes as the tech industry’s energy needs have grown in part because of power-hungry data centers related to artificial intelligence and other technologies. One result is a closer connection between a president who champions fossil fuels and executives in Silicon Valley who appear less willing to question his move to abandon the global climate pact.
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“Optimistic and celebrating,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said minutes after Trump ordered the nation’s exit from the Paris Agreement.
Zuckerberg’s post — while not a direct response to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal — included an American flag emoji and a grinning photo of him with his wife Priscilla Chan in black-tie and formal attire. They were preparing to co-host an inaugural ball for Trump, who last year threatened to jail the Meta CEO.
The heads of Apple, Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, offered “congratulations” to the president and reportedly donated millions of dollars to his inaugural committee.
“Eight years ago many tech leaders rightly condemned Trump’s withdrawal from Paris,” said Bill Weihl, Facebook’s former director of sustainability who later founded the environmental advocacy group ClimateVoice. “Their silence now is cowardly, complicit in reinforcing the status quo fossil fuel economy, and shows that they care more about their own profits than the American people.”
Apple, Google and Meta didn’t respond to requests for comment. Microsoft declined to provide a response.
“Silicon Valley is embracing President Trump because they have been failed by the Democrats’ weak and incompetent leadership for the last four years,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement. “American energy is being unleashed.”
The president has linked his campaign pledge to promote oil and gas development with a desire — shared by many in Silicon Valley — to “win the A.I. arms race with China (and others),” as Trump put it when selecting former North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum to lead the Interior Department and a planned National Energy Council. Trump sees the production of additional fossil fuels as key to achieving the country’s AI aims. (Former President Joe Biden also prioritized the development of artificial intelligence but sought to power the technology with new renewable energy installations.)
Trump has already recruited OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to spearhead a $500 billion AI and data center megaproject known as Stargate. The energy sources for the initiative haven’t been announced.
“It is clear that everyone’s afraid to offend the president,” said David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, who spoke with POLITICO’s E&E News from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Logically, it’s because they’re worried about retaliation, and they’re worried about keeping whatever favors they think they can get from government.”
The tech industry’s new approach to Trump was led by Elon Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla and another one-time critic of the president’s climate policy. He was joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who during the Biden administration committed $10 billion of his personal fortune to launch an eponymous environmental group. Both billionaires attended Trump’s second inauguration, along with Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Amazon spokesperson August Green said the online retailer remains committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its globally operations by 2040.
Tech and Trump, no longer on the rocks
Trump has long been skeptical of international institutions and deals. He found the United Nations-brokered Paris Agreement particularly irksome.
Trump initially deliberated over leaving the climate pact from the outset of his first term, and several of his close advisers and Cabinet members argued against it. They reasoned that it would be better to have influence over the rules governing emissions and clean energy than to be outside the process.
Cook, the Apple CEO, privately lobbied Trump to uphold the deal. Publicly, his company signed onto an open letter — along with Google, Microsoft and Facebook — that urged the president to stay in the 2015 Paris pact.
Trump didn’t.
The reaction from Silicon Valley following his June 1, 2017, announcement that he was leaving was quick and critical. Musk quit the White House’s business councils, and other tech CEOs took to social media to criticize the decision.
“Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook at the time. Cook tweeted that Trump’s move was “wrong for our planet.” Pichai said he was “disappointed with today’s decision.” Microsoft’s Satya Nadella added that “climate change is an urgent issue that demands global action.”
They all joined a coalition in 2017 that eventually became America Is All In, a group of leaders from states, cities, businesses and beyond that has vowed to help the United States achieve its promised emissions reductions. Facebook and Microsoft even submitted climate action plans that outlined their proposals for reducing carbon emissions.
In 2020, Microsoft shocked corporate America when it made a “carbon negative” commitment for the end of the decade, promising to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits. Apple, Google and Facebook all followed with more modest carbon neutrality pledges for 2030.
The next year, Joe Biden became president and immediately rejoined the Paris Agreement, making climate action a pillar of his administration. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, providing hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and clean energy projects, many tech companies redoubled their efforts to decarbonize.
At the same time, the giants of Silicon Valley were pouring billions of dollars into developing AI applications — and the data centers and energy infrastructure needed to run them. Microsoft’s emissions have jumped 29 percent since the company announced its carbon negative pledge in 2020. Google’s emissions have soared by 67 percent over the same period.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment,” Google said in its 2024 environmental report.
Silicon Valley sours on Biden
While many technology firms welcomed Biden’s climate policy, they sharply differed with him on other issues that are central to their profitability. The Biden administration took a hard line against tech consolidation, opening antitrust cases against Google and probing Microsoft and the chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.
Biden also sided with labor in a high-profile unionization drive at Amazon and criticized the company and its founder for not paying more in taxes amid a spike in inflation. Bezos responded by accusing the White House of “misdirection.”
The Biden administration publicly sparred with Musk as well, who eventually became the biggest financial supporter of Trump’s campaign, despite their differences on climate policy.
When Trump won back the White House, Bezos and a steady stream of other tech executives flew to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to meet with the Republican leader, who rejects the basic tenets of climate science.
Analysts and advocates expect the companies to continue pursuing their decarbonization commitments in the second Trump era, albeit with less vigor and fanfare.
“Investors and companies understand that the demand for energy is changing, and that diversified businesses are poised to be the energy companies of the future,” said Kirsten Spalding, vice president of the investor network at Ceres, a group of institutional investors advocating for climate action.
She doesn’t put too much weight on the withdrawal from Paris, arguing that what happens on the ground is what matters: “It’s like putting a billboard up, but it doesn’t actually change the work,” Spalding said.
Victor, the University of California professor, said there is a disconnect between what’s happening in Silicon Valley and Davos, the exclusive Swiss conference featuring many of the world’s biggest corporations.
Executives who attended the conference this week talked up corporate efforts to deploy carbon capture technology and invest in battery storage and solar.
Meanwhile, “their bosses are kissing the ring,” Victor said.
Trump, in his own speech to the Davos crowd Thursday, told them how he would unleash America’s “liquid gold” and build new fossil fuel-fired power plants to run data centers.
Then he took questions from corporate heavyweights. No one asked about climate change.
Mario Draghi dreamt it, Donald Trump announced it. “Stargate,” the mega-project to invest in infrastructure to develop artificial intelligence (AI), was unveiled by Trump on Tuesday, January 21. The initiative sends a simple and effective message that the European Union is still unable to convey: A major power setting itself the goal of being at the forefront of a new technological frontier. While the European Union is still in the process of diagnosing its economic stall, as highlighted by the Draghi report, the gap between the EU and the United States threatens to widen even further, to the benefit of the latter, which is demonstrating its strength by aligning its political objectives with technological advancements and investment capacity. Trump has become the spokesperson for a private initiative – pledging to spend $100 billion (€96 billion) immediately, then another $400 billion by the end of his term – to build massive data centers in the US and an energy system capable of powering them. At this stage, investment in these “AI factories” in Europe is capped at €1.5 billion. The American project will be implemented by cloud specialist Oracle, Japanese investment giant Softbank and generative AI start-up OpenAI. Even if too much shouldn’t be read into the hype, the US can be given credit once again for having a keen sense of marketing, with a name that evokes the conquest of space, significant sums of money and a mobilizing narrative: “This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” boasted Trump. A sprinkling of investments It may be argued that some of these investments had already been announced, that industry players didn’t wait for Trump to anticipate the revolution underway, that financing still needs to be mobilized, and that the 100,000 “immediate” job creations are more of a slogan than an economic reality. Regardless, it’s clear that, once again, Europe will find it hard to respond. Its capacities are still fragmented, its decision-making processes are still laborious and its ability to attract investment for such projects is no match for that of the US. Europe remains cowering in its defensive posture in the face of the onslaught of its rivals. Initiatives are limited to establishing standards, creating ineffective barriers and making a few investments to create the illusion of action. Since Trump’s inauguration, the planet has been living to the rhythm of his executive orders, while almost a year will have passed between the end of the European Parliament’s last legislature and the first decisions of the new Commission expected in the next few weeks. This way of working is no longer suitable for the demands of today’s world. Everything needs to be reviewed to mitigate this cruel contrast: governance, mobilizing capital and initiatives. Above all, the 27 member states need to focus on areas where the Union effectively tackles threats to our sovereignty and thwarts the risks of creeping subservience. But who is saying this? The extremes believe that Europe is the problem, not the solution, while the rest of the political class is content with incantations. But the time for action is now. History never repeats itself. Le Monde Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version. Reuse this content
Fault LinesThe Big Tech Takeover of American PoliticsSocial media is no longer just a tool for politicians to get out their message; politicians now have to shape themselves into optimized vessels for social media.By Jay Caspian KangJanuary 24, 2025Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk at Donald Trump’s Inauguration in January, 2025.Photograph by Saul Loeb / Pool / GettySave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyIn normal times, Inaugurations are gossipy affairs where the worst, and perhaps most fun, impulses of the political media get put on full display. We comment on hats worn by, say, Aretha Franklin or Ivanka Trump, and who has aged well or terribly in the past four years, and whose spouse looks bored. We read body language, interpret eye rolls, scan the lists of invitees to the various balls and parties for clues into who might hold influence on the incoming President. Compared with Donald Trump’s first Inauguration, which was covered gravely and with zero humor, his second, on Monday, seemed like business as usual. Among the guests, Shou Zi Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, drew notable attention after the platform’s temporary blackout over the weekend. He, along with Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and, of course, Elon Musk, were seated behind the Trump family during the ceremony, a powerful image that suggested Silicon Valley—which had previously been either politically agnostic, economically libertarian (but also culturally progressive), or slightly left-leaning—had switched their allegiances and would be instrumental in Trump’s “golden age of America.”In the opening column for Fault Lines, I tried to update the core thesis of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” from 1985, which, roughly speaking, argues that revolutions in information technology, particularly the rise of television, dictated the messages that were relayed through new mediums in much more powerful ways than we might expect. The defining characteristics of modern political discourse—deep polarization, escalating interpersonal conflicts, and the constant need to establish oneself as the anti-establishment figure—were more or less inevitable because of the speed of Internet communication, the inherently adversarial and mostly anonymous characteristics of online chatter, and the isolation that comes with staring at a screen all day.What this means in the political realm is that social media is no longer just a tool for politicians to get out their message; politicians now have to shape themselves into optimized vessels for social media. In 2016, Trump became the Twitter President, but information technology has changed in the past nine years, and Trump, who always understood the power of catchphrases—“You’re fired!”—has turned himself into an ideal President for the short-form-video format that has proliferated on platforms such as TikTok. His long-winded rallies might have been derided by much of the press, but he has the same editing impulses as Twitch personalities, like Kai Cenat, and the podcaster Joe Rogan, who produce hours of content a week and capitalize on a seemingly counterintuitive dynamic, where an almost unbearably long-form original product gets chopped up and distributed as short viral clips. Only a few people watch this kind of content in full, but these viral-clip-makers have a similar outlook as vérité documentarians: if you just keep the camera rolling, something interesting is bound to happen. Trump, already the biggest star that social media has ever seen, is now onstage, in the director’s chair, and at the ticket booth at the same time. He also understood that the attention economy had shifted toward these celebrities and, apparently on the advice of his son Barron, spent much of his campaign talking to the masters of the algorithm. The Inauguration, which was attended not only by the tech moguls but also by a collection of influencers including Jake and Logan Paul and Rogan himself, was the ceremonial introduction for the new establishment media.For us Postmanites, then, Big Tech’s drift toward the right should suggest that the mediums, whether Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, or Google, have been temporarily captured by the right. We should expect those platforms, which have become the nation’s public square, to amplify the politics of the people who own them, just as we expect traditional media companies to reflect the beliefs of their founders. The only question left is whether these tech titans are fully on board with Trump’s agenda, or if they are simply acknowledging a tidal shift in American politics and making nice with the new President. Will they uphold a commitment to free speech, which all of them, in various ways, espouse, or is free speech just the pretext to undoing social, corporate, and political norms that might have restrained their companies from fully hijacking America’s attention? Will they fiddle with the knobs of their platforms, as Musk has done at X, to produce a chaotic agitprop machine? Or are they just happy they no longer have to pay for D.E.I. consultants or deal with an aggressive F.T.C.?I imagine it’s a little of all these options. The more cautious platforms won’t go full Musk and will hedge their bets in case political sentiment swings back to the left, or, at the very least, they’ll cloud their intentions in vague missives about free speech. But the liberal-oriented measures that some of these companies have taken, however half-heartedly, in the course of the past decade—which included attempts to flag disinformation, fact-check political posts, and, most tellingly, limit Trump’s influence on their platforms—will disappear. In 2017, when Trump first came into office, the resistance lived on both social and traditional media. The two had a symbiotic relationship—Twitter discourse was dominated by “blue-check” accounts, many of which belonged to those working for news organizations. (Celebrities also had a role in this discourse, albeit more of a supporting one.) These posters and the outlets that employed them were almost uniformly liberal and entirely fixated on whatever Trump posted that day. They placed pressure on social-media companies to adopt new safeguards and ultimately ban Trump’s account.Musk upended all that when he purchased Twitter, installed a pay-for-play verification system for blue checks, and suppressed outgoing links. (He also replaced Trump as the center around which all outrage discourse spins; apparently the quickest way to amass political power in America is to become the most hated person on Twitter.) Zuckerberg, in the announcements that he made earlier this month about ending fact checking and D.E.I. at Meta, indicated that the era of liberal influence in his company was over. Just those two alone should be enough to take apart the pipelines of the #Resistance. This, in some ways, is a good thing. Your online life might feel a bit more scammy and conspiracy-brained once these guardrails are lifted, but the attempts to control disinformation, bigoted speech, or Trump himself should all be seen as failures that only furthered the suspicion that the liberal establishment was trying to censor or suppress the beliefs of half the country, which, let’s admit, was kind of what they were doing.But it also means that the resistance has lost its voice. In the past week, many outlets, including the Times, have written stories about the seeming lack of outrage and resolve among Democrats. I have noticed this myself since the election and, though I do think many traumatized liberals have shied away from the news, I wonder if the muting of dissent and the inability to organize mass protests like the ones after Trump’s first Inauguration might more reflect a forceful passing of the megaphone from the left to the right.Most communities, especially political ones, are online now. Five years ago, a video of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer supercharged the entire liberal online infrastructure. Symbols of allegiance were widely shared—Black Lives Matter signs, solidarity posts on Instagram, iconic renderings of Floyd—and the online communities that activists had been building since the killing of Trayvon Martin, in 2012, took to the streets for weeks of protest. Progressives rely on socially distributed moral pressure, which used to be the lingua franca of social media. Maybe it seemed that “wokeness,” whatever that means, went too far during this period, that its views didn’t reflect the priorities and beliefs of the majority of Democrats. But that is an inevitable outcome for a medium that amplifies heightened commentary and discourse. Wokeness was nothing more than the maximalized version of a progressive affinity system, perfectly tailored for social media and rubber-stamped by the élite establishment and prestige news media. What happens to the angry Democratic voter when they are cut off from their social-affinity networks? One can only rage alone for so long.A second Postmanite question: If a large portion of liberals, especially those comfortable enough to believe the worst of Trump will not harm them, fall into a weary sort of acceptance, will the mainstream media follow suit? Objectivity in journalism is a noble goal, but, like everything else, it’s shaped by some mix of cultural trends, audience preferences, and technology. The Obama years, for example, gave rise to a technocratic voice that was shaped by the rise of blogging. The triumph of electing a broadly popular, Black President demanded a voice that matched liberal enthusiasm and felt like it represented the technological, Internet-fuelled future. Blogging, in turn, had its own demands—namely, the need to post constantly—which necessitated faster access to authoritative sources. You no longer had the time to call five people to take the temperature around an issue and then cautiously hint at some conclusion. To keep up, you had to access Googleable information, either in the form of data or a historical anecdote that could be found in the depths of a Google Books search result.These, for the most part, were welcome advances that broadened the scope of political commentary and opened audiences up to new forms of evidence outside the self-proclaimed objectivity and authority of the journalist. But liberal bloggers’ choke hold on the establishment came from their ability to adapt to new forms, be it social media or podcasting or TikTok, and these mediums changed much more quickly than they had during the decades when people got a newspaper in the morning and tuned into Peter Jennings in the evening. Consequently, technology had a larger role in how journalists thought about their influence.Data and history might have worked well for blogs, but they don’t really fit into short-form videos. You can make all the charts and infographics you want, but, in the end, video requires interpersonal drama: fake beefs between YouTubers, two straight hours of politicians insulting their rivals at a rally, conspiracy-coded “rabbit holes” about Nikola Tesla and the Great Pyramid of Giza. This doesn’t mean that the bloggers who came to prominence during the Obama era are now irrelevant, but they have had to adjust like everyone else to these new forms, which will require a change in message to fit the new medium. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found in my career that the same people tend to be the first movers on every new platform, which is a talent.) In a recent column for the Times, Ross Douthat described the impending shift away from data and argued that we were returning to a narrative and dramatic form. “So as we enter into the Trump restoration,” Douthat wrote, “any auguries about the next four years need to be adequate to this mythopoetic landscape, and dramatically fitting in the fate that they envision for both the president and the United States.”Can the liberal mainstream media tell a cinematic, mythopoetic story in a time when the information infrastructure of the “resistance” has been commandeered and turned against them? I am skeptical, mostly because I don’t know if any such story could survive the hostilities of the people who own the airwaves. If, in 2017, a Trump associate had given the same Sieg-heil-like salute that Musk gave this week at the Inauguration, every news outlet would have multiple stories offering frame-by-frame analyses. Historians would be called in to provide context, and every social-media app would be trembling with outrage. The liberal media’s response to Musk somewhat followed that template, but at a fraction of the scale. Some might see all this as a sign of progress; the politics of calling everyone a “fascist” did not work and it’s time for Democrats to move on to some other story, perhaps about economic populism or staunch centrism. I agree with that on the merits, but I see more capitulation than strategy in the tempered response to Trump’s second term. Most liberals, at least the ones I’ve spoken to in the past two months, have chosen to log off and wait until the next election cycle, which means they will not hear whatever story the Democrats start to tell. Who can blame them for not registering their outrage on the platforms of the men who lined up behind the Trump family at the Inauguration? The trolls won the medium and the country went with it.But there is still hope for the Democrats because they, like the Republican establishment in 2016, are primed for a hostile takeover. In the midterms, will we see candidates crop up across the country who express anger at liberal institutions, at internal corruption in local Democratic governance, and at the selfishness of leaders such as Joe Biden who have put their own egos and legacy over the good of the Party? If so, these new candidates—I do not think we know who any of them are at this point—will be tapping into the most valuable commodities in both the new and old media: conflict and uncomfortable truths. Their specific policy positions will not matter as much as their willingness to call out everyone from Biden and Kamala Harris, to the tech oligarchy, to whatever failing mayor happens to be nearby. Social media will eat them up, Joe Rogan will admire their authenticity, the video clippers will spread their “truth bombs” across the Internet, and they might very well be able to ride that wave of discontent all the way through to 2028. The viral economy might have taken over our lives, but it is also fickle and always backlashing against itself. ♦
2025 Black Rock City Temple: Temple of the Deep. Image © Miguel Arraiz GarcíaShareShareFacebookTwitterMailPinterestWhatsappOrhttps://www.archdaily.com/1026145/miguel-arraiz-reveals-temple-of-the-deep-for-burning-man-2025-in-nevada-united-statesClipboard”COPY”CopySpanish architect Miguel Arraiz has introduced the design for the 2025 Burning Man Temple, titled Temple of the Deep. Drawing inspiration from the natural landscape of the Black Rock Desert, the Temple aims to provide a space for reflection, healing, and connection. The Temple of the Deep explores the concept of radical acceptance, emphasizing the importance of fully experiencing emotions as part of the healing process.
Washington [US], January 24 (ANI): Apple has released Safari Technology Preview 212, the latest update for its experimental browser.First introduced in March 2016, Safari Technology Preview is designed to let users explore and test upcoming features intended for future releases of the Safari browser.Also Read | Mahasamund Road Accident: Infant Killed, 43 Injured As Bus Rams Into Stationary Truck in Chhattisgarh; CM Vishnu Deo Sai Expresses Grief.The new update focuses on enhancing the user experience, bringing a variety of bug fixes and improvements in multiple areas.The update includes optimizations for a wide range of web technologies such as Authentication, Canvas, CSS, Forms, JavaScript, Loading, Networking, PDF, Rendering, SVG, Text, Web API, and the Web Inspector, according to Mac Rumours.Also Read | ‘Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah’ Fame Gurucharan Singh’s Father Shares Health Update on the Actor After Hospitalisation, Reveals ‘He Is out of Danger’.These improvements aim to address issues and enhance the overall performance of the browser for developers and advanced users who rely on cutting-edge web tools.The latest release of Safari Technology Preview is compatible with macOS Sonoma and macOS Sequoia, the most recent versions of macOS.Users can easily download and install the update via the Software Update mechanism found in System Preferences or System Settings, provided they have already installed Safari Technology Preview from Apple’s official website.Apple’s Safari Technology Preview program continues to gather valuable feedback from developers and users.As per Mac Rumours, the goal is to fine-tune features before they are included in the regular Safari releases.Unlike the full version of Safari, this experimental browser does not require a developer account, making it accessible to a broader audience eager to test new capabilities.Safari Technology Preview allows users to run the experimental version of the browser alongside the regular Safari browser, ensuring that testing and feedback do not interfere with daily web usage.Although designed primarily for developers, anyone with an interest in web technologies can download and use Safari Technology Preview.This preview version offers a glimpse into the future of Safari, providing both developers and users the opportunity to explore and provide feedback on new features before they make their way into official Safari updates.By gathering insights from real-world usage, Apple aims to improve the quality and stability of the final features, which ultimately enhance the web browsing experience for all users.For those interested in learning more about the changes included in Safari Technology Preview 212, Apple has made the complete release notes available on the Safari Technology Preview website.The release notes offer a detailed breakdown of the updates and fixes introduced in this version, providing transparency and allowing users to track progress. (ANI)(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky will pay a working visit to the United States in early February, where he might meet his new US counterpart Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump’s new envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, according to reports by Aktualne.cz yesterday.
The Czech government will discuss the minister’s visit to the US next week.
The foreign minister’s visit is expected to take place from 5-8 February. The Foreign Ministry has not yet confirmed whom Lipavsky will meet in the US. However, Aktualne.cz reported that the Czech embassy in Washington has been instructed to try to arrange meetings with the officials Lipavsky wants to meet the most.
“Czech diplomacy has been preparing for both outcomes of the election – including Donald Trump’s victory. Together with the [US] side, I will address transatlantic security, new technologies, cybersecurity and energy. We are in agreement with Trump on fundamental foreign policy challenges,” Lipavsky told the server.
According to the document to be debated by the cabinet: “The primary goal of the trip is to send a signal to the new US administration about the Czech Republic’s readiness to continue developing dynamic bilateral relations with the US in all its areas, immediately after the new administration takes office, and to establish personal contacts between the foreign minister and its members.”
Lipavsky said in recent days that he was looking forward to working with the new head of US diplomacy to strengthen bilateral relations and fight the new “axis of evil”. He said he also expected Rubio to take a firm stance on “authoritarian influences”.See also
Rubio, who has been described as a hawk in his approach to China, Iran and Cuba, became the first confirmed member of President Trump’s new administration on Monday.
Lipavsky will also attend the Globsec forum in the United States, scheduled to begin on 6 February. “The forum will be a good opportunity to discuss common challenges with leaders from both the Republican and Democratic camps and set the future shape of transatlantic cooperation,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Daniel Drake.
The Czech delegation to accompany Lipavsky to Washington is to consist of eight people, with the names to be decided in the coming days.
Good Friday morning. First in Sunburn — U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds continues to bring heavy hitters in Florida Republican politics onto his campaign. Chris Hudson, a 10-year veteran of Americans For Prosperity, has joined the campaign as a senior adviser. He follows Tony Fabrizio, President Donald Trump’s top pollster, and longtime GOP campaign consultants Ryan…
Just a few years ago, children with Type 1 diabetes reported to the school nurse several times a day to get a finger pricked to check whether their blood sugar was dangerously high or low.The introduction of the continuous glucose monitor (CGM) made that unnecessary. The small device, typically attached to the arm, has a sensor under the skin that sends readings to an app on a phone or other wireless device. The app shows blood sugar levels at a glance and sounds an alarm when they move out of a normal range.Blood sugar that’s too high could call for a dose of insulin — delivered by injection or the touch of a button on an insulin pump — to stave off potentially life-threatening complications including loss of consciousness, while a sip of juice could remedy blood sugar that’s too low, preventing problems such as dizziness and seizures.Schools around the country say teachers listen for CGM alarms from students’ phones in the classroom. Yet many parents say that there’s no guarantee a teacher will hear an alarm in a busy classroom and that it falls to them to ensure their child is safe when out of a teacher’s earshot by monitoring the app themselves, though they may not be able to quickly contact their child.
Ruby Inman attends class with her diabetes support dog, Echo. Ruby’s mom, Taylor Inman, a pediatric pulmonologist, says Ruby got little help from her San Diego public school after being diagnosed at age 6 with Type 1 diabetes and starting to use a continuous glucose monitor, which triggers an alarm if her blood sugar is too high or low. Her public school would not commit to monitoring the alarms via an app, so her family got the dog, which is trained to detect abnormal blood sugar levels, and later transferred Ruby to a private school that remotely monitors the alarms.
Taylor Inman
Parents say school nurses or administrative staff should remotely monitor CGM apps, making sure someone is paying attention even when a student is outside the classroom — such as at recess, in a noisy lunchroom, or on a field trip.But many schools have resisted, citing staff shortages and concerns about internet reliability and technical problems with the devices. About one-third of schools do not have a full-time nurse, according to a 2021 survey by the National Association of School Nurses, though other staff can be trained to monitor CGMs.Caring for children with Type 1 diabetes is nothing new for schools. Before CGMs, there was no alarm that signaled a problem; instead, it was caught with a time-consuming finger-prick test, or when the problem had progressed and the child showed symptoms of complications.With the proliferation of insulin pumps, many kids can respond to problems themselves, reducing the need for schools to provide injections as well.Parents say they are not asking schools to continuously monitor their child’s readings, but rather to ensure that an adult at the school checks that the child responds appropriately.
“People at the [school] district don’t understand the illness, and they don’t understand the urgency,” said Julie Calidonio of Lutz, Florida.Calidonio’s son Luke, 12, uses a CGM but has received little support from his school, she said. Relying on school staff to hear the alarms led to instances in which no one was nearby to intervene if his blood sugar dropped to critical levels.”Why have this technology that is meant to prevent harms, and we are not acting on it,” she said.Corey Dierdorff, a spokesperson for the Pasco County School District, where Luke attends school, said in a statement to KFF Health News that staff members react when they hear a student’s CGM sound an alert. Asked why the district won’t agree to have staff remotely monitor the alarms, he noted concerns about internet reliability.In September, Calidonio filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department against the district, saying its inability to monitor the devices violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires schools to make accommodations for students with diabetes, among other conditions. She is still awaiting a decision.The complaint comes about four years after the Connecticut U.S. attorney’s office determined that having school staffers monitor a student’s CGM was a “reasonable accommodation” under the ADA. That determination was made after four students filed complaints against four Connecticut school districts.”We fought this fight and won this fight,” said Jonathan Chappell, one of two attorneys who filed the complaints in Connecticut. But the decision has yet to affect students outside the state, he said.
Chappell and Bonnie Roswig, an attorney and director of the nonprofit Center for Children’s Advocacy Disability Rights Project, both said they have heard from parents in 40 states having trouble getting their children’s CGMs remotely monitored in school. Parents in 10 states have filed similar complaints, they said.CGMs today are used by most of the estimated 300,000 people in the U.S. with Type 1 diabetes under age 20, health experts say. Also known as juvenile diabetes, it is an autoimmune disease typically diagnosed in early childhood and treated with daily insulin to help regulate blood sugar. It affects about 1 in 400 people under 20, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.(CGMs are also used by those with Type 2 diabetes, a different disease tied to risk factors such as diet and exercise that affects tens of millions of people — including a growing number of children, though it is usually not diagnosed until the early teens. Most people with Type 2 diabetes do not take insulin.)Students with diabetes or another disease or disability typically have a health care plan, developed by their doctor, that works with a school-approved plan to get the support they need. It details necessary accommodations to attend school, such as allowing a child to eat in class or ensuring staff members are trained to check blood glucose or give a shot of insulin.For children with Type 1 diabetes, the plan usually includes monitoring CGMs several times a day and responding to alarms, Roswig said.Lynn Nelson, president-elect of the National Association of School Nurses, said when doctors and parents deem a student needs their CGM remotely monitored, the school is obligated under the ADA to meet that need. “It is legally required and the right thing to do.”Nelson, who also manages school nurse programs in Washington state, said schools often must balance the students’ needs with having enough administrative staff.
“There are real workforce challenges, but that means schools have to go above and beyond for an individual student,” she said.Henry Rodriguez, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of South Florida and a spokesperson for the American Diabetes Association, said remote monitoring can be challenging for schools. While they advocate for giving every child what they need to manage their diabetes at school, he said, schools can be limited by a lack of support staff, including nurses.The association last year updated its policy around CGMs, stating: “School districts should remove barriers to remote monitoring by school nurses or trained school staff if this is medically necessary for the student.”In San Diego, Taylor Inman, a pediatric pulmonologist, said her daughter, Ruby, 8, received little help from her public school after being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and starting to use a CGM.She said alerts from Ruby’s phone often went unheard outside the classroom, and she could not always reach someone at the school to make sure Ruby was reacting when her blood sugar levels moved into the abnormal range.”We kept asking for the school to follow my daughter’s CGM and were told they were not allowed to,” she said.In a 2020 memo to school nurses that remains in effect, Howard Taras, the San Diego Unified School District’s medical adviser, said if a student’s doctor recommends remote monitoring, it should be done by their parents or doctor’s office staff.
CGM alarms can be “disruptive to the student’s education, to classmates and to staff members with other responsibilities,” Taras wrote.”Alarms are closely monitored, even those that occur outside of the classroom,” Susan Barndollar, the district’s executive director of nursing and wellness, said in a statement. Trained adults, including teachers and aides, listen for the alarms when in class, at recess, at gym class, or during a field trip, she said.She said the problem with remote monitoring is that staff in the school office doing the monitoring may not know where the student is to tend to them quickly.Inman said last year they paid $20,000 for a diabetes support dog trained to detect high or low blood sugar and later transferred Ruby to a private school that remotely tracks her CGM.”Her blood sugar is better controlled, and she is not scared and stressed anymore and can focus on learning,” she said. “She is happy to go to school and is thriving.”Some schools have changed their policies. For more than a year, several parents lobbied Loudoun County Public Schools in Northern Virginia to have school nurses follow CGM alerts from their own wireless devices.The district board approved the change, which took effect in August and affects about 100 of the district’s more than 80,000 students.
Before, Lauren Valentine would get alerts from 8-year-old son Leo’s CGM and call the school he attends in Loudoun County, not knowing if anyone was taking action. Valentine said the school nurse now tracks Leo’s blood sugar from an iPad in the clinic.”It takes the responsibility off my son and the pressure off the teacher,” she said. “And it gives us peace of mind that the school clinic nurses know what is happening.”KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.