Sanitation

Weekend Briefing

From Reuters Daily Briefing

By Robert MacMillan, Reuters.com Weekend Editor

Thanks for reading the Weekend Briefing. The U.S. struck Iranian radar sites, complicating efforts to reach a ceasefire. The screwworm outbreak isn’t doing Texas’ cattlemen any favors. SpaceX’s upcoming IPO has drawn demand of about $150 billion from investors, twice the amount it’s seeking to raise. And I’m having trouble getting my work done because the On Assignment podcast on Turkmenistan is commanding my attention. Please do have a look.

AI is going to drink even more water

REUTERS/Noah Berger

Thirst: Data centers likely will consume twice as much power and water by 2030, U.N. researchers said. Japan’s digital minister defended a bill to change the country’s privacy law to use medical and criminal records for model training without people’s consent. China wants to use AI to promote Xi Jinping’s thinking among its people.
Target: Florida sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing the company’s GPT platform of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm and addicting young people. A British lawmaker sued xAI, saying people used it to create fake sexualized images of her. The world’s largest instrumental musicians union sued Warner Music Group and Universal for licensing members’ work to tech companies for AI training without their permission.

Trump undercuts Netanyahu at a critical moment

Rebuke: Trump called his Israeli counterpart crazy, modifying the word with an adjective that I can’t print here, illustrating their strained ties. Israel’s finance minister plans to expand three Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank by more than 2,000 homes.
And in Ukraine: NATO chief Mark Rutte warned young Russians that the chances are they’ll die in the Ukraine war if they join up. The EU is considering limiting protection for Ukrainian men of fighting age. Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin to invite him to face-to-face peace talks. Putin rejected the offer.

NASA withdraws space-station evacuation alert

Leak in space: Five astronauts prepared for evacuation for about two hours as Russian cosmonauts tried to fix a crack on its portion of the International Space Station. NASA disagreed with how they wanted to do the repair and withdrew the order after the Russians paused their efforts, an official with the agency said.
Maps to the stars: A vast web of cold cosmic gas stretches across the heart of our galaxy with threadlike filaments flowing through space and converging into bright clouds where new stars form. And now we have a really nice map for it.

The screwworm returns to the USA

First case in decades: A calf at a ranch in La Pryor, Texas tested positive for the flesh-eating parasite, which left a gaping hole around its umbilical cord. The World Health Organization pledged more than $500 million to fight the Ebola outbreak in Africa. The CDC warned that the outbreak could match or surpass the outbreak a decade ago.
Protein alert: A Florida mother and daughter sued Campbell’s after they said they found “worm-like organisms” in their SpaghettiOs.

Sleep with one eye open all the time

A somnolent duty: More than 20 police officers responsible for protecting the royal family were placed on restricted duties after being served with misconduct notices for falling asleep at Windsor Castle and leaving their posts unattended.
Arrested: A Norwegian teenager traveled to Britain to carry out a murder for money after a Swedish crime group used by the Iranian government recruited him.

Italy, sex education and consent

Legal fluidity: Sex education in Italian schools will require parental consent under a bill whose sponsor said it aims to protect children from “the confusion of gender propaganda.”
Put it away: Poland will ban children under 16 from using mobile phones in schools and will introduce stricter age-verification rules for access to pornography.

Iran World Cup players get their U.S. visas

A geopolitical contest: The team is staying in Tijuana and is scheduled to play against New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, then against Egypt in Seattle.
An own goal: About 60 people bought their cup tickets for free on FIFA’s website. The soccer body said it was a tech error and asked the fans to pay in full. FIFA banned vuvuzelas, whistles, air horns and other loud noise-making devices from the contest’s stadiums. It also banned reusable bottles and said fans can bring one factory-sealed disposable water bottle inside.

Before I forget…

It took 53 rescuers to free a man whose leg was trapped under a boulder nearly 400 feet inside a cave in northwestern Italy.
Thousands of Albanians protested in Tirana against a plan by a company linked to Jared Kushner to build a resort on coastal wetland that is home to flamingos, seals and sea-turtle nesting sites.
Ohio State University reached a $100 million settlement with nearly 300 survivors of sex abuse from 1978 to 1998 at the hands of the school’s former campus doctor.
Four migrants working as fruit pickers in slave-like conditions in southern Italy were burned to death in a van. Dozens of people died after a truck carrying them from Mali to Niger broke down in the Sahara Desert.
This is not a dead parrot: An expedition spotted a rarely seen blue-fronted lorikeet on the island of Buru in Indonesia.
More interesting fauna: Scientists also discovered a new species of dragonfly as well as a grasshopper and a fluorescent spider on the Lisima plateau in Angola.
Thanks to everyone for their passionate replies regarding daylight saving time. Most of you want a permanent standard time, in case you were wondering.

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Before I forget…