The model is a massive part of the AI-ecosystem, used by Stable Diffusion and other major generative AI products. The removal follows discoveries made by Stanford researchers, who found thousands instances of suspected child sexual abuse material in the dataset.

European countries struck a key deal on Wednesday to overhaul their joint migration system, making a patchwork of compromises aimed at allaying mounting pressure from ascendant far-right political parties across the continent. The plan, named the European Union migration and asylum pact, was the result of three years of negotiations. With anti-migrant sentiment rising and driving a shift to the right in Europe and beyond, negotiators were under pressure to finalize the agreement ahead of elections this summer across the bloc’s 27 nations. The agreement aims to make it easier to deport failed asylum seekers and to limit entry of migrants into the bloc. It also seeks to give governments a greater sense of control over their borders while bolstering the E.U.’s role in migration management — treating it as a European issue, not just a national one.

Communities are using an organizing tool intended for sports stadiums to bargain with energy transition projects for labor standards and affordable housing.

At last, this was the year he lost some patience.

Donald Trump said Tuesday at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, that undocumented migrants are “destroying the blood of our country” — the latest anti-immigrant comments from the former president in the sprint to the Iowa caucuses — and pushed backon recent criticism that his rhetoric has echoed Adolf Hitler, telling a crowd in Iowa that he’s never read “Mein Kampf” or any book for that matter.

A fan fiction writer has been sued by the estate of JRR Tolkien for copyright after publishing his own sequel to The Lord of the Rings. US-based author Demetrious Polychron published a book called The Fellowship of the King in 2022. He dubbed it "the pitch-perfect sequel to The Lord of the Rings." The court ruled that Polychron must stop distributing copies of the book and destroy all physical and electronic copies. 'Frivolous' lawsuit In April 2023 Polychron attempted to sue the Tolkein estate and Amazon, claiming the TV series, Rings of Power, infringed the copyright in his book. The case was dismissed after the judge ruled that Polychron's own book was infringing on Amazon's prequel that was released in September 2022. The Rings of Power dazzling but slow, say critics The Tolkien Estate then filed a separate lawsuit against Polychron for an injunction to stop The Fellowship of the King from being further distributed. On Thursday Judge Steven V Wilson called the lawsuit "frivolous and unreasonably filed" and granted the permanent injunction, preventing him from selling his book and any other planned sequels, of which there were six. The court also awarded lawyer's fees totalling $134,000 (£106,000) to the Tolkien Estate and Amazon in connection with Polychron's lawsuit. The estate's UK solicitor, Steven Maier of Maier Blackburn, said: "This is an important success for the Tolkien Estate, which will not permit unauthorised authors and publishers to monetise JRR Tolkien's much-loved works in this way. "This case involved a serious infringement of The Lord of the Rings copyright, undertaken on a commercial basis, and the estate hopes that the award of a permanent injunction and attorneys' fees will be sufficient to dissuade others who may have similar intentions." Earlier this year it was confirmed by Warner Bros that more Lord of the Rings films are on the way over the next few years. Work on the second series of Amazon's TV show began in October. The BBC has tried to contact Demetrious Polychron for comment.

NASA, working to send high-bandwidth video and data from deep space to Earth, transmitted a video of a cat named Taters as part of an experiment.

The Houthis would only halt their attacks if Israel’s “crimes in Gaza stop and food, medicines and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population”, al-Bukhaiti said.

Workers making $17 an hour not impressed by holiday offer from company that just tripled profits to $9.9bn

A panel of judges has said that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the 2021 blackout. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.

The campaign to reelect the extremely old man dragged down by inflation and war and trailing his criminally indicted opponent is going great.

The North Carolina Supreme Court published a ruling Friday that a Black man on death row should not be given a new trial despite that he’d been sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors used a handout to strike Black people from the jury pool. Russell William Tucker was sentenced to death in 1996 for killing a security guard outside a Kmart in Forsyth County. He has since challenged that conviction, arguing that prosecutors relied on racist jury strikes to send Black jurors home and ensure that those who decided his death sentence were all white. The North Carolina Supreme Court disagreed. In a ruling written by Justice Phil Berger Jr., the son of the president pro tempore of the state Senate, the high court determined that their analysis of Tucker’s case was limited because he hadn’t raised juror discrimination issues in earlier appeals, and that his “newly discovered evidence” was insufficient to clear a procedural hurdle that could allow them to grant him a new trial. Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling was rooted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision published in 1986, Batson v. Kentucky, which found that prosecutors picking a jury in a criminal case could not use peremptory challenges — dismissing jurors without valid cause — to exclude prospective jurors solely on the basis of race. North Carolina’s Supreme Court was the last in the South to find a Batson violation. The first time it did so was in a in a May 2020 decision — written by the then-Democratic majority — that gave lower courts guidance on how to better assess racial discrimination claims in jury selection. In 2022, for the first time in state history, the high court struck down a conviction because of discrimination against a Black juror. Advocates worried those wins would be reversed under the conservative majority that has assumed control of the court, a fear that looks increasingly well-founded as Republican justices continue to issue rulings that find no racial discrimination in jury selections.

A south St. Louis bar owner is now facing charges stemming from an incident that began when police crashed an SUV through the front wall of his business. The incident happened in the city’s Carondelet neighborhood around 12:30 a.m. today, when a police SUV traveling northbound on South Broadway swerved across multiple lanes of traffic and into Bar:PM just as the LGTBQ bar was closing up. The police probable cause statement associated with the charges against Bar:PM co-owner Chad Morris (who also goes by Chad Wick) alleges that Morris began to "scream obscenities" in the wake of the collision. The officer writes that Morris "struck me hard in the chest with an open hand, causing me to temporarily lose my balance." Morris then allegedly tried to flee into a gangway between the bar and another building, closing a gate on an officer as he did, according to the statement.

Labor activists say a scandal-plagued construction company is taking advantage of Biden’s climate plan. The excitement was in the air at this year’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Washington, D.C., in late September. About a year earlier, the Inflation Reduction Act had been signed into law by President Joe Biden, establishing new tax benefits to boost green-friendly construction. Vendors at the world’s largest green building symposium were buzzing. The expo featured rows of exhibitions on the environmental virtues of companies involved with every stage of the construction process, from insulated concrete manufacturers to wastewater management companies. Lectures and panel discussions peppered the sprawling convention center hall, featuring industry luminaries waxing poetic about the challenges and promises of green capitalism. Many of these companies will likely benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA); the federal government is expected to spend about $369 billion on green building investments because of the law’s tax provisions... Kingspan is a textbook example of a corporation greenwashing its own harmful environmental practices while also glossing over criticism of its safety and labor practices. Now, as an ostensibly “green” operation, the company is likely to receive lucrative U.S. tax benefits. Kingspan’s most controversial moment came in December 2020, when British parliamentary investigators shed light on the company’s indifference toward fire safety while investigating the role its insulation materials played in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, the deadliest residential fire in Britain since the end of the Second World War. As public scrutiny over Kingspan’s role in the Grenfell Tower fire intensified in the U.K., in the months leading up to the bombshell revelations Kingspan launched a new long-term strategy: a sustainability campaign called “Planet Passionate.”

Warehouses and freight trucks take a toll on residents, while corporate "community engagement" plans do little but silence local voices.

A New York jury on Monday found actor Jonathan Majors guilty of assault and harassment of his former girlfriend during a domestic dispute.

In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’. West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.’

These days, every online retailer you can think of has some kind of chatbot. Classically, these were about as intelligent as old-school phone systems, able to pull out a few keywords and direct you (maybe) where you wanted to go. Auto dealerships have more recently been implementing advanced AI chatbots that can do more to help customers in greater detail. Hilariously, though, in one case, a dealer chatbot looks to have gone far beyond answering car questions—and into coding help and beyond. The apparent flaw in the AI chatbot used by Chevrolet of Watsonville was raised by a number of people. Chris White appears to have been the first to discover it, sharing it on Mastodon. The hilarious find was then shared by documentingmeta on Threads, and it spread across the Internet thusly. Screen captures show an AI chatbot that says it is “Powered by ChatGPT” answering questions on how to code Python scripts to solve the complicated Navier-Stokes fluid flow equations. Another user posted a long chat in which the ‘bot appeared to recommend the Ford F-150 as a capable truck.

After a transformative year on the picket lines, the United Auto Workers’ ambitions for building worker power don’t stop at the US border.

Interviews and newly unearthed documents reveal that Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.