AI job automation affects virtually every sector and industry. While this might seem like cause for alarm, it’s actually long overdue news.

On Sunday, hundreds of people marched in Fayetteville demanding answers and justice after a man was shot and killed by an off-duty Cumberland County Sheriff's Deputy.

A man who sent more than 91,000 pennies to be dumped onto a former employee’s Georgia driveway is accused of retaliation in a U.S. Labor Department complaint filed in federal court. Miles Walker, owner of A OK Walker Autoworks in Peachtree City, Ga., is accused of retaliation and other labor-law violations after Andreas Flaten found $915 worth of oily pennies forming a “nasty circle” at his Fayetteville, Ga., home in March.

Consumption of the resources that lead to carbon emissions matters more to climate change than population growth on its own, and those resources are primarily consumed by a relatively small number of wealthy people around the world.

U.K. government advisers have recommended against giving a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine to nursing home residents and people over 80 because data shows that a third shot offers lasting protection against admission to the hospital. Instead, the government should focus on giving a third dose to as many people as possible to boost protection against the highly transmissible omicron variant. The U.K. is racing to offer booster shots to adults across the country after research showed that two doses were not enough to protect people from omicron.

Two people have been hospitalized after multiple skiers on Beech Mountain were sprayed with freezing cold water on Friday after a water line seemingly broke, according to officials. Tim Williams shared videos of the event with WCNC Charlotte, saying he and his daughter witnessed the whole thing. Williams said some skiers were blown off the lift as a result of the water pressure. "People were frantic. There were some people that tried to grab a snowboard and cover the water, but that did not work," said Williams. He said people tried to help as freezing cold water sprayed into lifts. “The problem was when they stopped the lifts, they stopped a chair directly above the water," said Williams, "When that happened, it was pretty hard to watch.”

Months after the pipeline company Enbridge announced it had finished its Line 3 pipeline, hundreds of the project’s opponents have pending court cases for arrests made at protests during last year’s construction. Defense attorneys for the water protectors, as the members of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement are known, said many of the charges are overly aggressive and should be dismissed. Defense attorneys pointed to examples like felony theft charges for protesters who chained themselves to equipment and felony aiding attempted suicide for those who crawled into sections of nonfunctional pipe. “These felony theft charges started coming out during the summer and it’s very clearly an abuse of the prosecutorial charging function,” said Joshua Preston, a lawyer for the water protectors. “It’s meant to send a message saying, ‘If you come to this property and chain yourself to something, we’re going to throw the book at you.’” One of the county attorneys pursuing felony theft charges said the indictments were appropriate. “Criminal felony theft meets the elements of the offense,” Hubbard County, Minnesota, Attorney Jonathan Frieden told the Intercept.

Maine’s Democratic governor has vetoed a bill that would have given farm workers in the state the right to unionize, citing the possibility of heaping new costs on an already struggling agriculture sector. The Maine Legislature passed the proposal, which called for people working in agriculture to be able to organize for the purposes of collectively bargaining for wages, hours, working conditions and benefits.

Vermont schools should stop contact tracing and PCR surveillance testing for students and staff, the Agency of Education said Friday in an email to school administrators announcing an "imminent policy shift." A new "rapid response" testing program will be used instead, the directive says. The change is being driven by the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, which has made many of the school strategies that were previously effective no longer useful, Education Secretary Dan French wrote in the letter sent Friday evening and obtained by Seven Days.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A top Tennessee House Republican lawmaker has apologized for losing his temper and being ejected from watching a high school basketball game after a confrontation with a referee.

A man stuck in a chimney in Montgomery County, Maryland, was rescued after two dozen firefighters responded, breaking through a wall and dismantling part of the chimney brick-by-brick to free him, officials said. A resident of the single-family home on the 9000 block of Dameron Drive in Silver Spring told News4 he called police after hearing rustling that he thought…

Staring at your non-fungible tokens on a smartphone or laptop screen is fine and all, but why not remind everyone who visits your home of the money you spent on digital art NFTs by showcasing them on your TV screen? Somehow we’re in a world where that’s about to become reality: Samsung says it’s planning extensive support for NFTs beginning with its 2022 TV lineup. “With demand for NFTs on the rise, the need for a solution to today’s fragmented viewing and purchasing landscape has never been greater,” the company said in a press release. “In 2022, Samsung is introducing the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator, a groundbreaking platform that lets you browse, purchase, and display your favorite art — all in one place.”

Using a state-of-the-art climate model, researchers now believe the level of ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching the Earth’s surface could have been underestimated, with UV levels being up to ten times higher.

Bits of soybean coated parts of the city's North End neighbourhood near the end of December after a processing issue at the nearby Bunge plant.

Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image. So as an experiment, I made an NFT that changes based on who is looking at it, since the web server that serves the image can choose to serve different images based on the IP or User Agent of the requester. For example, it looked one way on OpenSea, another way on Rarible, but when you buy it and view it from your crypto wallet, it will always display as a large poop emoji. What you bid on isn’t what you get. There’s nothing unusual about this NFT, it’s how the NFT specifications are built. Many of the highest priced NFTs could turn into poop emoji at any time; I just made it explicit. After a few days, without warning or explanation, the NFT I made was removed from OpenSea (an NFT marketplace):

Harvesting this vegetable oil is a huge driver of deforestation. Numerous startups are taking up the daunting task of engineering it instead.

Former UH football players and others close to the program provided testimonies about the state of the program under head coach Todd Graham.

Several new cases in New Brunswick involve caretakers of those afflicted, suggesting a possible environmental trigger

This past November, Portlanders got an urgent reminder that the city’s lead problem has persisted. Out of 104 homes sampled by the water bureau, 10 percent had lead levels higher than 21 parts per billion (or ppb) — the highest results the city has seen in two decades and well above the federal limit.

Development of a $1 billion resort and housing project in one of the state’s most wildfire-prone communities has been placed on hold after a judge ruled developers didn’t adequately plan for what might happen when a wildfire erupts and thousands of people have to run for their lives. The Lake County judge’s ruling on the Guenoc Valley Resort could have sweeping ramifications for housing and business developments across a state where fires are growing in severity and local officials are under intense pressure to approve new building projects during a housing crisis. The ruling, under California’s powerful environmental law, also represents a major victory for environmentalists opposed to new housing and business projects in areas with extreme wildfire risks. Concerns about evacuation routes backing up with traffic during frantic wildfire evacuations aren’t unique to Lake County. At least eight people died in their cars, stuck in traffic, as they tried to escape 2018’s Camp Fire in Paradise, the state’s deadliest wildfire that burned 10,000 homes and killed 85 people in a matter of hours. Their cars burned over despite Paradise officials having conducted evacuation drills and developing fairly sophisticated evacuation plans. Experts said the reality was the routes out of Paradise were simply too few and too tiny to handle the town’s entire population fleeing at once.