Picture released of star in Sagitta constellation on the cusp of going supernova
The James Webb space telescope has captured the rare and fleeting phase of a star on the cusp of death.
The observation was among the first made by the telescope following its launch in late 2021, but the picture was not released until this week. Webb’s infrared eyes observed all the gas and dust flung into space by a huge, hot star 15,000 light years away. A light-year is about 5.8tn miles.
Continue reading...US secretary of state Antony Blinken says collision of Russian fighter jet with US drone was ‘reckless and unsafe action’
Thanks for following along – that’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. My colleague Martin Belam will take you through the rest of the day’s news.
AFP has this flash of news, saying Russia has called on the US to halt what it calls its “hostile” flights, after the collision of a Russian fighter jet with a US MQ-9 Reaper drone that the Pentagon said was conducting a routine flight.
Continue reading...Federal judge in Texas holds hearing on status of mifepristone, which a far-right group claims is unsafe despite FDA approval
The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that a federal prosecutor has unveiled an indictment against a Chinese tycoon tied to Steve Bannon and other top allies of Donald Trump. Here’s what we know so far about the charges:
Ho Wan Kwok, a Chinese tycoon with close links to prominent Trumpist Republicans including Steve Bannon, has been indicted on 12 counts relating to an alleged $1bn fraud.
Continue reading...Stallion zebra, which was behaving ‘erratically’, shot dead by police after attacking Ronald Clifton, 72
A midwestern farmer called emergency services, shouting: “Come before it gets me again!” after he was attacked by his pet zebra at a farm in Circleville, Ohio.
The zebra, which bit Ronald Clifton, 72, on the arm, partially severing it, was the only stallion in a small herd of four or five mares.
Continue reading...US attorney says Wengui, also known as Miles Guo and Ho Wan Kwok, used stolen money to buy a $3.5m Ferrari and finance a $37m yacht
Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese tycoon with close links to prominent Trumpist Republicans including Steve Bannon, has been indicted on 12 counts relating to an alleged $1bn fraud.
The charges announced by the US attorney for the southern district of New York on Wednesday include wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.
Continue reading...Proposal also calls for gender neutral language at women’s college whose alumni include Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright
Students at the famed Wellesley College for women voted this week to extend admission to trans men and non-binary students, though campus administrators have said there is “no plan” to immediately change school policy.
In a non-binding election on Tuesday, students at the liberal arts college in Massachusetts voted to open admission to all non-binary and transgender students, including trans men, reported Wellesley News, the college’s student newspaper.
Continue reading...‘I certainly hope for success,’ says senior Kremlin official of hopes of raising debris from seabed west of Crimea
Moscow has said it intends to recover the wreckage of a US drone brought down on Tuesday following an interception by Russian fighter jets, but the White House said the debris could be in such deep water that recovery is impossible.
“I don’t know if we can recover [it] or not, but we will certainly have to do that, and we will deal with it,” Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, said on Wednesday. “I certainly hope for success.”
Continue reading...French bulldogs take title after dizzying rise, thanks to celebrity owners from Leonardo DiCaprio to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
For the first time in three decades, the US has a new favorite dog breed, according to the American Kennel Club (AKC).
Adorable in some eyes, deplorable in others, the sturdy, push-faced, perky-eared, world-weary-looking and distinctively droll French bulldog became the nation’s most prevalent purebred dog last year, the club announced on Wednesday. Frenchies ousted labrador retrievers from the top spot after a record 31 years.
Continue reading...Major rivers were overflowing in 16 locations in the state, including in central California where a levee on the Pajaro River failed
A powerful atmospheric river pummeling California could cause even more flooding and mudslides in regions already waterlogged after weeks of back-to-back storms.
The National Weather Service declared a high risk of excessive rainfall across the state, in both coastal and mountainous communities. “Lives and property are in great danger from Tuesday into Wednesday,” the agency warned.
Continue reading...US accuses Russia of ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ intercept of MQ-9 Reaper drone over waters west of Crimea
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A Russian fighter has collided with a US Reaper drone, forcing it down into the Black Sea, in what US forces called an “unsafe and unprofessional” intercept.
A US European Command statement said the collision happened just after 7am on Tuesday morning, when two Russian Su-27 fighter jets flew up to the MQ-9 Reaper drone over international waters west of Crimea. The statement said the Russian pilots sought to disrupt the US aircraft before the collision.
Continue reading...The senator, a leading force in the Democratic push for gun control, warns the US is ‘headed towards a very dangerous place’
A Democratic US senator at the forefront of a push to enact new gun control measures has said Republicans “don’t give a crap” about children or gun violence.
Connecticut’s Chris Murphy – who has been a leading force for Democrat gun control efforts since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting killed 26 people in his state, 20 of them children – made the comment in a wide-ranging interview with Salon that was published on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Russia’s and China’s ‘signalling’ to US aircraft in international airspace is nothing new, but downing a craft is a worrying development
On any given day around Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Russian and Nato aircraft and naval vessels, manned and unmanned, buzz around in close proximity, a constant recipe for a superpower crisis along the edges of a war.
The stakes are raised by the fact that both sides have thousands of nuclear warheads as a weapon of last resort, and the risks are raised considerably by reckless behaviour.
Continue reading...Merrick Garland, the attorney general, tasked with moving the country ‘as close to universal background checks as possible’
Joe Biden announced Tuesday a new slate of executive actions that are aimed at reducing gun violence and the proliferation of guns that are sold to prohibited people.
The president spoke at a community center in Monterey Park, California, meeting victims’ families and community members devastated by a mass shooting that claimed 11 lives and injured nine other people in January following a large lunar new year festival in the city’s downtown.
Continue reading...One of her biggest victories was signing a family leave bill in 1993, providing job protection for care of a newborn, sick child or parent
Pat Schroeder, a pioneer for women’s and family rights in Congress who confronted and angered conservatives, has died. She was 82.
Schroeder’s former press secretary, Andrea Camp, said the former congresswoman suffered a stroke recently and died on Monday in Celebration, Florida.
Continue reading...Latest version can take images as inputs and improves upon many of the criticisms users had, but will still ‘hallucinate’ facts
The artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of the groundbreaking AI system that powers ChatGPT, which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor.
Calling it “our most capable and aligned model yet”, OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said the new system is a “multimodal” model, which means it can accept images as well as text as inputs, allowing users to ask questions about pictures. The new version can handle massive text inputs and can remember and act on more than 20,000 words at once, letting it take an entire novella as a prompt.
Continue reading...College football, Mexican cola and muffins – UK prime minister has plenty to talk about in private hour at Aukus
It is common for British and American leaders to try to show the “special relationship” between their two countries extends to them personally.
When Rishi Sunak landed in San Diego for a flash visit to see Joe Biden, the world’s media were spared any such attempts verging on the grandiose.
Continue reading...Likely contender’s statement read on air by Fox News host Tucker Carlson aligns him with rival Donald Trump
Here’s Ron DeSantis’s full statement outlining his position on Ukraine, as posted by Tucker Carlson:
Other big Republican names responded to the Fox News commentator’s questionnaire, including Texas governor Greg Abbott, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, former vice president Mike Pence and, of course, Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Restructuring, as part of the company’s ‘Year of Efficiency’, also sees 5,000 unfulfilled job adverts closed without hiring
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is laying off another 10,000 people and instituting a further hiring freeze as part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency”, the chief executive announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
The restructuring, which also sees a further 5,000 unfilled job adverts closed without hiring, comes less than six months after the company announced another wave of 11,000 redundancies. At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees globally, with a substantial portion of that hiring occurring in the middle of the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...President reveals he visited his Democratic predecessor, who is receiving hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia
Jimmy Carter – who entered home hospice care in February – has asked fellow Democratic president Joe Biden to eulogize him after he dies, Biden has revealed.
Biden told people at a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on Monday that he had recently visited Carter after the 98-year-old former president’s health had “finally caught up with him”, according to multiple reports on the remarks.
Continue reading...In this week’s newsletter: While its quick slip into financial hardship has left American bankers reeling, its UK division is surprisingly fine. But the tech sector isn’t out of trouble yet
Last week, if you had heard of Silicon Valley Bank UK, you probably worked in tech. The bank had only been spun out in to a separate entity last summer, after its few thousand corporate customers pushed it over a regulatory threshold, and while SVB had grown to almost hold £10bn of deposits, with £5.5bn of outstanding loans, it was very much a specialist player.
The bank’s selling point was that it understood the needs of the “innovation economy”, something that high street banks frequently failed to acknowledge. A startup might have zero revenue, yet hold £5m in the bank and have 10 employees, a profile fundamentally different from a typical small business. As a result, trying to get something as simple as a corporate credit card could be a surprising hassle, and when SVB arrived on the UK scene, it was enthusiastically adopted by founders and venture capitalists alike.
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