Voices of people lost to gun violence have been re-created using AI to call for action, now six years to the day after the Parkland shooting that killed 17

Six years ago today, Joaquin Oliver was killed in a hallway outside his Florida classroom, one of 17 students and staff murdered in the worst high school shooting in the US. On Wednesday, lawmakers in Washington DC will hear his voice, recreated by artificial intelligence, in phone calls demanding to know why they’ve done nothing to tackle the plague of gun violence.

“It’s been six years and you’ve done nothing. Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have happened since,” the message from Oliver, who was 17 when he died in the 2018 Valentine’s Day’s tragedy at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, says.

“I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. Other victims like me will be calling too, again and again, to demand action. How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen?”

A new study has unveiled a significant advancement in chaos theory, introducing a flux-based statistical theory that predicts chaotic outcomes in non-hierarchical three-body systems. This breakthrough holds practical implications for fields such as celestial mechanics, astrophysics, and molecular dynamics, offering a more efficient and precise approach to analyzing complex systems and enabling deeper exploration and understanding of chaotic phenomena.

The research is published in the journal Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy.

The study led by Prof. Barak Kol from the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University validates a novel approach to understanding the dynamics of non-hierarchical three-body systems. The newly introduced, flux-based statistical theory demonstrated remarkable accuracy in predicting chaotic outcomes, paving the way for streamlined computations and deeper insights into complex systems.

The research aimed to confirm a theory regarding the behavior of three-body systems, proposing that chaotic outcomes in such systems can be predicted using a formula involving a chaotic emissivity function and the asymptotic flux, a known function. To measure this chaotic emissivity function, researchers conducted simulations, tracking millions of scattering events to distinguish between regular and chaotic scattering.

As a Fulton county, Georgia, board of registration and elections meeting began in earnest Thursday afternoon, the elections director, Nadine Williams, unfurled a prepared statement about a recent hack of county government computers.

“There is no indication that this event is related to the election process,” Williams said. “In an abundance of caution, Fulton county and the secretary of state’s respective technology systems were isolated from one another as part of the response efforts. We are working with our team to securely reconnect these systems as preparations for upcoming elections continue.”

Any time the Fulton county elections board meets, a cantankerous crowd greets them to pepper appointees with challenges to voter registrations or demands for paper ballots or generally unsympathetic noise. The rancor of the 2020 election and its unfounded charges of vote tampering still ripple through the democratic process. Elections officials in Fulton county take care about what they say, knowing that a platoon of critics lay waiting to pounce on a misplaced word.

Even by that standard, county officials have been holding uncharacteristically tightly to a prepared script – or saying nothing at all – in the days since a computer breach debilitated everything from the tax and water billing department, to court records, to phones.

CHAPIN, S.C. — Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.

Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.

Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?

“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
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Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.

While MAGA went gaga over Democrats’ secret plot “to turn Taylor Swift into an international pop star and the Kansas City Chiefs into a football dynasty so Swift could then date a Kansas City player and leverage the collective media coverage to get Joseph R. Biden, Jr. elected as President,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was throwing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe back in the U.S. Supreme Court’s faces.

Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Monday that a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy is “fundamental” (WHYY):

With four separate concurring opinions — three of which also dissented in part from the majority opinion — the 219-page decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. PA Department of Human Services is complex. However, the key — and unanimous — finding was that patients and abortion providers could challenge the state’s 1982 Abortion Control Act, which prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover funding for abortions.

The lower court, the Commonwealth Court, had previously said that access to abortion didn’t have anything to do with women’s rights or women’s equality and, therefore, the petitioners did not have merit to file the case — a decision the Supreme Court overruled.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner wrote in 1951. “Old times there are not forgotten,” wrote Daniel Decatur Emmett in “Dixie” a century earlier in 1859. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” wrote somebody, but not likely Mark Twain.

Totally recommend this podcast. It just posted today, with 7 episodes. Two reporters from NCPR have investigated and interviewed people in the North Country of NYS about far right ideology and the rise of extremist groups/militias.

As we all know, Elise Stefanik repeats far right talking points such as "replacement theory".

There are clips of the Lewis Co. sheriff, Mike Carpinelli, who is a constitutional sheriff and member of Oath Keepers. He refused to speak with the reporters, but there are clips of him at meetings threatening to go into schools and arrest teachers if they are caught talking about such things as gender identity.

Fulton Co. sheriff Rich Giardino is a member of Protect America Now, a far right sheriffs group. I used to ride for the FultonCo. Sheriffs K9 fundraiser. I won't do it anymore since Rich is getting more and more radicalized. At the last event, he pointed to his puppy and said "She's a girl now but the government says she can choose what she wants to be". How was that necessary and what did it have to do with anything? My uncle hangs out with Rich and I have noticed a change in him. I can't be around him because he espouses conspiracy theories and even made a comment about civil war.

The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “threw Donald Trump under the bus” in testimony to a grand jury investigating election subversion in Georgia, a new book reportedly says, saying the former president would have believed “martians came and stole the election” he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the US supreme court to block his grand jury subpoena – and losing … Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus’,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write in Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, Politico reported.
Trump the sinister playground bully in New Hampshire victory lap

“According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton county confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘that martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you’. He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”

The book, which cites “a source familiar with [Graham’s] testimony”, will be published next week.

A Colorado pastor who is charged with stealing more than $1m from his Christian community in a cryptocurrency scheme has admitted to the fraud but argued that God instructed him to carry it out.

Eli Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn, are charged with creating and selling their cryptocurrency, known as “INDXcoin”, to Christians based in their home town of Denver, Colorado, allegedly telling would-be investors that the Lord had told him people would become rich if they invested, the state’s division of securities announced in a press release on Thursday.

But INDXcoin was “practically worthless” in reality, prosecutors said in the statement. Investors lost millions of dollars while the Regalados used their investments for lavish living.

The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.

On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”

Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.

On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”

“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”