James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit alleges Trump and top executives at his company, the Trump Organization, conspired to pad his net worth by billions of dollars on financial statements given to banks, insurers, and others to make deals and secure loans.

In a pretrial court filing, James’ office estimated that Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion. State lawyers contend Trump used the inflated numbers to get lower insurance premiums and favorable loan terms, saving at least $168 million on interest alone.

They’re seeking the return of more than $300 million of what they say are ill-gotten gains and a ban on Trump and other defendants from doing business in New York. Because it is a civil case, there is no possibility of prison time.

The lawsuit, which cuts to the heart of Trump’s image as a wealthy and successful businessman, went to trial in New York in October. Trump testified on Nov. 6. His three eldest children, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, also testified. Closing arguments are expected in mid-to-late December.

.

Trump

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.

Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction. The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages. Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.

Ozempic, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Ozempic is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes—a condition that accounts for ninety per cent of all diabetes cases—and has been available since 2017. Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections. In 2021, Novo Nordisk received approval for Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic but comes with a higher maximum dose, as an anti-obesity drug. On a year-end earnings call in 2022, Novo Nordisk cited worldwide market growth of fifty per cent, with almost forty thousand new Wegovy prescriptions being written every week.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://www.nytimes.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The concert is in London. You’re watching it live from your home in Atlanta. What makes that possible is a network of subsea cables draped across the cold, dark contours of the ocean floor, transmitting sights and sounds at the speed of light through strands of glass fiber as thin as your hair but thousands of miles long.

These cables, only about as thick as a garden hose, are high-tech marvels. The fastest, the newly completed transatlantic cable called Amitié and funded by Microsoft, Meta, and others, can carry 400 terabits of data per second. That’s 400,000 times faster than your home broadband if you’re lucky enough to have high-end gigabit service.

And yet subsea cables are low-tech, too, coated in tar and unspooled by ships employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. SubCom, a subsea-cable maker based in New Jersey, evolved from a rope manufacturer with a factory next to a deep-water port for easy loading onto ships.

Though satellite links are becoming more important with orbiting systems like SpaceX’s Starlink, subsea cables are the workhorses of global commerce and communications, carrying more than 99% of traffic between continents. TeleGeography, an analyst firm that tracks the business, knows of 552 existing and planned subsea cables, and more are on the way as the internet spreads to every part of the globe and every corner of our lives.

You probably know that tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google run the brains of the internet. They’re called “hyperscalers” for operating hundreds of data centers packed with millions of servers. You might not know that they also increasingly run the internet’s nervous system, too.

.

Zooey Liao/CNET

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

Photograph: GETTY IMAGES

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Thinking of spring cleaning? Whether you’re finally cleaning up the junk drawer or upgrading your tech, don’t condemn your old device to your in-home gadget graveyard — or worse, the garbage. We all hang onto outdated tech for our own reasons, but there are also multiple ways to repurpose old devices for your smart home, using them as security cameras and more.

Whatever the tech, when it’s finally time to say goodbye, there’s a right way to dispose of your old gadgets — and there are a lot of wrong ways. We’ll show you which is which.

What to do before you get rid of a device

When you’re finished with a gadget, make sure it’s also finished with you. Make sure to back up anything you want off the device — photos, videos, songs — and then perform a factory reset. Here are a few CNET articles to help clarify the finer points of wiping a device:

Here are the best places here in the US to recycle, repurpose, or give new life to your old technology.

How to recycle smartphones

Smartphone Recycling lets you print a free FedEx shipping label or request a recycling kit. Ship your old smartphone, and you might even get paid, depending on the device’s condition and age. Smartphone Recycling accepts devices in bulk, so you have to ship a minimum of 10. Depending on how long you’ve been hoarding phones, you might meet this quota on your own. If not, check with friends and family and make it a group effort.

.

What do you do with your phone when it’s served its purpose? We’ll give you some options.  Sarah Tew/CNET

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

On Aug. 4, 2020, Clorox’s chief executive officer, Benno Dorer, told Reuters that there would likely be a shortage of the company’s name-brand disinfectant wipes until 2021. Even though the company increased its production by 40%, the Covid-19 pandemic increased demand for the wipes by more than 500%—far more than annual spikes related to flu season.

But even though Clorox wipes may not be on grocery store shelves as much as they used to, there are plenty of alternative disinfectants, including ones you can make yourself. And some of them are better for the planet, too.

The shortage of Clorox wipes stems from crushing demand, but also from its supply chain. While most of its products will bounce back from shortages in the next six months (predicted at the time this article was written in August 2020), Dorer told Reuters, disinfecting wipes “will probably take longer because it’s a very complex supply chain to make them,” including the IP-protected material Clorox uses for the wipe itself.

“What people like about Clorox wipes is that they’re consistent and quality-controlled,” says Rachel Noble, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In other words, they feel like they can trust the product—which is especially important in such uncertain times.

Fortunately, there are plenty of effective alternatives. The US Environmental Protection Agency has a list of nearly 500 different disinfectant products that work to kill SARS-CoV-2 if you’re looking for something store-bought in lieu of Clorox wipes.

There are ways to make your own wipe substitutes at home, says Noble, but in order to be effective, they have to be made properly.

.

So many more ways to clean. Photo by Reuters/Chip Somodevilla

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________