media

WEEI is once more optimizing its program for afternoon trips.

Former Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson joins the station to host “WEEI Afternoons” from 2-6 alongside Andy Hart and Nick “Fitzy” Stevens, who’s expanding his role. Christian Arcand, who served as co-host, will now host weekdays 6-10. The changes come into effect on January twenty first.

Johnson, a three-time Super Bowl champion, may also co-host “WEEI Football Sunday” with Arcand, Hart, Meghan Ottolini, Chris Scheim, Tom E. Curran, Stevens and Jermaine Wiggins through the NFL season.

“I've been fortunate to play on some incredible teams over my 10-year career, and now, 30 years later, I'm excited to announce that I'll be part of another great team at WEEI,” Johnson said in a single Interview press release.

Johnson most recently served incessantly as third host on “The Rich Shertenlieb Show” on WZLX it was abruptly discontinued on November 4th as a part of budget cuts at iHeartMedia stations across the country.

Stevens joined WEEI in the summertime of 2019 and hosted each day shows on the station, including “The 6 Rings Postgame Show” with Hart after every Patriots game.

“After his playing days, Ted honed his broadcasting skills in Houston and here in Boston,” Mike Thomas, vp and market manager of Audacy Boston, said in a press release. “He has entertaining stories and valuable information that all Boston sports fans should not miss. Fitzy has been an asset to the station and we are excited to expand his role on WEEI Afternoons with his knowledge as a die-hard Boston sports fan.”

The move takes place five months later WEEI has modified its lineup by firing midday presenters Andy Gresh and Christian Fauria. The duo was replaced by Rich Keefe and Adam Jones, who had served as co-hosts on the afternoon drive.

In Nielsen Audio's fall rankings, released in December98.5 “Felger and Massarotti” from Sports Hub continued their long dominance with a top share of 17.6. “The WEEI Afternoon Show,” starring Arcand and Hart, placed twelfth with a 2.5 share in its first full-length book because the lineup shakeup in August.

This report used information from previous Globe stories.

Wegovy and Ozempic are weight-loss drugs that promise to rework the treatment of obesity, heart disease and other chronic conditions that afflict thousands and thousands of Americans. But while everyone agrees that these drugs have the potential to alter lives, nobody can agree on the most effective approach to pay for them.

Wegovy sold for a List price – or price before discounts – from $1,349 per thirty days within the US. In Canada the identical drugs cost $265 and within the UK they cost lower than half. These dramatic differences illustrate a bigger problem: the list prices of patented drugs within the United States are far higher than in other wealthy countries.

US Senator Bernie Sanders spoke in favor of it many Americans when he said the high drug costs in America are “not just an economic issue” but “an profound moral question.”

Moral outrage results in the seek for villains. Joe Kernan, host of the CNBC business show “Squawk box“, summed it up when he asked: “Who’s kidding us here?” The PBMs? The drug manufacturers?”

As Health Economist Who writes about it? Innovations within the healthcare sectorI actually have spent much of the last five years excited about these questions. What I've learned is that prime list prices for drugs don't say much about who's screwing whom. To truly understand the drug pricing problem within the United States, it’s worthwhile to start with the tricky economics PBMs or pharmacy profit managers.

What are Pharmacy Benefit Managers?

More and more pharmacy profit managers were popping up Late Nineteen Sixties as a provider of claims processing and administration services for health insurers. Over time, they became key intermediaries between drug manufacturers and the various insurers, employers, and government entities that purchase drugs on behalf of their members, constituents, and beneficiaries.

Mergers between PBMs have resulted in a market dominated by a small variety of very large players. In 2023, the three largest – OptumRx, Express Scripts and CVS Caremark – have made it 79% of US prescription claims and served around 270 million customers.

The primary role of those corporations is to barter prices, affordability, and access to prescribed drugs. You do that through Operating and designing formsthese are lists of medicines covered by insurers.

Forms also assign medications different levels which determine what patients should pay out of pocket to get the medication. Generic medications are typically assigned to the tier with the bottom out-of-pocket costs. Patented drugs which might be preferred by insurers are placed in a higher-cost tier, and non-preferred drugs are placed in a tier that requires patients to pay much more. Some medications may even be excluded from the drug list entirely, meaning they will not be covered by insurance.

Tiering determines how inexpensive a drug is for consumers and the actual drug price insurers pay. Drug manufacturers compete with one another for placement at the specified formulation levels by offering PBMs significant discounts from their list price. The price at which the PBM obtains the drug for its customers is the web price – the list price minus the drug manufacturer's rebate.

When a drug manufacturer increases its rebate, the web price falls, even when publicly advertised list prices remain high. For this reason, specializing in list prices when determining the price of a drug might be misleading.

The price is correct?

Drug list prices are public knowledge, but drug manufacturers' rebates on PBMs are closely guarded secrets. That makes it difficult to know exactly how much insurers pay for many prescribed drugs.

This secrecy raises difficult questions. Are PBMs using their size and bargaining power to extract lower net prices from drug manufacturers? Or are PBMs using their dominant market positions and opaque business practices to counterpoint themselves on the expense of their customers and the remaining of society?

Surprisingly, the reply to each of those questions is yes. When competition for drug placement works because it should, competition forces drug manufacturers to supply significant discounts to the published list price. As a result, insurers and consumers profit from a reduced net price for medicines. However, formula competition might be undermined in various ways.

For example, in a 2024 report, the US Federal Trade Commission found evidence that the manufacturer was producing a patented type of insulin higher discounts offered to a PBM if competing insulins were placed at a less favorable level of a formulation or excluded entirely. This regulation limits consumer alternative. By excluding a less expensive generic equivalent, the agreement would also favor a dearer drug, increasing patient costs. The widespread use of such exclusion discounts could even discourage latest generics and reduce competition.

Introduction of biosimilar drugs made specifically for PBMs Substituting expensive biologics manufactured elsewhere can even undermine formulation competition. When PBMs favor their proprietary products in formulations, this reduces the inducement for other drugmakers to introduce competing products. The result’s each less competition and better prices.

Competition throughout the formulation can be distorted when drug manufacturers publish contributions very high list prices. This artificially increases rebates for PBMs without reducing net prices for insurers and other parties. Inflated list prices also increase drug costs for some patient groups – particularly those that would not have medical insurance or have high deductibles.

Market competition

Just as fair competition can break down throughout the PBM forms, it may also break down available in the market for PBM services.

The current regulatory environment within the US tolerates overly large PBMs that engage in anti-competitive practices to build up excessive profits. Without strong competitors, dominant PBMs can charge customers high fees and keep a bigger portion of drugmaker rebates for themselves.

In theory, this problem should correct itself. High profits are intended to draw latest competitors into the industry. Competition from these latest entrants is prone to drive down fees and reduce the share of discounts these corporations retain. However, things are different in practice as the biggest PBMs have done this merged with the biggest health insurers. CVS merged with Aetna. Express Scripts and OptumRx merged with Cigna and UnitedHealthcare, respectively. These mixtures reduce the variety of potential customers for brand spanking new PBMs and thus prevent latest competitors from entering the market.

Even belligerent upstarts who could upend the establishment are at a drawback because of ordinary contracting practices. Large PBMs, for instance, often insist on “Most-favored-nation agreements that require drug manufacturers to match or exceed the costs they provide to other buyers. These contracts eliminate the competitive advantage that a brand new PBM could gain by achieving higher prices than incumbents.

There is growing concern amongst experts that dominant PBMs are also using formularies to funnel profitable “specialty prescriptions” to pharmacies with which they’re affiliated. Pharmacies affiliated with the three largest PBMs increased their share of the specialty drug market 55% to 67% between 2016 and 2023. Concerns about such anti-competitive practices have led to this non-partisan laws to force PBMs to sell their retail or mail-order pharmacies.

Who are the villains?

So, are PBMs ripping us off? If we didn't have PBMs, we might should invent them – or something similar – to get reasonable prices for patented drugs. But the concentration of market power in a couple of corporations threatens to destroy the worth they create.

Increasing competition within the PBM market will likely require a bigger variety of smaller PBMs, and enormous insurers might also have to divest their PBM units.

Contrary to popular belief, smaller PBMs are prone to be just as capable of negotiate a low net price for Wegovy and other patented drugs as larger PBMs. Once a certain minimum size is reached, the competition for the position of the forms and never the PBM size is vital. A more competitive and transparent marketplace for PBM services will help be sure that this competition stays fair and transparent – for the Benefits for patrons and society.

In this sense, PBMs will not be the villain. Too much market power in too few hands is the issue, and that may very well be fixed with more competition, sensible regulation and vocal consumers.

Within three weeks, South Korea experienced one transient declaration of martial lawits sudden cancellation and the impeachment its president Yoon Suk Yeol.

An underappreciated driver of the recent drama is the rise of YouTube agitators, activists and influencers who’re making the most of and fueling a brand new sort of populism. The impact in South Korea is serious – however the trend is global.

An extremely online constituency

In the 2022 South Korean election, Yoon trailed his opponent for much of the campaign. He is aggressive Populist politics received some support, nevertheless it gave the look of it will fail.

Then he found it a brand new constituency – a gaggle of lively and partisan young men who campaigned for the abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. These agitators used YouTube and other platforms to spread their message.

This crowd, together with traditional conservative voters, allowed Yoon a narrow victory and control of South Korea's strongest political position. He then duly abolished The gender ministry said structural sexism was “a thing of the past”.

After gaining power, Yoon relented Arrest warrants for several of his supposed political opponents. Among these was Kim Yeo Juna critical and inflammatory YouTube journalist and a polarizing populist figure with ties to liberal politics. Kim's weekly videos Send news, guest interviews and snarky comments to hundreds of thousands of lively followers.

We have turn out to be accustomed to the concept that social media platforms Influence democratic processes by disseminating news and evaluation and by directing users' attention by recommending specific content. However, the increasing political visibility of platform actors like Kim suggests that the influence is becoming more direct.

Platforms for populist news and views

Social media platforms provide access to a big selection of stories and media producers, from mainstream media outlets to independent commentators at the acute ends of the political spectrum. However, not all news receives the identical attention.

Research shows, no less than in South Korea, fake news receives more likes and interactions than verifiable messages. “Real news” is commonly dismissed and ridiculed.

Further South Korean research shows residents could also be using platforms Look for conspiracy theories and despise unpopular political groups or decisions. Users also notorious direct hatred on topics comparable to women's rights.

These problems will not be limited to South Korea. Polarizing and populist news and evaluation is a worldwide phenomenon.

Trust in traditional news media is declining, partly due to fear in keeping with elite and powerful personalities. These fears are sometimes confirmed Social media influencer who wish to turn out to be the brand new opinion leaders.

Online influencers are great vehicles for populist politics. They normally have close relationships with their viewers suggest easy solutionsand frequently resist accountability and fact-checking.

Platforms are sometimes more more likely to recommend polarizing and even radicalizing content for viewers, crowding out more balanced content.

Platforms for journalism?

However, these polarizing personalities will not be alone in these areas. Experienced journalists and newcomers get used to the platforms and still provide reliable information.

On YouTube, former mainstream journalists, comparable to B. Australia Michael West and the American Phil Edwardshave built a following while combining personal and casual content with more traditional journalism.

Non-journalists, comparable to Money & Macro and the English Tom Nicholashave expanded their influence by adopting some basic journalistic practices. With the support of their many viewers, they produce content that researches, explores and explains current news and evaluation.

These YouTube news influencers show that journalistic content can contribute to the brand new news media ecosystem and attract large audiences without counting on populist and polarizing content.

“Newsfluencer” produce Journalism on platformsB. YouTube, adapt their content to the conventions of the platforms.

Newsfluencer and the long run

Newsfluencers often film in informal settings moderately than traditional sets, constructing an informal relationship with their audience. They use “authenticity” and exit of their method to “Avoid looking like polished corporate media“.

Their diverse sources of income include advertisements, sponsors, merchandise and, most significantly, direct audience contributions. These contributions may be made through memberships or through third-party platforms comparable to Patreon and Substack.

Even major news organizations like Australia's ABC have began adopting YouTuber norms. While the present podcast was produced under the auspices of the national broadcaster If you listenFor example, with its casual style and deal with giving the audience what they need, it significantly outperforms traditionally formatted content.

In South Korea there are YouTube channels like VoiceOfSeoul Take similar steps and mix street reporting with informal talk show panels and investigative journalism. OhMyTV combines YouTuber and breaking news styles and includes hyperlinks for private contributions and sponsorships.

At the identical time, legacy media like KBS maintains a powerful following via TV and portal sites like Naver. However, KBS's conventional format is struggling to realize comparable viewership on the increasingly dominant platforms on which these unconventional journalists thrive.

There is a transparent space for journalism on YouTube and similar platforms. However, it has to adapt.

As the South Korean experience shows, the time may come when platform journalism is crucial to democracy.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press Technology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google unleashed one other wave of artificial intelligence on Wednesday aimed toward handling more of the work and considering of humans as the corporate tries to remain on the leading edge of technology while combating regulatory threats to its empire to ward off.

Google's next generation of AI is bundled under the package Gemini umbrella introduced a yr ago. Google sees its release of Gemini 2.0 as a springboard for AI agents designed to interpret images displayed via a smartphone, perform a wide range of tedious tasks, remember conversations consumers have with people, help video game players plan Strategies to assist and even accomplish the duty of conducting online searches.

In a blog postGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai predicted that the technology included in Gemini 2.0 will “understand more about the world around you, think several steps ahead and take action on your behalf, under your supervision.” An analogous goal is pursued by stubborn competitors akin to OpenAI with its ChatGPT technology and industry giants akin to Microsoft with a wide range of similar tools in its Windows software.

Much of Google's latest AI technology will initially be reserved for test groups and subscribers who pay $20 a month for Gemini Advanced, but some features will likely be made available through the search engine and mobile apps. Google plans broader releases next yr that can incorporate the technology into its smorgasbord of free products, including its Chrome browser, digital maps and YouTube.

In addition to attempting to outshine OpenAI and other ambitious startups, Google can also be attempting to stay one step ahead of Apple because the pioneering company begins incorporating AI into its latest iPhones and other devices. After publication a software update While the iPhone's first batch of “Apple Intelligence” features was activated, boosting the device's Siri assistant, one other batch of the AI ​​technology got here out with a free software update, also released on Wednesday.

Google is pushing its latest AI advances, as is the US Department of Justice attempt to separate myself the Mountain View, California, company to forestall further abusive practices by its dominant search engine, which was declared an illegal monopoly by a federal judge earlier this yr as a part of a landmark antitrust case.

Among other things, Gemini 2.0 is meant to enhance the AI ​​overviews that Google highlights in its search results as a substitute of the standard listing of probably the most relevant links to web sites Earlier this yr in response to AI-powered “response engines” like Perplexity.

After the AI ​​overviews initially produced some silly suggestions including Apply glue to pizzaGoogle has refined the technology to reduce such missteps. Now the corporate's executives promise that things will get even higher with Gemini 2.0, as Pichai says it can find a way to exercise more human considering while solving more complex mathematical problems and even producing computer code. The improvements to the AI ​​overviews will initially only be made available to a test audience before being released more broadly next yr.

The technological upgrade can also be intended to provide much more intelligence and flexibility to a still-experimental universal AI agent called “Project Astra,” allowing people to have more meaningful and helpful conversations with the technology. To express its confidence, Google said it might increase the number of individuals testing Project Astra, without disclosing group size.

As a part of Gemini 2.0, Google may also begin testing an extension for Chrome called “Project Mariner” that will be activated to perform online searches and browse the outcomes so people don't need to worry about it.

If the U.S. Justice Department gets its way, Google will likely be forced to sell or spin off Chrome as punishment for using its search engine in a way that stifles competition and potential innovation. Google has derided the Justice Department's proposal as “too broad” and vowed to withstand any try and break up the corporate at federal court hearings scheduled to start next spring in Washington, D.C.

Even if that process culminates in a court order ordering a dissolution, Google could still appeal and face a lawsuit that might take years to resolve as the corporate continues its AI expansion.

“I can’t wait to see what this next era brings,” Pichai wrote in his blog post, signaling that the corporate doesn’t consider it can be deterred by regulators.

Originally published: December 11, 2024 at 9:55 am PST

policy

The back-to-back catastrophic Helene and Milton attacks within the southeastern US are reshaping the presidential race and putting climate disasters at the middle of the ultimate stretch of the dueling campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

In interviews and speeches, on the campaign trail and on social media, Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Republican Trump are increasingly talking in regards to the same thing—hurricanes and disaster relief—and in very other ways.

For Helene, disasters were the main focus of the campaign because the storm made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region on September 26 as a Category 4 storm before dumping historic rainfall inland that triggered deadly flooding, particularly within the West North Carolina. In the wake of the storm, Harris and Trump adjusted their travel plans to go to affected communities and so they increasingly talked about recovery efforts.

The threat of Milton, one other powerful hurricane that hit Florida as a Category 3 storm Wednesday evening, only heightened candidates' attention to the difficulty.

Trump used the dual disasters to attack Harris and President Joe Biden over their response, spreading misinformation about it on his social media page Truth Social and in interviews and rally speeches. Trump falsely claimed that disaster relief funds can be diverted to migrants and that hurricane victims could only receive $750 in aid. He also claimed without evidence that the relief effort neglected Republican communities.

Meanwhile, Harris spends much of her time talking about hurricane preparedness, response and relief. The issue got here up when she appeared on ABC daytime talk show The View. She dismissed a few of Trump's baseless claims in regards to the government's post-Helene relief effort. She later called the Weather Channel to counter further misinformation about hurricanes. (Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told Bloomberg News: “The only misinformation is coming from the Harris-Biden administration.”)

The Harris campaign also released a brand new ad attacking Trump's handling of past disasters during his time as president. It highlights the map of the trail of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, which Trump famously altered with a Sharpie – a saga that became often called Sharpiegate. The ad features interviews with two former Trump officials highlighting his response to the storm. “He would propose not to provide disaster relief to states that did not vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, the lead attorney for former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, says within the ad.

Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that climate change is increasing the strength of hurricanes, making them intensify more quickly and bringing more rain.

Harris didn’t address the connection between the storms and global warming. And so far, she has not made climate a cornerstone of her campaign, although the Biden administration has left a major climate legacy and plenty of Democrats say global warming is amongst their top election priorities. She only touched on the difficulty briefly in her speech to the Democratic National Convention. In the talk with Trump, she briefly mentioned Biden's green initiatives before touting U.S. oil and gas production. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” up to now, has vowed to gut Biden's climate policies while disparaging clean energy technologies corresponding to wind power and electric vehicles.

Both candidates are actually talking about climate change, even in the event that they don't use those words, says Pete Maysmith, senior vp of campaigns on the LCV Action Fund, the election-related site of the League of Conservation Voters.

“I think sometimes there's a view that we need these magic words or we're not talking about climate change,” Maysmith says. “Of course we're talking about climate change.” (Similarly, he argues that Harris has already talked about it in her comments on wind energy, solar energy, automotive batteries and more.)

Environmental groups have followed the Harris campaign's lead on find out how to raise the difficulty of climate with voters by focusing their ad buys and other voter education efforts on how federal climate spending creates recent jobs and usually lowers energy costs, reasonably than to present the political details intimately. And now they're following suit and making hurricane news.

The LCV Action Fund recently posted a brief video on Instagram showing images and pictures of Helene's damage, with a voiceover from Trump saying: “When people speak about global warming, I say that the ocean inside will decrease by 100ths of an inch over the subsequent 400 years. This will not be our problem.” (Trump has made versions of this claim in campaign rallies and tv interviews.) The video has been viewed greater than 4 million times, partially because American musician Billie Eilish reposted it.

The advocacy group Climate Power released a video Thursday with rapper Big Freedia highlighting how Project 2025 — a conservative wish list for a second Trump presidency that Trump himself has rejected — proposes privatizing the National Weather Service, which raises warnings issues that Americans proceed to depend on to maintain Helene and Milton protected.

“The indisputable fact that Hurricane Milton became such a strong storm in such a brief time period shows that the climate crisis is here and shows through a really clear lens the fee to people – in lost lives, in lost homes, within the lack of…”corporations,” says Alex Glass, communications director at Climate Power.

Cost is an important think about coverage

Access to weight reduction is an issue

Although Justin Timberlake and his lawyer insisted that the pop star was not drunk when he was stopped by police within the Hamptons, the arresting officer's report describes a driver who failed a series of sobriety tests and had difficulty speaking and standing safely.

Timberlake, who pleaded not guilty to driving while intoxicated last week, was arrested within the upscale Long Island community of Sag Harbor on June 18. He was out with friends on the American Hotel, a well-liked hangout within the Hamptons, where he was reportedly “intoxicated” and was seen drinking, including sipping one other guest's cocktail. reported the New York Post.

Young police officer Michael Arkinson observed Timberlake driving away from the hotel shortly after midnight and is alleged to have seen him ignore a stop sign and move into one other lane, the Daily Mail reported.

Arkinson's handwritten notes appear to point out that the officer followed procedure to find out that Timberlake exhibited quite a few signs of intoxication, reported the Daily Mail, which obtained a duplicate of the singer's arrest report. For example, Timberlake was swaying on his feet and unable to take care of his balance, the report said.

The report states that Timberlake was alone within the automobile when Arkinson stopped him. He was noted to have “bloodshot and glassy eyes, an odor of alcohol on his breath, an inability to concentrate and an unsteady step.”

The officer quoted the singer as saying, “I was drinking a martini and following my friends home.” However, Atkinson noted that Timberlake “was unable to concentrate on speaking while he was looking for the vehicle registration.”

Timberlake refused to take a breathalyzer test, a breath test that measures how much alcohol is within the exhaled air. The singer had every right to refuse the test, but refusing is taken into account a traffic violation that robotically ends in a one-year license suspension – which is strictly what happened to Timberlake last week during a virtual court hearing.

During the arrest, the young officer may not have been aware that he was arresting a world-famous entertainer. A source told Page Six that Timberlake once said, “This is going to ruin the tour.” When the official asked, “Which tour?” Timberlake had to clarify, “The world tour,” referring to his “Forget Tomorrow World Tour,” which had recently taken him to Europe.

During the sphere sobriety test, Timberlake was asked to take nine steps in a straight line, walking from heel to toe, then turn around and repeat the nine steps back. During the test, Timberlake was “very unbalanced” and “unable to properly follow directions.”

Next, Timberlake was asked to lift one foot barely off the bottom and keep it raised without moving for 30 seconds. Arkinson reported that Timberlake swayed in the course of the test, had to make use of his arms to take care of balance, and put his foot back down before the required 30 seconds had elapsed.

The officer then detained Timberlake, handcuffed him, and placed him within the back seat of the patrol automobile to be taken back to the police station. There, Arkinson took a list of Timberlake's belongings, which included a Rolex watch, a black vape pen, a gold ring, a wallet containing three $100 bills, a $5 bill, and a $1 bill.

At the police station, Timberlake also refused to take a second breathalyzer test, which could possibly be admitted as evidence. But Timberlake refused this too, saying, “No, I don't do a chemical test.”

When Timberlake was read his Miranda rights, he told Arkinson that he understood them and that he wouldn’t speak again with out a lawyer. The singer spent the remaining of the night within the police station, was arraigned the subsequent morning, after which released on his own bail.

Prosecutors charged Timberlake with drunk driving since the officer observed the singer during his breathalyzer test. Timberlake was also accused of ignoring a stop sign and failing to remain in his lane.

Timberlake's attorney, Edward Burke Jr., told reporters after an incident on July 26 that his client was not drunk and shouldn’t have been arrested for drunk driving, claiming police “made a number of very serious errors in this case.”

Timberlake can have a number of witnesses to back up his claim that he was not drunk, Page Six reported. First, the bartender on the American Hotel told Page Six that he only saw the singer drinking a martini. Second, the police had a friend of the singer, who had been drinking with him on the hotel, drive his BMW rental automobile back to their house. TMZ reported.

The friend and her husband drove ahead of Timberlake and led him to their house. When Timberlake was arrested, she stopped and approached the cops to ask them, “Are you going to arrest Justin Timberlake?”

Sources told Page Six that the lady offered to drive Timberlake to her house, where the pop star was planning to spend the night. Police apparently didn’t take the lady up on her offer and arrested Timberlake.

The twist is that police accepted the lady's other offer to drive Timberlake's rental automobile back to her house since he was going to jail, TMZ reported. Cops said OK, although sources said it will need to have been obvious she had been drinking too, since she arrived on the American Hotel two hours before Timberlake. Police still allowed her to drive away from the scene.

An Austin, Texas, attorney said the girlfriend's testimony could help Timberlake's defense. She could say, 'Hey, I drank the identical amount and I used to be wonderful and I got home safely,'” trial attorney Tray Grober said in a statement obtained by this news organization.

“If the police thought she was fit to drive despite her alcohol consumption, that's an excellent argument and can greatly profit Justin Timberlake's defense because it is going to create reasonable doubt within the minds of the jury,” Grober added.

Originally published: August 6, 2024 at 2:58 pm

OAKLAND – An El Cerrito man who has three previous drunken driving convictions was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2022 for killing his friend while inebriated, court records show.

Nipun Ajmani, 44, pleaded no contest to alleged assault by drunken driving in reference to the March 12, 2022, crash on the MacArthur Maze that killed 36-year-old Zeeshan Khan, a passenger in Ajmani's automobile. He was formally sentenced in June but stays in Santa Rita Jail for now.

The story behind Ajmani's arrest began an hour before the crash, when he and Zhan were stopped by police in a vehicle driven by a 3rd party around 1:15 a.m. Officers concluded Ajmani was too drunk to drive and drove him and Zhan to the 1000 block of University Avenue in Berkeley, where Ajmani owned a cellular phone store, court records show.

Police estimated that Ajmani wouldn’t be sober until around 11 a.m. and told him so, based on court records. Instead of following officers' advice, Ajmani got behind the wheel of one other vehicle and picked up Zhan once they collided with a automobile from behind on the maze at around 2:20 a.m., authorities said.

“(Ajmani) is absolutely devastated by (Zhan's) death,” Morris wrote. “He regrets his actions and wishes nothing but healing and recovery for Mr. Khan's family.”

Ajmani was arrested after the accident and has been in prison ever since. He took classes to treat his alcoholism while in prison and is being sued by Zhan's next of kin, court records show.

According to court records, Ajmani has been convicted of drunk driving 3 times, all between 2003 and 2010.

The boom in artificial intelligence has had such a profound impact on the massive technology firms that their energy consumption and hence their CO2 emissions, have increased.

The spectacular success of huge language models akin to ChatGPT has contributed to this increase in energy requirements. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT query, AI queries require about 10 times as much energy as traditional Google searchesbased on the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. New AI functions akin to audio and video generation are prone to increase these energy requirements.

The energy requirements of AI are changing the best way energy firms calculate their costs. They are actually exploring previously untenable options, akin to Restarting a nuclear reactor on the Three Mile Island power plant, which has been in infamous disaster in 1979.

Data centers have experienced continuous growth for many years, but the size of growth within the still-young era of huge language models has been extraordinary. AI requires far more computing and data storage resources when data center growth was possible before AI.

AI and the ability grid

Thanks to AI, the ability grid – in lots of places already at capability or vulnerable to stability problems – is under greater pressure than before. There can also be a big lag between computer growth and network growth. Building data centers takes one to 2 years, while feeding recent energy into the network requires over 4 years.

According to a recent report by the Electric Power Research Institute, only 15 states have comprise 80% of knowledge centers within the USASome states – like Virginia, home of Data Center Alley – amazingly, data centers devour over 25% of their electricity. Other parts of the world are seeing similar trends in the expansion of cluster data centers. Ireland, for instance, has Become a knowledge center nation.

In addition to the necessity to increase electricity generation to sustain this growth, just about all countries have decarbonization targets. This signifies that they strive to feed more renewable energy sources into the gridRenewable energies akin to wind and solar are irregular: the wind doesn’t at all times blow and the sun doesn’t at all times shine. Lack of low cost, green and scalable energy storage signifies that the grid faces a good greater problem in balancing supply and demand.

Further challenges to the expansion of knowledge centers are Increasing use of water cooling to extend efficiencywhich puts a strain on the limited freshwater sources. As a result, some communities Push back against recent investments in data centers.

Better technology

The industry is addressing this energy crisis in several ways. First, computer hardware far more energy efficient through the years by way of operations performed per watt consumed. Data center energy efficiency, a metric that shows the ratio of power consumption for computers in comparison with cooling and other infrastructure, has been reduced to 1.5 on averageand in modern facilities even to a formidable 1.2. New data centers have more efficient cooling through water cooling and external cooling air where available.

Unfortunately, efficiency alone won’t solve the sustainability problem. Jevons Paradox shows how efficiency results in Increase in energy consumption in the long run. In addition, efficiency gains in hardware significantly slowed downbecause the industry has reached the bounds of scaling chip technology.

To further improve efficiency, researchers are developing Special hardware akin to acceleratorsrecent integration technologies akin to 3D chipsand recent Chip cooling Techniques.

Researchers are also increasingly investigating and developing Cooling technologies for data centersThe report by the Electric Power Research Institute confirms recent cooling methodsakin to air-assisted liquid cooling and immersion cooling. While liquid cooling has already found its way into data centers, few recent data centers have implemented immersion cooling, which continues to be under development.

Flexible future

A brand new option to construct AI data centers is flexible computing. The basic idea is to do more computing when electricity is cheaper, more available, and more environmentally friendly, and fewer when it’s costlier, scarce, and more polluting.

Data center operators can upgrade their systems to supply a versatile load on the network. Science And Industry have provided early examples of knowledge center demand response, where data centers regulate their power based on the needs of the ability grid. For example, they will schedule certain computing tasks for times of lower utilization.

Achieving broader and greater flexibility in power consumption requires innovations in hardware, software, and network-data center coordination. For AI particularly, there may be a variety of scope for developing recent strategies to optimize the computational load and thus the energy consumption of knowledge centers. For example, data centers can reduce the accuracy to cut back the workload when training AI models.

Achieving this vision requires higher modeling and forecasting. Data centers can try to raised understand and predict their loads and conditions. It can also be essential to predict network load and growth.

The Electric Power Research Institute Load forecasting initiative includes activities to support network planning and operations. Comprehensive monitoring and intelligent analytics – possibly based on artificial intelligence – for each data centers and the network are essential for accurate forecasting.

On the sting

The U.S. is at a critical juncture given the explosive growth of AI. It is immensely difficult to suit a whole bunch of megawatts of power demand into already overburdened grids. It could also be time to rethink the best way the industry builds data centers.

One way is to sustainably construct more edge data centers—smaller, more widely distributed facilities—to bring computing to local communities. Edge data centers also can reliably add computing power to densely populated, urban regions without putting additional strain on the grid. While these smaller centers currently account for 10% of knowledge centers within the U.S., analysts predict that the marketplace for smaller edge data centers will grow by over 20% in the following five years.

In addition to remodeling data centers into flexible and controllable loads, innovations in the sting data center space may help make AI's energy needs significantly more sustainable.