Key Takeaways

• Bigger cars, bigger danger. Pedestrian fatalities have surged 75% since 2009, linked to the rise of larger vehicles like SUVs and pickups.
• Size matters in safety. Larger vehicle dimensions contribute to increased pedestrian deaths, with 200-400 lives potentially saved annually if cars hadn’t grown.
• Regulations and repercussions. Changes in emissions and fuel economy rules inadvertently encouraged bigger cars, impacting pedestrian safety.
• Physics of impact. Larger vehicles distribute force differently, but their height and mass increase the risk of deadly collisions.

Bottom line: The rise of larger vehicles has significantly increased pedestrian fatalities, highlighting the unintended consequences of regulatory changes and vehicle design trends.

The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to “blackmail” him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony.

The tech pioneer testified behind closed doors before the House oversight committee on 10 June regarding his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 as he awaited trial for sex crimes.

According to the transcript released by the committee on Tuesday, Gates spoke of “veiled” threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit, even as Gates was distancing himself from Epstein.

“I was not blackmailed, but you know, as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein’s brainstorming was going in that direction,” Gates added, referring to documents from the Epstein case released in January by the US Department of Justice.

A peer-reviewed Nature critique argues that Microsoft's 2025 Majorana quantum-computing breakthrough -- and its claim that it could enable "a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years" -- is fundamentally flawed. According to Dr Henry Legg, a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, the claims were undermined by omitted data, selective plotting, and basic Python errors that concealed alternative results. Microsoft, for its part, says the bugs were minor and stands by its findings and roadmap.

This week, the team discusses Amazon’s controversial decision to drop Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI’s Sam Altman — which reportedly did not paint him in a favorable light. Alongside Google DeepMind’s $75 million brand new partnership with indie film studio A24, how much of a dent is AI actually having in the films we see? They also discuss the recent upheaval of workers — from electricians to software engineers — against data centers. Plus: Meta’s program to track employees’ data gets paused after a massive leak, and Anthropic is now getting along with the government thanks to CEO Dario Amodei no longer being in the room.

In this News Brief, we talk with Emmaia Gelman, author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, about how––despite posing a civil rights org––the ADL functions as defender of colonialism and enforcer for reactionary western ideologies.

Questions are mounting around a proposed artificial intelligence data center in California's Imperial Valley because its developer is now seeking Colorado River water, despite earlier saying the project would avoid drawing from the drought-stressed river.

KPBS reported that Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing has gone to court to secure 260 million gallons of water per year from the Imperial Irrigation District — about 750,000 gallons a day — for a planned artificial intelligence complex in the desert.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• By studying population trends and forecasting models, researchers have come to believe that nearly 15,000 U.S. cities will face noticeable depopulation by 2100.
• Populated areas of the cities in question could experience a decline of up to 44 percent.
• Projections call for the biggest drops in city populations to occur in the Northeast and Midwest.

In a Monday morning decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a formerly incarcerated individual, denying his right to sue the state of Louisiana for violating his Rastafarian beliefs by forcibly shaving his hair. The case is notable in that, while this iteration of the high court has made numerous decisions defending right-wing Christians’ purported First Amendment religious freedoms…

Source

The sweep also sends an undeniable message to establishment Democrats in Washington, including House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who campaigned against Mamdani’s candidates and lost. Mamdani and his slate were openly fighting for dramatic change on key issues, with Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza and affordability chief among them.

... Unfortunately, there remains ambiguity about the full scale of military spending given the poor state of Pentagon accounting practices, including its inability to pass a financial audit. Members of the public and members of Congress need a full accounting of the military budget to analyse, discuss, and debate the proper size of military spending both on its own and in relation to other non-military funding priorities.

To provide accurate spending figures, Congress should reform its budgeting practices and provide a true total military budget that combines all forms of military and war spending in one place and one true total figure. Congress also should stop appropriating, and thus hiding, money for the military in other agencies’ budgets. Until Congress begins reporting accurate numbers, members of the media and other analysts should stop repeating incomplete congressional spending data and tell the public what the country is really spending on the military and war.

Under capitalism the endpoint of every app is a slot machine.

While the independent Imperial report itself does not single out the Ulez or any other policy, Khan said: “The evidence is now overwhelming and unarguable: the bold action we have taken in London has reduced pollution, improved public health and saved lives.

“This latest data shows why expanding Ulez London-wide was even more important than we previously thought and is transforming lives right across our capital.”

The Ulez was launched in 2019 in central London and widened across inner boroughs in 2021.

Vehicles that fail to comply with emission standards – typically those with diesel engines from before 2015 or petrol from before 2004 – have to pay a daily charge, starting from £12.50 for cars. The overwhelming majority of vehicles driving in the zone, about 97%, are now compliant.

What a crock of shit