The Fox News talking head in this clip seems to be critical of North Korea. My bet is that the established commentators will tend to support the President and come down on the side of Kim Jong Un and against the South Koreans.
Given all the reporting on the mass firing of government employees under DOGE, mass firings at the FBI and DOJ, and the proposed new Schedule/Policy Career classification in the Civil Service, there have been remarkably few case of individual lawsuits filed alleging unjust firings. There have been some group filings by employee associations etc. but almost noe by individuals.
According to the MSPB at https://www.mspb.gov/about/annual_reports/MSPB_APR_for_FY_2025.pdf there were over 20,000 complaints submitted in fiscal 2025, but because of a lack of a quorum, and budget restrictions at the agency, it is likely that a relatively small proportion of these cases were resolved. In addition the P/C rule was only finalized in February of 2026. Because of this only a small number of settled cases could be eligible for judicial review.
Nevertheless it has been stated that thousands of employees at DOJ have been fired, and these employees can apply for judicial review immediately.
But available sources suggest that there have been only about a half a dozen cases filed. And of these there have been no decisions reported.
My question is: Why have more employees not appealed their firing to the courts? And given the slow pace, how long will it be before these cases wend there way to SCOTUS for final decision.
Pirro is withdrawing the charges in the reflecting pool case because (oops) we just got word that the damage was caused by faulty installation. Why did someone not tell her this before she brought the charges. Did someone else make a mistake in the investigation. Whose fault is it?
Surely we cannot expect a Fox News talking head to accept responsibility.
Can they get it there before the election?
This article is dated July 17, and talks about the options open to Trump and his tariff obsession when the current section 232 tariffs expire on Friday July 24. there was widespread speculation at that time that Trump would replace these tariffs with section 232 (national security) and section 301 (unfair trade practices). However, just two days later Trump announced tariffs against Canada under section 338, ( discriminatory treatment of US Commerce). What explains this abrupt change in tactics? While all of these sections require some justification - for which Trump and his henchman Jamieson Greer can concoct a trumped up reason (yes the pun was intended) - The section 338 tariffs provide Trump with much more flexibility. Only section 338 allows Trump to act solely on his personal whims without any sort of investigation. This will allow him to put tariffs on, reduce them, take them off and re-impose them at will without any tiresome resort to investigations. As well as satisfying his need for total control, it will also allow Trump to manipulate markets whenever he wishes. For that reason we will probably see this section used on other countries and not just Canada.
What is the best tack to take.
This source provides a highly informative summary of progress in the DOJ's state voter information case suits.
It source shows 32 cases filed (my count from the table attached to the article)
Of which 16 DOJ losses, and 1 settlement.
One case was dismissed on appeal. (Michigan). The DOJ has apparently requested an en banc review.
An appeal has been announced for 11 of the cases
Some of the cases were settled too recently for an announcement to be made (5)
Does anyone know what the status of the remaining states is. Did they provide the information voluntarily?
And, given the DOJ's tenacity in similar cases it is likely that some of these cases will make it all the way to the Supreme Court. And if they are in fact appealed to SCOTUS is it likely that they will be granted certiori, and will an emergency injunction be granted one way of the other. That then raises the question of whether SCOTUS will hear the case before the next election, and what will happen in practical terms if they deliver a judgment or issue temporary injunction before the election.
Many times when I try to use copilot in the side panel to guide me to find an edge setting it will direct me to a setting that either doesn't exist on my version of Edge, or direct me to a path that is not the correct one.
Most recently I was trying to find the setting to turn off grounding and it happened again.
Here is my first prompt "can I change the Edge settings to prevent page grounding by default"
after the first response I prompted "walk me through the steps to go to exactly where the toggle is how to verify whether grounding is active how to set Copilot to “manual grounding only” how to test whether grounding is working or blocked"
It then walked me through a path that did not exist on my version of EDGE.
My questions are.
Why does Copilot appear to respond with information on EDGE settings that do not pertain to my version of Edge?
Is there a prompt which will direct it to provide me information on the the correct steps to follow.
And why was Gemini able to return a response which allowed me to turn off grounding (albeit with a bit of difficulty) Is it trained on more recent data? And is Copilot trained on old and outdated versions of Edge, or is there some other reason why it does this.
P.S. the reason I asked Copilot to give me directions after using Gemini to turn of grounding was that I wanted to check and see if the initial solution had worked.
As an aside, does anyone else find the default grounding response to be incredibly frustrating?
Does the recent SCOTUS decision on firing the heads of agencies established by Congress apply to the Smithsonian, or is the Smithsonian not part of the Executive branch.
Not sure if this is the right sub for this question since I am not at all technical, but if not can you point me one that is suitable.
Preamble
I was trying to prompt Copilot to tell me if there was any commentary on a conflict between Jeaninne Pirro being a prosecutor in Washington and a talking head on Fox, and it returned a response that Pirro was not the DC prosecutor. To me this appeared to be a hallucination (whether it is me or the Copilot is of course a question of fact which I may not be able to answer depending which is the hallucinator).
In order to correct the hallucination I submitted a number of prompts including:
1.a link to a PBS story on her news conference.
Several additional links
A prompt asking if any reputable news sources had reported on the appointment of Pirro
If Copiloy could give the current date and report on the the dates the previous prosecutor was appointed and his current status.
Copilot returned various responses including:
The links were broken
The links were fabricated to show incorrect information
the links were fabricated to show a future date
the links and their contents were a hallucination by copilot.
.
I submitted prompts with additional links, requests for correct links to current articles, questions about the dates of appointment of the DC prosecutor, etc. but the response was always a hallucination.
Question
When I recognize that a response is a hallucination is there some way to ameliorate/resolve the hallucination problem by submitting additional prompts, and in this case, what sort of additional prompts would be appropriate?
Apparently the alleged reflecting pool vandal is being charged with a felony with a maximum penalty of 10 years.. Even assuming that he is guilty as charged this sounds to me to be somewhat excessive. Was the rioter who defecated on the House Speaker's desk charged with a felony, and if so, what was the sentence. To me the reflecting pool vandal should be given a somewhat more lenient sentence if he is convicted, especially since it appears that the blue coating was already coming off the pool. I would think that maybe a day or two in jail would be more proportional to the offence, but certainly it should be a little less than defecating in the halls of congress.
Forget the Big Mac Index or the thanksgiving Dinner Index, the economist has come up with another.
The article is paywalled but in summary :
To calculate the bill, The Economist has created a summer BBQ Index, tracking ten cookout staples in 25 American cities. Our basket should feed four hungry adults and includes protein (1.5 pounds, or 675g of rib-eye steak, two pounds of ground beef and of frying chicken, and a pack of pork sausage), carbs (two pounds of potatoes, a big bag of potato crisps, which Americans insist on calling chips, and a loaf of bread), beverages (a 64-ounce, or two-litre, bottle of Coke and a six-pack of beer) and lettuce. Using prices gathered by the Council for Community and Economic Research, a think-tank, we then compared the cost of our basket with median hourly pay in each metro area to see how long the typical worker must toil to afford it all.
The index offers an unappetising conclusion. Across the 25 cities in our sample, the basket now costs an average of $81, 12% more than a year ago, the fastest annual increase in a decade (see chart 1, top panel). That far outpaced grocery-price inflation of less than 3%, reflecting the unusually sharp increases in several items in our barbecue basket.
What is pushing up the barbecue bill? Ground-beef inflation looks comparatively mild in our sample, partly because prices were already elevated a year ago. Nationally, they rose by nearly 20% in the year to the first quarter. For a family buying two pounds a week, that adds roughly $10 a month to the cost of hamburgers. Steak prices climbed even faster in our index, by more than 25% on average. Other parts of the basket are becoming more expensive, too. Across the 25 cities in our index, a two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola rose in price by about 15%, while a bag of potato crisps was up by roughly 10%.
The article says :
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and other members of President Donald Trump's administration have refused to file the statement Judge Leonie M. Brinkema demanded in her judicial order last week.
AlterNet reported that last Friday, Judge Brinkema said she wanted to "avoid any further litigation in this civil action," and asked Blanche along with Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to submit a declaration they wouldn't take any further action to create Trump's slush fund.
Is this a separation of powers question, and can the court continue the case?
And here is another sorry story on the failures of the CRA. I have to admit that after the posturing and virtue signalling of the Trudeau government, the Carney government does seem to be making some effort to make the trains run on time, but there is still a long way to go.
The article is paywalled but the gist is that the CRA has failed to make the improvements that are required. One of the problems is the delay in processing requests for adjustments which leads taxpayers to call the call center only to be frustrated with a further lack of information.
From the article:
Mr. Boileau said he’s increasingly hearing from Canadians who struggle with issues that often emerge after the end of tax season. One of the main drivers of the jump in complaints last year was due to delays in processing personal income tax return adjustments, which are requests to change returns that have already been filed.
and later on:
Even the process of complaining about poor service to the CRA can lead to more complaints to Mr. Boileau’s office, as many Canadians using the agency’s Service Feedback Program said they did not receive a response within the published service standards.
For those without access to the G&M the article starts
The federal fiscal watchdog says Ottawa’s plan to roll out automatic tax filing could see Canadians who normally don’t file their tax returns get thousands of dollars in owed benefits annually.
The federal government announced a plan in the 2025 budget for the Canada Revenue Agency to file taxes for certain low-income individuals and offer pre-filled returns for others with simple tax situations.
The government relies on the CRA to distribute certain benefits supporting workers, parents or low-income households – which means those who don’t file their taxes probably aren’t receiving the benefits they’re owed.
For me its about time. Keeping benefits that the poor are owed on the grounds that they should have filed a tax return is the ultimate in cynicism.
For those without a Globe and Mail subscription, the piece starts:
The U.S. government’s directive that Anthropic prevent foreign nationals from accessing its latest artificial intelligence models underscores the risks that Canada and other countries face without alternatives to American tech giants, according to experts.
Anthropic said on Friday that the U.S. government issued an export control directive to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, even if they are employees of the company. The directive for Fable and Mythos, which are the San Francisco-based AI giant’s most capable models, cited national security concerns, according to Anthropic.