u/Silent-Resort-3076

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• The White House sped up construction of a new helipad and related work in anticipation of an “upcoming state visit,” requiring crews to work around-the-clock and driving the cost up by $875,000, according to a contractor’s records obtained by The Washington Post.
• The $13 million project also includes work on the nearby South Portico and an adjacent portion of the White House driveway, which will be retopped with white stone, the contracting records show.
• Workers have been on-site since last Monday, when construction on the helipad got underway, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the project publicly.

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• California is returning a stretch of rugged Mendocino County coast to the Indigenous nations whose ancestors once stewarded its shores.
• State transportation officials recently approved the transfer of Blues Beach and the surrounding bluffs to Kai Poma, a nonprofit founded by representatives of the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Round Valley Indian Tribes and Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians.
• The transfer of 136 acres just south of the community of Westport will mark the first time land managed by the California Department of Transportation has been returned to Indigenous tribes.
• “This is beyond huge,” said J. Carlos Rivera, tribal chairman of the Sherwood Valley Band of Pomo Indians. “It’s enormous from our tribal perspective that we are basically obtaining the land that our people once lived on before colonization.”
• California purchased the swath of rocky cliffs and windswept shoreline in the 1960s to expand the construction of Highway 1 and create a scenic viewpoint for highway travelers, according to a California Coastal Commission report.

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• Travelers heading into Palm Beach International Airport this holiday weekend may notice a change before they even reach the terminal: new highway signage reflecting the airport's upcoming name change has begun going up along Interstate 95.
• Overnight, crews installed additional signs on both the northbound and southbound lanes of I-95 showing the airport's anticipated new name, "President Donald J. Trump International Airport," marking an early visual shift ahead of the official change scheduled for July 9.
• The timing comes just ahead of what is expected to be a busy Fourth of July travel period, with airport officials urging passengers to plan for extra time.
• Inside the terminal, however, most travelers said the change is secondary to their immediate focus: getting to their flights.
• "Oh! It changed already! I knew it was happening," said passenger Nibras Jarrar. "But for me, it's a name change. … I think there are a lot of places where presidents have names."
• Another traveler, Fedor Welebob, said the update does not affect his travel plans.
• "The name change really doesn't mean anything to me as long as the airport is still functional and available to us," he said. "That, I think, is the most important thing."
• Palm Beach County officials say the renaming process will roll out in phases. While roadway signage is beginning to reflect the new name, leaders say updates to airline booking systems, websites and other operational materials will take longer.

There are some things from the article, I don't want to post here:(

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>Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers while bombarding its competitors' AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism.

>Internally known as "Cannes," the project, run by Meta contractor Covalen, targeted OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Character.AI chatbots using throwaway under-18 accounts, Wired reports. This was seemingly done to stress test the models, with the contractors instructed to push the chatbots into giving responses that defied their guardrails — though the AI companies had no idea this was happening.

>Per the reporting, one spreadsheet of the nearly 3,8000 the prompts the contractors used in one instance showed that hundreds focused on suicide and self-harm, hundreds more on eating disorders, and at least 239 involving sex or romance — all written from the perspective of a child or teenager.

>One described a fifth-grader whose classmate pointed a gun at his mouth. Another was about a girl trying to hide bulimia from her parents. (REMOVED one sentence by OP) One posing as a higher schooler asked where to "get a cocaine." They also sent images depicting pills, nooses, knives, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure, per the magazine.

>This is just a tiny preview of Meta's brute force approach, as another round of testing involved over 45,000 prompts. The contractors meticulously recorded the epic number of chatbot responses in spreadsheets. But what Meta did with all this data is unclear. An internal document from Covalen described the effort as "comprehensive AI safety benchmarking" that delivered "[c]ritical datasets for model comparison and compliance."

I'm a bit confused by this news! VERY IMPORTANT!! "Vote-by-mail ballots must be at a supervisor of elections office by 7 p.m. on Election Day."

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• Florida voters won't be affected by Monday's Supreme Court ruling on mail-in ballots. The court ruled 5-4 to uphold Mississippi's law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked and received within five days of Election Day.
• Florida law only allows late ballots from voters who are overseas, and only if they are returned by mail, explained Paul Lux, supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County.
• "To be perfectly candid, in Florida, our laws have been very clear," said Paul Lux. "They are given an extra 10 days only in presidential preference primaries and general elections."
• Nothing will change in Florida as a result of the ruling, Lux said. Vote-by-mail ballots must be at a supervisor of elections office by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

“Our company stands on values of human dignity, opportunity, and freedom.”

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• A leading vendor of the US delicacy that is the pickle has withdrawn from the Great American State Fair in Washington DC after North Carolina’s booth displayed a video containing a Confederate flag.
• The Mt Olive Pickle Company, which is located in eastern North Carolina and bills itself as the “#1 bestselling brand of pickles, peppers and relishes in the US”, told local news station WNCT it had been unaware that an image of the flag would be included in a video as part of the state’s exhibit.
• “Mt Olive Pickle Company was invited to participate in the North Carolina exhibit for the Great American State Fair … as part of America’s 250th celebration,” the company said, alluding to the US’s semiquincentennial on Saturday. “We are proud of our North Carolina roots, and we agreed to be a part of an exhibit, as presented to us, that would represent the best of our great state.
• “Our company stands on values of human dignity, opportunity, and freedom.”
• The Confederacy evoked by the flag was the white supremacist, losing side of the US civil war. It defended the ownership of enslaved people before its civil war defeat.

I had to share this idiocy!! And, couldn't find it anywhere else....

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• Kylie Jane Kremer, the activist listed as the permit holder for the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol attack, has floated a new theory about Washington's summer heat: it's sabotage.
• In a post on X, Kremer claimed someone with an "extreme case" of Trump derangement syndrome "geoengineered" the weather in D.C. She pointed to the cold at Trump's inauguration as proof of the same plot.
• "I’m telling y’all that someone with an extreme case of TDS geoengineered this weather in DC. Same way they geoengineered Trump’s inauguration to be one of the coldest in U.S. history. People with TDS hate Trump more than they love America," she wrote on X.

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>That's Trump. A treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civil idolatry; in fact, let's throw "idolatrous" in there too. And if you don't understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

>But these, of course, are minor matters that will pass. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

>There  is still much to celebrate about the United States of America—its art and literature and music, its scientific achievements, its physical beauty, and of course the principles of liberty it introduced to the world 250 years ago and toward which we daily and yearly strive. 

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• With the help of two recently hatched chicks, Pittsburgh's National Aviary has plans to help a bird species that no longer exists in the wild to once again find its way home.
• The National Aviary has two baby Guam kingfishers, known as sihek in the indigenous CHamoru language. The male Guam kingfisher hatched on April 19, while the female hatched on May 12. On May 27, the male chick took his first flight.
• Ultimately, the goal is for the pair to travel thousands of miles west as part of a program working toward restoring Guam kingfishers in the wild.
• Why is the National Aviary breeding Guam kingfishers?
• The National Aviary is part of the Association of Zoos and Aquarium's Guam kingfisher Species Survival Plan Program.

Gigi Felix is 18 years old and lives in Fort Lauderdale. 

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• The race to save a South Florida woman is on.
• OneBlood is calling on those of African descent to donate blood as soon as they can to save the life of 18-year-old Gigi Felix, who has sickle cell disease and is in need of a rare blood type combination.
• Sickle cell disease is a chronic illness that affects red blood cells and causes severe pain, and in some extreme cases, death. Sickle cell disease causes red blood cells to be crescent-shaped rather than being round. Because of the misshaping, the red blood cells tend to block blood flow and cause pain, anemia, and a higher risk of serious infections.
• OneBlood says Felix is in need of a bone marrow procedure to survive.
• “To me it just seems like my last golden ticket,” Felix said, in a statement released by OneBlood.
• The procedure requires O-Negative blood type, which is very rare, as only 7% of the population has that type. But Felix also needs a blood antigen profile found in those of African descent. Antigens are proteins and sugars that attach themselves to red blood cells, and act as a nametag that can trigger the immune system to release antibodies to attack foreign invaders.

Gigi Felix is 18 years old and lives in Fort Lauderdale. 

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• A race against time is underway to save the life of 18-year-old Gigi Felix, who is battling an aggressive form of sickle cell disease.
• Doctors say she urgently needs 50 units of extremely rare, specially matched blood before they can safely move forward with a bone marrow transplant—her best chance at a cure.
• “I’m just asking for your help, because I really do need it,” Gigi said.
• Doctors say the challenge isn’t just finding O-negative blood—it’s finding blood that matches Gigi’s antigen profile, the genetic markers found on red blood cells.
• Because Gigi has received countless transfusions over her lifetime, her body has developed antibodies, making most donor blood incompatible.
• Gigi’s required antigen profile is most commonly found in people of African descent.
• Statistically, doctors say only 1 in 1,000 people of African descent may be a match.
• “We need the African American and Afro-Caribbean community to step up to help save Gigi’s life,” said Dr. David Crawford, a pediatric hematologist/oncologist.

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• Blood donors of African descent are needed to save the life of a Florida 18-year-old fighting an aggressive form of sickle cell disease, OneBlood announced.
• Gigi Felix, 18, is battling an aggressive form of sickle cell disease and urgently needs rare blood donations to undergo a lifesaving bone marrow transplant.
• Gigi’s survival depends on securing 50 units of very rare blood from very specific donors before they can proceed with the bone marrow transplant.
• For a person to be a match for Gigi, they have to have the same blood type and need to have the same antigen profile. if not, her body will reject the blood. The antigen combination Gigi has can only be found in a certain ethnic group.

• The family of a 27-year-old Michigan woman found dead near a Miami park spoke out Friday as authorities said she died by suicide, after the case drew wider concern on social media.
• To'Nea Nicole Miller, of Flint, Michigan, was found dead near Gwen Cherry Park on June 18. Her family told NBC6 she had been in Miami since February.
• The Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office said the death is being investigated as an apparent suicide and that, at this time, there is no evidence of foul play.
• Miller's aunt, Michele Howell, traveled to Miami to identify her niece's body. She told NBC6 on Friday that after speaking with the investigator assigned to the case and with the medical examiner, the family also believes Miller took her own life.
• "After talking with the investigator on the case and speaking with the medical examiner ... it was suicide," Howell said. "...After gathering information and investigating, it was not homicide."

>But at a news conference with the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP on Friday, Miller's sister strongly disputed that.