Somebody's learning how to post stories to the WBAL website. 😄 https://www.wbal.com/this-should-become-the-h1-fingers-crossed/

> The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.

> The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.

> The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.

> Russia has quashed dissent since invading Ukraine Lawyers for protesters risk wrath of authorities Young attorneys fill gap from those who have fled Tiring, risky work seldom brings acquittals Moscow sees Western conspiracy to destroy Russia July 4 (Reuters) - Sofia Gominova wanted to be a lawyer from age 11.

> Born after the fall of the Soviet Union, she grew up in a Russia blighted by organised crime and watched police dramas on TV, wanting to "fight evil like they did."

> Now, at 29, Gominova believes she is doing just that.

> Among a new cadre of young lawyers outraged by suppression of dissent, she has joined OVD-Info, one of Russia's biggest legal defence groups that supports thousands detained for opposing the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

> "I have always had a keen sense of justice," Gominova told a Reuters reporter based in Poland.

> WASHINGTON, July 4 (Reuters) - Even as it has ushered in sweeping changes to American law and society - on abortion, gun rights and affirmative action - the U.S. Supreme Court has kept tabs on another issue of keen interest to its conservative majority: keeping federal regulatory power in check.

> The issue will figure prominently during the court's next term, which begins in October, as the justices already have agreed to decide several cases that could curtail the authority of U.S. agencies to issue regulations and enforce laws in areas ranging from finance to fisheries.

> The cases involve what has come to be known as the "administrative state," the agency bureaucracy that interprets laws, crafts federal rules and implements executive action. The court's conservatives, with a 6-3 majority, in recent years have reined in what they viewed as governmental overreach by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies.

> GENEVA, July 4 (Reuters) - Temperatures are expected to soar across large parts of the world after the El Nino weather pattern emerged in the tropical Pacific for the first time in seven years, the World Meteorological Organization said on Tuesday.

> El Nino, a warming of water surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean, is linked to extreme weather conditions from tropical cyclones to heavy rainfall to severe droughts.

> The world's hottest year on record, 2016, coincided with a strong El Nino - though experts says climate change has fuelled extreme temperatures even in years without the phenomenon.

> Even that record could soon be broken, according to the WMO.

> Researchers say that nearly 336,000 devices exposed to the Internet remain vulnerable to a critical vulnerability in firewalls sold by Fortinet because admins have yet to install patches the company released three weeks ago.

> CVE-2023-27997 is a remote code execution in Fortigate VPNs, which are included in the company’s firewalls. The vulnerability, which stems from a heap overflow bug, has a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. Fortinet released updates silently patching the flaw on June 8 and disclosed it four days later in an advisory that said it may have been exploited in targeted attacks. That same day, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration added it to its catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities and gave federal agencies until Tuesday to patch it.

> Despite the severity and the availability of a patch, admins have been slow to fix it, researchers said.

> Stars are thought to form within enormous filaments of molecular gas. Regions where one or more of these filaments meet, known as hubs, are where massive stars form.

> These massive stars, located nearby, would have put the early Solar System at risk of a powerful supernova. This risk is more than just hypothetical; a research team at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, led by astrophysicist Doris Arzoumanian, looked at isotopes found in ancient meteorites, finding possible evidence of a massive star’s turbulent death.

> So why did the Solar System survive? The gas within the filament seems to be able to protect it from the supernova and its onslaught of radioactive isotopes. “The host filament can shield the young Solar System from stellar feedback, both during the formation and evolution of stars (stellar outflow, wind, and radiation) and at the end of their lives (supernovae),” Arzoumanian and her team said in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

> HomeVestors of America claims to be the country’s largest cash homebuyer and says it helps homeowners out of jams. But a closer look reveals that the company trains its franchisees to cash in on homeowners’ desperation.

> Millions of Americans have peripheral artery disease, a disorder primarily caused by fatty deposits that can narrow arteries and block blood flow to the legs. Often, the first symptom they feel is leg pain. Experts say that most treatments are safe, but some have expressed a growing sense of alarm that doctors may be doing procedures that patients don’t need, exposing them to unnecessary risks.

> ProPublica looked into artery procedures and found that some doctors are making millions of dollars doing a questionable number of treatments. Government insurers pay well for vascular procedures that are done outside of hospitals, and doctors can bill tens of thousands of dollars for treatments done in a single office visit.

> One doctor in Maryland made millions of dollars from the federal government for performing thousands of vascular procedures. A state medical board investigation found that his inappropriate treatments put patients at risk of serious harm. One man had to have his leg amputated after invasive treatments for mild pain, according to filings in a settled lawsuit. A grandmother bled out and died shortly after the same doctor cut into her, according to another ongoing lawsuit. The doctor denied the allegations in legal filings, but declined to be interviewed and did not respond to emailed questions.

> July 3 (Reuters) - Elon Musk’s Twitter has put a temporary limit on the number of tweets that users can see each day, a move that has sparked some backlash and could undermine the social network’s efforts to attract advertisers.

> The limit, imposed to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”, is the latest change by Twitter, which was last year acquired by Musk for $44 billion.

> What does the latest change mean and what are the alternatives to Twitter? How do the changes impact users?

> Users cannot view tweets without logging in to the platform. Verified accounts can now read 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts 600 posts and new un-verified accounts 300 posts. After that, users will get a message that says, “rate limit exceeded”.

> …

> A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

> What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a key study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

> “It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/632917

> > June 26 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday plans to lay out how a $42 billion investment in expanding internet access will be divvied up among the nation's 50 states, in an effort to give all Americans access to high-speed broadband by 2030. > > > The move will kick off the second leg of Biden's tour highlighting how legislation passed by Congress during the first half of his term will affect average Americans, as his reelection bid gears up. > > > "We have an historic opportunity here to make a real difference in people's lives and making sure that we deliver on that potential is what we're about every day and to make sure that people feel that at their kitchen table, in their communities, in their backyards,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said. > > > Zients compared the broadband effort to President Franklin Roosevelt's efforts in 1936 to bring electricity to rural America. The administration estimates there are some 8.5 million locations in the U.S. that lack access to broadband connections.