Donald Trump Arrives for Closing Arguments in New York Civil Fraud Trial After Bomb Threat

NEW YORK — Donald Trump arrived for closing arguments Thursday in his New York civil fraud trial after authorities responded to a bomb threat at the home of the judge who moved this week to prevent the former president from delivering his own closing statements.

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Authorities responded to the threat at Judge Arthur Engoron’s home on Long Island, a court official said. The proceedings were not delayed.

Trump, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, has repeatedly disparaged the judge in the case, accusing him in a social media post Wednesday night of working closely with the New York attorney general “to screw me.”

“At this moment the judge is not letting me make the summation because I’ll bring up things he doesn’t want to hear,” Trump said as he walked into the courtroom, characterizing the decision as “political interference.”

“This is a case that never should have been brought,” he said.

At 5:30 a.m. on Thursday, hours before the trial’s final day was set to begin, Nassau County police said they responded to a “swatting incident” at Engoron’s Great Neck home. Nothing amiss was found at the location, officials said.

The false report comes days after a fake emergency call reporting a shooting at the home of the judge overseeing Trump’s Capitol attack criminal case in Washington, D.C. The two incidents follow a spate of similar false reports at the homes of public officials in recent days.

On Wednesday, Engoron had nixed an unusual plan by Trump to deliver his own closing remarks in the courtroom, in addition to summations from his legal team, after lawyers for the former president would not agree to the judge’s demand that he stick to “relevant” matters.”

That will leave the last words to the lawyers in a trial over allegations that Trump exaggerated his wealth on financial statements he provided to banks, insurance companies and others.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, wants the judge to impose $370 million in penalties. Trump says he did nothing wrong, didn’t lie about his fortune and is the victim of political persecution.

The former president had hoped to make that argument personally, but the judge — initially open to the idea — said no after a Trump lawyer missed a deadline for agreeing to ground rules. Among them, Engoron warned that Trump couldn’t use his closing remarks to “deliver a campaign speech” or use the opportunity to impugn the judge and his staff.

Trump is still expected to be in court as a spectator, despite the death of his mother in-law, Amalija Knavs, and the launch of the presidential primary season Monday with the Iowa caucus.

Since the trial began Oct. 2, Trump has gone to court nine times to observe, testify and complain to TV cameras about the case, which he called a “witch hunt and a disgrace.”

He clashed with Engoron and state lawyers during 3½ hours on the witness stand in November and remains under a limited gag order after making a disparaging and false social media post about the judge’s law clerk.

Thursday’s arguments are part of a busy legal and political stretch for Trump.

On Tuesday, he was in court in Washington, D.C., to watch appeals court arguments over whether he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to overturn the 2020 election — one of four criminal cases against him. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

James sued Trump in 2022 under a state law that gives the state attorney general broad power to investigate allegations of persistent fraud in business dealings.

Engoron decided some of the key issues before testimony began. In a pretrial ruling, he found that Trump had committed years of fraud by lying about his riches on financial statements with tricks like claiming his Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three times its actual size, or valuing his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida at more than $612 million based on the idea that the property could be developed for residential use, when he had signed an agreement surrendering rights to develop it for any uses but a club.

The trial involves six undecided claims, including allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.

Trump’s company and two of his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are also defendants.

Besides monetary damages, James wants Trump and his co-defendants barred from doing business in New York.

State lawyers say that by making himself seem richer, Trump qualified for better loan terms from banks, saving him at least $168 million.

Trump contends his financial statements actually understated his net worth. He said the outside accountants that helped prepare the statements should’ve flagged any discrepancies and that the documents came with disclaimers that shield him from liability.

Engoron said he is deciding the case because neither side asked for a jury and state law doesn’t allow for juries for this type of lawsuit. He said he hopes to have a decision by the end of the month.

Last month, in a ruling denying a defense bid for an early verdict, the judge signaled he’s inclined to find Trump and his co-defendants liable on at least some claims.

“Valuations, as elucidated ad nauseum in this trial, can be based on different criteria analyzed in different ways,” Engoron wrote in the Dec. 18 ruling. “But a lie is still a lie.”

source https://time.com/6554362/donald-trump-new-york-fraud-trial-bomb-threat/

A Forgotten 1964 Supreme Court Case Suggests the First Amendment Doesn’t Protect Misgendering People

Courts around the country are grappling with claims by teachers, professors, businesses, and more, which assert that their right to free speech protects them from consequences for calling transgender students, customers, and employees by names and pronouns inconsistent with the gender they live every day. On the other side, some states are banning teachers from using the pronouns students prefer and even firing teachers for referring to themselves with gender-neutral honorifics like “Mx.”

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While the context is undoubtedly new, the U.S. Supreme Court may have provided the answer to this legal question more than 50 years ago, when it overturned a Black activist’s conviction for criminal contempt after she insisted on being referred to as “Miss.” The Court’s reasoning offers powerful insight into how it might view the debate over pronouns today. 

In the 1960s, Mary Hamilton was one of just a handful of women in leadership positions in the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which pioneered the use of nonviolent direct action to protest racial segregation in the South. Several times, police arrested Hamilton for her role in CORE protests and civil disobedience.

After one such arrest in 1963 in Alabama for protesting, Hamilton opted to testify on her own behalf. 

When the prosecutor began questioning her, he addressed Hamilton as “Mary.” At that time, a white woman testifying in open court would have been called Miss or Mrs., but referring to Black adults as “girl,” “boy,” or by their first names was common in the South as a way to reinforce racial hierarchy. The practice reflected how segregation extended into the day-to-day and the anodyne—no exchange was too minor to concede an inch of white supremacy.

Because of this custom, Hamilton instantly perceived the intended slight in how the white prosecutor addressed her. She refused, however, to concede the indignity, instead telling him, “My name is Miss Hamilton, please address me correctly.”

The prosecutor continued his questions without even acknowledging Hamilton’s request. “Who were you arrested by, Mary?” he asked.

Read More: Anti-Trans Violence and Rhetoric Reached Record Highs Across America in 2021

“I will not answer,” Hamilton responded, “unless I am addressed correctly.”

Hamilton’s insistence on the same dignity the prosecutor routinely showed to white women who sat in the witness seat was a proud act of defiance, and everyone in the courtroom knew it. Immediately the judge declared Hamilton in contempt of court and sentenced her to a $50 fine—and five days in jail.

Hamilton served her jail sentence, but she did not accept her punishment. With the help of lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she appealed her conviction to the Alabama Supreme Court. Reversing Hamilton’s conviction would have upended the segregationist status quo, something the court refused to do. Instead, it found that the prosecutor had done nothing wrong because Hamilton’s legal name was “Mary Hamilton”—that is, the honorific “Miss” did not appear on her birth certificate. 

The state justices disregarded the reality that white women were afforded the courtesy of being called “Miss,” instead employing a type of formalistic legal reasoning that courts had perniciously deployed to justify segregation and white supremacy for decades. Most infamously, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding separate but equal accommodations in Plessy v. Ferguson reasoned that segregation was not unfair to Black Americans because both Black and white people were separated from each other. The Alabama court’s decision in the Hamilton case, like Plessy before it, relied on technical truths that belied the lived reality of a race-based caste system.

Hamilton appealed again, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. By 1964, the Court had renounced its formalistic way of thinking about the race line. A six-justice majority reversed Hamilton’s conviction without so much as scheduling oral argument in the case, the judicial equivalent of giving Alabama the back of the hand.

Read More: Public Opinion About Gender Identity Is Increasingly Complex

Though the Court did not write an opinion in Hamilton’s case, it provided clues as to its reasoning. Hamilton’s lawyers had argued that her conviction violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment. While Justice Hugo Black noted that he agreed with the due process argument, the other five justices in the majority reversed without comment. The implication was that they found the equal protection argument compelling, a victory that Hamilton’s lawyers trumpeted. 

Throwing out Hamilton’s conviction sent a powerful message that racial segregation and racial discrimination would not be tolerated in America’s courthouses any more than in its schoolrooms. If white women were entitled to be referred to by an honorific, so too was Hamilton. The First Amendment did not protect the prosecutor’s refusal to extend equal courtesy to Hamilton any more than it would protect him from hanging a “Colored Only” sign by her seat.

More than a half century later, much has changed in our language. Social interactions in 2023 are much more casual than they were in 1963; it’s rare to use honorifics like Ms. or Mr. outside of professional settings. 

But there are parallels between Hamilton’s case and the intentional misgendering of transgender people. Language matters. As Hamilton’s case shows, rigid adherence to what may be printed on a person’s birth certificate is not a neutral choice and often ignores the reality of how we refer to each other.

Calling cisgender people—but not transgender people—by the name and pronouns that reflect the gender they know themselves to be diminishes the dignity of transgender people and creates a double standard. Under some circumstances, such as an employer who persistently and intentionally misgenders an employee, that double standard can be a form of discrimination—one that’s not shielded by the Constitution. In the case of government officials, such conduct may even violate the Constitution.

At a time when the U.S. is witnessing an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ laws, arguing about honorifics and pronouns may seem unimportant. Mary Hamilton’s bravery reminds us that it is anything but.

Ria Tabacco Mar is a civil rights lawyer. Formerly of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she is now director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.

source https://time.com/6548381/supreme-court-misgendering-history/

What to Know About South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel

On Jan. 11, South Africa and Israel will take the stand before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case that could shape the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. 

Oral proceedings will take place on Thursday and Friday in the Netherlands, after South Africa filed a case against Israel in late December for its “genocidal acts” against Palestinians in Gaza. The suit was filed to the ICJ—the main judicial body of the United Nations which settles international disputes among member states and answers requests for advisory opinion on legal questions.

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More than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and killed 1,200 people and kidnapped some 200 others. The Gaza Strip has experienced a shortage of resources since, with hospitals and churches subject to airstrikes, and limited international aid coming into the enclave.  

The court, on Thursday, will not decide whether Israel is committing genocide, but instead will assess whether South Africa’s case is strong enough to issue provisional measures that would “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm” to Palestinians and “‘to ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide,’” the application against Israel says. 

Here’s what to know about the case. 

What is this case about? 

South Africa submitted an application to institute proceedings against Israel on Dec. 29, 2023, for “alleged violations by Israel” under the Genocide Convention.

In the 84-page application, South Africa cites United Nations experts who have, for week, sounded the alarm of the risk of genocide against Palestinians. The application points to evidence including, but not limited to: statements by Israeli state representatives that they say express genocidal intent; the deprivation of access to food and water; blockage of humanitarian aid; killing civilians; causing serious mental and bodily harm; and mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians.

Israel has denied that it has violated international law during its military campaign in Gaza. “The use of the term ‘genocide’ in relation to Israel’s lawful targeting of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations in Gaza empties the term of meaning,” reads a Q&A published on the Israeli Defense Forces website. “Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the people of Gaza. It is committed to conducting its operations in accordance with international law and wishes no harm to Palestinian civilians anywhere.” 

How the case will play out

The case is currently at the provisional measures stage, meaning “South Africa is not asking the court to rule definitively that Israel is committing genocide,” Rutgers Law School professor Adil Haque says. 

Instead, South Africa is asking the ICJ to issue an order that would be similar to a preliminary injunction in a U.S. court and “preserve the status quo,” Lea Brilmayer, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, adds.

South Africa is specifically requesting Israel to “halt all military attacks that constitute or give rise to violations of the Genocide Convention,” according to their court application. They also ask that Israel “cease killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinian people in Gaza” and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. The court has the power to order Israel to comply with all of South Africa’s requests, or it may only issue some orders. 

Scholars could not concretely provide a timeframe for when the ICJ would issue their decision after the oral arguments. Some said it could take weeks, if not longer. Francis Boyle—a professor at University of Illinois College of Law who serves as counsel to the Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority—says it could be even faster. He notes that the massive Palestinian death toll due to the ongoing military offensive in Gaza creates urgency in this case.

Either way, if the ICJ does rule in favor of South Africa, the provisional measures would only be temporary. Judges would later have to decide if the case could move forward to the merits phase, which would lead to a fully-fledged trial between South Africa and Israel during which the court would decide whether Israel committed genocide. A decision on that would take years, according to experts. 

A separate case has also been opened in the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is reviewing actions taken by Israeli officials since the war and “conduct that may amount to Rome Statute crimes committed since 13 June 2014 in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” per a Nov. 17 statement. The ICC differs from the ICJ in that it is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals for their actions. 

Role of the ICJ in determining genocide

The ICJ’s orders are legally binding—but experts warn that the ICJ does not have the power to enforce a state to abide by its judgment. 

“It’s an institution that enforces its judgments through public pressure, because it looks very bad for a country to defy an order from the ICJ because it’s very prestigious and authoritative,” Brilmayer notes. “The ICJ is basically stuck if it comes up against a state who refuses to comply with the order.”

Haque points to a similar case filed by Ukraine against Russia in February 2022 as a possible precedent. While the case is still pending in the courts, judges issued a provisional measure telling Russia to “suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine” and that any military support must take “no steps in furtherance of these military operations.” But Russia has not ended its ongoing military campaign. 

The UN Security Council has the authority to enforce ICJ orders, but countries like the U.S. and Russia have veto power, making them and their allies immune to demands. Boyle says that the UN General Assembly could issue a resolution for enforcement on the matter, but other experts note that even that action could be ignored. 

“The court orders will more likely be the basis for a wide variety of states to criticize Israel if it does not comply, and use other means to try to pressure Israel to comply with whatever the orders turn out to be,” Haque says. 

Still, Alexander Hinton, the UNESCO Chair in Genocide Prevention at Rutgers University, says that pursuing this legal avenue is worthwhile. 

Having South Africa file this case could be evidence of a trend towards greater universal care, he suggests. All member states are permitted to present a case about genocide to the ICJ under the UN Genocide Convention, and this would not be the first time a third-party brings forward a case to the ICJ about genocide; in 2019, Gambia, presented a case against Myanmar for its genocide against the Rohingya. But having a country that does not neighbor Israel file the claim is significant.

Settling international matters may be slow, but Hinton says “there is a worth to determine the facts to render a judgment and to morally and legally implicate [an entity] who could be found to violate the genocide treaty.”

source https://time.com/6553912/israel-south-africa-icj-genocide/

The 5 Words That Help Me Accept My Body

Some days I look in the mirror and feel a sense of deep dissatisfaction. My belly is puckered from pregnancy; my thighs are dimpled and ample; my proportions are rearranging now that I’ve hit 40. I have been fat for pretty much my whole life, and discovered body positivity, which advocates taking a positive attitude toward our own form, when I was 20. Sometimes, though, it feels like just another standard against which I am failing. 

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Body positivity is a familiar answer to the salient–and sometimes pressing–question of how we can and should think about our bodies. It encourages viewing ourselves and others as beautiful, no matter our size and shape. But while it remains an important entry point for many people in resisting diet culture and fatphobia, a systematic form of oppression that has ensnared me and so many others, it has over the years been leached of much of its original meaning and purpose. Once a radical idea, with its roots in Black feminism, body positivity has unfortunately been widely co-opted by thin white women performatively embracing their stretch marks or cellulite.

Read More: How Doctors Inadvertently Fat-Shame Kids

And in truth, there were always problems with its advice—which may explain why, even after I committed to stop dieting and to accept my own fatness, I have not found it especially helpful. The psychologists Lisa Legault and Anise Sago have observed that the body-positivity movement has a number of features in common with toxic positivity, which compels us to take a relentlessly upbeat view, and—in the case of how we view bodies—minimizes valid feelings of body grief, dissatisfaction, frustration, insecurity, and dysphoria. The body-positivity movement seems not necessarily well-suited to the needs of trans people, for example, many of whom need or want to change their bodies, sometimes in radical ways, and should not be pressured to feel positive about their current physical incarnation. 

So how should we feel about our bodies? How should we educate our children to view and treat themselves? Of course, no amount of changing how we feel about our bodies is going to change the ways fat people are subject to widespread discrimination, in education, employment, and health care, among other realms. We urgently need to fight these inequities together—often, for our own sake, as well as that of larger people. And yet we have to live in our bodies day to day, to look in the mirror and see our forms and figures reflected back at us, so how we choose to consider them still matters.

The main going alternative to body positivity is body neutrality, which tells us to view our bodies neutrally instead, and to consider our appearance and our form with something like studied indifference. Body neutrality, too, clearly gets something right. But it is hardly the most inspiring option. Uniform praise for our bodies veers into meaninglessness, but no praise is dispiriting, lackluster. A truly neutral attitude is hard to maintain, moreover, with some psychologists disputing whether it is even possible, and others holding that it is at least a rarity. The words still others suggest to capture a neutral affect are, tellingly, quite variable, with some—feeling “meh” or “so-so”—seemingly tinged with negativity. Others, like “feeling nothing in particular,” imply a kind of blankness that is surely hard to conjure routinely about a subject as fraught as our own bodies.

Read More: The Messed-Up Reason I Couldn’t Date a Fellow Fat Person

Moreover, there’s something about body positivity and body neutrality that both adhere to the same tired paradigm: they are like awarding our bodies a positive number or a zero, rather than a negative one. Meanwhile, what I think is needed is dispensing with numbers altogether. 

The thought that has helped me the most in navigating this territory, and provides an escape from the apparently exhaustive options of positivity, neutrality, and negativity, is this: my body is for me. Your body is for you. Our bodies are not decoration. Our bodies are not objects for consumption or comparison—or ranking. A body is not something good or bad or neutral for people generally, but rather something that may suit and work better or worse for the person who inhabits it. And her perspective on her body is the only one that matters.

This ethos—which I call body reflexivity—holds that taking a uniformly positive or neutral view of our own bodies is neither realistic nor desirable. Body reflexivity does not prescribe any particular attitude toward one’s form. It is compatible with finding oneself beautiful, or sexy—or not, as the case may be. Body reflexivity prescribes a radical reevaluation of who we exist for, as bodies: ourselves and no one else. We are not responsible for pleasing others. 

Body reflexivity is compatible, to be sure, with appreciating our bodies—and also that of others. But the uncritical lens we adopt speaks against anything like scoring. We do this in other realms as a routine matter. Go for a walk sometime—you can appreciate a sunset, a flower, a dog, without comparing it to others or rating it as superior, inferior, or neutral. There’s a reason the popular X account We Rate Dogs is firmly tongue-in-cheek, with each delightful creature garnering more than a 10/10. It is absurd to rate dogs; dogs are too wonderful. 

And so, I’ve come to understand, are human bodies—without necessarily being, or having to be, beautiful. I have come to channel the words often said to me by my husband—“I don’t look at you with a critical eye,” which means more to me, in the end, than his also telling me I’m beautiful. I have come to view others with an attitude of gratitude and gladness that they are here in the world amongst us, in all of our glorious individuality and diversity; our vulnerability; our differences in size and shape and age and disabilities. We need not assess every body positively or neutrally when we cease to assess bodies altogether. 

The idea of body reflexivity is tied to a political perspective—a radical politics of autonomy that would vindicate the right to be fat, or trans, or nonbinary, or queer, or disabled. Moreover, by not requiring any particular attitude toward our bodies, body reflexivity can recognize the psychological consequences of our current political predicament. As Da’Shaun L. Harrison has pointed out, feeling insecure makes sense in a world set up to undermine us. We feel insecure because, in being fat or trans or queer or disabled or otherwise othered in a bodily dimension—that which Harrison calls “Ugly”—we are made to be insecure in our very embodiment. They write,

Insecurity . . . must be political. If the politicization of Ugly leads to the social, political, economic, and physical death of a person, they are bound to feel unprotected, uncared for, and unconfident. To that point, Insecurities are valid. It is okay for us to be insecure in bodies that are constantly beat on and berated. Those Insecurities don’t change the reality [of] what anti-fatness, or overall Ugliness, is and what it does. . . . You can’t beat people down forever and expect that they never feel the effects of that continued beating. Insecurities are not a personal indictment; they are an indictment of the World.

Body reflexivity need not, and does not, try to paper over this truth. Your body is for you, and the ways it has been impugned stem from the many people and practices and structures that have missed this fundamental idea, instead perpetuating the lie that your body is meant to please or serve or placate others. You may well feel insecure in a society structured around this lie—and that, as Harrison says, is not a moral or personal failing. The world has to be remade; it has to serve you better. In particular, it must cease to enter you automatically into the most pointless yet prevalent of contests: beauty.

I hold out hope for a future in which our current relentless beauty pageant has no more judges—and not a single entrant. It is not that everybody wins or gets a participation trophy in the form of our collective studied neutrality. There should be nothing in its place. There ought to be no contest.

As I reflect on that, in front of the mirror, I feel my self-criticisms fall away. If my body is for me, then its specific contours and vagaries and oddities no longer seem like defects; they are simply a part of me. They are what I have to work with. And I am floored by the way my body has allowed me to think and move and love and grieve and grow, and give life to my young daughter. I am floored by everything it has allowed me to weather.

Adapted from Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne. Copyright © 2024 by Kate Manne. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

source https://time.com/6552430/body-reflexivity-unshrinking-kate-manne/

Microsoft’s OpenAI Ties Face Potential E.U. Merger Probe

Microsoft Corp.’s $13 billion investment into OpenAI Inc. risks a full-blown investigation by European Union deals watchdogs, after a mutiny at the ChatGPT creator laid bare deep ties between the two companies. 

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The European Commission said on Tuesday that it’s examining whether Microsoft’s involvement should be vetted under the bloc’s merger rules — paving the way for a formal probe and even a potential unwinding if it’s found to hamper fair competition. The EU move, part of a broader look at artificial intelligence, follows a similar step by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.

“Virtual worlds and generative AI are rapidly developing,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust commissioner. “It is fundamental that these new markets stay competitive, and that nothing stands in the way of businesses growing and providing the best and most innovative products to consumers.”

Microsoft has benefited richly from its outlay on OpenAI. By integrating OpenAI’s products into virtually every corner of its core businesses, the software giant very quickly established itself as the undisputed leader of AI among big tech firms. Rival Alphabet Inc.’s Google has been racing to catch up ever since. 

Microsoft stock fell 0.6% to $372.60 in pre-market trading of 59,538 shares. The company declined to immediately comment beyond pointing to its statement last month on the UK’s move. 

Microsoft said then that since 2019 it has “forged a partnership with OpenAI that has fostered more AI innovation and competition, while preserving independence for both companies.”

The recent firing — and subsequent rehiring — of Sam Altman as chief of OpenAI exposed how inextricably linked the two companies have become. Microsoft shares fell immediately after OpenAI’s board ousted Altman. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella personally helped negotiate and advocate for his return to the company — at one point offering to hire Altman himself, along with other employees at OpenAI who wanted to leave.

OpenAI’s board eventually agreed to reinstate Altman. The company then named a three-person interim board and added Microsoft as a nonvoting observer.

Balance of Power

In December, the UK’s competition watchdog announced that the saga led it to check whether Microsoft’s investments should be examined further. The CMA said it will look at whether the balance of power between the two firms has fundamentally shifted to give one side more control or influence over the other. Bloomberg News also previously reported that the US Federal Trade Commission has made queries into the ties between the firms.    

At the core of the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is the massive amounts of computer power required to keep the worldwide boom in generative AI going. Running the systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard has sent demand for cloud services and processing capacity soaring. OpenAI, for example, has become a major customer of Microsoft’s cloud business. 

In turn, all three of the world’s biggest cloud-computing providers — Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc., and Google — have become active investors in AI startups. 

On Tuesday, the EU’s antitrust enforcers also announced a call for feedback on competitive issues that may arise in the field of generative artificial intelligence and virtual worlds. 

“We are inviting businesses and experts to tell us about any competition issues that they may perceive in these industries, whilst also closely monitoring AI partnerships to ensure they do not unduly distort market dynamics,” Vestager said. 

The Brussels-based commission added that venture capital investment in AI in the EU is estimated at more than €7.2 billion in 2023 and the size of the virtual worlds market in Europe is estimated to have reached more than €11 billion. The exponential growth is likely to have a major impact on how businesses compete, the authority said.

source https://time.com/6553469/microsoft-openai-eu-merger-probe/

Why Are Lefty Quarterbacks Like Michael Penix Jr. Still So Rare?

Throughout the New Year’s game, Michel Penix Jr., quarterback for the University of Washington Huskies, sliced wounds wide open, deep in the hearts of Texas. Penix cut up the Texas Longhorns defense in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff, to the tune of 430 passing yards, two touchdown throws, and zero interceptions, while leading the Huskies to a 37-31 win in the Sugar Bowl. He launched darts off his back foot, deep in the pocket or on the move, with an arm motion that can look a bit unusual to the untrained eye. That’s because Penix Jr. accumulated such impressive big-game statistics while doing something that’s become a rare feat: throwing a football with his left hand.  

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While left-handed arms populate the pitching mounds of Major League Baseball—and earn players, even one-inning relief specialists, millions upon millions—they can feel almost extinct on the football field. Some 10% of the population is left-handed (full disclosure, this writer among them), but of the 75 NFL quarterbacks who’ve thrown at least one pass this 2023 season, Tua Tagovailoa, of the Miami Dolphins, is the lone lefty. That’s a southpaw population of a mere 1.3%. 

“By definition, by obvious scientific truth,” says Hall of Fame left-handed quarterback Steve Young, “football is biased against lefties.”

Read More: Aaron Rodgers Needs to Stop Talking

There have been some fantastic left-handed quarterbacks over the years: Young, Ken Stabler, and Michael Vick among them. A couple—Tagovailoa, at Alabama, and Tim Tebow of Florida—have even won national titles in college this century. But of the 34 quarterbacks inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, just two—Young and Stabler—are lefties. Of the 38 quarterbacks to win the Heisman trophy, just three—Oregon State’s Terry Baker in 1962, Matt Leinart of USC in 2004, and Tebow in 2007—are southpaws. The last NFL left-hander to start a game before Tagovailoa’s NFL debut in 2020 was Kellen Moore, in 2015, for the Dallas Cowboys. 

If he puts in another stellar performance—this time against Michigan in the national championship game in Houston Monday night—Penix Jr. will up his odds of joining Tagovailoa in the NFL’s lonely lefty signal-callers club, and maybe break down any barriers keeping southpaws from calling cadence. In his two years at Washington, Penix Jr.—who came in second, to LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels, in his year’s Heisman race—has finished 25-2 as the starter. “He’s got huge hands and incredible accuracy that you very rarely see,” says Boomer Esiason, who won an NFL MVP award in 1988 as lefty QB for the Cincinnati Bengals. “It just comes so natural to him.”

Read More: Lionel Messi Is TIME’s 2023 Athlete of the Year

Before arriving in Seattle, Penix Jr., who grew up in the Tampa area, spent four injury-plagued seasons at Indiana. In 2018 and 2020 he sustained season-ending ACL-injuries. A sternoclavicular-joint injury and a dislocated shoulder joint cut short his 2019 and 2021 campaigns. He transferred to Washington to play for coach Kalen DeBoer, who was his offensive coordinator for the Hoosiers.

Penix Jr. says he’s “blessed” to be a lefty. In a podcast interview this season, he noted that his grandmother is the only other lefty in his family, and he’s a big fan of hers. “At a young age, it wasn’t like I chose what hand I wanted to throw with,” Penix Jr. says. His offensive coordinator at Washington, Ryan Grubb, sometimes calls plays for Penix Jr. to roll to the left, his natural side. “I’m like, Coach, I can throw it anywhere,” says Penix Jr. “It don’t matter. Just call anything.” 

It’s difficult to pinpoint why more lefties haven’t thrived at football. Maybe they see pitching as an easier road to riches. There are more big-league mound gigs available than quarterbacking jobs, and you don’t have to worry about 320-pound linemen crushing your anatomy. 

Some receivers have trouble getting used to the different spin a lefty puts on the football. But it’s their job to adjust on the fly. “I used to tell my wide receivers, dude, God gave you hands to catch a football,” says Esiason. “He didn’t say it had to be from a right-hander.” 

It might be an eye-test thing. Since we’re not used to seeing left-handers doing certain tasks, like throwing a football, we subconsciously assume they’re ill-fitted for them. Even Scott Mitchell, the former NFL quarterback who threw for more than 4,300 yards, left-handed, for the Detroit Lions back in 1995, admits his brethren look weird. “When I first watched Michael Penix throw the football, it was just cringey to me,” says Mitchell, now a color commentator for University of Utah radio broadcasts. “He just looks so unnatural, he looks so weird. I feel that way about all left-handed quarterbacks. Boomer Esiason, Steve Young, they looked so weird. I’m prejudiced against my own kind.”

Mitchell, however, has come around on Penix Jr. “The dude grew on me,” says Mitchell. “Now I’m like, ‘This guy can throw the freaking football.’ That semifinal game, some of those throws he made, there are a lot of pros who can’t make some of those throws.” 

But on the youth and high school levels, there could be coaches who share Mitchell’s prejudices, and funnel potential young lefty quarterbacks into other positions or even sports. Or force them to change their ways. “Growing up, they tried everything in the world to change me from being left-handed to right-handed,” says Mitchell. “I was just so natural at being left-handed. I’m just brutally left-handed.” 

During Mitchell’s first meeting at his first mini-camp with the Miami Dolphins—the team that drafted him in the fourth round out of Utah in 1990—he said the team’s offensive coordinator “freaked out” because Mitchell is lefty. “It was almost like he didn’t know how to coach me,” Mitchell says. Mitchell says it took about 10 minutes for the coach to realize that left-handed football is still, well, football. “Instead of putting your right hand under the center’s butt, you put your left hand,” says Mitchell. “It comes out the same way.”

“I have tremendous emotion about this,” says Young. He’s just read a media report painting Penix Jr.’s left-handedness as a potential hindrance to his draft position. His voice is rising. “I’m like, what the freakin’ hell is that?” 

For Young, the issue is indeed personal. In the middle of his freshman season at BYU, Young says, his offensive coordinator told him “by the way, I don’t coach lefties.” So he was moved to defense in practice. Lucky for Young, that offensive coordinator left, and a new one came in the following season and gave him a shot to throw. The rest is Hall of Fame history. “Barring a lucky stroke of a coaching switch, being lefty would have cost me my career,” says Young. 

And while he’s joked about a conspiracy to keep lefties out of the NFL, Young can’t believe the lack of southpaws in the league is mere coincidence. Some bias, even unconscious, must be at play, he says, which feels counterproductive. 

“Since football is so right-handed, being lefty is an advantage,” says Young. That split second of a defensive thinking “oh, that’s different” can make all the difference. “Everything’s run right-handed,” says Young. “Every practice is run right-handed. Eighty percent of every formation is right-handed. People install offense right-handed. It’s just how they do it. Michael Penix coming out as a lefty, that should heighten his draft status.” 

So it should come as no surprise that Young is pulling for Penix Jr. in Monday’s championship game. On behalf of southpaws everywhere. “Lefties unite, bro!” he says. “Lefties unite. I’m all for him.”

source https://time.com/6552756/michael-penix-jr-lefty-national-championship-washington/

Congressional Leaders Reach Deal on 2024 Spending to Avoid Government Shutdown

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders have reached an agreement on overall spending levels for the current fiscal year that could help avoid a partial government shutdown later this month.

The agreement largely hews to spending caps for defense and domestic programs that Congress set as part of a bill to suspend the debt limit until 2025. But it does provide some concessions to House Republicans who viewed the spending restrictions in that agreement as insufficient.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In a letter to colleagues, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday the agreement would secure $16 billion in additional spending cuts from the previous agreement brokered by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden and is about $30 billion less than what the Senate was considering.

“This represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,” Johnson writes.

Read More: Here’s How a Government Shutdown Could Affect You

Biden said the agreement “moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities.”

“It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties and signed into law last spring,” Biden said in a statement. “It rejects deep cuts to programs hardworking families count on, and provides a path to passing full-year funding bills that deliver for the American people and are free of any extreme policies.”

The agreement speeds up the roughly $20 billion in cuts already agreed to for the Internal Revenue Service and rescinds about $6 billion in COVID relief money that had been approved but not yet spent, according to Johnson’s letter.

“It’s a good deal for Democrats and the country,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told colleagues in a briefing call.

Read More: Bidenomics Is Real Economics

Essentially, Democrats see the trade-offs they made as mild. In a description provided to reporters, they said the COVID savings would have “no significant impact on any current projects or activities in motion.” And they said that moving all of the $20.2 billion in IRS cuts to this year instead of over two years would still leave the agency able to maintain “critical investments” that Congress provided in 2022. At the time, Congress provided the IRS with an additional $80 billion that could be spent over 10 years.

Overall, the agreement calls for $886 billion in defense funding. It would provide $772 billion in domestic, non-defense spending, when including $69 billion called for in a side deal to the debt ceiling bill that McCarthy had reached with the White House, Democrats said.

The most conservative House Republicans opposed the earlier debt ceiling agreement and even brought House proceedings to a halt for a few days to show their displeasure. Many were surely wanting additional concessions, but Democrats have been insistent on abiding by the debt ceiling agreement’s spending caps, leaving Johnson in a difficult spot.

“It’s even worse than we thought,” the House Freedom Caucus said of the agreement in a tweet posted on X. “This is total failure.”

Lawmakers needed an agreement on overall spending levels so that appropriators could write the bills that set line-by-line funding for agencies. Money is set to lapse Jan. 19 for some agencies and Feb. 2 for others.

The agreement is separate from the negotiations that are taking place to secure additional funding for Israel and Ukraine while also curbing restrictions on asylum claims at the U.S. border.

In a joint statement, Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries voiced their support for the agreement.

“It will also allow us to keep the investments for hardworking American families secured by the legislative achievements of President Biden and Congressional Democrats,” Schumer and Jeffries said.

Read More: Government Shutdowns Were Never Necessary Anyway

But they also warned House Republicans about trying to add conservative policy riders to the bills in the coming days, saying Democrats would not support “poison pill policy changes in any of the twelve appropriations bills put before the Congress.“

Rep. Patrick McHenry, who helped lead the debt ceiling negotiations when McCarthy was speaker, noted that two-thirds of both parties in the House supported that agreement.

“This deal, which adheres to that framework, deserves equally as robust support,” McHenry said.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tweeted that he was encouraged that leaders identified a “path toward completing” the spending bills. It was a cautious recognition that some obstacles could lie ahead.

“America faces serious national security challenges, and Congress must act quickly to deliver the full-year resources this moment requires,” McConnell said.

source https://time.com/6552891/congress-johnson-democrats-agreement-spending-government-shutdown/