Big Balls
As grass ferments in the rumen — one of four compartments in the animal’s stomach — it naturally produces methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than CO2, although shorter lived in the atmosphere. That methane is released through belching and farting, and on average, a single cow can produce about 200 pounds of it per year. The gas is also released by manure, and livestock accounts for about a third of human-related methane emissions, which are collectively responsible for about 30% of global warming. […] Scientists have been working on the idea of a “cow fart vaccine” for well over a decade, but without tangible results as of yet.
Eight years ago […] this area of Myanmar [was] one of the poorest places on earth. But today, on this spot along the border with Thailand, a small city has emerged like a mirage. It is called Shwe Kokko, or Golden Raintree. It is accused of being a city built on scams, home to a lucrative yet deadly nexus of fraud, money-laundering and human trafficking. The man behind it, She Zhijiang, is languishing in a Bangkok jail, awaiting extradition to China. […] He accuses China’s communist leadership of turning on him because he refused to give them control of his project. […] The scams have grown into a multi-billion dollar business. They involve thousands of workers from China, South East Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent kept in walled-off compounds where they defraud people all over the world of their savings. Some work there willingly, but others are abducted and forced to work. Those who have escaped have told harrowing stories of torture and beatings.
Teens spent a quarter of the school day on their phones, study
Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a wide variety of fake trading apps, pig butchering scams, gambling websites, and retail phishing pages.
A young technologist known online as “Big Balls,” who works for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has access to sensitive US government systems, owns ‘Tesla.Sexy LLC’ and worked at startup that has hired convicted hackers [more]
In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into 2.4 million Teslas and the full self-driving feature. […] Tesla has also faced heat from the NHTSA over the car’s less advanced Autopilot system, after the agency found 467 crashes involving the effective cruise control feature. Those crashes resulted in 54 injuries and 14 deaths […] In December, it came to light that Trump’s presidential transition team had recommended that the incoming president quash the NHTSA’s crash reporting requirement for self-driving vehicles. In an internal document obtained by Reuters, the team described the safety reporting condition as a mandate for “excessive” data collection, advising that the president abolish the requirement entirely. […] Telsa’s Shanghai “gigafactory” is one of its biggest, and singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023. The business has been so successful there that Tesla broke ground on another, $200 million Shanghai “megafactory” in May 2024 […] Musk sparked more anger in Taiwan after SpaceX asked its Taiwanese suppliers to move their operations off island in late 2024, citing “geopolitical” concerns.
