More than a year before a shocking collapse that led to a near-crisis in the financial sector, Silicon Valley Bank was the subject of an investigation set in motion by the Federal Reserve in San Francisco, according to a new report.

Bloomberg is reporting today that the investigative team, made up of senior examiners for the Fed, was tasked with assessing the firm and its potential risks. What they found, it seems, should have been enough to get regulators involved long before the bank collapsed and sent shockwaves through the tech and financial sector – and long before taxpayer bailouts became an option.

According to Bloomberg, those investigators “fired off a series of formal warnings to the bank’s leaders, pressing them to fix serious weaknesses in operations and technology, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” //

In a twist, the San Francisco Fed’s deputy point person in charge of monitoring the bank until late 2021 received a new assignment afterward, becoming the regulator’s point person on Silvergate Capital Corp., according to people with knowledge of the situation. Silvergate also shut this month because of similar flaws in its deposit base and the positioning of its balance sheet. //

As the Democrats call for more regulation of the banking industry, this report highlights a familiar problem – namely, that the regulations and safeguards already in place don’t appear to be working.

The sudden rise of well-funded election activist nonprofits represents a paradigm shift away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process to benefit Democrats. //

Over the last several months, a growing number of Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, seem to be having a change of heart about universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.

While few Republicans are ready to completely abandon policies that support election integrity and transparency, more and more seem willing to follow the old adage “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” and suggest that Republicans become significantly more reliant on universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting to win elections. There is no worse idea in politics today.

Conservatives do not have the institutional or financial support to match Democrats in election activism and ballot harvesting, nor are they likely to be able to any time in the near future. The advantages Democrats have accrued over the last 20 years in election manipulation and “lawfare” are nearly insurmountable.

But this is not necessarily a portent of gloom and doom. The growing number of ultra-left Democratic candidates are deeply unpopular and would be unelectable outside deep-blue areas under the election norms that prevailed prior to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the 2020 presidential election. //

Republicans need to better understand the vast institutional power that is arrayed against them on the left in the form of lavishly funded 501(c)(3) nonprofits and charitable foundations, along with legions of election lawyers, data analysts, and election activists.

Do you want to redirect a page on your site using a beginner-friendly method? We’ve got you covered. In this guide, you will learn how to redirect a WordPress page both with and without plugins.

Steven Nelson
@stevennelson10
·
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"Hunter Biden does not concede in his lawsuit that he dropped off the laptop, received an invoice or neglected to pick it up. In response to such claims by Mac Isaac, the filing states, 'Mr. Biden is without knowledge sufficient to admit or deny the allegations.'"
Matt Viser
@mviser
NEW: Hunter Biden sues laptop repair shop owner, citing invasion of privacy. The lawsuit, a counter-move against John Paul Mac Isaac, escalates the battle over how provocative data and images of the president’s son were obtained five years ago. My latest: https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/17/hunter-biden-lawsuit-computer-repairman/
9:56 AM · Mar 17, 2023

Andrew Kerr
@AndrewKerrNC
·
Follow
Hunter has done plenty of media interviews since 2020. It's beyond me why no reporter has shoved a copy of this signed invoice in Hunter's face and asked him if it's legit.
10:50 AM · Mar 17, 2023 //

As to the legal merits, a court will ultimately decide, but having owned a computer repair business at one point, I can say that 90-day pickup periods are common. Usually, after that point, the piece of hardware becomes the property of the shop so they can monetize it for payment. Typically that comes in the form of selling the physical equipment involved. In this case, the shop owner tried to give the incriminating data to the FBI, but the FBI appears to have buried it.

There is a certain point in time when a piece of property is considered abandoned. That looks like what happened here, and Hunter Biden’s flailing will likely fail.

In October, the New York Times did an in-depth investigative story headlined, Using Adoptions, Russia Turns Ukrainian Children Into Spoils of War.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, Russian authorities have announced with patriotic fanfare the transfer of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia to be adopted and become citizens. On state-run television, officials offer teddy bears to new arrivals, who are portrayed as abandoned children being rescued from war.

In fact, this mass transfer of children is a potential war crime, regardless of whether they were orphans. And while many of the children did come from orphanages and group homes, the authorities also took children whose relatives or guardians want them back, according to interviews with children and families on both sides of the border. //

The material impact of this indictment will be limited, at least insofar as Putin is concerned. The ICC has no police force. It cannot compel nations to execute the arrest warrant. So, like fellow ICC-indicted war criminal and head of state, Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Putin will be free to travel to any place that doesn’t mind the stench.

More significant will be the political fallout. Putin’s status as an indicted war criminal will affect his ability to deal with other heads of state. Making it worse, he’s not indicted for run-of-the-mill atrocities. Instead, by charging him with kidnapping kids, he’s basically been labeled a pedophile masquerading as a head of state.

Any claim Putin could ever lay to a world leadership role is effectively finished. It is also tough to imagine anyone trying to broker a peace deal with someone indicted by the ICC. If the ICC is following the model of the UN report, we can expect more indictments to follow.

• Chuck Norris once walked away from a fight with two broken ribs and a dislocated arm. He hasn't given them back yet.
• Chuck Norris' calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd. No one fools Chuck Norris.
• Chuck Norris can hear faster than the speed of sound.
• Chuck Norris can find the end of a circle.
• Chuck Norris is the only person on the planet that can kick you in the back of the face.
• Chuck Norris can divide by zero.
• Chuck Norris once climbed Mt. Everest in 15 minutes, 14 of which he was building a snowman at the bottom.
• Jack was nimble, Jack was quick, but Jack still couldn't dodge Chuck Norris' roundhouse kick.
• Fear of spiders is called arachnophobia, fear of tight spaces is called claustrophobia, and fear of Chuck Norris is just plain logic.
• Chuck Norris used to beat the up his shadow because it was following to close. It now stands a safe 30 feet behind him.
• Chuck Norris can strangle you with a cordless phone.
• Chuck Norris can kill your imaginary friends.
• Chuck Norris can hear sign language.
• Chuck Norris knows Victoria's secret.
• Chuck Norris makes onions cry.
• Chuck Norris is the only person that can punch a cyclops between the eye.
• Chuck Norris is the reason Waldo is hiding.
• It is considered a great accomplishment to go down Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. Chuck Norris can go up Niagara Falls in a cardboard box.
• When Chuck Norris enters a room, he doesn't turn the lights on, he turns the dark off.
• Chuck Norris wins russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver.
• Chuck Norris can speak braille.
• Chuck Norris doesn't cheat death. He wins fair and square.
• Chuck Norris can do a wheelie on a unicycle.
• Chuck Norris found the last digit of pi.
• Chuck Norris doesn't have good aim. His bullets just know better than to miss.
• Chuck Norris can pick oranges from an apple tree and make the best lemonade youve ever tasted.
• Chuck Norris once went to mars. Thats why there are no signs of life.
• The only time Chuck Norris was wrong was when he thought he had made a mistake.
• Chuck Norris was once charged with three attempted murders in Boulder County, but the Judge quickly dropped the charges because Chuck Norris does not "attempt" murder.
• Chuck Norris was once on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune and was the first to spin. The next 29 minutes of the show consisted of everyone standing around awkwardly, waiting for the wheel to stop.
• Chuck Norris puts the "laughter" in "manslaughter".
• Bulletproof vests wear Chuck Norris for protection.
• Chuck Norris can unscramble an egg.
• Chuck Norris is the only person on the planet that can kick you in the back of the face.
• When Chuck Norris was born he drove his mom home from the hospital.

Whenever I open an .epub file in Calibre e-book viewer, the text is full-justified. I want to set left-justification as a permanent preference for all .epub files. How can I do that?

I'm running the latest version of Windows 10 Home Edition 64-bit, and the latest version of Calibre (I think), 5.14.

Thanks for any help.

UPDATE: I submitted my question to the MobileRead forum's thread, Custom CSS Stylesheets for Calibre's Viewer, and received an answer from Kovid Goyal, himself (the creator of Calibre). The solution is to use a style sheet (as suggested by Christian__N, below) with this entry:

* { text-align: left !important; }

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51500

In the Ebook Viewer application, click on the Hammer [gear] icon (Preferences), then put the code in the "User stylesheet" edit box and click OK. Have an ebook open in the viewer for the full effect, before and after.

In our series of letters from African writers, retiring journalist Jonathan Paye-Layleh reflects on his 30-year career covering the tumultuous events in his home country, Liberia.
Short presentational grey line

I am glad I managed to stay alive to pen these words.

Over the last three decades, colleagues have died while doing their job and I have found my life threatened, especially when covering Liberia's conflicts.

But I survived.

Three decades ago, during the first of Liberia's two civil wars that overwhelmed the country for 14 years, I wanted to tell the story of the people trapped behind rebel lines.

I was in Gbarnga - the stronghold of then-rebel leader Charles Taylor, whose forces controlled most of Liberia except the capital, Monrovia.

Where better to tell those stories than on the BBC World Service's Focus on Africa radio programme?

Liberians had become addicted to the broadcast following Taylor's interviews with its editor at the time, Robin White. It was required listening wherever you were.

And it was almost an obligation for people in Gbarnga - where a local station had taken to relaying the programme. //

But there have been happier milestones which I have witnessed, not least the election of one of the continent's few female presidents - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf - who stepped down in 2018 after 12 years in office.

Even though in terms of infrastructure development, Liberia has not attained much, I am pleased that the peace we fought so hard to achieve holds.

Monrovia traffic jams are nothing to celebrate but at least this suggests a city that is alive, where the people want to get on. It's not the ghost town yearning for the presence of people like it was during the civil war. //

How come other countries have emerged from the ashes and made massive progress but my country has not?"
-- Jonathan Paye-Layleh, BBC Liberia reporter 1993-2023

Jonathan is leaving the BBC in order to stand as a candidate for the House of Representatives in the 10 October elections

Officials are monitoring the clean-up of a leak of 400,000 gallons (1.5m litres) of radioactive water from a local nuclear power plant in Minnesota.

Xcel Energy, the utility company that runs the plant, said the spillage was "fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility".

State officials said there was no immediate public health risk.

The leak was first discovered in late November, but state officials did not notify the public until Thursday.

The water contains tritium, a common by-product of nuclear plant operations.

A naturally occurring radioactive isotope of hydrogen, tritium emits a weak form of beta radiation that does not travel very far in air and cannot penetrate human skin, according to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Giving young babies - between four and six months old - tiny tastes of smooth peanut butter could dramatically cut peanut allergies, say scientists.

Research shows there is a crucial opportunity during weaning to cut allergy cases by 77%.

They say the government's advice on weaning - which says no solids until around six months - needs to change.

Experts warn whole or chopped nuts and peanuts are a choking risk and should not be given to children under five.

The current NHS guidance does say peanut (crushed, ground or butter) can be introduced from around six months old.

A baby is ready for their first solid food if:

• they can stay in a sitting position, holding their head steady
• co-ordinate their eyes, hands and mouth so they can look at their food, pick it up and put it in their mouth
• swallow food, rather than spit it back out //

There had been long-standing advice to avoid foods that can trigger allergies during early childhood. At one point, families were once told to avoid peanut until their child was three years old.

However, evidence over the last 15 years has turned that on its head.

Instead, eating peanut while the immune system is still developing - and learning to recognise friend from foe - can reduce allergic reactions, experts say.

It also means the body's first experience of peanut is in the tummy where it is more likely to be recognised as food rather than on the skin, where it may be more likely to be treated as a threat.

Israel, where peanut snacks are common in early life, has much lower rates of allergy.

Other studies have suggested introducing other foods linked to allergies - such as egg, milk and wheat - early also reduced allergy.

https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(22)01656-6/fulltext

The facts of Shurtleff were simple enough: Boston city officials barred the display of a flag bearing a Christian message in a square that for decades had welcomed the flags of a wide spectrum of causes, movements, and organizations. They did so because the application submitted by the sponsoring group referred to it as a “Christian flag.”

But it was not just the justices affirming that the First Amendment protects religious expression that makes Shurtleff a landmark decision of immense significance. The justices also laid the groundwork for reversing the “Lemon Test” the Court had established way back in 1971 in Lemon v. Kurtzman.

As Anne Howe on Scotus Blog explained following the Court’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision, the Lemon test was used for decades by the Court “to decide that a law or practice will pass constitutional muster if it has a secular purpose, its principal effect does not advance or inhibit religion, and it does not create an ‘excessive entanglement with religion.’”

The Bremerton decision affirmed that high school football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray in public at the 50-yard line after games in which his players competed, representing a public school.

In a statement earlier this week, Liberty Counsel described the significance of Bremerton and the connection to Shurtleff:

In addition, the High Court also finally buried the “Lemon Test,” citing Liberty Counsel’s 9-0 decision in Shurtleff v. City of Boston involving the Christian flag. The Justices wrote: “In fact, just this term, the Court unanimously rejected a city’s attempt to censor religious speech based on Lemon and the endorsement test (See Shurtleff, 596 U. S.).”

There are multiple positive consequences of these developments that ought to put huge smiles on the faces of First Amendment/civil liberties/religious freedom advocates across the political spectrum. Here are four, as described by Liberty Counsel:

• Government shall not discriminate against religious viewpoints whether expressed in speech, symbols, displays, or performances.
• Public schools must permit after school religious student clubs the same access they allow similar secular clubs.
• Churches can rent public schools for worship services.
• Since the “Lemon Test” is dead and the Establishment Clause must be interpreted according to its historical intent, all the cases that relied on the Lemon test are no longer good law, including cases that struck down prayer, Ten Commandments, Nativity displays or other religious symbols, religious performances, religious speech and expression, rental of public school facilities for church services when other secular use is permitted, student aid programs, and much more.

The Storage Spaces feature built into Windows allows you to combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive. It can mirror data across multiple drives for redundancy, or combine multiple physical drives into a single pool of storage. Storage Spaces is similar to RAID or LVM on Linux.

This feature was added in Windows 8, and was improved in Windows 10. It’s available on all editions of Windows 8 and 10, including Home editions.

Dozens of countries have privatized or partially privatized.

Computer screens have replaced not-always-clear windows in many air traffic control centers. Controllers don’t use binoculars anymore because high-definition cameras let them see much more, especially at night.

A Government Accountability Office study found that in countries that privatized, there are fewer delays and costs are lower.

So why doesn’t America privatize?

Because our politicians get money from labor unions, who “advocate for keeping the same people in the same jobs,” says Furchtgott-Roth.

Another opponent is the private plane lobby. Under our current system, Congress makes sure that the big airlines, which you fly, subsidize private flights’ air traffic fees.

“If they have private planes,” says Furchtgott-Roth, “they should be able to pay their fair share.” Yes. Today’s pricing amounts to welfare for rich people.

A third obstacle is fear. “For-profit companies will cut corners and make flying less safe!” But this is nonsense. That GAO study found that safety stayed the same or improved in countries that privatized.

Also, “For-profit companies actually run the airlines!” Furchtgott-Roth points out.

The airlines get FAA supervision, but the main reason planes don’t crash is because the private companies don’t want to destroy their business by killing their customers. //

Today, computers controlling air traffic in other countries keep getting better. In America, privatization would reduce delays and make flying even safer.

But our arrogant politicians won’t allow it. They insist government run things.

Since governments rarely innovate, you must sit at the airport and wait.

Some felt pressure to keep it secret, worried that if they reported their abuse, their parents would be sent home from the mission field.

Children felt that the mission work of their parents came before their needs. One alum in the report said going away to boarding school as elementary-age children left children with a “profound” sense of abandonment.

As has been widely reported, over a nine-month span before its demise, SVB did not employ a chief risk officer. However, SVB made sure it had a chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer on board at all times. Misplaced priorities, anyone?

When the rubber hit the road and the Fed’s decade-long money printing binge came to an end, banks like SBV, which didn’t see the economic writing on the wall because they were so concerned with showcasing their woke bona fides, were caught in a very perilous position.

To make a long story short, SBV had spent years taking cheap money from the Fed and investing poorly, mostly in long-term Treasury bonds. When the Fed hastily reversed course and started raising interest rates, short-term Treasury bonds began to pay a higher yield than long term Treasury bonds.

This is what economists call an inverted yield curve, and it was a huge flashing red sign that the economy is on unsound footing. Shockingly, even as this was happening, SVB and Signature just kept plugging along, business as usual.

Cronly helps you sleep better at night. Just schedule your cron jobs in the cloud, and we'll tell you when your updates, analytics, payments or emails are failing.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Vegas Loop has given one 1 million passengers a ride throughout the Sin City, the company confirmed today.

After being proposed in 2019 and unveiled in April 2021, the Vegas Loop has provided a new, express-geared method of transportation for residents and visitors to travel between various hotspots in Tesla Model 3 and Model X vehicles. //

Initial projections showed that the Vegas Loop was capable of transporting over 4,400 passengers every hour, and projections for the future could allow as many as 20,000 people to receive affordable, express rides in Tesla vehicles each hour to travel between points of interest throughout the city.

The Vegas Loop includes numerous stops along the Las Vegas strip, including to various casinos, the Harry Reid International Airport, Allegiant Stadium, and more. The fares vary according to each trip, but the Boring Company says the 4.9-mile trip from Harry Reid International Airport to the Las Vegas Convention Center takes 5 minutes and costs $10.

Since the last ice age

It’s not the Sun
The Sun is the source of energy on the surface of our planet, so it stands to reason that variations in solar activity might cause climate changes. But solar activity has been declining over the past few decades as our planet warmed, so there’s no link. Although solar energy is immense, its variations are tiny.

“It was called the solar ‘constant’ for a long time because you need extremely sensitive instruments to see any variation in the Sun's energy output,” said Owens. Over an 11-year sunspot cycle, the solar energy reaching the top of the atmosphere varies by about 0.15 percent, but it rises and falls every cycle, so it can’t drive climate trends like ours. //

In addition to these 11-year cycles, the Sun also goes through “grand solar minima” and “grand solar maxima” of activity that last decades. One of those, called the “Maunder Minimum,” was once thought to be the cause of a cold period between about 1300 and 1850, called the Little Ice Age.” But “it just doesn't add up,” Owens told me. “The temperature starts to drop long before the Maunder Minimum happened.”

The Maunder Minimum may have contributed a fraction of a degree to the cooling during the Little Ice Age, which evidence has since indicated was mostly the result of volcanic eruptions and human land use changes.

The Sun also regulates the dose of cosmic rays inflicted on our atmosphere. These are mostly protons that originate in space from things like supernovae, and there was an idea in the late 1990s that they might affect climate by seeding cloud formation. But the data shows no correlation, Owens told me, and experiments with the CERN particle accelerator show that cloud seeding by cosmic rays is weak. “The growth rate of droplets is just too small to really do anything in the atmosphere,” said Owens, so it can’t explain the Little Ice Age or modern climate change.

Owens is underwhelmed by the Sun’s current activity: “We're ramping up into solar cycle 25. It's looking very, very average!” he said. //

Mann and others have found no discernible climate oscillation in the last thousand years that lasts as long as our climate has been warming, so the warming has outlasted all of these natural oscillations.

It turns out that some apparently natural cycles are illusions. The 40-60-year-long “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” is one of several that are really just echoes of decades-long cooling caused by explosive volcanic eruptions in the preindustrial era. More recently, competition between human-caused warming and human-caused cooling resulting from sulfurous pollution has also left its imprint on the oscillation. Consequently, “key trends, such as the warming of the tropical Atlantic and the increase in hurricane activity associated with it cannot, as some researchers have claimed, be blamed on an internal oscillation,” said Mann. They are instead the result of human-caused warming. //

If an eruption is explosive enough to loft material into the stratosphere and if that material includes a lot of sulfur dioxide gas, the gas forms tiny droplets of sulfuric acid in the stratosphere. These “act like a shiny mirror,” Schmidt said, which reflect some sunlight back into space and cool Earth’s surface.

Eventually the droplets “sediment out of the atmosphere,” as Schmidt put it, and temperatures recover. The 1991 Pinatubo eruption cooled the climate by up to 0.5°C for nearly three years, but bigger historical eruptions had stronger impacts. The eruption of Tambora in 1815 caused 1816 to be “The Year Without a Summer,” and eruptions in 1257, 1452, and 1600 were probably the main causes of the “Little Ice Age.”

“The ocean has a long memory of any changes in temperature,” Schmidt told me, so cooling by past eruptions, like the enormous 1883 eruption of Krakatau, still slosh back and forth in climate variations today.

Ironically, human-caused warming will raise the altitude of the stratosphere, making it harder for eruption plumes to reach it, and will also speed up a stratospheric wind known as the “Brewer-Dobson Circulation,” which will enhance the cooling by those fewer eruptions that manage to reach the higher stratosphere. //

We can rule out the usual natural suspects people often bring up to sow doubt about our role in climate change, and we can rule in humans because multiple lines of evidence prove our role. As the IPCC and agencies in the US, UK, Europe, Japan, China, and others have documented in exhaustive detail, global warming is unequivocally driven by emissions from human activities.

As sure as sure can be, it’s not natural—it’s us.

Westinghouse's heat-pipe reactor theoretically outputs respectable power compared to larger reactors using light water, heavy water, or both, to cool the fission core. To scale this tech down to a form factor that fits on the back of an 18-wheeler trailer is a feat within itself. //

At its core, the eVInci heat pipe microreactor almost resembles a large gas canister more so than it does a mobile power generating station. Inside this large metal cylinder, nuclear fuel rods of particularly high quality are arranged into a compact but powerful fissile core with large metal heat transfer pipes running through the core's center. The fuel in question is known as Tri-structural isotropic particle fuel, or TRISCO for short. It consists of a proprietary blend of Uranium isotopes mixed with carbon and oxygen to form a fuel kernel the size of a poppy seed.

These highly enriched and energy-potent fissile fuel pellets can theoretically remain critical without the need for refueling for up to eight years. At this point, the whole device can be packed into a shipping container and sent back to Westinghouse's facility in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, for proper disposal of spent nuclear fuel rods. On top of that, Westinghouse reckons it's possible to install an eVinci power station in as little as 30 days. //

a pint-sized fission reactor capable of delivering up to five megawatts of electrical power and up to 13 megawatts of thermal energy out of a system that could fit comfortably inside an average-sized warehouse.