Latest news with #Pottinger
Extra.ie
6 days ago
- Extra.ie
Grieving families targeted in heartless scam selling fake access to funeral live-streams
A new scam has appeared on Facebook, promising bereaved families and friends, access to funerals streamed over the internet. The scammer is believed to be trawling through obituary notices in newspapers and on social media posts to sell fake access to funerals streamed over the internet, charging €10 a time to view the ceremonies online. These heartless criminals have easy access to publicly available death notices, and they create fake Facebook profiles, posing as family or friends of the recently deceased. Pic: Shutterstock They then contact potential mourners to offer them links to a fake 'live stream' of a funeral for about ten euro, but after paying the money, the victims find they cannot log on. The fraudsters will also often ask you to support a fake 'donation page' they say has been set up on behalf of the deceased person's family, using trusted charity platforms, to make friends of the deceased believe they are contributing to a cause which had been close to the heart of the person who has passed on. Any donations are then pocketed by the scammers. Pic: Getty Images A UK based humanist celebrant Halde Pottinger, discovered the fraud after his own brother died, when he received FIVE fake invitations to watch the funeral online, despite having attended his brother's funeral in person, and the ceremony NOT being streamed online. Mr Pottinger says 'They waited until an hour before my brothers funeral, a time when people are at their most vulnerable' – He then saw five different accounts offering access to a 'Live-stream' of the funeral, and sickeningly the invitations included photos and details of his brothers funeral. Pic: Shutterstock Online funerals became common during the Covid pandemic, when ceremonies were often streamed over the internet because social distancing rules meant it wasn't possible for all family and friends to attend in person. The British Chartered Trading Standards Institute says that over the past few years they have seen an increase in this sort of 'disturbing scam'. Katherine Hart, from the CTSI, says, 'Targeting people during one of the most emotionally difficult moments of their lives is despicable. It is particularly upsetting as victims often feel they cannot report what is happening for fear of adding further stress to grieving families. The criminals count on their silence.' Halde Pottinger added, 'It is sick and disgusting. The more tragic a death, such as if someone dies young, a suicide or the death occurred in particularly unexpected circumstances – then the more it seems to attract scammers, and fewer people will come forward to admit they have been swindled'.
Chicago Tribune
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago activists, wary about Trump's Israel-Iran ceasefire announcement, to keep protesting
Chicago activists welcomed word of a 'complete and total ceasefire' in the war between Israel and Iran at a downtown protest Monday evening but said they were cautiously optimistic and urged continued agitation. The protest at Federal Plaza attracted about 200 people despite Monday's extreme heat. Demonstrators called for the United States to stop bombing Iranian nuclear sites, among other demands. Many condemned U.S. military aid to Israel, supporting its war in Iran and also in Gaza, which has lasted nearly two years. President Donald Trump said on social media Monday that Israel and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire to be phased in over 24 hours. The countries had been at war for 12 days. The U.S. got involved Saturday, bombing three Iranian nuclear sites. Israeli military officials declined to comment on Trump's statement. Iranian state media had no word on what response Tehran had to the ceasefire. But back at Federal Plaza Monday, John Pottinger was skeptical. 'I wouldn't hold my breath on the ceasefire,' Pottinger, 71, said. Pottinger, who lives on the city's North Side, came out to the demonstration because 'protest is the only language that the government understands,' he said. The US-Palestinian Community Network, which organized Monday's protest as well as dozens of other demonstrations over Israel's war in Gaza, said it was likewise wary of the ceasefire announcement. 'The main thing is that we don't trust anything that Trump or Netanyahu say,' according to a statement from the group. 'Trump lies, exaggerates, and shares unsourced material all the time, so until there's true corroboration from Iran's foreign ministry or any other more responsible figure in the world, it means nothing.' Organizers said they told the crowd about the ceasefire at the start of the demonstration, but their message throughout the event remained largely unchanged. Demonstrators chanted, 'No boots on the ground, no bombs in the air, U.S. out of everywhere' and held signs that read, 'Hands off Iran now,' for about an hour before they marched north to Trump Tower. Iranian flags were scattered among the crowd. Evan Callan, 36, said his message to elected officials was 'don't get involved in a war that's not our own.' The Uptown resident said he came directly from work to the protest. Despite word of the ceasefire, Callan said, 'We still need to continue applying pressure,' citing the war in Gaza. He called for more people to protest. Adam Fleischer, 22, of Oak Park, said he didn't want the U.S. to get involved in another 'forever war.' He cautioned one ceasefire didn't mean an end to fighting in the Middle East.
Politico
23-06-2025
- Business
- Politico
Iran rattles Gulf AI dreams
With help from Aaron Mak With American B-2 bombers pummeling Iran this weekend, and Iran attacking a U.S. base in Qatar Monday, the region is suddenly looking like an inhospitable place for U.S. tech companies planning enormous new data centers in the Gulf to power artificial intelligence. For Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the multi-billion-dollar deals announced in May during President Donald Trump's trip to the region are a vital step in their strategic plans to diversify their economies away from oil. For the American AI companies, these deals deepen connections with countries that are already major investors in U.S. data centers, and give the companies access to abundant, cheap energy. But the past weekend's strikes on Iran, and Tehran's reprisal, underscore a possible downside: Once they're built, giant projects critical to the U.S. AI buildout could easily become targets for retaliation. Those projects include plans by OpenAI, Nvidia, Cisco, Softbank and the Emirati G42 company to build a data center campus in the UAE with a capacity of 5 gigawatts — enough to power Miami. And the state-backed Saudi Arabian AI company Humain intends to buy at least 18,000 chips from Nvidia for building 'AI factories,' part of a landslide of tech deals including a $5 billion partnership with Amazon and a $10 billion collaboration with AMD. Matt Pottinger, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said, 'The idea that we can build our largest data centers in the Middle East within easy drone and missile striking range of Iran and its proxies suggests to me that some people working for President Trump haven't done their homework. The joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear weapons program in recent days only reinforces this point.' White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Monday, 'The President is fully committed to these deals and looks forward to continued prosperous relations with our Gulf partners.' To offset the increased cost of protecting AI infrastructure in the Gulf, Pottinger suggests that Congress demand American companies building data centers in the region contribute $3 billion a year to pay for their defense. 'The U.S. has spent $6 billion in the last two years on airstrikes, naval deployments and use of advanced munitions to defend against Iranian proxies attacking U.S. interests in the Gulf region,' Pottinger said, pointing to Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacking sites including U.S. ships in the Red Sea. Three billion dollars would be small change for some of the largest tech companies; Nvidia had the world's second-highest market cap of $3.5 trillion on Monday. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment over the weekend. OpenAI, Cisco and Oracle did not respond to requests for comment. Until this past week, critics of the AI deals focused on less kinetic concerns. Congressional Democrats, including Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Senate Armed Services ranking member Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), pointed in a statement in mid-May to the risk of U.S. technology leaking to China or otherwise leaving American soil. They wrote, 'we could become as reliant on the Middle East for AI as we are on Taiwan for advanced semiconductors – and as we used to be on the Middle East for oil.' Warner and Shaheen's offices did not reply to questions on the deals. The House Select China Committee, chaired by Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), wrote on X in May that the data center plans 'present a vulnerability for the CCP to exploit.' Moolenaar did not reply to a request for comment over the weekend. The White House, on the other hand, has defended the deals, even after Israel's airstrikes on Iran began on June 13. White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks told Bloomberg last week that the U.S. risked losing the tech race if it didn't expand to the Gulf: 'When we think about our goals here with respect to AI, we want the American tech stack to win. … We want to be the partner of choice in the world.' At an energy forum held by the Atlantic Council in Washington last Tuesday, OpenAI's head of global affairs Chris Lehane told POLITICO the U.S. gains a strategic benefit by pulling the Gulf's economic powers into its orbit over China's. In a speech to the same forum, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, called for restraint. 'The United Arab Emirates stands for dialogue, for de-escalation and diplomacy,' he said, before turning to his country's priority, AI: 'To realize the full power of AI, we must give it the power it needs,' he added. Dania Thafer, a lecturer at Georgetown University and founder of the Washington-based Gulf International Forum, said Iranian attacks on U.S. installations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia could challenge their visions of becoming tech superpowers. 'This is why they have been working hard to de-escalate,' she said. So far, it's not clear how far Iran will go in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes. Iran reportedly warned Qatar ahead of Monday's strike, minimizing harm. But the disruption in the region is already immense. Air traffic is interrupted across the Gulf including over the UAE. Iran's parliament also reportedly endorsed closing the Strait of Hormuz that runs between the UAE and Iran and serves as a critical corridor for some 30 percent of the world's oil shipments. Karen Young, a senior research scholar and Gulf specialist at Columbia University, said she was surprised Iran targeted an American base in Qatar, calling the nation Iran's 'best friend' in the region. The two also share the world's largest gas field. Even though it appears to be a symbolic strike — the Defense Department said there were no reports of U.S. casualties — the attack on Qatar could be an indicator of more to come that could undermine some core assumptions about the Gulf business climate. Young said the global boom in AI sparked by the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 overlapped with a strategic shift among Gulf countries, led by UAE and Saudi Arabia. Those countries shifted away from regional rivalries and turned to diversifying their economies away from oil — and American industry was eager to partner in the process. Conflict with Iran 'is the ultimate threat' to that shift, Young said. 'You start seeing the way Iran likes to fight wars — through hijackings, hostage taking, civilian attacks,' she said — tactics that undermine the idea of the Gulf as a stable and prosperous hub to the world. 'It doesn't work without foreigners, without technology partnerships,' she said. State AI law moratorium survives A spending bill provision preventing states from enforcing their AI laws for 10 years unexpectedly survived procedural objections in the Senate late Saturday, meaning it now needs to find enough Republican support to stay in the reconciliation process. Many Republicans — and Democrats — widely expected the moratorium to be nixed by the Byrd rule, which prohibits provisions from being included in spending bills if they are extraneous to budgetary matters. However, Senate Republicans reached a compromise in early June meant to abide by the Byrd rule by conditioning state eligibility for federal broadband funding on compliance with the moratorium. As POLITICO's Morning Tech team reports, child safety advocates are up in arms over the moratorium surviving the weekend. The provision has also generally faced pushback from state attorneys general, as well as Democrats and a handful of Republicans. In fact, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) previously indicated he would work with Senate Democrats to introduce a floor amendment removing the provision. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) reiterated her opposition to the moratorium in an X post Monday, calling it a 'poison pill.' The moratorium would prospectively impact every corner of the country, as all 50 states have either passed or introduced AI legislation to address deepfakes, data collection, copyright, and other issues. Hollywood opposes bill on noisy streaming ads Two major entertainment trade groups are opposing a proposal that would force streaming platforms to turn down the volume on ads. The Motion Picture Association and Streaming Innovation Alliance — which together represent the likes of Disney, Amazon and Netflix — are urging California lawmakers to drop a bill that would prohibit streamed ads from being louder than the content they accompany. In a memo obtained by POLITICO's California Decoded team, the groups argue the requirement would particularly burden smaller platforms due to the technical costs associated with implementing audio controls. They also claim that streaming platforms are already looking into ways to voluntarily lower volumes. Democratic state Sen. Tom Umberg introduced SB 576 in February after the senator's legislative director complained that unexpectedly loud streaming ads were waking up his daughter. Congress passed a federal law known as the CALM Act in 2010 to set volume standards for television ads, but it doesn't cover streaming platforms. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Aaron Mak (amak@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
As temperatures rise, the US Corn Belt could see insurance claims soar
In the United States, farmers have access to federally subsidized crop insurance — a backstop that affords them some peace of mind in the face of extreme weather. When droughts, floods, or other natural disasters ruin a season's harvest, farmers can rely on insurance policies that will pay out a certain percentage of the expected market value of the food, saving them from financial ruin. But that insurance program could become strained as global warming worsens, bringing more uncertainty to the agricultural sector. A new study models how harvests in the U.S. Corn Belt — the swath of Midwestern states including Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa that produce the vast majority of the nation's corn — could fluctuate over the next few decades under a warming scenario projected by United Nations climate scientists. The researchers compared these results to a scenario with no warming, in which tomorrow's growing conditions are the same as today's. They found that, as temperatures continue to rise, the nation's corn growers are likely to see more years with lower yields — and the losses they incur during those years will also be greater. The study projects that the likelihood of corn growers' yields falling low enough to trigger insurance payouts could double by 2050, creating financial strain for both farmers and the government. The findings demonstrate how growing climate impacts like unprecedented heat could destabilize the business of growing food and the nation's food supply. Reduced corn yields would be felt widely, as the crop is used to feed cattle, converted into fuel, and refined into ingredients used in processed foods, among other applications. 'Corn is so essential to the U.S. food system,' said Sam Pottinger, a data scientist at University of California, Berkeley and the lead researcher of the study. 'There's the corn we eat, but we also feed it to the livestock. It's just an absolute cornerstone to how we feed everyone in the country.' In recent years, climate change has strained the U.S. property insurance market, as insurance companies have raised homeowners' premiums and in some cases pulled out of risky areas altogether. Pottinger's study seems to reflect similar cracks in the federal crop insurance system, which wasn't designed to account for the kind of yield volatility farmers are likely to experience if the rise in global temperatures continues unmitigated. First established in the 1930s as an agricultural support in the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal Crop Insurance Program, or FCIP, got permanent authorization from Congress in 1980. Not all farms can afford these policies or choose to enroll in them: The program covered about 13 percent of U.S. farms in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. Data suggests that the way federal crop insurance is currently set up is most attractive to the nation's largest farmers — for example, as the number of farms insured under FCIP decreased from 2017 to 2022, but the number of acres insured went up. Meanwhile, smaller farms and those that focus on specialty crops such as fruits and vegetables are less likely to have federal coverage. Farmers who go without insurance are on their own when extreme weather strikes, forced to rely on savings to make up for lost income or reach out to other USDA subagencies for support. Rising temperatures have already taken a major toll on the FCIP. Climate change drove up federal crop insurance payouts by $27 billion in the period between 1991 and 2017, according to a Stanford University study. A separate 2023 report by the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on pollutants, found that federal crop insurance costs grew more than 500 percent over a roughly two-decade period ending in 2022. Given this astronomical jump, Pottinger was not sure if he and his colleagues would see another significant increase in costs in their projections for the future. The team used a machine learning model to simulate growing conditions under one of the more moderate warming scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.'s top body of climate scientists. The team's results were 'eye-popping,' said Pottinger, who at one point worried they'd made a mistake in the calculations. To contextualize the results, he mentioned the 2012 to 2013 growing season, which was especially bad for corn farmers, with yields around 23 percent lower than expected. 'What our simulations are saying is: That year was bad, but that kind of a bad year is going to happen a lot more often.' Eunchun Park, an assistant professor focused on agricultural risk at the University of Arkansas, said the paper's methodology was sound and its findings are 'well aligned' with his previous research on crop insurance. (Park did not participate in the study; he is, however, engaged in similar research with one of the study's co-authors.) Stephen Wood, an associate research professor at the Yale School of the Environment, agreed about the methodology but noted that the study's loss estimates may be on the high end — since the algorithm used by the researchers didn't account for farmers planting different crops or changing planting strategies after a bad harvest. 'It's a good analysis, but it's probably a maximum impact, because there are adaptation measures that could mitigate some of that,' he said. Park noted, as the paper does, that the FCIP isn't prepared for the kind of yield volatility that climate change is creating. Under the program's Yield Protection plan, for example, farmers can insure their crops up to a certain percentage of their actual production history, or the average of a grower's output over recent years. If a farmer's yield falls below that average, say, due to extreme heat or a hail storm, then the plan will make up the difference. But averages do not reflect dramatic dips or spikes in yield very well. If a farmer's yield is 180 bushels of corn per acre one year and then 220 the next, they have the same average yield as a farmer who harvests 150 bushels per acre and 250 bushels per acre over the same time period. However, the latter scenario costs the insurance provider — in this case, the federal government — a lot more money. Pottinger and his team say lawmakers could ease the financial burden on farmers and the FCIP by tweaking the nation's farm bill, which governs U.S. agricultural policy roughly every five years, so that the FCIP rewards growers for using regenerative agriculture methods. These practices, like planting cover crops alongside commercial crops and rotating crops from field to field, help boost soil health and crop resilience. Wood's previous research has found that agricultural lands with more organic matter in the soil fare better in extreme weather events and see lower crop insurance claims. And other research has shown cover crops confer some resilience benefits against droughts and excessive heat. Regenerative agriculture techniques may, however, cause lower yields in the early stages of implementation. 'Crop insurance doesn't have a good way to recognize that right now,' said Pottinger. Both Park and Wood predicted that the Risk Management Agency, the part of the USDA that regulates crop insurance policies, may be reluctant to change its approach to regenerative agriculture. 'There's some resistance there,' said Wood. Pottinger emphasized that while his team recommends making crop insurance more inclusive to regenerative agriculture practices, his report does not try to 'dictate practice' for farmers. He thinks growers should decide for themselves whether to try cover cropping, for instance. 'Farmers know their land better than anyone else,' he said. 'And they should really be empowered to make some of those decisions and just be rewarded for those outcomes.' This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As temperatures rise, the US Corn Belt could see insurance claims soar on May 14, 2025.
Otago Daily Times
13-05-2025
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Councillor's attendance questioned
Nobby Clark. PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark has hit out at an attempt by a councillor to ask for details about museum build costs, saying if he turned up to meetings he would be aware of the money involved. Mr Clark and Cr Ian Pottinger were at odds at yesterday's infrastructure and projects committee meeting after the councillor proposed a notice of motion seeking answers to questions about how money had been spent. In March, Cr Pottinger filed a Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act request seeking details on the amount spent on consultants for Project 1225, which includes the new museum for Southland, the tuatara enclosure and a storage facility in Tisbury. Speaking to the motion, he said after reading the information he had questions about how money had been spent. He outlined those questions which were included in an amended resolution asking council staff to prepare a report explaining why $337,927 was spent on museum operational advice, if the $249,519 spent on legal services involved litigation or mediation and what the $387,000 spend on fit-out and design was related to. During the discussion of the motion, Mr Clark said it was with a "reasonable level of frustration" that he listened to Cr Pottinger speak to the motion. In the past seven months the project had been discussed at length during four meetings, he said. "Three of those four meetings he's been an apology." At the council's July 30 meeting where eight resolutions regarding the museum were passed, the only one Cr Pottinger opposed was a proposal to consult the public. Cr Pottinger called a point of order and said the reason he was not at the meeting was because he was in the United States. "This is getting personal from the mayor against me." He asked the meeting chairman Cr Grant Dermody to intervene. Cr Dermody said he was about to and asked Cr Pottinger to be "respectful". "We're not going to get into a tit for tat here." Mr Clark said the time to have input had been at those earlier meetings. "It's a bit rich to come back at this late stage in an election year and do politicking."
