   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S69Everything You Need to Know About 'Honkai: Star Rail's Next Big Update   Honkai: Star Rail’s main story has been chugging along like the Astral Express since the game launched in April, culminating in some major plot revelations in version 1.3. It looks like players will finally get a break in version 1.4, which was revealed in detail during a special program livestream on September 29 from HoYoverse. Version 1.4, titled “Jolted Awake From a Winter Dream” is just around the corner, and like past updates, it will bring new characters, new quests, and new limited-time events. Plus, it’s the welcome return for one of the game’s best DPS characters. Here’s everything we know about Honkai: Star Rail version 1.4
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S3How Generative AI Is Changing Creative Work  Generative AI models for businesses threaten to upend the world of content creation, with substantial impacts on marketing, software, design, entertainment, and interpersonal communications. These models are able to produce text and images: blog posts, program code, poetry, and artwork. The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images. Companies need to understand how these tools work, and how they can add value.
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S4Keep Your Team on Track Amid Cost-Cutting, Layoffs, and Uncertainty  It’s natural for workers to feel distracted and lose their drive when times are tough. In this article, the author shares insights from three experts on management and motivation. Their recommendations include keeping team meetings short and quick and devoting more attention to one-on-one check-ins; seeking out ways to provide team members with more autonomy, growth experiences, and opportunities to do meaningful work; and offering space and time to talk openly about your employees’ concerns.
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S5The Burden of Proof for Corporate Sustainability is Too High | Andrew Winston  Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Throughout 2023, tech companies have continually laid off workers. The year started with Amazon and Salesforce cutting 18,000 and 8,000 people, respectively, and sector momentum grew into the spring. An article in the April/May 2023 issue of Fortune magazine asserted that companies were “swapping exuberance for efficiency” and pointed out that they had collectively laid off more than 150,000 people since January. (By August, that number was up to nearly 225,000.)
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S6How 'strike culture' took hold in the US in 2023  On 14 September, when members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union walked off the job at three Midwest auto factories owned by General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, it seemed a fitting way for the US labour movement to cap this year's summer of strikes. And collective action is only continuing.In 2023, we've seen labour stoppages in industries of all types. Beginning in May, Hollywood screenwriters in the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) walked the picket line for 148 days before reaching a tentative deal. Actors' union SAG-AFTRA, also struck in July, and remain off the job. Starbucks workers are participating in an ongoing series of labour actions; and frontline workers including nurses, hotel staff and pilots have also walked out, with some work stoppages continuing. There have also been major near-misses: in July, the package delivery company UPS narrowly averted a strike at the eleventh hour that would have been the largest single-employer labour stoppage in US history.
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S7Spicy curried mung bean sprouts  Ruta Kahate is a woman on a mission to demystify Indian cooking – particularly Indian spices – for an American audience.This cookbook author, chef and restaurateur wants people to know that it is possible to make Indian food "without a gazillion spices". This is why she chose just six of them to star in her latest book, 6 spices, 60 dishes: Indian Recipes That are Simple, Fresh, and Big on Taste, published in January 2023. The book is a follow up to 5 spices 50 dishes, her 2007 book that went out of print a couple of years ago. As she explained, "People are intimidated by spices, or they are just unsure and don't know how to use them."
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S812 of the best TV shows to watch this October  Today, David Beckham is best known as the head of a celebrity family, husband of Victoria and father of Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz and Harper, almost famous for being famous. This four-part documentary, co-produced by Beckham's own production company, looks back at what made him famous in the first place, his career as an astonishingly good athlete, whether he's called a footballer as in the UK or soccer star as in the US. The series goes back to his childhood, with comments from his mum and dad, moving through his grapples with fame and success and on to the present. Actor Fisher Stevens, known for playing the slimy communications tsar Hugo in Succession, directs, but he is no newcomer. His previous films include the 2016 climate change documentary Before the Flood and the 2021 drama Palmer, with Justin Timberlake. It may well offer an intimate portrait of its subject, though possibly not an objective one.Fresh from contacting spirits by toying with an embalmed hand in this summer's hit horror film Talk to Me, Sophie Wilde has a much more down-to-earth role in this new Netflix series as teenaged Mia, who has spent months in a hospital recovering from an eating disorder. When she returns to school, she realises she has missed so much that she creates a bucket list to catch up. The items she is determined to check off that list include getting drunk, doing karaoke, going on a first date, and breaking the law. She is very determined. Everything Now is the latest show to take teenagers' real-life issues as a starting point, then exaggerate enough to be entertaining without losing relevance. Glamour UK captured the tone when it called the show a must "if you loved the cheeky high school angst of Sex Education and Heartstopper". Stephen Fry is the other notable cast member, as Mia's therapist.
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S9S10S11S12S13S14HIV self-test kits are meant to empower those at risk -  University of Johannesburg provides support as an endorsing partner of The Conversation AFRICA.In 2016, the World Health Organization recommended HIV self-test kits as a way for people to confidentially test for HIV in their homes or other private places. Each kit contains detailed instructions on how to administer the test and read the results without the help of a clinician. However, the instructions advise confirming results in a health facility to improve access to care, especially for those with a positive reading.
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S15S16Nigeria's new blue economy ministry could harness marine resources - moving the focus away from oil  Isa O Elegbede is presently affiliated with the Lagos State University and with many international and local NGOs, such as Geo Blue Planet, IUCN/CEESP/TGER; he is also the president of Sayne Development Foundation and Executive director of Pearlrose Foundation. He has received a fellowship grant from Ocean Frontier institute (OFI) in Canada and several international organisations in the past.Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced a new ministerial portfolio in August: Marine and Blue Economy. This was welcome news as it renewed hope for economic development outside the oil sector. We asked marine sustainability and blue economy expert Isa Olalekan Elegbede to explain how the ministry could benefit Nigeria.
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S17Argentina's economic crisis: whoever wins presidential election is on a collision course with the IMF  Argentina is heading to the polls on October 22 for a presidential election dominated by another profound economic crisis. In September, annual inflation in Latin America’s third-largest economy hit 124%, its highest since 1991. This was after a devaluation of nearly 20% in the peso amid pressure on the government from major creditor the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stop artificially propping it up. To curb the inflation, Argentina’s central bank raised the benchmark rate of interest to a horrific 118%.
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S18Long COVID patients are much more likely to have multiple organ abnormalities  It wasn’t that long ago that some people speculated that long COVID was all in the mind – a psychosomatic illness. Thankfully, that period of speculation is now behind us. We have compelling evidence that long COVID is very real and very harmful.I’m the lead investigator on an ongoing study called C-More which looks at the long-term harms caused by COVID. Our latest findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, show that nearly a third of people who were severely ill with COVID have multiple organ abnormalities on MRI five months after they were discharged from hospital. This is based on a sample of 259 people who were hospitalised with COVID and 52 in the control group who did not catch COVID.
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S19Glaciers can give us clues about when a volcano might erupt  Globally, there is about one volcano erupting each week. Volcanic unrest kills an average of 500 people every year and costs the global economy roughly US$7 billion (£5.7 billion). With one in 20 people living somewhere at risk of volcanic activity, every effort that can be made to improve the monitoring of volcanoes is important. This is especially true for volcanoes covered by glaciers – roughly 18% of all volcanoes on Earth. When these erupt, the consequences can be among the deadliest of all natural disasters.
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S20Mercury: shrinking planet is still getting smaller - new research  Planetary scientists have long known that Mercury has been shrinking for billions of years. Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, its interior has been cooling down as internal heat leaks away. This means that the rock (and, within that, the metal) of which it is composed must have contracted slightly in volume. It is unknown, however, to what extent the planet is still shrinking today – and, if so, for how long that is likely to continue. Now our new paper, published in Nature Geoscience, offers fresh insight.
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S21Three steps for getting over social media envy - advice from a psychologist  In the past, you may have envied your neighbour when they bought a new car or went on holiday abroad when you could not. Although these feelings of envy would have been perfectly valid, they were isolated incidents that would last for a short period of time. Today’s world is vastly different, as we carry comparison machines around with us in the form of mobile phones. The rise of social media has had many benefits but also given rise to social media envy when users perceive the perfect lives of others – even though they are rarely as perfect as they seem on the surface.
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S22New species of cobra-like snake discovered - but it may already be extinct  Around the world, natural history museums hold a treasure trove of knowledge about Earth’s animals. But much of the precious information is sealed off to genetic scientists because formalin, the chemical often used to preserve specimens, damages DNA and makes sequences hard to recover. The Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, a mountain chain on the border with Mozambique, create a haven of cool and wet habitats surrounded by savannas and dry forest. They are home to many species that are found nowhere else.
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S23Navigating the risks and benefits of AI: Lessons from nanotechnology on ensuring emerging technologies are safe as well as successful  Twenty years ago, nanotechnology was the artificial intelligence of its time. The specific details of these technologies are, of course, a world apart. But the challenges of ensuring each technology’s responsible and beneficial development are surprisingly alike. Nanotechnology, which is technologies at the scale of individual atoms and molecules, even carried its own existential risk in the form of “gray goo.”As potentially transformative AI-based technologies continue to emerge and gain traction, though, it is not clear that people in the artificial intelligence field are applying the lessons learned from nanotechnology.
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S24Michael Gambon's best film is a violent work of art  Let’s get one thing out of the way from the start: I have neither read nor seen any of the Harry Potter stuff. Others may disagree, but I do not consider this a loss. So it strikes me as a bit of shame that so many people, especially younger audiences, are probably more familiar with the late Michael’s Gambon’s role as Dumbledore in the Potter films than any of his other work.
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S25Five things that the west doesn't understand about China's foreign policy  China’s capacity to surprise western politicians was demonstrated recently, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping was unexpectedly absent from the G20 summit. There were a few reasons why this G20 might have been less important for Xi, including the rising influence of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) partnership. But often western reactions to a Chinese decision can come from a lack of understanding of Beijing’s motivations. A deeper knowledge of China would help the west interpret Beijing’s actions more clearly, helpful at a time where many analysts see China as a potential challenger to the US as the dominant world power. With this in mind, here are five things that the west often gets wrong about Chinese foreign policy.
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S26Even before deepfakes, tech was a tool of abuse and control  Of the many “profound risks to society and humanity” that have tech experts worried about artificial intelligence (AI), the spread of fake images is one that everyday internet users will be familiar with.Deepfakes – videos or photographs where someone’s face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to be doing something they are not – have already been used to spread political disinformation and fake pornography.
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S27Rosebank shows the UK's offshore oil regulator no longer serves the public good  In a four-line statement announcing the approval of the new Rosebank oil field 80 miles west of Shetland, the UK’s offshore oil and gas regulator showed its mission no longer serves the public good. The announcement by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which regulates oil and gas extraction in the waters off the British coast, asserted that net zero considerations had been taken into account – a technical definition that makes it appear long-term oil production is compatible with climate goals. This has outraged and dismayed climate scientists, campaigners, and the many other people concerned about the UK’s faltering climate leadership.
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S28New single-use plastic ban takes effect in England - here's why its impact may be limited  Single-use plastic and packaging has become an essential part of our lives. In the UK, households collectively throw away an estimated 100 billion pieces of plastic packaging each year. One way to reduce the amount of plastic we use is to introduce bans. In 2020, the UK government banned the sale of several single-use plastic products in England including straws, stirrers and cotton buds – but with exceptions for medical use.
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S29S30Riskier times on campuses mean we need a tool for prevention and intervention of sexual assaults  The excitement of entering a new academic year for university and college students can be palpable and filled with hope. But the start of the school year in post-secondary settings also has a shadow side, known as the red zone. The red zone is one of the riskier times for gender-based and sexualized violence to occur — about 50 per cent of sexual assaults on campus happen during this period. The impact on victims can be tremendous and devastating.
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S31Promises to get tough on youth crime might win votes - but the evidence shows it hasn't worked for NZ  The promise to “get tough on youth crime” is a New Zealand election perennial. This year, parties on both the left and right have pledged to crack down on young offenders – despite a lot of evidence that such approaches do not work in the long term.Already, the Ram Raid Offending and Related Measures Amendment Bill is working through the legislative process. If passed, it would create a new offence within the Crimes Act, allowing the prosecution of children as young as 12, and prison sentences of up to ten years.
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S32Saskatchewan's revised policy for consulting Indigenous nations is not nearly good enough  Kathy Walker has volunteered for Saskatchewan NDP and federal Liberal party candidates in Saskatchewan in two elections.The Government of Saskatchewan announced its revised framework for consultation with First Nation and Métis communities in August 2023. This framework sets out the provincial government’s latest approach to fulfilling its constitutional duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous Peoples. However, Indigenous leaders say the changes do not go far enough.
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S33The rise and 'whimper-not-a-bang' fall of Australia's trailblazing rock press  People under 30 don’t need to care about – or even understand – this. But there really was a time when exposure to culture was mediated by curators who had far too much power over what we all saw, heard or experienced. In the era before social media and widespread internet access, artists had no direct connection to their fanbases, and required whole distinct manifestations of media to communicate news of their activities, directions and products.
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S34What has the Nobel Prize in Physics ever done for me?  Each October, physics is in the news with the awarding of the Nobel Prize. The work acknowledged through this most prestigious award often seems far removed from our everyday lives, with prizes given for things like “optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms” and “elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions”.However, these lauded advances in our basic understanding of the world often have very real, practical consequences for society.
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S35S36S3750 years of hip-hop: Its social and political power resonates far beyond its New York birthplace  Some historians say hip-hop culture all started at a party one hot August night in the South Bronx in 1973. DJ Kool Herc plugged his parents’ record gear into a street lamp and began creating what is known as breaks — longer instrumentals in records created by replaying the musical interludes over and over. In 1980, the first commercial rap record, Rapper’s Delight, was recorded. With its large distribution network and popularity, this song reached the Billboard Top 40.
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S38Being told where their blood ends up encourages donors to give again - new research  Telling people who have donated blood when and where the blood was used makes them more likely to do it again, according to our new study. Donors who got details like the date and the hospital were 10% more likely to donate again than people who were just thanked.Together with University of Hamburg marketing scholars Besarta Veseli and Michel Clement, we conducted real-world studies, backed by an online experiment.
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S39Where the Supreme Court stands on banning books  Efforts to ban books in public schools and public libraries reached an all-time high in 2022 and show few signs of abating for 2023, according to the American Library Association.The recent movement to remove books appears to be a coordinated campaign taking place at both the state and local levels; it often targets books that address race, gender or both. Some of these efforts have resulted in laws that threaten to jail librarians.
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S40S41S42Holes in baby dinosaur bones show how football-sized hatchlings grew to 3-tonne teens  Despite their public image as torpid, lumbering creatures, many dinosaurs were evidently warm-blooded, highly active animals, capable of prolonged and strenuous aerobic exercise. Our results, published in the journal Paleobiology, show Maiasaura was capable of taking in huge amounts of energy and nutrients and using them for rapid growth and levels of activity comparable to those of modern mammals.
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S43Tenacious curiosity in the lab can lead to a Nobel Prize - mRNA research exemplifies the unpredictable value of basic scientific research  The 2023 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine will go to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discovery that modifying mRNA – a form of genetic material your body uses to produce proteins – could reduce unwanted inflammatory responses and allow it to be delivered into cells. While the impact of their findings may not have been apparent at the time of their breakthrough over a decade ago, their work paved the way for the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, as well as many other therapeutic applications currently in development.Another example is the discovery of antibiotics, which was based on an unexpected observation. In the late 1920s, the microbiologist Alexander Fleming was growing a species of bacteria in his lab and found that his Petri dish was accidentally contaminated with the fungus Penicillium notatum. He noticed that wherever the fungus was growing, it impeded or inhibited the growth of the bacteria. He wondered why that was happening and subsequently went on to isolate penicillin, which was approved for medical use in the early 1940s.
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S44S45Voice support up in Essential poll, but it is still behind  Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne The referendum on the Indigenous Voice to parliament will be held on October 14. A national Essential poll, conducted September 27 to October 1 from a sample of 1,125, gave “no” to the Voice a 49–43 lead, a narrowing from a 51–41 “no” lead a fortnight ago.
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S46We started a service for people worried about their sexual thoughts about children. Here's what we found  In its 2017 final report, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified that there was no large-scale national early intervention service in Australia for people worried about their sexual thoughts or behaviours in relation to children. Among the Commission’s final recommendations was the implementation of such a service to help stop people from committing such abuse. In September 2022, Stop it Now! Australiawas launched, an anonymous service for people worried about their own or someone else’s sexual thoughts and behaviours in relation to children. The aim of the service is to provide help to callers in order to keep children safe from abuse.
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S47My Sister Jill: Patricia Cornelius' new play is a blistering post-war social and cultural commentary  Emerging from one of Australia’s most enduring and significant theatrical partnerships between director Susie Dee and playwright Patricia Cornelius, My Sister Jill is a contemporary homage to George Johnston’s classic 1964 Australian novel My Brother Jack. Both these works are set in post-war suburban Australia in the 1960s. But instead of the longing for the classic values of an older Australia that valorise war heroism and stoic masculinity, My Sister Jill centres the perspectives of those impacted by this narrative.
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S48S49S50S51Shop theft has been building for years - here's how to tackle retail crime and keep workers safe  Retail giants like Boots, Tesco and Primark are pushing for Home Office action after violent incidents and abuse against shop staff almost doubled since the COVID pandemic. Retail crime cost UK shops £1.76 billion in the year to April 2023, according to the British Retail Consortium.The increase in theft from UK grocery and convenience shops is often blamed on the cost of living crisis. But this situation has been building for many years because overburdened policing and criminal justice systems can’t cope with a rise in organised crime and drug-fuelled stealing.
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S52The burials that could challenge historians' ideas about Anglo-Saxon gender  There are a significant number of Anglo-Saxon burials where the estimated anatomical sex of the skeleton does not align with the gender implied by the items they were buried with. Some bodies identified as male have been buried with feminine clothing, and some bodies identified as female have been found in the sorts of “warrior graves” typically associated with men. In the archaeology of early Anglo-Saxon England, weaponry, horse-riding equipment and tools are thought to signal masculinity, while jewellery, sewing equipment and beads signal femininity. And, for the most part, this pattern fits.
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S53Kwame Onwuachi's Cuisine of the Self  It was only 10:30 A.M. on a Tuesday in July, but the staff at Tatiana, the restaurant in Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall, seemed exhausted. "Kerry Washington was in last night," a publicist told me. Someone else mentioned that there had been a private event on Sundayâthe one day of the week when the restaurant is usually closed. The last guests had trickled out at 4 A.M. on Monday, and the managers hadn't left until six. The party was for Beyoncé, who had just played a sold-out show at MetLife Stadium, and Jay-Z. ("I buried the lede," the publicist said.)Kwame Onwuachi, Tatiana's chef and proprietor, wouldn't normally be at the restaurant so early, but he was there to record a television segment for WNBCâhis second of the day, after the "Today" show, at half past eight. "You've had a busy morning!" the camera operator said. "It's not really morning if you don't sleep," Onwuachi replied.
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S54What We Did Before the Sandwich  It is commonly said that John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, would order his valet to bring him salt beef between two pieces of toasted bread during long sessions of cribbage and other card games. He was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue gambling while eating, without the need for a fork, and without getting his cards greasy from eating meat with his bare hands. So what did human beings do before the sandwich?Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.
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S55Matt Gaetz Accuses Kevin McCarthy of Behaving Like an Adult  WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a sign of the worsening feud among congressional Republicans, Representative Matt Gaetz lashed out at Kevin McCarthy, accusing the Speaker of “behaving like an adult.”“Listening to others and striking a compromise are adulthood at its worst,” he charged. “Kevin McCarthy needs to look at himself in the mirror and ask if he wants to be an adult, or a Republican.”
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S56London Breed's Cynical Swing to the Right  Is California headed for a right-wing backlash? This question has hovered over the state's politics for years now, as the public's frustration with homelessness and property crime has escalated. To date, the evidence has been decidedly mixed. The most recent mayoral election in Los Angeles was supposed to be a referendum on this matter, but much to the chagrin of those declaring a new purple wave in Southern California, Karen Bass, an establishment progressive, defeated Rick Caruso, a real-estate billionaire and former Republican who promised to "clean up" the city. Up north, the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco was supposed to be proof that voters in a famously liberal city had had enough, but soon after Boudin was recalled, Pamela Price, a fellow-progressive, was elected as the district attorney of Alameda County. Now Price herself is facing a similar recall campaign, which some would marshal as proof that "the wokes" have lost for good.The lack of clarity has led to some strange decisions by a few of California's most prominent liberal politicians, who are responding in a myriad of ways to the possibility of a rightward swing. Last week in San Francisco, London Breed, the city's mayor, announced a bill to deny welfare benefits to anyone "suffering from substance-use disorder" who was not enrolled in a drug rehabilitation or treatment program. "No more handouts without accountability," Breed said. "In order to receive resources from our city, you will need to be in a substance-use-disorder program and consistently seeking treatment." The plan received an approving "bravo" tweet from Elon Musk. The city's progressives and homeless advocates voiced their dissent to what they correctly see as an egregiously punitive policy, straight out of the Reagan era.
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S57Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Quartet Abounds in Audacious Artifice and Stinging Political Critique  Wes Anderson's new quartet of films, based on stories by Roald Dahl, which dropped on Netflix last week, may be briefâthree are seventeen-minutes long, one runs thirty-nineâbut there's nothing minor about them. They make even clearer what his features have long shown: Anderson is one of the two most original inventors of cinematic forms since the heyday of the late Jean-Luc Godard. The other is the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Where Kiarostami undermined the artifices of fiction with documentary elements, Anderson overmines fiction by overloading it with intricate artifices that nonetheless have a quasi-documentary aspectâin that they reveal the contrivances on which filmed fictions depend. Anderson's Dahl shorts go further than ever in foregrounding his conceptual work, but the results are more than just theoretical; they embody a vision of human relations, of society at large, that is properly understood to be political.This should be no surprise, given the centrality of Dahl in Anderson's artistic development. The director's 2009 adaptation of "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is the hinge in his career, the point at which he perceived and heightened the political implications of the stories he was telling, albeit in a way of his own. He expanded Dahl's brief story of cruelty (the murderous mania of its trio of farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean) to emphasize the Foxes' family lifeânot just their emotional conflicts but also the stylish nobility of their resistance. In effect, what nearly everyone loved about Anderson's 2014 live-action feature, "The Grand Budapest Hotel"âexpressly a story of a resistance and one in which high style emerges as crucial tool in resisting Nazi oppressorsâwas already there in "Fantastic Mr. Fox," Anderson's first great political film. At the same time, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" also brought an aesthetic renewal: in discovering the joy of total control that stop-motion animation afforded, he learned lessons about how wild emotions could be combined with even more precisely calibrated performances, even more copiously ornamental designs, and even more aphoristically literary scripts. Since then, Andersonâwith an even keener awareness of directorial powerâhas endowed his live-action features with ever more reflexive narrative framing devices, which make the telling of stories the subject of his stories.
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S58The Trump Legal Show Might Be in Town Until Christmas  On Monday morning, Donald Trump returned to lower Manhattan for the first of the many trials he’s facing up and down the country. Outside the grand old New York State Supreme Courthouse at 60 Centre Street, Foley Square was blocked off, and there was a large battery of TV cameras and arc lights. Inside the courthouse, there was another press area directly outside Courtroom 300, where Judge Arthur Engoron was presiding over the opening day of a civil trial brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who has accused Trump of committing business fraud.As a civil defendant, Trump had no legal obligation to show up, but he had evidently decided that a personal appearance would serve his defense and his political position, which is that he is the innocent victim of a Democratic “witch hunt.” When he got to the courtroom, flanked by lawyers and Secret Service agents, he paused at the press pen to repeat that phrase for the hundred-millionth time. Repeating himself again, he called Engoron a “rogue judge”and described James as “a racist.” The entire case is “a scam and a sham,” the ex-President declared angrily before walking into the courtroom. James, for her part, stopped on her way into the courthouse to remind everyone that “no one is above the law.”
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S59Girl Math, or a Too-Big-to-Fail C.E.O.?  In the world of girl math, cash is not real money, buying on sale is aform of saving, and cosmetic procedures is an “investment in yourfuture self.” —CBSNewsIf I did something hard today, like firing fifty thousand people, I deserve a little treat, like a nice, juicy blood boy, and whatever I spend on it doesn’t count.
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S6025 Years Later, a Forgotten Jedi Could Fix 'Ahsoka's Laziest Storyline  As the wily Jedi Kanan once told Ezra Bridger in Rebels, “Having a laser sword doesn’t make you a Jedi.” Sabine Wren is the perfect example. Though she wielded the Darksaber as a Mandalorian, she never considered herself a Jedi until Ahsoka began training her, though some unknown event drove a wedge between the two.Now, in Ahsoka, we’ve seen Sabine start to tap into her Jedi identity again, but she’s the first to admit she’s not very good at the classic Jedi telekinetic powers. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t even move a cup. It’s one of Ahsoka’s odder storylines, given that the show hasn’t really explained why someone with no apparent affinity for the Force is being trained in its use. But even if she’s no Matilda, Sabine could still find success as a Jedi through a workaround used in an old, non-canonical novel.
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S61You Need to Watch the Best Sci-Fi Epic of the Decade on Netflix ASAP  Adapting a massive, dense sci-fi or fantasy novel is never an easy thing to do. For every successful adaptation that’s been done (e.g. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy), there’s always an example of a misfire of equal proportion (e.g. 2017’s The Dark Tower). Readers, consequently, have learned to approach all adaptations of their favorite books with a healthy level of skepticism. As warranted as that is, too, it’s worth celebrating the book-to-movie adaptations that actually work.There’s no recent example that fits that criteria better, either, than 2021’s Dune. Directed and co-written by Sicario director Denis Villeneuve, the big-budget adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert’s iconic 1965 novel is a gargantuan, immaculately conceived sci-fi blockbuster. In a sense, it’s the culmination of the eight-year run that cemented Villeneuve’s status as one of the most formidable and consistent craftsmen in all of Hollywood.
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S62Google's More Powerful Chromebook Plus Laptops Start at an Affordable $399  Chromebooks have a reputation for being cheap — cheap hardware and cheap pricing. Google wants to change that perception with a new tier of ChromeOS-powered laptops called Chromebook Plus.Starting at $399, Chromebook Plus is a category of Chromebooks with minimum specs that — to put it bluntly — don't suck. In many cases, Chromebook Plus devices will have up to twice the performance, storage, and memory of non-Plus Chromebooks, according to Google.
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S6332 Years Later, Matthew Lillard's D&D Obsession Is Now a Thriving Side Hustle  While he’s best known as a Hollywood actor of millennial hits like Scream, She’s All That, and the live-action Scooby-Doo, more recently, he’s harnessed the power of his Dungeons & Dragons obsession into a thriving side hustle. In 2018, Lillard and his best friends co-founded Beadle & Grimm’s, a tabletop gaming accessories company. The founders have all played the same continuous campaign of D&D together for more than 30 years and counting, and it’s company policy that they must still make time to play as a group.“We had to make an edict of the company that when we go on quarterly retreats, it is built to play games,” Lillard tells Inverse. “We started a company, so we stopped playing games. We got away from the thing we love most because we were working.”
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S64Honda's First EV in the U.S. Plays it Very Safe  To make up for years of falling behind in the U.S. EV market, Honda is playing it safe by releasing an all-electric midsize SUV as its first offering. The Prologue will officially kick off Honda’s attempt at breaking into the stateside market as a 300-mile range EV with a “neo-rugged” design. It looks like any other standard SUV out there, but we’re just glad that Honda is finally making EVs in the U.S. With just the Prologue so far, Honda falls behind other major car brands who have already established a solid presence in the U.S. Honda did get a little help from GM with the Prologue since it’s built upon the Ultium platform that’s also used for the Cadillac Lyriq and Chevy Blazer EV. Honda is working on its own e:N Architecture F platform that will make its debut with the very similar-looking e:Ny1 that’s exclusive to Europe.
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S65'Ahsoka' Episode 8 Will Bring Its Story to an Explosive Conclusion -- or a Cliffhanger  It’s finally here. Ahsoka is coming to a close, but its hero has a lot to do before the credits roll on Episode 8. Ahsoka Tano is reunited with Ezra and facing down Thrawn, and together they need to defeat him — or at least thwart him — and find their way out of the Peridea galaxy and back to the Republic they helped build.Here’s everything you need to know about the Season 1 finale that’s set to wrap everything up... or at least tease future Ahsoka-focused projects.
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S66This Modded Rivian EV Brings the 'Halo' Warthog To Life  What Halo diehard hasn’t dreamed of riding around in a Warthog? You may be able get a one-to-one replica of that combat vehicle in real life, but Apocalypse Manufacturing has given us a modern-day design that resembles the franchise’s iconic Warthog. Apocalypse’s Nirvana is built off of Rivian’s R1T pickup truck, but it’s been so heavily modified that it looks like a distant cousin. The company behind the Nirvana has plenty of experience with modding out Jeeps, Ram trucks, and Ford Broncos, but this is Apocalypse’s first time working on customizing a Rivian. The Nirvana may not be the practical everyday driver you’re looking for, but you’ll definitely be ready for the apocalypse with this beast of an electric truck.
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S67The Creator of 'Fable' Just Quietly Released a Fascinating Free RPG on Steam  You wake up in a room made of checkered green and purple bricks, and already tutorials are flashing at the top of the screen. Outside your room, someone asks if you’ve had any dreams, and you answer by typing whatever you please. No one’s particularly interested in what you’re up to, leaving you to find your way through the world from the very start. You’ll likely be taken down by a beetle within the first few minutes.If you haven’t heard of Moonring before, that’s probably because it came more-or-less out of nowhere. The open-world RPG launched for free on Steam at the end of September with next to no ceremony, despite its intriguing pedigree. Its designer, Dene Carter, is one of the creators of Fable, and while Moonring is a vastly different game, more than a few threads connect the two.
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S68S70Humane Finally Shows Off What the Ai Pin Looks Like Ahead of November 9 Unveil  Mark your calendar for November 9 — the date Humane says it will fully unveil its “intelligent clothing-based wearable” called Ai Pin. We got our first glimpse of the Ai Pin back in April and last Friday, during Paris Fashion Week, in collaboration with French luxury brand Coperni, Humane had supermodel Naomi Campbell walk down the runway wearing the “screenless, standalone device and software platform built from the ground up for AI.”
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