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Meta is asking California Attorney General Rob Bonta to block OpenAI’s planned transition from a non-profit to for-profit entity.

In a letter sent to Bonta’s office this week, Meta says that OpenAI “should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains.”

The letter, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal and you can read in full below, goes so far as to say that Meta believes Elon Musk is “qualified and well positioned to represent the interests of Californians in this matter.” Meta supporting Musk’s fight against OpenAI is notable given that Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were talking about literally fighting in a cage match just last year.

Link without paywall Here

Donald Trump said he can’t guarantee that his promised tariffs on key U.S. foreign trade partners won’t raise prices for American consumers and he suggested once more that some political rivals and federal officials who pursued legal cases against him should be imprisoned.

The president-elect, in a wide-ranging interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday, also touched on monetary policy, immigration, abortion and health care, and U.S. involvement in Ukraine, Israel and elsewhere.

Trump often mixed declarative statements with caveats, at one point cautioning “things do change.”

Kamala Harris has been lying low since her defeat in the presidential race, unwinding with family and senior aides in Hawaii before heading back to the nation’s capital.

But privately, the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, “I am staying in the fight.”

She is expected to explore those and other possible paths forward with family members over the winter holiday season, according to five people in the Harris inner circle, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Her deliberations follow an extraordinary four months in which Harris went from President Joe Biden’s running mate to the top of the ticket, reenergizing Democrats before ultimately crashing on election night.

“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” said one former Harris campaign aide. “The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”

Archive Link https://archive.ph/cFuRP

President-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans have begun preliminary discussions about making significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal safety net programs to offset the enormous cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts next year.

Among the options under discussion by GOP lawmakers and aides are new work requirements and spending caps for the programs, according to seven people familiar with the talks, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Those conversations have included some economic officials on Trump’s transition team, the people said.

However, concern is high among some Republicans about the political downsides of such cuts, which would affect programs that provide support for at least 70 million low-income Americans, and some people familiar with the talks stressed that discussions are preliminary.

“I don’t think that passing just an extension of tax cuts that shows on paper an increase in the deficit [is] going to be challenging,” said one GOP tax adviser. “But the other side of the coin is, you start to add things to reduce the deficit, and that gets politically more challenging.”

As cold temperatures are once again upon us, it's unlikely many Canadians are thinking about heat waves. But Canadians increasingly have to deal with them, and it's virtually certain next year won't be any different.

In 2021, a heat wave stifled parts of B.C., killing roughly 600 people. As a result, many people rushed out to buy air conditioners, and the government even created a program to provide free AC to low-income families.

The effort to stay cool in a warming world is a challenge. Our air conditioners are not only hooked up to energy grids that may be fossil fuel-intensive, but they often leak, emitting harmful greenhouse gases — the most concerning being hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HFCs) — into the atmosphere.

They also emit a lot of heat themselves.

So how do countries keep their citizens cool and safe as heat waves become more frequent and intense without increasing their carbon footprint?

The answer is called sustainable cooling.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she agrees with Ontario Premier Doug Ford's suggestion that Canada and the U.S. look at cutting Mexico out of the North American trade agreement.

Smith was asked by Power & Politics host David Cochrane if she agrees with Ford's suggestion that Mexico be dropped from the agreement if it doesn't tighten up restrictions on Chinese products.

"A thousand per cent," she replied. "I'm very much in sync with what he has to say.

"The real issue we have is that Mexico has not been that equal partner with the United States. In addition to that, they're inviting China to engage in investment in Mexico."

On Tuesday, Ford floated the idea of returning to a Canada-U.S. bilateral trade pact like the one that predated the enactment of NAFTA in 1994.

US Muslim leaders who supported Republican Donald Trump to protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and attacks on Lebanon have been deeply disappointed by his cabinet picks, they tell Reuters.

“Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his Secretary of State pick and others,” says Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump. Muslim support for Trump helped him win Michigan and may have factored into other swing state wins, strategists believe.

China's Baidu Inc (9888.HK), opens new tab unveiled a slew of new applications for its artificial intelligence technology on Tuesday, including a text-to-image generator and a tool that enables users to develop software applications without coding expertise.

The country's leading search engine company is among tech firms shifting their focus to the commercialization of large language model (LLM) applications after nearly two years of heavy investment in research and development in models that they tout as alternatives to OpenAI's GPT.