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Hammerhead shark spotted far off Cape Cod coast, white shark seen 30 yards off Orleans beach

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

A hammerhead shark was recently spotted far off the Cape Cod coast during a New England Aquarium aerial survey of a marine protected area.The hammerhead was one of more than 700 ocean animals that researchers saw in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, the only marine national monument in the U.S. Atlantic Ocean.The New England Aquarium scientists flew above the biodiversity hotspot 150 miles off the coast of Cape Cod last week, capturing photos of fin whales and pilot whales along with bottlenose, striped, and Risso’s dolphins.The researchers also spotted Chilean devil rays, manta rays, common dolphins, sunfish, and the hammerhead shark.“The Aquarium has been documenting the marine mammal biodiversity in the Monument for seven years, and every aerial survey flight is breathtaking,” said Orla O’Brien, an associate scientist in the Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.“Our photos only scratch the surface of the o...

Holy Cross quarterback Matt Sluka leads an offensive juggernaut

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

WORCESTER — Holy Cross quarterback Matt Sluka has the luxury of multiple options to work with in the 2023 season.That’s a welcome relief for the can-do field general who is no longer required to do it all for the Crusaders’ offense. The 6-3, 216-pound senior from Locust Valley, N.Y., has the pieces in place to replicate the high-volume offense from 2022.Holy Cross went undefeated in the regular season (11-0) for the third time in program history and reached the quarterfinals of the FCS playoffs. Holy Cross is the preseason pick to repeat as Patriot League champions and ranked No. 6 in the FCS Coaches Poll.“This year it is more about finding playmakers and getting them the ball and our offense is stacked,” said Sluka, during the Crusaders’ media day on Thursday morning at Fitton Field.“Being able to get anyone the ball in space and allow them to make plays is going to be the key to our offense. It is almost like there are not enough plays to get everyone the ball and it has been grea...

Turnover at POST Commission as one commissioner joins, another plans to leave

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

Gov. Maura Healey appointed a police chief to the state’s powerful panel that licenses law enforcement in Massachusetts on Thursday just as another commissioner is quitting.Healey tapped Framingham Police Department Chief Lester Baker to serve on the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission. Baker, who was sworn in virtually before a morning meeting, replaces Pittsfield Police Chief Michael Wynn.As Baker joins, officials told the Herald that Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell are nearing a decision on Chaplain Clementina Chéry’s replacement. Chéry sent a letter in March informing the pair that she intended to resign from her POST commissionership on April 14 or upon the appointment of her successor, whichever came later.In the March 23 letter obtained by the Herald, Chéry said she believed it was time to return to giving her “undivided attention” to the Louis D. Brown Institute, which she leads and co-founded.“I am thus ready to let another deserving individual have ...

Dye & Durham completes sale of TM Group to Aurelius

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

TORONTO — Dye & Durham Ltd. says it has completed the sale of its TM Group business to alternative investment firm Aurelius in an agreement worth up to 91 million pounds.The previously announced sale came after a British competition regulator took issue with the software company’s acquisition of the business in 2021. The company announced the acquisition of TM Group (UK) Ltd. in July 2021 in a deal worth about 91.5 million pounds.However, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered the sale of the acquisition after it found it would “substantially” lessen competition in property search reports in England and Wales.Dye & Durham previously said it plans to use the net proceeds it receives at closing to reduce debt.In a previous release announcing the deal, CEO Matthew Proud said Dye & Durham plans to seek new merger and acquisition opportunities in the United Kingdom to continue to grow its business.This report by The Canadi...

FEC moves toward potentially regulating AI deepfakes in campaign ads

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

The Federal Election Commission has begun a process to potentially regulate AI-generated deepfakes in political ads ahead of the 2024 election, a move advocates say would safeguard voters against a particularly insidious form of election disinformation.The FEC’s unanimous procedural vote on Thursday advances a petition asking it to regulate ads that use artificial intelligence to misrepresent political opponents as saying or doing something they didn’t — a stark issue that is already being highlighted in the current 2024 GOP presidential primary. Though the circulation of convincing fake images, videos or audio clips is not new, innovative generative AI tools are making them cheaper, easier to use, and more likely to manipulate public perception. As a result, some presidential campaigns in the 2024 race — including that of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — already are using them to persuade voters. The Republican National Committee in April released an entirely AI-generated ad meant t...

A Georgia teacher wants to overturn her firing for reading a book to students about gender identity

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia public school teacher took the stand Thursday trying to reverse her firing after officials said she improperly read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class.Katie Rinderle had been a teacher for 10 years when she got into trouble in March for reading the picture book “My Shadow Is Purple” at Due West Elementary School in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County.The case has drawn wide attention as a test of what public school teachers can teach in class, how much a school system can control teachers and whether parents can veto instruction they dislike. It comes amid a nationwide conservative backlash to books and teaching about LGBTQ+ subjects in school.“This termination is unrelated to education,” Craig Goodmark, the lawyer defending Rinderle, argued Thursday. “It exists to create political scapegoats for the elected leadership of this district. Reading a children’s book to children is not against the law.”Officials in Cobb County, ...

Man convicted of 1989 murder of girl, 10, granted chance for new appeal

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

A man convicted of killing a 10-year-old girl in Toronto more than 30 years ago has been granted a chance for a new appeal after the federal justice minister determined there was a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice had occurred.Timothy Rees has been fighting for his innocence since being found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 15 years for the murder of 10-year-old Darla Thurrott, who was found strangled to death in her Toronto home in March 1989.Minister of Justice Arif Virani says he is referring Rees’s conviction back to the Court of Appeal of Ontario after the identification of new information that was not before the courts in the original trial and previous appeal.Rees’ appeal to the Court of Appeal for Ontario was dismissed in 1994, but he was in allowed out of custody on parole in 2016 and submitted an application for criminal conviction review in 2018.If granted, the appeal...

Suburban Detroit woman says she found a live frog in a spinach container

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

DETROIT (AP) — A woman in suburban Detroit said she got a scare when she discovered a life frog in a container of spinach she had just bought at a grocery store.Amber Worrick of Southfield said she bought the sealed Earthbound Farm spinach package earlier this week from a Meijer store, WJBK-TV reported. When she got home, her daughter found a live frog in the container and screamed, Worrick said.“It was alive and moving,” Worrick said. “Just thank God I didn’t eat the frog.”Worrick said she immediately returned the package and the frog to the store. Workers there released the frog and gave her a refund, she said.The TV station’s video showed the frog in a sealed container.Jennifer Holton, a spokesperson with the Michigan Department of Agricultural and Rural Development, told the Detroit Free Press that no one has filed any complaints about the incident. Holton said the store workers shouldn’t have released the frog because now her department has no way of knowing what ty...

Preschool pals Toopy and Binoo leap from books to TV to theatres

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

TORONTO — Nearly 30 years after debuting in a francophone book series, Canadian preschool TV stars Toopy and Binoo leap to the big screen with their first animated feature.By chance, the long-gestating project from Quebec author Dominique Jolin opens the same day her daughter turns 23, and the gregarious writer-turned-director jokes that this Friday’s premiere will celebrate two “babies.”However, her maternal perspective runs deeper than that – the candid Jolin says she created Toopy and Binoo (Toupie et Binou in French) in 1994 because she longed for a child and thought that writing a children’s book would give her a chance to participate inthe nightly storytime rituals common to many families.“I wanted so much to have a kid. I was dying to have a baby. I wanted to be part of a family in their home, their bedtime, so I created little ones to be with families,” an effusive Jolin says during a recent video call, joined by line producer Janice Metzger who provided the occasional trans...

Former Conservative senator, longtime politico Hugh Segal dead at 72

Published Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:55:50 GMT

OTTAWA — In 1962, then-prime minister John Diefenbaker visited Hugh Segal’s school in Montreal to present the principal with a copy of the newly minted Canadian Bill of Rights.So impressed was Segal with Dief’s description of Canada as a country that was open, free, democratic and based on the presumption of innocence that, at the tender age of 12, he became a lifelong Conservative.“I went home on that Friday night and declared at the dinner table that I like Mr. Diefenbaker and I would be supporting his candidate in the local riding of Mount Royal,” Segal recounted in a speech to the Senate in 2013.“That was not a happy bit of news for me to bring to the Friday night table in our home. My father (a Liberal campaign manager) said those wonderful words which every pre-teen waits for: ‘Over my dead body’ … It got me excited because I knew there was one thing I could do that would upset him all the time.”It was a pattern Segal was t...