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Today — 10 January 2025Main stream

Lakers head coach JJ Redick emotional while opening up on 'awful feeling' of losing home in wildfires

10 January 2025 at 16:09

Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick is one of the thousands in Los Angeles whose home did not survive the wildfires that have ravaged the area this week.

Redick was in Dallas for a game when he learned of the fires and that his family had evacuated.

Speaking with the media Friday, a day after a Lakers game at Crypto.com Arena was postponed, he opened up about his experience returning to Palisades and what he saw.

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"I'm good. My wife got out really early. She was actually on the other side and came outside, saw the fire, was with some people, and were headed to the airport. … Got the kids from school. They're safe. All that mattered," he said.

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"Went to the hotel, woke up at 7, headed up to Palisades. I had to see it for myself. I was not prepared for what I saw. It's complete devastation and destruction. I had to go a different way to the house but went through most of the village, and it's all gone. I don't think you can ever prepare yourself for something like that."

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Redick's home was destroyed Thursday.

"We were renting for the year to try to figure out where to be long-term, and everything we own that was of importance to us — almost 20 years of being together and 10 years of parenting — was in that house," an emotional Redick said. "There's certain things you can't replace. They'll never be replaced.

"The material stuff is whatever. My family and I, we're processing the self side, the individual side of losing your home. You don't ever want to wish that on anybody. It's an awful feeling to lose your home. … Not sure I've wept or wailed like that in several years.

Monday night's Vikings-Rams NFL playoff game was moved from Inglewood to Arizona because of the fires that have claimed at least 10 lives, destroyed over 10,000 buildings and burned roughly 30,000 acres. 

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Zuckerberg trash talks Apple in interview with Joe Rogan

10 January 2025 at 16:12
An image of Mark Zuckerberg in front of a swirling background.
Laura Normand / The Verge

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks Apple “[hasn’t] really invented anything great in a while” and that it has been coasting off of its past success. “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he said this week.

Zuckerberg made the statements during a nearly three-hour long podcast with Joe Rogan where, along with discussing Meta’s moderation policy changes and turn against diversity and inclusion policies, they got into Meta’s beef with Apple and its policies.

The conversation actually started with Rogan’s issues with Apple. Rogan said he’s moving “from Apple to Android” in part because he doesn’t “like being attached to one company.” He also isn’t a fan of Apple’s App Store policies. “The way they do that Apple store, where they charge people 30 percent,” he said. “That seems so insane that they can get away with doing that.”

“I have some opinions about this,” Zuckerberg said. While he gives credit to the iPhone as “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time,” he argued that Apple has put rules in place that “feel arbitrary.”

Zuckerberg said that Apple has “thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way” as Apple’s own products, like the AirPods. If Apple let other people use its protocol, “there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there,” Zuckerberg said.

Naturally, there’s business behind Zuckerberg’s gripes. Meta has had longstanding issues with Apple and the 30 percent cut it takes on some App Store transactions. Apple’s iOS restrictions have made it harder for Meta to compete on hardware and wiped out billions of dollars in advertising. Zuckerberg said that if Apple’s “random rules” didn’t apply, Meta would make “twice as much profit or something” based on his “back of the envelope calculation.”

Apple is increasingly under pressure to open up. It’s made changes in the European Union in response to new laws targeting its policies, and it’s facing a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice for holding a monopoly over smartphones. But the company seems intent on maintaining its closed ecosystem until it’s forced to change.

Zuckerberg believes that Apple’s reliance on “just advantaging their stuff” will ultimately hurt the company. Apple has “been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things,” he said. He said that the tech industry is “super dynamic,” and “if you just don’t do a good job for like 10 years, eventually, you’re just going to get beat by someone.” (It’s easy to guess who Zuckerberg thinks that might be!)

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s remarks.

Zuckerberg touched on a lot of other tech topics as part of his conversation with Rogan, including AI and how he thinks about screen time with his daughter playing Minecraft. One area he spent some time on was neural interfaces and how physical and digital worlds will blend together.

He thinks that “it’s going to be a while before we’re really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain,” for example, and (naturally) he talked about the benefits of a wrist-based neural interface, which Meta is working on as part of its Orion augmented reality glasses.

Down the line, Zuckerberg envisions a world where you’ll be able to use the neural interface wristband and the glasses to text a friend or an AI and have the glasses give you the answer. He also believes that as smart glasses or even contact lenses as a computing platform become more developed, the internet will be “overlaid” on the physical world.

“I think we’ll basically be in this wild world where most of the world will be physical, but there will be this increasing amount of virtual objects or people who are beaming in or hologramming into different things to interact in different ways,” he said.

“There isn’t a physical world and a digital world anymore,” he added. “We’re in 2025. It’s one world.”

Tulsa Race Massacre: Barbaric but not prosecutable, DOJ finds

10 January 2025 at 16:04

The Justice Department in a report released Friday concluded "no avenue for prosecution exists" for the crimes carried out during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the deadliest series of murders in U.S. history.

The big picture: The findings come roughly three months after the DOJ launched its first-ever federal probe into the coordinated attack that left an estimated 300 Black residents dead and decimated the thriving Greenwood community, also known as "Black Wall Street."


  • The event is widely regarded as the worst race massacre in U.S. history.
  • The DOJ noted in its report — which corroborates survivor testimonies and existing research — that its conclusion was "despite the gravity of the department's findings." It was also the federal government's first comprehensive acknowledgment of the massacre.
  • The report confirms that the massacre was not just mob violence but a coordinated military-style attack that involved systematic arson, looting, and killings carried out by white residents, some of whom were deputized by the Tulsa police.

What they're saying: Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division called the massacre "a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community."

  • "Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa," she said.
  • "This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation's past."

Zoom out: The DOJ report says prosecution is no longer feasible because the youngest potential defendants would now be over 115 years old and relevant statutes of limitations "expired decades ago," leaving no legal avenue for federal charges.

The DOJ report found:

  • Coordinated Attack: The DOJ found that — depending on how you define participation — up to 10,000 white residents of Tulsa devastated Greenwood.
  • Government Complicity: Local law enforcement disarmed Black residents, detained survivors in camps, and participated in arson and murder. Tulsa hindered recovery by imposing restrictive fire codes, rejecting aid, and resisting rebuilding efforts.
  • Legal Failures: The DOJ acknowledged that civil rights laws could have allowed hate crime prosecutions, but in 1921, no such protections existed and federal laws were unenforced, leaving survivors and descendants without justice.

Between the lines: While the report recognizes its historical significance and documents the trauma and loss suffered by Greenwood's residents, Rev. William Barber of the Repairers of the Breach expressed frustration at the limitations imposed by expired laws.

  • "Isn't it a tragedy that we have a statute of limitations on the murdering of an entire community?"
  • "If the Justice Department says the statute of limitations is a law, then there ought to be a campaign for new legislation that says, when the government has participated in political murder, this country will not allow a statute of limitation to prevent justice."

The bottom line: Barber stressed the need to reframe such events in historical narratives, because we "can't let these stories be told incorrectly."

  • "We must not use the language of 'riot.' Whether it was Springfield, Illinois; Wilmington, North Carolina; or Tulsa—they weren't riots. They were murders, bombings, and insurrections."
  • "The Justice Department's findings must be built upon, and this moment must stir action, even if the results take time. Sometimes what you do in one moment has an impact in another."

More from Axios:

Microsoft accuses group of developing tool to abuse its AI service in new lawsuit

10 January 2025 at 15:38

Microsoft has taken legal action against a group the company claims intentionally developed and used tools to bypass the safety guardrails of its cloud AI products. According to a complaint filed by the company in December in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a group of unnamed 10 defendants allegedly used […]

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Apple Intelligence isn’t helping Apple boost iPhone sales, says analyst

10 January 2025 at 15:37

Apple last year introduced Apple Intelligence, its own set of AI tools. Since they are all processed on-device, Apple Intelligence requires the latest hardware such as the . Even so, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the requirements of Apple Intelligence haven’t helped Apple boost iPhone sales.

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