- As ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Debuts To Strong Audience On Netflix, Creative Team Looks Ahead To Expanding Live-Action Adaptation Deadline
- What TV shows like Avatar lose by having shorter seasons Polygon
- Avatar: The Last Airbender Live-Action Series Is Officially a Netflix Hit Gizmodo
- Bending the Elements: How ‘Avatar’ VFX Team Brought Aang, Koizilla and Animated World to Life for Netflix’s ‘The Last Airbender’ Hollywood Reporter
- ‘It Pains Me Too’: Avatar: The Last Airbender Showrunner Reacts to Fan Complaints CBR – Comic Book Resources
Tag Archives: expanding
US communicating with Israel at ‘the highest levels’ about protecting Gaza civilians but quiet on expanding war – CNN
- US communicating with Israel at ‘the highest levels’ about protecting Gaza civilians but quiet on expanding war CNN
- White House: Israel must distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters in Gaza Al Jazeera English
- Palestinian civilians ‘didn’t deserve to die’ in Israeli strikes, US chief security adviser says The Guardian
- US says Israel must protect civilians in Gaza, stop Jewish settler violence Yahoo News
- U.S. and Israel have had “conversations like friends do on the hard questions,” Jake Sullivan says CBS News
Feds may throw struggling First Republic Bank a lifeline by expanding emergency lending program – Fox Business
- Feds may throw struggling First Republic Bank a lifeline by expanding emergency lending program Fox Business
- First Republic Bank Stock: Why I Am Sticking To My Investment (NYSE:FRC) Seeking Alpha
- U.S. Authorities Consider Giving More Time To First Republic, Which Had Given Its Founder And Family Members A Whopping Payday Before Suffering A Crisis – First Republic Bank (NYSE:FRC) Benzinga
- U.S. reportedly considers more support for banks while giving First Republic time to shore up balance sheet CNBC
- US explores additional bank support, favoring First Republic: Report Cointelegraph
- View Full Coverage on Google News
U.S. said to evaluate expanding emergency lending for banks – report – Seeking Alpha
- U.S. said to evaluate expanding emergency lending for banks – report Seeking Alpha
- U.S. reportedly considers more support for banks while giving First Republic time to shore up balance sheet CNBC
- US Mulls More Support for Banks While Giving First Republic Time Bloomberg
- First Republic Bank Stock: Why I Am Sticking To My Investment (NYSE:FRC) Seeking Alpha
- U.S. Authorities Consider Giving More Time To First Republic, Which Had Given Its Founder And Family Members A Whopping Payday Before Suffering A Crisis – First Republic Bank (NYSE:FRC) Benzinga
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Kristen Stewart and Nicole Kidman Embrace, Jonathan Majors Talks Expanding ‘Creed’ Universe: Inside Chanel’s Pre-Oscar Party – Variety
- Kristen Stewart and Nicole Kidman Embrace, Jonathan Majors Talks Expanding ‘Creed’ Universe: Inside Chanel’s Pre-Oscar Party Variety
- Kristen Stewart Wore See-Through Netted Short Shorts to Chanel’s Pre-Oscar Party InStyle
- Hollywood stars spend Oscars eve at annual Chanel dinner The Associated Press – en Español
- Hollywood stars spend Oscars eve at annual Chanel dinner – KION546 KION
- Brie Larson shows off her toned legs at Chanel and Charles Finch’s Pre-Oscar Awards dinner Daily Mail
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Seven iOS Features Launching or Expanding in 2023
2023 is upon us and it will be another busy year for iPhone software. While details about iOS 17 remain slim, Apple has previously announced several features that will be available this year as part of upcoming updates like iOS 16.3 and iOS 16.4.
Below, we have recapped seven iOS features that are expected to launch or expand to additional countries in 2023, such as an Apple Pay Later financing option and an Apple Card savings account that will allow for interest to be earned on Daily Cash.
Web Push Notifications
Apple said iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 will add opt-in support for web-based push notifications in 2023. This feature will allow iPhone and iPad users to receive notifications from websites through Safari, just like notifications sent from apps.
Apple Pay Later
Announced at WWDC 2022 last June, Apple Pay Later is a financing feature that will let qualifying customers in the U.S. split a purchase into four equal payments over six weeks, with no interest or fees to pay. The feature will be built into the Wallet app and will be available for purchases online and in apps on the iPhone and iPad.
Apple says the feature is coming in a future software update for qualifying applicants in the U.S. and may not be available in all states. Apple Pay Later is not available with iOS 16.2 and is not present in the first beta of iOS 16.3. Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman has suggested that the feature might launch with iOS 16.4 this year.
Security Keys for Apple ID
The first iOS 16.3 beta enables a new Security Keys for Apple ID feature that Apple said will be available globally in early 2023. The feature gives users the option to use hardware security keys to further protect their account. For users who enable this feature, Security Keys strengthens Apple’s two-factor authentication by requiring a hardware security key as one of the two factors instead of a verification code from another Apple device.
Apple does not plan to release its own hardware security keys. The feature will rely on third-party security keys available from brands like Yubico.
Apple Card Savings Account
In October, Apple announced that Apple Card users would “soon” be able to open a new high-yield savings account from Goldman Sachs and have their Daily Cash cashback rewards automatically deposited into it, with no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements. The account would be managed through the Wallet app on the iPhone.
Once the account is set up, all Daily Cash received from that point on would be automatically deposited into it and start earning interest, unless a user opts to continue having Daily Cash added to their Apple Cash balance. Apple Card provides 2-3% Daily Cash on purchases made with Apple Pay and 1% on purchases made with the physical card.
The savings account was listed in the release notes for the iOS 16.1 Release Candidate, and Goldman Sachs updated its Apple Card customer agreement for the feature, but it has still not launched. The savings account is still not available in the first iOS 16.3 beta released last month, and it’s unclear when it will launch.
Next-Generation CarPlay
At WWDC 2022, Apple previewed the next generation of its iPhone-based software platform CarPlay, which will feature support for multiple displays, widgets, and integration with vehicle functions like the instrument cluster, climate controls, and FM radio.
Apple says the first vehicles with support for the next-generation CarPlay experience will be announced in late 2023, with committed automakers including Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Volvo, and others. Apple plans to share additional details about the next generation of CarPlay later this year.
Advanced Data Protection in More Countries
Apple recently introduced an optional Advanced Data Protection feature that expands end-to-end encryption to many additional areas of iCloud when enabled, including iCloud Backups, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Voice Memos, and more. The feature was added in iOS 16.2, macOS 13.1, and other recent software updates for U.S. users only and will start rolling out to the rest of the world in early 2023, according to Apple.
It’s unclear exactly when Advanced Data Protection will be available in additional countries, but given Apple’s early 2023 timeframe, it’s possible that the feature will be expanded to more iPhone users with iOS 16.3 or iOS 16.4.
Emergency SOS via Satellite in More Countries
Apple last month announced that the iPhone 14’s life-saving Emergency SOS via Satellite feature will be supported in additional countries next year. However, Apple did not provide a list of countries where the feature will be expanding to next.
Emergency SOS via Satellite first launched in November in the U.S. and Canada and requires an iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, or iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 16.1 or later. The service became available in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK last month, with iOS 16.2 or later required for some local emergency service numbers.
The feature allows iPhone 14 users to send text messages to emergency services via satellite when outside the range of cellular and Wi-Fi coverage. The service is free for two years starting at the time of activation of an iPhone 14 model.
US believes Wagner mercenary group is expanding influence and took delivery of North Korean arms
CNN
—
Newly downgraded US intelligence suggests the Russian mercenary group Wagner has assumed expanded influence and is recruiting convicts – including some with serious medical conditions – from prisons to supplement Moscow’s flagging military.
The group recently took delivery of arms from North Korea, a top US official said, a sign of its growing role in the war in Ukraine.
And the US believes Wagner could be locked in a power battle with the Russian military itself as it jockeys for influence with the Kremlin.
“In certain instances, Russian military officials are actually subordinate to Wagner’s command,” said John Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator at the National Security Council. “It’s pretty apparent to us that Wagner is emerging as a rival power center to the Russian military and other Russian ministries.”
The revelations about the Wagner group came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s historic visit to Washington, where he thanked the United States for its military assistance and said more was needed to fend off Russian advances.
Wagner has emerged as a key player in the 10-month conflict. The group is often described as President Vladimir Putin’s off-the-books troops. It has expanded its footprint globally since its creation in 2014, and has been accused of war crimes in Africa, Syria and Ukraine.
On Wednesday, the US applied new restrictions on Wagner’s access to technology exports.
Kirby said the US estimates Wagner currently has about 50,000 personnel deployed inside Ukraine, of which 40,000 could be convicts recruited from Russian prisons. He said the group was spending $100 million per month to fund its operations in Ukraine.
The group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has even traveled personally to Russian prisons to recruit convicts himself to go to the front lines and fight. Some of them suffer from “serious medical conditions,” Kirby said.
“It seems as though Mr. Prigozhin is willing to just throw Russian bodies into the meat grinder in Bakhmut. In fact, about 1,000 Wagner fighters have been killed in the fighting in just recent weeks, and we believe that 90% of those 1,000 fighters were, in fact, convicts,” Kirby said.
Prigozhin, who has sometimes been referred to as “Putin’s chef,” already has close ties to the Russian president. But Kirby suggested he was working to strengthen those ties through his efforts to bolster Russian forces through his mercenary recruitment.
“It’s all about how good he looks to Mr. Putin, and how well he’s regarded at the Kremlin,” he said. “In fact, we would go so far as to say that his influence is expanding.”
Last month, Wagner received a delivery of infantry rockets and missiles from North Korea, Kirby said, an indication of how Russia and its military partners continue to seek ways around Western sanctions and export controls.
Wagner, not the Russian government, paid for the equipment. The US doesn’t believe it will significantly change the battlefield dynamic in Ukraine – but suggested North Korea could be planning to deliver further material.
PACT Act: Biden signs bill expanding health care benefits for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits
The bill is a major bipartisan victory for Congress and addresses an issue that is personal to the President. Biden has said he believes there may have been a connection between the brain cancer that killed his 46-year-old son, Beau Biden, and the burn pits Beau was exposed to during his military service.
Burn pits were commonly used to burn waste — including trash, munitions, hazardous material and chemical compounds — at military sites throughout Iraq and Afghanistan until about 2010. These massive open-air burn pits, which were often operated at or near military bases, released dangerous toxins into the air that, upon exposure, may have caused short- and long-term health conditions, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“Toxic smoke, thick with poison spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops. When they came home many of the fittest and best warriors that we sent to war were not the same. Headaches, numbness, dizziness, cancer. My son Beau was one of them,” Biden said.
Beau Biden was an Iraq war veteran who served as the attorney general of Delaware and died of brain cancer in 2015.
The bill adds conditions related to burn pit and toxic exposure, including hypertension, to the Department of Veterans Affairs list of illnesses that have been incurred or exacerbated during military service, removing the burden for veterans to prove that their toxic exposure resulted in these conditions. It could provide coverage for up to 3.5 million toxic-exposed veterans.
“I was going to get this done come Hell or high water,” Biden said, calling the legislation “the most significant law our nation has ever passed to help millions of veterans who are exposed to toxic substances during their military services.”
The President said, “We have many obligations and only one truly sacred obligation: To equip those we send into harm’s way and to care for them and their families when they come home.”
Biden was introduced on Wednesday by Danielle Robinson, the wife of Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson, whom the legislation is named after. Her daughter, Brielle Robinson, was by her side. Danielle Robinson was first lady Jill Biden’s guest at Biden’s State of the Union address when he called on Congress to pass burn pits legislation.
“To us and to many of you in the room, if not all of you, it’s personal. Personal for so many people like Danielle and Brielle. Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson, just 39 years old. … They held his hand for the last time at age 39,” Biden said.
Biden thanked comedian and political activist Jon Stewart, who has been a lead advocate for veterans on the issue and was at the White House for the bill signing.
“You refused to let anybody forget. You refused to let them forget. And we owe you big, man. We owe you big,” Biden said.
The Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas were scheduled to attend the bill signing at the White House.
The White House is hailing the legislation, known as the PACT Act, as the most significant expansion of benefits and services for veterans exposed to toxins in more than 30 years.
The bipartisan bill passed Congress last week after Republicans, who had previously supported the measure, temporarily blocked the bill from advancing while they sought to add cost-controlling amendments to the package. Republicans’ surprise move sparked swift backlash among veterans and veterans’ groups, and advocates for the measure protested on the US Capitol steps for days.
How this trippy illusion will make you see an ‘expanding black hole’
(opens in new tab)
A brand new optical illusion tricks the majority of people into thinking that a dark “black hole” region at the center of a stationary image is rapidly expanding, as if the observer were moving toward it. Researchers now suspect that the image literally tricks the brain into thinking that the observer is moving into a darkened space, like a cave or tunnel.
The illusion consists of a large black ellipse surrounded by a dark halo on a white background filled with smaller black ellipses. Typically, as a person stares at the image, the dark elliptical region will appear to expand outward for a couple of seconds, which is why the design has been nicknamed the “expanding hole.”
In a new study, researchers found that 86% of the 50 participants who looked at the optical illusion reported seeing the expanding darkness. The team suspects that the illusion plays on the brain’s perception of changing light levels.
“The expanding hole is a highly dynamic illusion,” lead researcher Bruno Laeng, a psychologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, said in a statement. The illusion tricks the mind into seeing a change in brightness that isn’t really there, “as if the observer were heading forward into a hole or tunnel,” Laeng added.
Related: A new type of optical illusion tricks the brain into seeing dazzling rays
The illusion hijacks a natural reaction in the brain that predicts when light is about to change, the researchers said. The dark region at the center of the image mimics the entrance to a cave or tunnel, and the surrounding pattern gives the observer the impression that they are moving toward that cave or tunnel. When the brain registers a potential change in light intensity, such as walking into a cave, it can trigger the pupils to contract or dilate to prepare you for the upcoming disruption in advance.
The illusion is so good at tricking the brain that it also causes people’s pupils to dilate as if they were actually moving into a darker space. The researchers used special cameras to track observers’ eye movements as they looked at the illusion, and the scientists found that their subjects’ pupils were expanding just like the dark region of the illusion appeared to expand in their minds. Those who saw a bigger dark hole showed more dilation than those who saw a less-stark “black hole,” the researchers said.
“The illusion of the expanding hole prompts a corresponding dilation of the pupil, as it would happen if darkness really increased,” Laeng said. This shows that “the pupil reacts to how we perceive light, even if this light is imaginary.”
The researchers also exposed observers to versions of the illusions where the color of the ellipses had been changed. When this happened, the illusion’s expanding effect was reduced and the observer’s pupil dilations were less noticeable. And when the colors were inverted (placing white ellipses on a black background), the observers’ pupils contracted, instead of expanding, as if they were moving toward a bright light.
The researchers have no idea why some people who look at the expanding hole are unable to see the dark region moving. The team hopes to test the illusion on other animals and see if they can learn more about how those visual systems differ from that in humans, to solve this mystery.
The new study was published online May 30 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (opens in new tab).
Originally published on Live Science.
Amazon ramps up FedEx, UPS rivalry by expanding Prime to third parties
Leon Neal | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Amazon will let other online merchants piggyback on its Prime service to deliver goods quickly to their customers.
The company on Thursday launched a new service, Buy with Prime, that lets third-party merchants use Amazon’s vast shipping and logistics network to fulfill orders on their own sites, while also appealing to Amazon’s 200 million-plus Prime customers.
These web sites will be able to put the Prime badge on their websites next to items that are eligible for free two-day or next-day delivery. Prime members will use the payment and shipping information stored on their Amazon account to place an order.
Buy with Prime won’t be free for sellers, and pricing will vary depending on payment processing, fulfillment, storage and other fees.
To start, the service will only be available by invitation to sellers who use Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA. With that service, merchants pay to have their inventory stored in Amazon’s warehouses and to make use of the company’s supply chain and shipping operations. Eventually, it will be extended to other merchants, including those not selling on Amazon.
Amazon has long set its sights on being the fastest in the online delivery race. For years, the company has plowed profits back into physical expansion, growing its fulfillment centers and shipping partnerships across the country in order to offer two- and same-day delivery in more markets. It has amassed a hefty fleet of its own delivery drivers, trucks and planes to speed packages to customers’ doorsteps.
Industry watchers have paid close attention to Amazon’s growing in-house logistics operations, speculating it aims to directly compete with major carriers like UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service. Indeed, Dave Clark, Amazon’s CEO of worldwide consumer, told CNBC last year Amazon is on track to become the nation’s largest delivery service by early 2022.
The company already handles some orders for products sold on some other web sites. It offers a program called Multi-Channel Fulfillment, which lets sellers store and ship products using Amazon’s services regardless of whether they’re selling on the home site.
Amazon previously offered a service where its drivers picked up packages from retailers and delivered them to consumers, but it was paused at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic as Amazon became overwhelmed with online orders.
While Buy with Prime is likely to remain small at launch, it could grow into a lucrative service for Amazon over time, said Bob O’Donnell, founder and chief analyst at Technalysis Research.
“If you think about it, one of Amazon’s most successful businesses was started as an internal tool,” said O’Donnell. “That being AWS [Amazon Web Services], of course.
“They’ve built this huge logistics business initially for their own purposes and now what they’re starting to do is leverage that as its own service,” O’Donnell added.
In some ways, Amazon has already turned its massive shipping and logistics operations into a cash machine. Amazon reported that third-party seller services, which includes commissions, fulfillment and shipping fees, along with other services, grew 11% year-over-year to $30.3 billion in the latest quarter.